Has anyone made a movie with DAZ3d?

SasquatchIsCool

I was wondering if anyone has made a movie with DAZ3d or just still figures?  Do you have any interest in making movies using DAZ 3d? 

Please share your movie or animation!  Also can you share tips?  

Bridges are available now so can you show us your work you have done.  

I remember Rosa using DAZ but haven't seen anything since this that even compares or am I missing a few?  

WendyLuvsCatz

not sure if it actually counts as a movie since it is episodes joined together but I did do this 

 

it's getting a bit long in the tooth though

and

 

 

 

2 parts but never finished

Roman_K2

I would like to make a movie that shows the earth turning slowly. (Not too fast but a lot faster than IRL! It's a movie.) Could be a "gibbous" earth - some of it dark. It would be ok to have the stars twinkle a bit, Disney animation style.

The basics of such a desktop animation would be easy but once you get into music licensing and licensing the images from the Getty archives or UPI or World Vision, CNN etc. I'm worried that the paperwork would start to overshadow the creativity!

As the earth turns and the music (Blue Danube with Von Karajan?) plays quietly, you'd cut repeatly to nasty scenes - war, famine, people shouting, napalm, refugees with their belongings stacked up, scuffles in Parliament. Cut the music while the scene or short video clip plays, then resume with the turning earth and the music, as it the "break" never happened.

Perhaps there could be "normal" stuff in some of the intermittent scenes: goats or lambs romping in a meadow, a man and a boy launching a toy boat in a pond, a bumble bee making its rounds, an athlete at the moment of winning in the 100-metre hurdles, a mother and her newborn, skydrivers free-falling in a circle, a sailplane doing a loop, bulldozers pushing garbage in a landfill site, canoeists drifting silently past a munching moose, a pod of dolphins, a whale breaching, ducklings covered in oil. Whatever.

Overall it would be kind of "shock and awe" but heavy on a balancing, study in contrasts to make its point.

I'm guessing this has been done before but I think not lately, eg. major firestorms, drought, people rowing down Main street, the melting arctic.

Anyway great topic and hats off to the OP!

Roman_K2

Btw to date (summer 2022) the DAZ Studio movie that sticks in my mind was the Kung Fung monk with the brown cassock and hoodie pulled down low. Also the Dire Wolf made with Dog 8.

Roman_K2

WendyLuvsCatz said:

2 parts but never finished

I liked the where the blonde guy runs out into bright daylight. And the running water when he takes a shower was good. The people and car traffic outside the bar were a nice touch as well! 

I once took a nap in total darkness in a wooden building. Then an RAF Vulcan (a delta winged, jet bomber) flew directly overhead, maybe 150 feet up? You wake up fast, where am I, OMG IT'S AN EARTHQUAKE! I ran outside fast only to be blinded by the light.

Another time I was briefly trapped in a soundproofed, round corridor with endless doors, none marked and all were locked and painted dark gray. Very Bruce Lee-ish, all that was needed was some ghostly warriors to stoke my rising fear. Two people with me including the mayor of a very large city... we'd tried to duck out of a party unobserved.

WendyLuvsCatz

all those a few years old now, I mostly do music videos now with Youtube audio library tunes

some an hour long but not exciting more a series of scenes 

SasquatchIsCool

Roman_K2 said:

I would like to make a movie that shows the earth turning slowly. (Not too fast but a lot faster than IRL! It's a movie.) Could be a "gibbous" earth - some of it dark. It would be ok to have the stars twinkle a bit, Disney animation style.

The basics of such a desktop animation would be easy but once you get into music licensing and licensing the images from the Getty archives or UPI or World Vision, CNN etc. I'm worried that the paperwork would start to overshadow the creativity!

As the earth turns and the music (Blue Danube with Von Karajan?) plays quietly, you'd cut repeatly to nasty scenes - war, famine, people shouting, napalm, refugees with their belongings stacked up, scuffles in Parliament. Cut the music while the scene or short video clip plays, then resume with the turning earth and the music, as it the "break" never happened.

Perhaps there could be "normal" stuff in some of the intermittent scenes: goats or lambs romping in a meadow, a man and a boy launching a toy boat in a pond, a bumble bee making its rounds, an athlete at the moment of winning in the 100-metre hurdles, a mother and her newborn, skydrivers free-falling in a circle, a sailplane doing a loop, bulldozers pushing garbage in a landfill site, canoeists drifting silently past a munching moose, a pod of dolphins, a whale breaching, ducklings covered in oil. Whatever.

