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With all due respect, this is the type of comments I read from 3d artists and animators; I have yet to hear your average person who's just playing a game or watching an animated film make comments about reflections in hair or anything similar; your average person is usually more involved with the story, the action and the special effects.
A character's movements being ever-so-slightly incorrect tends to hit the uncanny valley instantly, but painted reflections, not so much.
I still find watching episodes of Reboot enjoyable, where their deadlines didn't even allow time for shadows, yet alone reflections.
-- Walt Sterdan
Sounds good, Walt! Good luck! You have to start somewhere. My first "animation" was a Poser guy walking for 10 seconds in a straight line through a little environment I made, and I realized that an animated movie is just a bunch of clips stuck together, so I figured if I could do 10 seconds, I could do 10 minutes, or an hour, given time!
Ah, Reboot--a classic! Hexadecimal was the best.
War planets was my favorite!
Well stated Tim,
My 93 minute feature length film
Galactus Rising took six years to complete as well.
And the Story in "Galactus Rising",was based on one of the Greatest series of Marvel Comic books ever written IMHO.
Yet it was rendered on a 14 year Old macbook laptop with 2 gigs of RAM starting with V4/M4 and finishing with Genesis 2 figures.
Having worked completely alone on a feature length project ,
I,more than anyone in this community, certainly understand where you are coming from.
And that's the title of this discussion, "should I animate with daz". You don't need to be Pixar to get decent animation, see any blender open movie. As for your short, as I said I did enjoy it myself, it is very pretty and amusing indeed. My comments were focused on advice for improving and not intended as criticism. As for time vs quality the tools make all the difference, that's why using blender instead of daz I strongly advise.
Didn't know it's ten years old this explains much.
@Padone,
for clarification, the latest project "Quest for the key " by @Auroratrek
is not ten years old, but is currently in production.
Also Tim Animates in iclone and exports to C4D for rendering so the question
of animating in Daz studio ,for him, is moot.
His ten year old project was the Star trek based 55 minute film released in parts
over 5 years and Also rendered in Maxon C4D.
The lack of reflections in his star trek production & Current project is a stylistic choice much like the recent Disney Series "Clone Wars" or "bad Batch"
"BAD BATCH" 2021
MAxon C4D also has a spline based Dynamic hair system and
Obviously C4D was capable of reflections ten years ago as My Film
"Galactus Rising" (produced over the same time period as ,Tim's Star trek film,)
and had a completely Different asthetic by Choice.
@woft359: "War Planets" in Canada was called "Shadow Raiders" and the only thing wrong with it was that it only lasted two seasons. A favourite here as well. As for "Clone Wars?"
and the spin-off "Bad Batch", I found them far more enjoyable than any of the actual Star Wars movies.
-- Walt Sterdan
Thanks for clarifying the Aurora/Quest production timeline,Wolf! I didn't see Shadow Raiders back in the day--not sure it was available(?) Looks like fun!
I was going to bring up Clone Wars and Bad Batch (which, like Walt, I like better than the movies), both of which would be exceedingly guilty of not using the latest shaders and lighting technology, despite being produced by Lucasfilm/Disney. They could easily employ these technologies to create super-realistic characters, shaders, and scenes, but that's not the look they're trying for--they're supposed to resemble a Ralph McQarry painting. But even they make compromises, for example, the armor breast plates on the clone trooper squash and stretch as the characters move, which is of course not realistic, but it allows for more movement, so it was a choice the animators made to allow for more range of motion in the characters, not to mention that anyone who does 3D character animation shudders at the idea of trying to animate a torso/shoulders inside a rigid mesh! None of this has stopped Clone Wars/Rebels/Bad Batch from being so successful that the stories and characters have gone canon, and one is even getting their own live action show.
As another comment on style, as much as I loved Clone Wars, it did take a little time to get used the the look of the highly-stylized characters--they kind of looked like painted wooden dolls--but the magic of animation is that the viewer adjusts their expectations to the look and will go with it if the story is compelling enough, and that was true for me. That said, it doesn't mean it's a free-for-all when it comes to style, it should probably relate to the subject matter--unless used ironically or for deliberate contrast--and should probably also have a certain amount of consistency, since you probably don't want one highly realistic character with flowing hair and dynamics all over the place next to a stylized character with none of those. To circle back to Padone's point about the lack of secondary motion in the hair and scabbard in my character, if I did it for that character, I would have to do it for every character, and that just takes too much time. For the average viewer, once they get used to "stiff" hair etc., they'll temper their expectations accordingly and stop seeing it, the same way nobody complains about the sometimes jerky stop motion of the 1960's Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer. Obviously, modern stop-motion movies like Kubo and the Two Strings have "much better" animation, but, again, the magic of animation is that the audience will adjust to what they see, so people don't refuse to watch Rudolph because the animation looks "dated". In a more extreme example, I don't think South Park gets angry letters about how crude (style-wise) their animation is--in their case the crude silliness of the animation is used as a juxtaposition to the crude subject matter.
