Has anyone discovered great ways to pose characters yet?
PlacidFalcon
Posts: 16
I've tried keyboard shortcuts and creating auxillary windows for side and back camera. But I'm still taking 30 minutes to get one pose. My characters are kinda floatingin negative gravity with bad centers of gravity all the time, then I have to worry about the center axis point constantly moving after applying pre-made mposes.
I am willing to download any plugin that may help. (aside from purchasing a physical doll which don't exist and connexion mouse which wouldn't help since i'm posing not sculpting).
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Half-an-hour sounds quick, I'm afraid.
ditto what richard said. :) if i can get just the lower neck, upper neck, head and eyes posed well in an hour, i'm feeling lucky...
i do hear what you're saying, though...it's be great if one or two of daz's resident wizards came up with a script that'd link joint/bone movement in a more realistic way--or apply some dialable correction to an existing pose to make the interaction between the joints more lifelike and balanced...even on a figure that's had limits turned off, which most pose sets pretty much demand.
i expect that'd be a must-buy for tons of studio users...but it'd also take years to develop, likely enough. and by the time a genesis 3 version was ready to roll out, daz would probably be shipping victoria 9. :)
j
It is worth checking Casual's posts in the Freebies forum.
this vid certainly helps with the workflow
I look for one that goes some way to getting what I want, then tweak and/or adjust after that. (Sometimes it's more than tweaking, hence the and/or.)
Personally, one node at a time with the parameter dials and the node selector
Prebuilt poses are a great timesaver, whether you use them out of the box or as starting points. I originally avoided them since I could do it myself for free, until I realized how painfully slow that was, now I can't have enough premade poses.
Umm...yeah. One of the areas of content creation I'm very glad that there are others that enjoy it and are very good at it...because I suck...frankly. I don't have the patience to get better at it.
I used to think, "Why pay for poses when the tools are available to create them myself?" Until I spent hours trying to get a good pose, lol. Posing can be painful, but I am getting better (and slightly faster) at using the Active Pose Tool node selector in conjunction with rotation parameters. I've never had much luck just using the freeform gizmo. PowerPose can be handy when you don't want to constantly change your camera to be able to select the right node (especially handy with, well, bones in the hands) and you don't want to drill down through the node tree in the Scene pane.
Today's early super sales discount made it a no-brainer to snatch up more pose packs.
On a related note, posing things like tentacles, cables, snakes, etc. can be a royal pain. Being able to set select nodes into position and have the rest do a "best fit curve" would be incredibly handy. More often than not, I feel like I'm wrestling with the tentacle or snake more than posing it. If anyone has any tips or pointers, I'd sure appreciate it. As is, my method is to select a range of nodes and use the Pose tab to bend the group into a smooth curve, tweaking individual nodes as necessary. Applying a twist can spread the loops of coils out like a stretched spring, but that's about all I've got going (aside from tweaking individual nodes. Pinning doesn't really seem to help; if anything, I guess because of the IK, pinned nodes behave even more strangely when you manipulate nodes further up the chain.
Yes, I'm very meticulous about posing - no feet or toes thru floors, no fingers thru bodies or clothes, no eyes looking in the wrong place....you get the idea. I can fiddle MUCH longer than 30 minutes just fixing/posing hands. LOL
Laurie
I am trying to pose the Eastern Dragons now, two of them, and while I did buy a pose set for them already none of the poses include what I want - 2 poses where each dragon is like opposite sides of a DNA strand. There is one pose though that is a decent start to a helix (DNA is a double helix).
Buy the hand poses FIRST. There are great products for that. That's where most the time is probably spent, right?
Personally I would suggest just tugging and pulling your person and having fun with it for about five minutes (don't worry where the floor is) and you may surprise yourself by getting a pose you wouldn't have thought of. When you are ready to ground your person/object, remember to go UNDER the ground plane and see if anything is poking through. Easy smeezy to see if your character is too deeply embedded. That, with watching your white brackets, makes it really easy to "floor" your folks. Use your sliders when Y translating if you are jerky with the Universal Tool out in the viewport.
Laurie- do you know that by selecting the hand in Scene tab, if you go to Parameters there are very easy sliders to grasp, open hand, squeeze fingers together, etc? (not trying to insult you LOL)
I do know that but I normally want something that's a bit different than what the sliders do. I like the hands to look as natural as I can get them. The process of fine-tuning is part of the fun for me...I'm weird that way. LOL
Tweaking existing poses...fine, I can do that. Start from scratch...drives me crazy.
I'll happily take poses...store bought, freebie, included with sets (those are some of the ones I hate coming up with the most..specific poses for specific items). And, yeah, I'm like Laurie...the little things that are 'off' are a big distraction and I'll spend the time needed (often too much) to 'fix' them.
The PowerPose tool does help some...but it's not going to cover many current figures without updates. There are community supplied updates for some of the recent figures...
How to make new templates: http://www.sharecg.com/v/67300/related/3/PDF-Tutorial/Creating-PowerPose-templates-for-Daz-Studio (Blackfeather does have some additional templates)
Power Pose Update: http://pdsmith.deviantart.com/art/Powerpose-Update-for-DAZ-Studio-Cookie-n-Chip-465432403 (this has some more included support).
PowerPose documentation: http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/artzone/pub/software/powerpose/start
Oh, yes, understand that. I use it as a starting point, or after I've already started posing each finger. It's useful to move them AS they're being posed/ tweaked. I like posing too.
