More animation fun
Added 2020-05-11 03:11:17 +0000 UTCI'm now more or less happy with the actual animation workflow; now i just need to experiment and get better at using and integrating it.
Part of that test is improving the animations I use. Daz has multiple animation systems; you can animate entirely out of keyframes (which is what I did for Katie), you can preload a bunch of key-frames (which is what I did for an animation that is rendering right now), or you can use a new system, called AniBlocks, which is what I'm testing here.
AniBlocks are pre-set animations, usually mocap (here of a girl going through a Karate kata), that can be animated and combined. This particular video tests a couple of things; it's the first long-form animation I've done with the new video workflow (DAZ->Denoiser->AE). Since the mocap data is already at 30 FPS, I dropped DAIN this time; she's already moving at the speed she's supposed to.
So what did I learn from this test? Well, first of all, I really should have rendered her inside an environment. Or at least with a ground-plane, so her shadow interacted with it; that would have sold the illusion better. This is actually two distinct animations, and while the discontinuity was hard to spot in DAZ, it's pretty obvious in-context. Apart from that it appears to have worked pretty well; this is a 500 frame animation, rendered happily overnight, and the output looks good at 1080p. Her head actually clips the camera a couple of seconds in, which I didn't notice in preview. Such is life.
Hope you enjoyed the little test; Emily's been talking about how she trains with sword, dagger and unarmed... I'll just write this off as MC having a dream about her training :)
