Animating the time of day in DAZ Studio?

Joepingleton

Back in college we had an assignment to paint a location at different times of day to see how the light changes.  I was playing around in the DAZ Studio Iray setting and noticed that there was an "Environment" setting named "SS Time".  Is there a way to set a keyframe for this setting?

Attached is a sample render of a secne with two hour incraments.  

linvanchene

As far as I know it is a limitation of the current DAZ Studio API that certain render engine specific parameters cannot be animated with the default timeline and even Keymate or Graphmate plugins.

The former OctaneRender for DAZ Studio plugin developer t_3 invested a lot of time and energy to work around this by adding an separate internal timeline to the OcDS plugin. You can animate OctaneRender specific parameters like material settings, light emission, render and postprocessing settings.

-> You can use the OctaneRender Daylight Environment to make animations with the sun moving at a specific time of day, date and place on earth.

Video of the OcDS Daylight Environment settings:

http://vimeo.com/55246483

Video example of an animated Daylight Environment:

https://vimeo.com/54735567

The videos show the interface of an older OcDS build but in the current version OR 3.x you can set a keyframe for each parameter you see in the environment options.

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Quick example with a cube:

The red dots and the red line below the OctaneRender parameter Latitude indicate that there is a keyframe set on the OctaneRender plugin timeline.

Frame 1 Lattitude 48

Frame 10 Lattitude -62

The whole 10 frame animation preview in the OctaneRender Image browser:

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DAZ_Josh

Have you tried loading the Sun Dial and animating that?

linvanchene

DAZ_Josh said:

Have you tried loading the Sun Dial and animating that?

Did not know about the Sun Dial.

The Sun Dial Set is located in the Smart Content product Default Resources.

If you click on the Sun Dial preset the SS Time options are replaced by a SS Sun node.

In the viewport you can now find a Sun Dial prop.

In the KeyMate plugin set the selection toTRSV and you can see and set keyframes for:

Sun Dial

transform

Sun Base

transform

Visible in Render

Cast Shadows

Sun Chain

Elevation

Azimuth

Visible in Render

Cast Shadows

Sun

Visible in Render

Cast Shadows

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What you probably want to do is change the Elevation and the Azimuth by dragging around the Sun Dial: Sun Gizmo in the viewport.

Frame 01

 

Frame 10

The challenge with this workaround with the Sun Dial is that the SS Time options are getting replaced.

-> The moment the Sun Dial is in the scene the user does not anymore have a way to tell what kind of time the manual sun position dragged together in the viewport corresponds to.

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To summarize:

It seems currently in Iray DAZ Studio you can animate the sun direction with the Sun Dial but you cannot animate all other Sun Sky specific parameters like SS Time, Haze, Saturation, Glow Intensity etc...

-> If you are looking to animate advanced daylight environment parameters you can do that in the OctaneRender plugin for DAZ Studio.

Joepingleton

Thanks for the info on the Sun dial.  I didn' even know it existed.  It looks like this will do the job.  Now I need to get experimenting ;)

 

Off topic: is Octane still  still a few hundreds of dollars? is it worth the price?

linvanchene

Joepingleton said:

Thanks for the info on the Sun dial.  I didn' even know it existed.  It looks like this will do the job.  Now I need to get experimenting ;)

 

Off topic: is Octane still  still a few hundreds of dollars? is it worth the price?

The pricing information for OctaneRender 3 can be found here:

https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=54021

Several users added their feedback about OctaneRender here:

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/1195021/

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Joepingleton

Thanks for the information. Unfortunately its still too pricey for me right now :(