Overall it would be kind of "shock and awe" but heavy on a balancing, study in contrasts to make its point.

I'm guessing this has been done before but I think not lately, eg. major firestorms, drought, people rowing down Main street, the melting arctic.

Anyway great topic and hats off to the OP!

I'd love to check something like that out. 

SasquatchIsCool

Roman_K2 said:

WendyLuvsCatz said:

2 parts but never finished

I liked the where the blonde guy runs out into bright daylight. And the running water when he takes a shower was good. The people and car traffic outside the bar were a nice touch as well! 

I once took a nap in total darkness in a wooden building. Then an RAF Vulcan (a delta winged, jet bomber) flew directly overhead, maybe 150 feet up? You wake up fast, where am I, OMG IT'S AN EARTHQUAKE! I ran outside fast only to be blinded by the light.

Another time I was briefly trapped in a soundproofed, round corridor with endless doors, none marked and all were locked and painted dark gray. Very Bruce Lee-ish, all that was needed was some ghostly warriors to stoke my rising fear. Two people with me including the mayor of a very large city... we'd tried to duck out of a party unobserved.

I always wantted to start a channel where we animate people's dreams.  :)

SasquatchIsCool

WendyLuvsCatz said:

not sure if it actually counts as a movie since it is episodes joined together but I did do this 

 

it's getting a bit long in the tooth though

and

 

 

 

2 parts but never finished

I bet you could port your animations now over to Unreal 5 and get some great renders. :)

WendyLuvsCatz

SasquatchIsCool said:

WendyLuvsCatz said:

snip

2 parts but never finished

I bet you could port your animations now over to Unreal 5 and get some great renders. :)

I do use UE4.27 now (not fond of 5) but as I said, not bothering with a narrative anymore 

maybe will go back to storytelling one day 

Dreaming Kitty channel below representative of my current choices 

3141592654

Hmmm ... not movies, but I have several animations that reach about 1 minute long and one animation (more like a collection of animations on one theme) that is a few minutes.

I will consider making a youtube channel for upload and display.

csaa

SasquatchIsCool,

Rosa is an impressive short film! And made in 2011 if I'm not mistaken.

You may want to reach out to wolf359 or benniewoodell about the videos they've made.

Cheers!

SasquatchIsCool said:

I was wondering if anyone has made a movie with DAZ3d or just still figures?  Do you have any interest in making movies using DAZ 3d? 

Please share your movie or animation!  Also can you share tips?  

Bridges are available now so can you show us your work you have done.  

I remember Rosa using DAZ but haven't seen anything since this that even compares or am I missing a few?  

TheMysteryIsThePoint

I don't want to start that up again, but I think the correct question is not can you, but rather should you. And with things like Diffeomorphic and Sagan around, I think the answer is a resounding NO. DAZ Studio is indescribably primitive when it comes to animation (and that's just the first step in the pipeline to final frames) and cut off from the rest of the 3D animation world.

If you take the time to learn Diffeomorphic and Blender, you'll be paid back manyfold with things that before we difficult or impossible that are now trivial. It's worth taking the detour.

 

WendyLuvsCatz

I just went with using DAZ content 

the stuff I shared was 90% rendered in iClone, some Carrara and Twinmotion... and a bit of UE4 too

I almost exclusively used DAZ mesh as iC6 I import FBX not port to Character Creator like iC7 users can

Rosa used DAZ content in Blender AFAIK as well as DAZ studio 

benniewoodell

I have these two I can show you from a couple of years ago. 

(509) There's No One in the Kitchen - A Daz 3D animated film - YouTube

(509) Peaches - A Daz 3D animated film - YouTube

The thing is if you animate in Daz strictly, you are going to run into a lot of restrictions on what you can do. In Peaches, you'll see the pushup scene and when he steps on the ledge, that was the best I could get either of those shots after five or six hours of trying to get the limbs to stop sliding, going in frame by frame and trying to get the hands and feet in the same place. I went into Blender and tried on a rig with real IK to see if it was a me or Daz problem, and in less than five minutes had a perfect push-up and a perfect step up on a ledge. But this was made for that Daz Movember contest a couple of years ago, so I didn't use the Blender versions. So Daz is great if you don't need to see hands and feet in place. There is a script now called limbstick that works really well and kind of works like IK, but the arms or feet don't rotate with it that well, so there's still limitations. 