So, ultimately, I think animation allows for a wide variation in style, and people should be encouraged to explore animation in their own way based on their own preferences, means, and abilities, and that posters on this site remember that we're all together here in our little teapot, and that the vast majority people out there don't care about or understand 99% of what is discussed here: when it comes to animation, the average person just wants to be entertained.
@wsterdan, IIRC back in the late 1990's-early 2000's there were alot
of 3D animated TV shows coming out of Canada (the home of Autodesk).
I watched them all: Beast machines,Max steel,reboot,bionicles , Starship troopper chronicles etc.
Brings back alot of fond memories.
@Auroratrek
I find myself kind of bored with uber realism and am always looking
for something stylized with vivid saturation.
You should check out the new Star trek prodigy series that debuted last week
on Nickelodeon
I really love the asthetic and Character designs.
I certainly agree, and support the exploration of different styles, both PBR and NPR. As for the audience expectations I also agree they will "adapt" to what they get, somewhat they are "forced" to. But then it's the top studios who lead what it is considered "good" by the audience. I mean it does exist a "standard quality level" that your works will always be compared to, indeed nobody in the world will never ever state that South Park gets good animation. Then it is enjoyable, yes, but that's another story.
And certainly it is possible to make "enjoyable" movies with very poor animation and rendering.
Ah, didn't realize the Autodesk connection. I do remember Max Steel and Starship Troopers fondly. And, yes, Prodigy looks like fun! I definitely plan to check it out.
Of course, but if that is the only measure, then the answer to "Can/should I animate with Daz?" is "No, stop wasting your time with Daz, go to Cal Arts, then work for Pixar." There is nobody from a top studio here, and there are very few Daz users even attempting to do long form character animation of any kind with it. If you're trying to encourage and advise Daz users to use Daz for animation, you should do so within that context, and not hand out backhanded compliments like "good for a home made short." Everybody on this site is doing "home made" work. The "bar", if you want to set one, is what good work is being done with Daz--use that as the starting point to encourage Daz users to aspire to rather than holding everyone to top studio standards. We are all well aware of what the top studios are doing, but if the edict is "be that good or give up," then Daz should just fold and we should all stop trying to do animation and take up knitting. No, wait, there's probably a top studio standard for that, too.
Of course, but if that is the only measure, then the answer to "Can/should I animate with Daz?" is "No, stop wasting your time with Daz, go to Cal Arts, then work for Pixar." There is nobody from a top studio here, and there are very few Daz users even attempting to do long form character animation of any kind with it. If you're trying to encourage and advise Daz users to use Daz for animation, you should do so within that context, and not hand out backhanded compliments like "good for a home made short." Everybody on this site is doing "home made" work. The "bar", if you want to set one, is what good work is being done with Daz--use that as the starting point to encourage Daz users to aspire to rather than holding everyone to top studio standards. We are all well aware of what the top studios are doing, but if the edict is "be that good or give up," then Daz should just fold and we should all stop trying to do animation and take up knitting. No, wait, there's probably a top studio standard for that, too.
The Autodesk connection is a little tenuous; Reboot and it's siblings were developed by Mainframe Entertainment, located in Vancouver, B.C., using Softimage 3D software (Softimge was located in Montreal, Quebec); Softimage (the first software to have Inverse Kinematics and used in movies like Jurassic Park and Fifth Element and loads of games) eventually went public and became a subsidiary of Microsoft, sold to Avid and eventually to Autodesk who discontinued it in 2015. I believe Autodesk has always been located in California.
=- Walt Sterdan
Okay, got it! A long and storied history of evolution to extinction--fitting perhaps that it was used in Jurassic Park. And that it was from Montreal explains why it was pronounced "Soft-eemazh" ;-)
With all due respect (and I sincerely mean "respect", you've made very effort to suggest things that could be done to improve someone's work with an eye to making it more professional, and it's very much recognized and appreciated) I think it's all a matter of perspective.
Every studio, big or small, cuts corners and makes compromises to meet deadlines and budgets.
