How to make and render Animation in DAZ.

Gagan4121

I am new to DAZ animation and i want to animate and render my own scene. What are the effective ways to render fast in IRay or should i use 3Dlight. Can i use Maya for animation of Daz characters? will i get control handles in Maya for animation. There are lot of qustion in my mind. If anyone can answer these i'll be vey grateful. Thanks

Diomede

Hopefully, some Daz animators will come by and fill you in soon.  If the answers help you decide to use Daz for animations, might consider the following video tutorial.  It is specific to using Daz for animations.  It is by Ivy Summers, and you can check out some of her posts in her Art Studio Forum threads.  In the Daz store, the tutorial is through Digital Art Live.

https://www.daz3d.com/daz-studio--getting-started-with-animation

Diomede

Here is a link to the fist page of Ivy's thread in he Art Studio forum.  Later pages are more recent.

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/9050/art-animations-by-ivy-summers/p1

Paradigm

Rendering an animation in IRAY will more than likely take time in the order of days if you're working with anything but a basic scene or have an enormous resource pool so I'd recommend starting out with 3Dlight. I personally find animating in Daz to be horrible, but there are others who disagree with me. You'll definitely want to buy both key and graph mate if you're serious about animating in DS.

Ivy

@Diomede_Carrara

{{{{ BLUSH}}}}

Thank you very much for your support.

nonesuch00

Render in 640x480 size frames if you render in iRay. If you render in pwToon then go for UHD. You'll want to add voice and other sounds in Blender or some expensive 3rd party package so sorry, if you though you could avoid Blender you can't, even early silent films have music sound tracks. There are 100s if not thousands of videos on all aspects of Blender on YouTube that are much more skilled at Blender than I so I'm not going to waste time telling you the merits of Blender.

If you do actually render in DAZ Studio then search YouTube for DAZ 3D's own short tutorials on how to animate in DAZ Studio. It's not hard really but even if the tools were top notch; animation is lots of tedious correction of intended animation movements with your 'storyboarded scenes' serving as keyframes (the most interesting dramatic scenes you'd choose for DAZ stills to render) if you want to look at it that way. It is easy though to get mediocre animations very fast in DAZ Studio; much faster than in any other tool I've used for sure; although I've not used iClone that others have used. Although I haven't tried those animations you make in DAZ Studio should then be exportable as FBXes (without the skinning) for retargeting and refinement in Blender, for example.

I think you might be able to get iClone 6 for free if you want to try & animate in it before purchasing a full version of iClone so ask iClone support about that. iClone may be beyond your budget though a sround-tripping capable version is pretty close to a $1000 dollars.

Chohole

@DazMaster
Please check your emails

 

benniewoodell

I animate everything in Iray in Daz right now. I render in anamorphic scope setting at 720x306 (but you can do it in 1:85 if you want, or even IMAX is an option they have!) Right now I'm rendering a shot that I've gotten 12 frames of 110 completed in 14 minutes. If I can, I try to do the characters in an alpha channel without the background to save time, and then just render out a frame of the background to comp them together. If there's a camera movement, well then I just do it all together because it's essentially the same amount of time, but if the camera stays in one place, comp them and save hours. 

Next, I load the shots in Davinci Resolve (totally free and you can do all of your editing and add sound effects/voice in it) and cut everything together, then I export it out as a Quicktime file, throw it into After Effects and do the detail preserving upscale and bring it up to 1920x1080 and you'd never know that it wasn't rendered in that resolution. You can even upres it to 4K if you want and it'll be fine. I just showed my producer three images, one rendered at 720x306, one at 1920x1080, and one at 3840x2160 because he said it had to be 4K, and the image he thought was the 4K render was in fact the 720x306, so you can save loads of time and get the glorious rendering of Iray. 

I do have to note that I have an Nvidia 1080ti card. 

For animation itself, I keyframe everything for the most part. I use anilip 2 for voices. And I also have keymate so what I do is at the start of every scene, I use whatever aniblocks I might want to use for the characteer and bake those as studio keyframes. Then I start at frame 1000 and anytime I need to make them walk or whatever, I just copy the keyframes from the beginning of the timeline, and paste them to where I want them, and then I can delete all of the keyframes for the arms if I want them to do something else, or make the person turn so I'll delete the Y rotation keyframes that the aniblocks made, and I have full control over what they do while walking, which I found was incredibly difficult to make work using the aniblock timeline. 