The past eight months I've been taking animation classes and learning Maya, and I've been using Maya with Daz characters and porting the keys back to Daz with the bridge. That works better, but there's still feet sliding, and certain rotations break the rig in Daz. But you can animate in Maya, bring the keys into Daz, and then spend some time cleaning it up as if you were cleaning up mocap data and still spend less time than animating in Daz. Copy and pasting keys works to an extent in Daz, and then at some point your character is going to distort, you'll have to highlight the keys and change it to linear and then back to TCB (or however you wanted it), and then inevitably Daz will crash soon after this distortion happens. Or in Maya or Blender, you can select all the limbs and set a key on everything in a fraction of a second, click the set key button for all the limbs in Daz and you're looking at sitting there waiting for a minute or three. The graph editor in Daz is really bad as well. In a normal graph editor, you can grab the tangent handles and adjust the spacing that way and it's so quick and easy, there aren't handles that I can find in the Daz graph editor. So you have to go in and manually move keys up and down on the graph to make the timing how you want it. 

It's entirely possible to animate in Daz, and once you spend the time to see what you're limits are and how you can work around that to still do what you want, it's entirely doable. But now for personal projects, I animate in Blender through Diffeomorphic, or if I feel like the character would render better in Daz (some skin materials from certain PA's look absolutely amazing in Daz but just don't transfer to Blender and I don't know enough to fix it), I'll animate in Maya and bring the keys into Daz. I've got my fingers crossed that Daz will fix the animation problems for Daz 5 whenever it comes out because I prefer rendering in Daz as it's far quicker than Cycles or Vray on my system. 

 

solis

Roman_K2 said:

I would like to make a movie...

....Overall it would be kind of "shock and awe" but heavy on a balancing, study in contrasts to make its point.

Not 3D but worth it:

1. Koyaanisqatsi - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koyaanisqatsi - from 1982. Somewhat dated but hey, Stunning visuals (70mm), Thoughtful narratives, and Philip Glass!

2. Baraka - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baraka_(film) - from 1992. Cinematographer from Koyaanisqatsi with a compelling visual showcase. A bit light on the deeper introspectiveness of the original though.

 

View on the LARGEST screen you can source, turn the volume UP, and......

SasquatchIsCool

3141592654 said:

Hmmm ... not movies, but I have several animations that reach about 1 minute long and one animation (more like a collection of animations on one theme) that is a few minutes.

I will consider making a youtube channel for upload and display.

Please share!  We would love to see.  :)

 

SasquatchIsCool

WendyLuvsCatz said:

I just went with using DAZ content 

the stuff I shared was 90% rendered in iClone, some Carrara and Twinmotion... and a bit of UE4 too

I almost exclusively used DAZ mesh as iC6 I import FBX not port to Character Creator like iC7 users can

Rosa used DAZ content in Blender AFAIK as well as DAZ studio 

Definetely would love to see who else used the content.  :

SasquatchIsCool

benniewoodell said:

I have these two I can show you from a couple of years ago. 

(509) There's No One in the Kitchen - A Daz 3D animated film - YouTube

(509) Peaches - A Daz 3D animated film - YouTube

The thing is if you animate in Daz strictly, you are going to run into a lot of restrictions on what you can do. In Peaches, you'll see the pushup scene and when he steps on the ledge, that was the best I could get either of those shots after five or six hours of trying to get the limbs to stop sliding, going in frame by frame and trying to get the hands and feet in the same place. I went into Blender and tried on a rig with real IK to see if it was a me or Daz problem, and in less than five minutes had a perfect push-up and a perfect step up on a ledge. But this was made for that Daz Movember contest a couple of years ago, so I didn't use the Blender versions. So Daz is great if you don't need to see hands and feet in place. There is a script now called limbstick that works really well and kind of works like IK, but the arms or feet don't rotate with it that well, so there's still limitations. 