We've mentioned shows like The Clone Wars as examples of very stylized animation. The reasons why it looks the way it looks has little to do with budget but more with artistic vision. George Lucas self-funded most, if not all of the sereis, at an estimated cost of a million dollars an episode (https://gizmodo.com/george-lucas-spills-all-about-clone-wars-at-skywalker-r-5033398
He didn't do it to make a profit (I'm sure he did in the end, but that wasnt the goal).
Of special interest is that in The Clone Wars the Imperial Guard wore capes. In Star Wars: Rebels, they do not. The apparent Reason for this is that in Clone Wars Lucas was filleting the bill, but in Rebels, Disney was, and Disney wanted to cut costs to make a profit, and so cut things like capes on the Imperial Guards. I have no doubt they cut other corners that we're not aware of, but compromises like this are the difference between making art and making a profit.
So while it's worthwhile to point out features that the big studios implement to make their product more photorealistic (and even though it's stylized, you're still pointing out features that highlight photorealim over NPR), when comparing the two products (stuff we do here versus high-end, professional studios) it's important to keep in perspective budgets and manpower.
If you told Lucasffim or Disney they only had a budget of $50,000 an episode, I'm sure we'd see a dramatic drop in quality, especially if you also told them they could only use two or three computers and a staff of three or four. On the flipside, if you told Auroratrek or Wolf359 that you were giving them $50,000 to produce 22 minutes of animation, they'd no doubt blow us away... more than they already do.
As to the audience judging what is "good" in an animated film, story and character design usually wins over qualty of anmation. The best, most photorealisiticly-rendered animation can't be saved if the story or the characters are poorly crafted, but a good story and well-designed, relatable characters can save a film with mediocre animation.
I think our main area of disagreement is simply what we both think "the audience" is going to "expect". With the incredible range of 3D animation out there (everything from Lego movies to high end Disney feature films not to mention the even wider range of animation in video games and even TV commercials) I do not believe they're all expecting photorealistic, Disney movie quality in everything. We're all bombarded every day by different levels of animation, the only people who might find most of them lacking are probably 3D artists, and if they're pointing out non-photorealistic highlights as something that they found lacking in an animation, they probably never fully engaged with the story and characters and probably don't enjoy most animation as much as most of the audience. If the story and characters are good, the audience is probably more focused on that than if any reflections were realisic enough.
-- Walt Sterdan
Exactly. And I didn't mean any "backhanded compliment". I do like your works. In my opinion blender is a good tool to reach for high quality animation. Daz studio is not. There are also good courses as @margrave pointed out, for anyone who wants to improve.
Indeed Autodesk was founded in california
I got a little confused by the Five Canadian locations
Calgary,Montreal(2),Toronto and Windsor
and that fact that softimage was used on beast wars& beast machines.
Autodesk has 64 offices worldwide
Market cap value nearly $70 billion , yikes!!!
Very good points, Walt! And if I can add one more audience expectation, an independently-produced animation uploaded to Youtube is going to garner its own expectations. The audience is going to go into it knowing it's not Disney, and will most likely lower their expectations accordingly. That has been my experience, and the upside is that I frequently hear "that was better than I expected" or "I wasn't expecting much, but I'm glad I gave it a chance." Always nice to pleasantly surprise people.
@wolf359 @wsterdan I also mostly agree with your comments. Didn't reply to avoid the dicussion to "explode" since those points are also remarked by @Auroratrek. As for storytelling and character design, as well as the overall artistic style of the rendering, they are certainly extremely important. I only was focusing on the animation quality in my comments since it's what this discussion is about. Rather than the overall "entertainment value" of a production, where many different aspects are involved outside animation itself.
@Padone: I don't disagree with many of your points per se, either, I just feel that we should try to stay realistic in advising people in the use of Daz or similar products. There's nothing wrong with taking inspiration from the top studios, but I'd be afraid of discouraging people from trying out independent animation by setting too high a bar. For independent work like what is being done here, it's mostly one person doing everything--not just animating, but scriptwriting, storyboarding, audio, mocap, lighting, effects, music, etc.--top studios have entire teams dedicated to each of these things. The challenge for a one-person show is trying to balance time, resources, and abilities, and hopefully come out with something watchable in the end.
Fair enough; so realizing I'm not trying to match the quality of a million-dollar-a-20-minute-episode-with-a-team-of-animators-and-a-giant-render-farm, who themselves cut corners due to budget and timeframe, what corners do you recommend I cut if my goal is to generate about 15-20 mintues of animtion a month on one or two lower-end computers, neither with an Nvidia or other high-end video card, a zero-dollar budget and with doing most of the work on weekends and evenings? What quality of render nad what render engine do you envision me using?
