WiP - A few scenes with Pegasus Rider

TJMusic

Having forums back, I'm starting my first WiP thread. After a few months of learning, the time has come to use DAZ Studio for something real :)

The big goal is to make a music video for one of my music productions. Most of the video will be just shot with a camera, but a few shots will be composite of real footage and DAZ 3D animation. Probably I will make a special edit that will contain 3D scenes only, to avoid a boredom for people interested only in animation. And in this thread, I'm going to discuss the problems I face on the way when making all the animated shots.

I will update the opening post with the most recent preview of the work, while further posts will contain updates on the progress.

The two main scenes are already done, I've uploaded them separately on YouTube so it could be seen in better quality than on animated gif below. I'm still working with additional scenes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLpoLWBRTxk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bhh9_2Kc9fU

Miss B

Unfortunately, the ability to upload images in the forum isn't working as yet. :-S

TJMusic

I see the images are already working :) But one thing is missing, comparing to the old forums - I can't see tag in the post, so I cannot scale 2x the animated gif, so it looks so tiny. I couldn't make them bigger without exceeding the upload size limit, and even in the tiny resolution, their filesize is a bit unreasonable.

Going back to the subject. The first shot I'm working on is the flight of the figure from left to right, than turn, and flying diagonally and a bit towards the camera. This movement is already keyframed as I wanted, I've manually matched the camera movement on the footage. I've already managed to make wings flapping, with Ivy's help - the advice of baking the aniblocks was the right way for this purpose. Next thing I need to do is to add horse's legs movement - I'm probably going to mix some poses with puppeteer. I probably have found 2 poses I want to use, and I need to buy 2 other pose sets for the poses I miss. I tried to adjust rigs manually, but failed to make anything natural enough.

Until I buy more horse poses, I'm temporarily working with other shot, this time just a view on Laura's eyes, with a bit of expressions and a moving shadow of pine needles on the face. I'd also like to use HSS here because it's a closeup, but I'm running into some serious problems with rendering time - getting 100 frames low resolution preview takes more than a full night, just because of using raytraced shadows. If I add raytraced reflections and HSS, rendering 100 frames in 360p resolution may become impossible without a rendering farm :P

Still, I'm just polishing the animation yet, so I will worry about the final render later. Currently, I've managed to add the raytraced shadows on the animation, but apparently the tree is still moving too fast - I couldn't fix it without seeing the shadows, and that tiny render took all the night.

TJMusic

It's strange how long some things take while others take surprisingly short time! I worked many weeks to get the eyes with raytraced shadows right - and all nights of one week to render (I don't leave PC running when I'm out for work). Still, there's nothing more to post because on miniature gif it would look mostly the same as on the preview I've posted already.

And today I decided to make one more shot, this time full figure of Pegasus with the same raytraced shadows, and composite it with real footage, to make it better linked with the rest of the film I'm making. And - I can't believe - I made it in just few hours, with just 30 minutes to render.

TJMusic

So many weeks passed, and I'm still working on the main 200 frames scene. I've already keyframed many details on rider's legs and puppeteered mount's legs and adjusted details in their poses in relation to the movement. Recently I added details to rider's hands movement in relation to bending to the neck of the mount. Still need some tweaks there, and then adding the lights and in another few weeks it will be done at last.