Can/should I animate with Daz?

nonesuch00

I've been told that professional animators do about 30 seconds of animation per 40 hour work week and that's not a joke or misunderstanding. TV quality animations is less time. And no, that's not why I keep getting delayed in applying myself in such a hobby; although it would mean that I would be spending 40 hours in one week to produce 30 seconds while not guarenteeing my results would be worth that effort in the least. I am speaking only of animation quality here not story, model, or lighting quality. 

wolf359

@nonesuch00
Actually the popular urban mythology is "3 seconds per week"
but sadly  wether its 3 or 30 seconds both are
some what reductive, old wives tales particularly
here in the age of Realtime production and automated systems.

@wsterdan looks like you have decent plan in place.

And ,trust me, it would speed up things alot if you could 
produce animation Data on the lesser machine
(Body motion as .duf and facial animation from 32 bit mimic)
and send it over  your network to the more powerful M1 where you can commit to long renders while still producing the next shot on the lesser machine.

animated pose files( .dufs) can be saved anywhere and literally
draged and dropped into the Daz studio Veiwport. 

nonesuch00

wolf359 said:

@nonesuch00
Actually the popular urban mythology is "3 seconds per week"
but sadly  wether its 3 or 30 seconds both are
some what reductive, old wives tales particularly
here in the age of Realtime production and automated systems.

@wsterdan looks like you have decent plan in place.

And ,trust me, it would speed up things alot if you could 
produce animation Data on the lesser machine
(Body motion as .duf and facial animation from 32 bit mimic)
and send it over  your network to the more powerful M1 where you can commit to long renders while still producing the next shot on the lesser machine.

animated pose files( .dufs) can be saved anywhere and literally
draged and dropped into the Daz studio Veiwport. 

Yes, thanks, I misremembered, it was 30 seconds at 40 hours per week for TV quality. Cinema quality was about like you said he told me, 3 seconds per 40 hour work week. Which is crazy, but true! Those numbers aren't old wives tales though, as useful as they are. I asked this animator specifically about hand keyframed animations though as that's the part of animating I'm most interested in. After I'm good at that then the techniques you use are needed to get anything substantive done with techniques learned keyframing needed to make characters unique. Or at least that's my hope. 

wsterdan

@wsterdan looks like you have decent plan in place.

And ,trust me, it would speed up things alot if you could 
produce animation Data on the lesser machine
(Body motion as .duf and facial animation from 32 bit mimic)
and send it over  your network to the more powerful M1 where you can commit to long renders while still producing the next shot on the lesser machine.

animated pose files( .dufs) can be saved anywhere and literally
draged and dropped into the Daz studio Veiwport. 

Thanks for the tips, and especially for the 48-hour video clip, it's nothing less than inspiring.

I'd always planned on using more than one computer for a real project, but I wanted to see how little one really needed to do some simple animation. The minute-plus I've done so far was first done on an Intel MacBook Air using DAZ Studio, iMovie and mostly purchased content... and not very expensive content at that. If someone knew what they were doing (NOTE: I don't) and were willing to take the time to adjust lighting and textures for either OpenGL or Filamant, and could work on it full-time I honestly think they could make a 10- or 15-minute little video once a month, if they kept things simple. Huge battlefiles full of many people fighting is going to slow things down tremendously, of course. 

MIgrating to Blender is a very serious option, as has been pointed out here, and something I'll consider for the future.

-- Walt Sterdan