Honestly looking for suggestions; full-body animation will be at a minimum for most of the 20 minutes.
-- Walt Sterdan
Walt, in my experience, rendering is probably not your biggest issue with animation--my renders generally take many hours, but generally speaking, you spend your working time animating, and render when you're away from the computer. It's a drag when you have to re-render, but overall it works for me. That said, it sounds like Wolf gets gets fast speeds with sophisticated lighting etc. in Blender, so he may have more to say about this. Also, the time it takes to animate depends a lot on what you're animating, so the first consideration might be to pick a story/subject that's easier to do. A fantasy epic with a dozen main characters and huge battles is going to be a lot more work than a story about a lone guy stranded on a desert island. When you write a script, remember that anything you write, you have to animate. When I did Aurora, it wasn't an accident that it mainly involved two characters on a tiny spaceship. I wanted to do something "Star Trek", but the traditional Star Trek cast is half a dozen main characters, plus a ship full of extras, not to mention a big ship with many locations. There are shots with many more secondary characters, but most scenes are just the two characters. So, I'd say, the first consideration is to not bite off more than you can chew when you consider your story/subject.
I can't join this discussion at anywhere close to your level but I'd like to make one small observation. Render time is probably the biggest deterrent for me when considering animations. Those quick animated loops that I play with are comparable to the little animated gifs so popular on social media. That's because no matter how many times I render the little animation, there's something I want to tweak and then render it again. OpenGL and Filament are just not in the class of Eevee but I have not yet learned how to animate in Blender.
Thanks very much for the suggestions, many of which I'd already worked out in recent weeks in preparing my assets for actual rendering and animation. I'm hoping to produce 5-10 minutes in the next week or so, and it'll be pretty crude as it's more of a proof-of-concept than anything else. The Act One script is done, assets mostly ssembled and I'm just finalizing which characters to use (Genesis, Genesis 3, Genesis 8 or custom toon models). I'm going in assuming I'll render the entire thing at least two or three times to generate different camera views that might be spliced together in post, as well as a number of smaller, non-speaking renders showing different character reactions and "idle" actions. By November 15, I'm hoping to be able to turn the whole mess over to my daughter who's been generous enough to assemble it all to a final cut and add additional soundtracks and sound effects as needed as I'll be back to working 9- to 11-hour days. Fingers crossed.
Again, thanks very much for the suggestions, they're very much appreciated.
-- Walt Sterdan
I was surpriced at how fast the (Iray) rendering went when I did some testing. A four second animation at 600x928/25fps (WxH) with one G8 figure plus clothing and hair took an hour and looked pretty good, so good that I could still take the settings down some.
Using 2070Super on i7-5820K/X66/64GB/W7 Ultimate
Honestly animation requires a decent rig. It's not impossible to do it on a low end pc, but you just add "difficulty" to an already difficult task. You can't render with the gpu if the textures don't fit so your only option is to render overnight with the cpu. Be sure to at least have a good cooler because a home pc is not designed to work overnight. Then I agree with @Auroratrek, try to keep everything very minimal, and I mean everything. It is your only option.
Point on a short story with a good storytelling and possibly minimal animation. Play around with the camera to add "action" rather than using animation. Use camera angles and shots to minimize animation. Use lights to stroke emotions, they're almost render free and they're a powerful tool. Then comes the sound track, what lacks in animation can be helped with the right music and sounds to drive the feelings of the audience. Most of all have fun doing it, it helps a lot.
Uh .. and backup. Seriously. That's the most important thing. You don't want to lose your work.
With Diffeo and Blender you can easily use complex Daz environments
and import animated Daz figures into Blender.
I have NO GPU
yet I have a self imposed times per frame limit of 59 second or less.you can set blender to auto cull all textures to 2K.
EEVEE is your best option but honestly 15 minutes per month
might be too ambitious for a beginner.
You have to decide if you are going to have speaking characters
and what method of lipsynch you will use;
(32 bit mimic, Anilip2 or face mojo, or the free papagayo script.)
those are your option even with a Daz studio only pipeline.
You should have an end to end pipeline planned in advance,
even using DS with aniblocks.
I've been using computers non-stop since 1981, so saving my work in almost part of my DNA, but thanks, it's never bad to remind someone, especially with work like this.
I'm going to run this first set of tests in DAZ Studio, mostly because that's where all of my assets are at the moment and my initial plan is just to see where my main problems arise with DAZ before looking at other software. Part of me likes the look of Maya, though not free, while the other part is drawn towards Blender. An added incentive to Blender is Apple's support for Blender, and I'm eager to see what sort of performance one gets with a high-end Apple Silicon machine once Cycles with full metal support in the next month or two.