The past eight months I've been taking animation classes and learning Maya, and I've been using Maya with Daz characters and porting the keys back to Daz with the bridge. That works better, but there's still feet sliding, and certain rotations break the rig in Daz. But you can animate in Maya, bring the keys into Daz, and then spend some time cleaning it up as if you were cleaning up mocap data and still spend less time than animating in Daz. Copy and pasting keys works to an extent in Daz, and then at some point your character is going to distort, you'll have to highlight the keys and change it to linear and then back to TCB (or however you wanted it), and then inevitably Daz will crash soon after this distortion happens. Or in Maya or Blender, you can select all the limbs and set a key on everything in a fraction of a second, click the set key button for all the limbs in Daz and you're looking at sitting there waiting for a minute or three. The graph editor in Daz is really bad as well. In a normal graph editor, you can grab the tangent handles and adjust the spacing that way and it's so quick and easy, there aren't handles that I can find in the Daz graph editor. So you have to go in and manually move keys up and down on the graph to make the timing how you want it. 

It's entirely possible to animate in Daz, and once you spend the time to see what you're limits are and how you can work around that to still do what you want, it's entirely doable. But now for personal projects, I animate in Blender through Diffeomorphic, or if I feel like the character would render better in Daz (some skin materials from certain PA's look absolutely amazing in Daz but just don't transfer to Blender and I don't know enough to fix it), I'll animate in Maya and bring the keys into Daz. I've got my fingers crossed that Daz will fix the animation problems for Daz 5 whenever it comes out because I prefer rendering in Daz as it's far quicker than Cycles or Vray on my system. 

 

Nice to hear from you Bennie!  I already follow you on Youtube!  Great job.  I'd love to work with someone like you in the future. 

SasquatchIsCool

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

I don't want to start that up again, but I think the correct question is not can you, but rather should you. And with things like Diffeomorphic and Sagan around, I think the answer is a resounding NO. DAZ Studio is indescribably primitive when it comes to animation (and that's just the first step in the pipeline to final frames) and cut off from the rest of the 3D animation world.

If you take the time to learn Diffeomorphic and Blender, you'll be paid back manyfold with things that before we difficult or impossible that are now trivial. It's worth taking the detour.

Yeah I meant using DAZ content.  It is amazing stuff to port over.

 

SasquatchIsCool

benniewoodell said:

I have these two I can show you from a couple of years ago. 

(509) There's No One in the Kitchen - A Daz 3D animated film - YouTube

(509) Peaches - A Daz 3D animated film - YouTube

The thing is if you animate in Daz strictly, you are going to run into a lot of restrictions on what you can do. In Peaches, you'll see the pushup scene and when he steps on the ledge, that was the best I could get either of those shots after five or six hours of trying to get the limbs to stop sliding, going in frame by frame and trying to get the hands and feet in the same place. I went into Blender and tried on a rig with real IK to see if it was a me or Daz problem, and in less than five minutes had a perfect push-up and a perfect step up on a ledge. But this was made for that Daz Movember contest a couple of years ago, so I didn't use the Blender versions. So Daz is great if you don't need to see hands and feet in place. There is a script now called limbstick that works really well and kind of works like IK, but the arms or feet don't rotate with it that well, so there's still limitations. 

The past eight months I've been taking animation classes and learning Maya, and I've been using Maya with Daz characters and porting the keys back to Daz with the bridge. That works better, but there's still feet sliding, and certain rotations break the rig in Daz. But you can animate in Maya, bring the keys into Daz, and then spend some time cleaning it up as if you were cleaning up mocap data and still spend less time than animating in Daz. Copy and pasting keys works to an extent in Daz, and then at some point your character is going to distort, you'll have to highlight the keys and change it to linear and then back to TCB (or however you wanted it), and then inevitably Daz will crash soon after this distortion happens. Or in Maya or Blender, you can select all the limbs and set a key on everything in a fraction of a second, click the set key button for all the limbs in Daz and you're looking at sitting there waiting for a minute or three. The graph editor in Daz is really bad as well. In a normal graph editor, you can grab the tangent handles and adjust the spacing that way and it's so quick and easy, there aren't handles that I can find in the Daz graph editor. So you have to go in and manually move keys up and down on the graph to make the timing how you want it. 

