Tag Archives: Animation

Animating sunlight (SS Time) in DAZ Studio

3D, 3D Podcast, Screencasts,

I’ve recently explained how to make use of the realistic sun disk in DAZ Studio. I’ve talked about how to make this thing visible and how to set it to mood/effect you want, and I’m pleased with the results. This workflow works great for still images, but for animations, it quickly becomes clear that the SS Time parameter under Render Settings – Environment cannot be keyframed.

Or can it? Looks like it can, thanks to a little helper tool called the Sun Dial. Let me show you how it works.

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Podcast: Download (Duration: 7:05 — 6.5MB)

Comparison: 3Delight vs NVIDIA Iray for Animations

3D, , ,

For this animation I’ve rendered the same scene twice in DAZ Studio 4.8: once with 3Delight and once with the new NVIDIA Iray engine. It’s interesting to compare the results in an animation rather than a still image due to the different challenges involved.

One thing is that the subject is illuminated differently depending on how far away it is from the camera. Another is that it’s difficult to get matching end results when mixing faster and slower hardware: Iray can take a long time to finish a render if no GPU acceleration is around.

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How to render with Alpha Channel in Anime Studio 8

2D,

We’ve been playing with Anime Studio 8 Pro and love it – for years I’ve been bombarded with “special offer” emails that told me how amazing this programme was so we finally gave in. I’m glad we did – Julia and I are having lots of fun creating 2D animations.

The included tutorials are great, but I believe they’ve been made for previous versions of the software. Some features have changed, and this is one I’ve had trouble funding on the web:

How to render an animation while retaining the Alpha Channel.

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Woody dancing at the office

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Woody is our favourite wooden artists’ manikin. He currently lives on a shelf with two woolly ninjas (Blackberry and Blueberry) but we though it was time that he was brought to life. I was delighted when I found him in the additional content for Poser 7.

I animated him using Animate 2 in DAZ Studio 4, then exported the sequence into Poser 7 and rendered it, much like Dancing Alien and Dancing Robot before him. I wanted to make the scene more interesting so I tried orbiting the camera round Woody – that’s different to rotating him, but not a hard job thanks to Poser.

Even though there’s still a lot that could be done to make it more realistic (Woody’s feet don’t cast shadows, and sometimes he sinks into the office floor) I’m quite pleased with the results. My MacBook was rendering for over 24 hours on this one – that was before I told him not to go to sleep – it may have been done quicker, who knows. I can imagine how the Pixar guys are sweating – render a full day just to find out it was all for nothing. That is one thing I don’t like about 3D Animation – the rendering to appreciate the full effect isn’t instantly visible.

The backdrop in this scene is Ratracer’s Film Noir Detective Studio. I added some colour correction in Premiere Pro CS 5.5 to brighten the dark scene up a bit. Julia kindly showed me how to use Garage Band on her iPad so that’s how we made the music (including robot sound samples).

Enjoy!

Dancing Robot Splash Screen

iOS Development

I thought I’d share a couple of Splash Screens I created for my (since rejected) iPhone Apps. Splash Screens are loading screens which are shown while the sometimes lengthy startup process would show a black screen – unless you provide an image. Makes for a much nicer user experience.

Dancing Robot (above) is lovely cartoon figure called Klank by 3D Universe – I absolutely love their style! I have a couple of other figures made by them and I’ll show you some pre-production artwork a bit later.

As you may have guessed, Dancing Robot is essentially the same app as Dancing Alien with a different character, an animated background and different music. Guess I won’t be submitting that one to Apple…

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Simon from Poser: 3D Animation gone bad

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Here we have my good buddy Simon – he’s one of the default figures that comes with Poser. I accidentally added two animation imports on top of each other which wasn’t so good for his hip. It looked rather amusing as he twists out of it so I thought I’d post this.

It’s also my first iMovie experience on Mac – all this was done in about 15mins (including the upload to YouTube mind you). Music written by Julia courtesy of Garage Band on iPad.

Enjoy!