Happy animating! 

 

outrider42

If it hasn't been mentioned, turn on Iray Preview for your viewport. This will keep the scene in memory so it doesn't need to reload every frame. This one setting will save you a massive amount of time. Additionally, the denoiser in the 4.11 beta may allow you to set your iteration count (or convergence) cap very low. So instead of rendering to 95% convergence, you could potentially render to a fraction of that and save even more time.

With these 2 tips rendering animation with Iray can be a lot less painful. But it is still a slow process even under the best circumstances. And of course your hardware determines how fast you can render, too.

Ivy

benniewoodell said:

 

For animation itself, I keyframe everything for the most part. I use anilip 2 for voices. And I also have keymate so what I do is at the start of every scene, I use whatever aniblocks I might want to use for the characteer and bake those as studio keyframes. Then I start at frame 1000 and anytime I need to make them walk or whatever, I just copy the keyframes from the beginning of the timeline, and paste them to where I want them, and then I can delete all of the keyframes for the arms if I want them to do something else, or make the person turn so I'll delete the Y rotation keyframes that the aniblocks made, and I have full control over what they do while walking, which I found was incredibly difficult to make work using the aniblock timeline. 

Happy animating!

sounds like a lot of work . 

I found with daz if you have animate 2  It has subt-racks you can use with multiple aniblocks all at once to make full motion animation,  its really helpful when makeing my own aniblocks  that I hand keyframe  animation and then i can save it for later use.  in using sub-tracks I can also keep the original motion tracks in tact and use a sub-track to make a custom motion by adding blank aniblocks then adding any motion keyframes  I like to the blank aniblock. This is specially help in action scenes where I'm doing repetitive motions specially if your like me and like to hand keyframe everything.  before rendering I can use keymate to make any minor corrections before baking the final results and moving it over to the render que

I also found it interesting you start out with such a small render 720dpi  size and enlarge to 1080 in after effects,  I'll have to give that a try . Its been pretty common practice  to get quality iRAY animation  , that rendering at larger size dpi scale and reducing size for final productions has  given the best results ,  I always had start at 2660 x 1440  then reduce to 1080 in the film editor during final edit helps reduce any graininess that I might have got during rendering.  specially if i was using low iteration settings  I just use 980ti  Maxwell  cards , my experience has been the only thing that speeds up iray rendering is the iteration settings and the amount of geometry & texture size that is in the scene, being seen by the camera . the less iteration the faster it takes to cook a iray animation sequence & removing everything not seen by the camera & reducing or removing textures used to create shadows reduces vram usage.  But that is just my way of doing things . I like to use bill board back grounds and props as well though

Each person has their own way of doing things ,.. thanks for sharing yours  

 

benniewoodell

Ivy said:

benniewoodell said:

 

For animation itself, I keyframe everything for the most part. I use anilip 2 for voices. And I also have keymate so what I do is at the start of every scene, I use whatever aniblocks I might want to use for the characteer and bake those as studio keyframes. Then I start at frame 1000 and anytime I need to make them walk or whatever, I just copy the keyframes from the beginning of the timeline, and paste them to where I want them, and then I can delete all of the keyframes for the arms if I want them to do something else, or make the person turn so I'll delete the Y rotation keyframes that the aniblocks made, and I have full control over what they do while walking, which I found was incredibly difficult to make work using the aniblock timeline. 

Happy animating!

sounds like a lot of work . 

I found with daz if you have animate 2  It has subt-racks you can use with multiple aniblocks all at once to make full motion animation,  its really helpful when makeing my own aniblocks  that I hand keyframe  animation and then i can save it for later use.  in using sub-tracks I can also keep the original motion tracks in tact and use a sub-track to make a custom motion by adding blank aniblocks then adding any motion keyframes  I like to the blank aniblock. This is specially help in action scenes where I'm doing repetitive motions specially if your like me and like to hand keyframe everything.  before rendering I can use keymate to make any minor corrections before baking the final results and moving it over to the render que