It's entirely possible to animate in Daz, and once you spend the time to see what you're limits are and how you can work around that to still do what you want, it's entirely doable. But now for personal projects, I animate in Blender through Diffeomorphic, or if I feel like the character would render better in Daz (some skin materials from certain PA's look absolutely amazing in Daz but just don't transfer to Blender and I don't know enough to fix it), I'll animate in Maya and bring the keys into Daz. I've got my fingers crossed that Daz will fix the animation problems for Daz 5 whenever it comes out because I prefer rendering in Daz as it's far quicker than Cycles or Vray on my system. 

I wish we could mix DAZ3d for content and way to use props and stuff between figures, then Iclone that ain't expensive and the quality of the animation and facials by Metahuman into UE5.

 

watchdog79

@SasquatchisCool - have you seen this thread?

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/358051/the-animators-assemble-thread-for-daz-animation-wips-clips-and-tips/p1

Roman_K2

Impressive! "Darla's New Outfit" - smooth motion on my 1366 x 768 laptop screen.  Thanks!  Shortcut - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICEj4bZwDAo&t=22s

Roger re: the earlier comment about watching "Baraka" on a big screen.

I think new people could use a glossary of the new... approaches. For example I think I've heard of "iMovie" (Mac?) but not "iClone".

Getting further away from DAZ Studio I've seen mentions of at least some "cell animation" augmentations for Android tablets... there are several programs in the category apparently. And possibly some "rotoscoping" stuff where those so inclined would sketch freehand over their DAZ renders?

Gordig

I've been working on an Avatar: the Last Airbender fan film for a bit now.

Daz figures bridged into C4D, a dForce hair that I don't immediately remember formed the base of the female's hair, and a couple of the buildings are from one of Stonemason's Streets of Asia sets. Clothes made in Marvelous Designer, characters animated in Cascadeur, Kitbash3D buildings, X-Particles....

WendyLuvsCatz

"iMovie" (Mac?) but not "iClone".

 

iClone has been around a long time, I started using it 12 years ago before I even knew of DAZ

it means a clone of yourself, nothing to do with Apple iProducts more I, robot and used to be called Itsme

was changed when we started getting iCars and all sorts of iThings (copying Apple I guess)

it's a 3D animation software

SasquatchIsCool

watchdog79 said:

@SasquatchisCool - have you seen this thread?

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/358051/the-animators-assemble-thread-for-daz-animation-wips-clips-and-tips/p1

Wow!  Thanks

SasquatchIsCool

Gordig said:

I've been working on an Avatar: the Last Airbender fan film for a bit now.

Daz figures bridged into C4D, a dForce hair that I don't immediately remember formed the base of the female's hair, and a couple of the buildings are from one of Stonemason's Streets of Asia sets. Clothes made in Marvelous Designer, characters animated in Cascadeur, Kitbash3D buildings, X-Particles....

How did you port the clothes and hair over?  Can you take Dforce hair and make it have a simulation?

Gordig

For the clothes, I exported an animated Alembic out of C4D into MD, simulated the clothing, then exported Alembic back into C4D. dForce hair can be exported as OBJ, and will import as splines into C4D (and presumably other programs, but that's the one I use). From there, you can convert to hair and simulate. However, that character has incredibly complicated hair, so the dForce hair just forms the static base of it, while the dynamics parts I had to create myself.

RorrKonn

SasquatchIsCool said:

I was wondering if anyone has made a movie with DAZ3d or just still figures?  Do you have any interest in making movies using DAZ 3d? 

Please share your movie or animation!  Also can you share tips?  

Bridges are available now so can you show us your work you have done.  

I remember Rosa using DAZ but haven't seen anything since this that even compares or am I missing a few?  

 Wait ,DAZ does partials n blooming flowers ? ROSA was rendered in DAZ .?

 DAZ for the content bridge to Blender eevee for the real time render. .gimp for the 2d .graphic and  blender for editing.

be fore Blender n DAZ Studio Rooster Teeth Animation ,RWBY & Red vs Blue.

 

wolf359

All Daz/Stonemason content ( Except the police car which is legacy poser)

FirstBastion

wolf359 said:

All Daz/Stonemason content ( Except the police car which is legacy poser)

 I liked that,  it looked really good.  And animations and the camera track were clean and smooth.  The dialog lipsync and her animated performance worked well too.

One thing that caught my eye in the background around :28 seconds in,  was the yinYang grafitti on the wall flickering.  Just wondering if you used a decal node for that?