I bought Zev0's and Draagonstorm's Pose builder so that I can mix and match/mirror existing poses. I have the one for Genesis 1 and 2 figs, and there's a separate one for Genesis 3 figs (which also bundles with the pose converter) and V4/M4. It cuts the time so that the minutiae is really what I have to work on. That said, that fine tweaking still takes anywhere from 15 minutes to close to an hour.
http://www.daz3d.com/pose-builder-for-genesis-genesis-2-female-s-genesis-2-male-s
http://www.daz3d.com/pose-builder-genesis-3-bundle
http://www.daz3d.com/pose-builder-for-victoria-4-2-and-michael-4
oh yeh, products for sale that are off pose wise annoy me; especially when the character is perched on top of the soft (the hints in the word soft) cushion they're sat on.
I've even try out the position myself to see what I get (usually weird looks if anyone comes in the room).
Posing can go wonky really quickly but by using various features available in DAZ Studio I don't find it particularly difficult or frustrating. Yes, I can spend a lot of time fiddling but the basic position usually falls into place by moving the trunk near where it should be, grabbing the ankle and forcing the leg to an initial bend then I work my way up to the thighs. Similarly for the arms and elbows/shoulders. During this process, "pinning" previously posed parts helps keep things from going wonky. When the basic position is set then I go back through and tweak the major limbs again with dials or manipulators. Then I go back down to the feet to get them into proper orientation. Then I work on the neck & head position. Now, I start working the hands. I hate working the hands. There used to be a great 3rd party tool called "handgrip" that could set an initial hand/finger position, but it got lost in the upgrades. Now I just bite the bullet and tweak each hand/finger joint with the dials or manipulators. All this body posing may have to be iterated a few times but if the first iteration is done thoughtfully the subsequent tries go quickly. Finally I work on the head expressions and eye positioning. The eyes are NEVER left parallel, they're always looking at ("point to") something that matches the action in the scene. Mouth twitches, eyebrows, eyelids, brow furrows, all that stuff. I usually spend as much time on the head/neck and expressions as I do on the rest of the body. It's where the character comes alive.
I don't finish the posing in one go. It's usually not until the 3rd or 4th rendering that I'm happy with what I see but if I come back to the scene a few days later I'll find something to tweak. In my universe people don't bury their fingers in the wall or toes into the floor, or float in the air. But by time an image is ready for publishing there is probably at least an hour posing on each major character in the scene.
If you don't use pre-made pose sets, the best way to pose a character is exactly the same as it always has been:
Stand up, assume the pose you want. See what bends / twists where. Replicate it on the figure.
Also, the primary pieces of advice:
1 ) If a pose is supposed to be static, the center of gravity must be over the rectangle that is defined by the feet.
2 ) If a pose is supposed to be dynamic, the center of gravity must NOT be over the rectangle that is defined by the feet.
3 ) The hips and shoulders must not be paralell to each other or the ground on any of the three axis. Even just a couple degrees makes a huge difference in realism.
4 ) Don't turn 'side to side' on for the elbows or knees unless representing a broken arm or leg. Twist the upper arm or thigh and bend the elbow or knee, instead.
I do a LOT of rendering, on the order of one scene a day, every day, while in production mode for my comic (which I haven't been doing the last couple of months as I convert things over to G3 from G2, but usually I am always in production mode). So I can't spend hours and hours on one pose -- it is just not practical. My comic would come out one page a year instead of one page a week. So I had to find ways to speed things up.
To help, I have tons of pre-made pose sets. Yes this costs money but my time is more limited than money. But I don't usually just use the pose set. I use it as a *base*, and then modify it. So let's say Liberty Lass is flying. I have like 12 different viable flying poses for her. I pick the one that looks closest to what I want, and then I fiddle with it to get it where I need to. This helps speed things up and allows me to produce a shot every day.
Sometimes it is just not possible... just yesterday I had to do a pose totally from scratch for a villain because nothing I had matched what I wanted. I can do that occasionally but not on a regular basis without getting so far behind that again, I would not be able to put out a 5-7 panel page every single week like clockwork.
Small additional tip : When you see a hand (or whatever) pose you like on a full pose in your library, you can use it on your current pose, simply select the hand, and press ctrl when clicking the new pose, pick "selected" (instead of "root"), "recursive", and you're done ;) . All your pose sets can be used as partials.
Now that's handy!
Thanks :) . It works with anything, you just have to pick the "last" body part involved in the bones chain, like lower abdomen for the upper body (on G3), or L/R collar for individual arms.
oops, sorry, my edit turned into a new post.
Posing takes time, and sometimes good posing takes even longer. Many times, starting from a prefab pose makes a lot of sense (as many others have said in this thread). A few other suggestions, if you will - make sketches using stickfigures on scrap paper to try out ideas in a quicker, less frustrating way. I like to just use a basic stickfigure with an oval for the head and a rectangle for the chest. It also can save some time if you think about the purpose of the pose. Are you posing a character for a 3/4 portrait? Don't worry about their feet and legs much, if at all, then. If the character isn't going to be seen from head-to-toe, I don't worry about body parts the viewer won't see but this is only possible if I have a composition in mind prior to posing. The devil is always in the details, but don't lose track of the big picture either and spend so much time agonizing about the exact angle an eye is posed instead of noticing that the head and neck are at awkward angles.
Thanks, it seems to work only for the G1/2/3 figures though. With generation 4 and earlier I don't get any dialog, it just applies the whole pose. I don't recall if that's normal?
+1
I rarely start from scratch. I go out of the box (with tweaking) and using them as starting points.
The "Friends of X" sale with the PC+ Weekend sale makes for some great deals on pose sets. I bought a bunch.
It only works for poses in DS formats (e,g, .dsa, .duf), not .pz2
OK, must be that then. Thanks.