I also found it interesting you start out with such a small render 720dpi  size and enlarge to 1080 in after effects,  I'll have to give that a try . Its been pretty common practice  to get quality iRAY animation  , that rendering at larger size dpi scale and reducing size for final productions has  given the best results ,  I always had start at 2660 x 1440  then reduce to 1080 in the film editor during final edit helps reduce any graininess that I might have got during rendering.  specially if i was using low iteration settings  I just use 980ti  Maxwell  cards , my experience has been the only thing that speeds up iray rendering is the iteration settings and the amount of geometry & texture size that is in the scene, being seen by the camera . the less iteration the faster it takes to cook a iray animation sequence & removing everything not seen by the camera & reducing or removing textures used to create shadows reduces vram usage.  But that is just my way of doing things . I like to use bill board back grounds and props as well though

Each person has their own way of doing things ,.. thanks for sharing yours  

 

You know, oddly enough this method has saved me hours of time. I tried so hard for so long to make the animate 2 thing work with the keyframes, and for whatever reason I can't get the keyframes to either stay for the entire sub block thing I create, or they're there for one frame and are gone the next. The feeling of accomplishment I had the two times I got it to work, I felt like I was back in school and got a hundred on the big test. I can't tell you how many painstaking hours I've sat there trying to jimmy rig it to work. I just did a fun little 35 second or so trailer for a robot movie using this new method, I was able to animate it all in about an hour and a half. But seeing as I've just been teaching myself animation the past year and a half, it's fascinating how everyone has their own method that works for them, and I love seeing other techniques that might help smooth things out for me! The most important thing is that we all have a lot of fun doing this and at the end of the day feel fulfilled creatively 

With the rendering, when I tried putting it out at 1920x1080, one frame was taking about 15 minutes to get to 100% (I have my iterations set at a max of 10000, but they hardly ever go above 4000), and that's with everything not seen hidden, it took me three months to render the first episode of my animated series. Then I found out about the after effects thing and tried that for episode two and it took me a month and a half to render it all, (but to be fair, I was in China for ten days without rendering so it would have been a little quicker). Right now I'm on the third episode which all takes place in like an underground poker game so there's no environment except the blackness around them so my frames are taking 1-3 minutes depending on the character(s) in the scene and what hair they have. I'm already halfway through rendering a 7 page scene this past week. I hope that product that came out earlier this week where you can click the button and it renders all the cameras on it's own gets released for animation soon, the PA said he was doing that next, that would be a load of help! 

I do need to learn more about textures and all of that. I just figured out this past week that if I don't do anything to the characters but load them in, there's zero lag time on my computer to animate them, only when I start adding all the maps, clothes, and hair does my computer start to take awhile to move to the next frame. I didn't realize putting maps on affected the timeline like that, I always thought it was just for the render lol. How much more time could I have been saving the past year and a half?!?  I justify it by saying it's all a learning process and mistakes only make you better and more knowledgable! 

Ivy

Yup its great to learn  how others do things with animation.  and working with full licensed version of animate2  just takes a lot practice and using it repetitively to learn everything sub tracks are easy towork with ,Animate2 is a bit dated and needs improvements in th IK and puppeteer. , I do like aniblock feature in animate2  because of the fact its easy to reuse them, quick setting them up its great to make a hand keyframe sequence and save it as a aniblock, once you master keymate and graphmate and have the full license of animate2  creating animation with daz fun.  like putting a puzzle together.

I start my test renders 1920 x 1080 and do my final rendering at  2660 x 1440  and use adobe premier film editor to bring back to 1920 x 1080 h-264 hd to take some of the imperfection out of it . Adobe premiere  can save in 4k xavs-5.   but i never had any need for saving anything in 4k. maybe someday if i start making stuff for VR or something i will

For my render settings I start at 90 iterations,  and work my way up from there until i achieve there being little to, no graininess in the render  i usually try to get around 30 seconds a keyframe,  & try to keep my target my renders times under a minute a keyframe anything longer is going to take a long time to render a 10 second 300 keyframe scene .and when making long running scene files it takes for ever to render them. and i don't have that kind of patients. and if i need to render anything that detailed i'll use a render farm for daz this is one of the better one that uses virtual desk top https://rentrender.com/online-render-farm-service/revup-render/

But there is a whole list of them on renetrender.com https://rentrender.com/iray-render-farms/

 Just look for the daz studio app icon for the supporting render farm, most any virtual desk top render farm will work for daz studio as long as you can connect tc-ip using SFTP and have 200mbps or better internet connection your good to go.

 i watched your film you posted you have some mad director skills,  i look forward to see what else you create with daz