W.I.P. "Sector 444"

drzap

Now that I found the right place to post,  I am starting my work on a full length movie (eventually) to be broken up into 15 minute episodes.  I am a little new to DAZ but I have a general grasp on its strengths and weaknesses.  At first I thought it would be impossible to keep most of my workflow within DAZ, but thanks to Wolf359's suggestion, I think it may be possible.  We will see.  Lately I have been window shopping for assets.  I have 5 main characters:  2 middle aged men (around 40 years old),  A woman in here thirties, and two younger women.  An elderly man and woman will be minor actors and there will be a lot of extras.  I have been looking for potential actors in the marketplace.  I have found that many figures suffer from "mannequin face".  Maybe it was the artist or the pose or maybe it was a limitation in the figure.  Are there any characters or figures in Daz studio that seem to be more expressive than others?  There are so many, I can't hope to be able to browse the whole catalog.  But I really like Mei Lin.  I definitely plan to use her.

At the same time, it is evident that I will run into render problems.  I did a search on this forum and it seems that there is no render farm or network rendering solution in DAZ.  This is why I chose an outside program for rendering.  Clarisse is lightning fast, but I want to push it along as much as possible so I am buying a faster workstation.  Dell makes an attractive model, the Dell T7910.  It will have plenty of cores (32) and I hope 64GB of ram is enough.  Clarisse is a CPU renderer so I can buy a modest GPU for viewport work.  That will arrive next week.  After that, I'm all in.  No turning back.  Wolf, please don't tell me what I'm getting into here!

wolf359

Greetings, My main advice would be
Establish your Pipeline so that it is 

"repeatable" and test every aspect of it

If you do plan to create all of your character animation in DS... fine but you MUST...MUST invest
in aniMate2 (full version)GraphMate and keymate.

Also Pick a good lipsinc solution
The free native mimic plugin for DS is only in the 32 bit daz studio
consider the newer "Mimic live"on sale atm for $15 USD.

and be aware that with Graphmate you can add more animated expressions on top of your auto generated lipsinc
so dont worry about how default character faces look 

SAMPLE HERE:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2TYEp536iB8THNhYzV3c3VXN0k/view

I have no knowledge of the "Clarisse"program and you plan on using alembic to get your animated meshes in to Clarrisse for rendering.

make sure Clarisse has no issues finding the UV's/textures that will export from DAZ....run tests!!
if  Clarisse supporst MDD consider the .obj/MDD pipeline that I am using with C4D.

Feel free to PM me here with questions about the pitfalls/ benefits on the DS side of things.
I will try to answer as best I can.

Take care

Chohole

Transferred to the Art Studio

drzap

Thanks Wolf for the advice.  I kind of lost this thread and just now found it.  Perhaps you can help me with a couple of questions.....  After a couple hours of playing on my gf's computer, I managed to create a scene.  But animation is a little rough in Daz (granted, it's free software).  If I decide to use it, it will take a lot of getting used to.  Is there a log file that can tell me statistics about a render (time to render, memory used, etc...)  This info is vital to my planning for production.  In the attached file, is it possible to make her sword glow like a lightsaber?  (Not a glowstick but like a badazz lightsaber)  Finally, are the camera settings true to life or are they just valid in the Daz world?  Thanks for the help.  BTW, just to clear things up,  the character below is not wielding a lightsaber.  It is a common lasertorch used by maintenance technicians for hull repair.  She flipped it into overload to deal with a sudden unfortunate incident.   Just so we're clear on that.

Richard Haseltine

This is being discussed in your other thread.