Experiments with AE

So I had this idea. In my head it was super cool, of someone capturing Katie cutting loose at  the big central even in Act VIII. This is one of the clips from the video:

To do so I started with a phone in Daz, and animated it being lifted up. In retrospect 30 frames was not anywhere near enough, but.. animation/rendering is a bit of a pain in daz, so I hoped it could work out.

The ugly pink screen is because DAZ does not actually support animating textures, so if I wanted to put a video on a surface in DAZ, I needed to first render it out, detect the pink spots, then super-impose the video onto that.

Turns out that's less simple than I thought it was; there's an interesting tutorial/walkthrough here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2JMQ11JIh8

But let's just say that... reality was somewhat messier than the displayed system :)

After re-rendering, re-tracking, banging my head off the table, and finally (when everything else had failed) quietly shifting a few pins by hand, I render it. And ... I'd forgotten just how short 30 frames are.

Oh... dear.  If that was a looping image it would be kinda cool. But that snaps like crazy. Linear interpolation using AI (like DAIN or Twixtor) is terrible for videos like this, because it twists and turns at the same time.

Okay, back to the drawing board. I'm gonna need more frames. Like, a LOT more. I think something like 10x longer would be nice, so... maybe 300 frames? Except 300 frames and DAZ don't really belong together. So we cheat.

Daz has a second renderer, called Filament. It's absolutely terrible with hair, and skin, and emissive surfaces, but it's lightning fast. 300 frames in ~2 mins. And luckily my handphone doesn't have any hair.

As a side-benefit, the longer frames (and me knowing somewhat what to do, and what not to do) makes the process a lot easier. With 300 frames I never fall for the temptation to do it per frame, and knowing the things that really messed with me last time (like the handphone screen going nearly horizontally), I.. don't do that. The end result ends up much better.

It's not erotic... and I don't know if anyone will think it's worth it. But it was fun learning and doing new things, and it makes for an entertaining ingame sequence.

Which reminds me; less making videos, and more writing scripts. I'll see you guys later!