I tested a couple of 14-hour renders with an m1 iMac and cooling does not appear to be an issue. The fan did run for probalby a good part of it but it's an unbelievably quiet fan, and with the huge empty areas inside the iMac for air flow, after 14+ hours the computer's back was still cool to the touch.
I'm testing with OpenGL, Filament and 3DL for now, keeping it simple. Thanks for the suggestions regarding the lighting, I'm keeping it pretty basic for now, but after your suggestion I did purchase and try "Interior Light Pro for Filament and Iray" with Filament. Unfortunately, while the package worked very well with iRay, I could not for the life of me get it to work with Filament. I checked a couple of suggestions in the forums but still no go. As my time off is very limited, I abandoned Filament for now but will probably take a run at it again once DAZ Studio 5 comes out and it's available on the Mac.
Again, thanks very much for the helpful suggestions. I'll review them again once I'm done with an eye to using some of them moving forward.
-- Walt Sterdan
@wolf359 -- Thans again for your earlier information and these suggestions, it's always appreciated.
As above, I'm going with DAZ only for now, mainly because my very restricted time off doesn't allow me for too much extra testing, like exporting my assets to and learning Blender (it's the first two weeks off I've had in a very, very long time, and some of it really has to be spent away from computers; as well, my son is coming home for the second week of my holidays, which will also slow down my testing).
So far, I've gathered all of my assets prior to Monday and starting Monday I've generated about 4 minutes of animation (some parts rendered two or three times to allow for different camera angles). I've hacked and slashed them into just over a minute of very bad animation which I'll try to upload to my unused website in the next day or so.
While I originally planned on using just a MacBook Air for everything, with my vacation time already getting eaten by non-computer time I relented and have done all of the animation set-up on the MacBook Air but have been testing higher-end renders on my m1 iMac. I agree that at least two computers is a good idea, and I have three I can use if I need them.
I'm currently testing 1080p at 30 frames per second; using OpenGL I can render a frame at roughly a half-second on the m1 iMac, or using OpenGL or Filament on the Air or a 2012 iMac takes closer to a second a frame.
Using 3DL on the m1 iMac cranks the time up to about a minute of animaton per hour.
As mentioned, I've just over a minute of animation hacked together; being generous, I'm going to say it's at "just a little better" than a normal animatic. I"ve already learnd that I really have to get timing down on simple actions like head turns and eye blinks. All of should be much faster than these initial attempts.
To speed things up, I'm using purchased sets, clothing and hair with custom toon characters. I saved each character in the movie as individual characters presets and then switched to the 32-bit version of DAZ Studio and spent about an hour using DAZ's lip synch to do the first half of all the lip synching; I would open up each character, apply each block of speech recorded for them and one-by-one saved each as a separate Pose Preset. Once I had the first few for each character synced and saved, I returned to 64-bit D|S and applied then rendered each clip, adding a couple of extra seconds before and after each clip. As mentioned, I rendered a speech pose, changed camera, renderd again, and so on. For this test, I kept adding them to the same timeline, but probably won't when it comes time to do this for real. I then opened iMovie, imported each clip, synced the sound to it as best I could (it still bites that I can generate a movie with the sound in 32-bit but not in 64-bit) and saved out the clip. I then linked a bunch of them, using one of the two or three versions to cobble together the animatic. It still has the extra spacing before and after the clips, as I'm expecting my daughter to eventually do the actual splicing in Da Vinci when she adds sound effects and soundtrack after I do the real renders. I also threw some very, very simple opening placards together as I haven't even thought about any designs for the opening title and act titles.
I'm just testing some green screening/picture-in-picture ideas and I'll try to add them to the first clip before uploading.
Regarding 20 minutes in a month being a little over-ambitious, I totally agree. My goal at this point isn't so much trying to make a great animation, but I'm looking at it more as "how bad would my animation be if I was doing 20 minutes a month?". My long-term goal is to help me decide if this is something I will actually want to do full-time once I retire. I can already see a lot of places where I could shave time off once I get more practice (again, my key frame timing is nothing less than embarrassing). I'm approaching it as designing a production flow that would allow one person to actually do 20 minutes of animation in a month or less with a second person to do the post edits. I'm expecting to fall flat on my face, but so far I'm having fun and learning, so in that arena it's already a success. Production quality, not so much, but still fun.
Thanks again for all the tips and suggestions, all are much appreciated.
-- Walt Sterdan