WORKFLOW - COMICS - TIMELINE?

bluesme

Hi,

I'm trying to create comic and have real issues with timeline:

- every new render/shot with new poses lights etc. -is next frame on timeline (not animate2 because sometimes I need to change morphs and had some issues with it);

- every frame need NEW KEYS for each figure FOR EACH BODYPART AND EACH PROPERTY DIAL for figure (excluding Hair, clothes etc) -to avoid total mismatch after 10 frames with different poses/properties;

- already discovered that CREATING new keys for ALL FIGUER'S CHILDREN take much more time, than creating separatly for: FIGURE PROPERTIES, HIPS children, .... (AND DIFFRENCE IS HUGE: 25sec to100sec);

- I often render many frames afterwards;

 

My main problems are:

- no visibility animation... (with workarounds like: 0% scale);

- no surface animation: usually it's Specular Roughness, or some map strength (for now I just render till that point);

- once every 10-20 frames I forget to place KEYS for figure's properties/bodyparts which leads to recreating frame... which takes time.

 

My question is:

Is there a better way to do that??? (produce sequence of images and render them. Don't get me wrong here -It's not an animation- it's: every frame different pose, camera, lights ETC.)

Or should I perfect my key creations further?

Thanks.

bluesme

P.S.  ALT+CLICK on dial -resets dial for whole timeline -is there any other, FAST way to reset dials to default for current frame only?

(already have my eyes on Dials Controls plugin)

AstroAce

This sounds like a hard way to render a sequence of images. I see what you're doing though.

What if you didn't use the timeline for making your scenes? Instead, make individual scenes and save them. Continue working on the same scene and pose the next scene. Do this over and over until you have all your scenes ready for rendering. Get a plugin like render queue by ManFriday which you can tell which scenes to load and render.

Perhaps this method might help you out instead of using the timeline.

PerttiA

I used to work like that on Poser, but when I moved to DS, I found out the same problem you did... Everything needed to be pinned for every scene, which lead to enormous (3GB's+) savefiles that took more than hour to open and save.
In the end I started saving each frame as a scene of it's own

green_90f49a94c9

Hey, I've used both methods; saving every frame as a new file and using render queues, as well as doing everything in one big timeline. Here's what I'll say about both:

Yes, you CAN do a comic by doing dozens or hundreds of scene files. And I have, extensively, in DAZ... But it's not an especially good way of doing things. It's slow, clunky, and inefficient, and it makes it very tedious to go back and make changes later.  I know there's a render queue that lets you make batch changes to multiple files, but even that doesn't give you as much control as just being able to go back and forth between frames on a timeline.

Which brings me to making comics in Poser. Poser is a program with a lot of flaws, which is why I moved to DAZ in the first place, but the timeline is significantly better than DAZ's. Let's say you're working in Poser, and you have a comic that all takes place in one big scene. You can just set every object and figure's interpolation to constant, use each frame for every new shot, and put potentially dozens of shots in a single file. There are a couple of quirks to this, but generally, once something is set as constant, they'll stay constant unless you change it. This means that if I make a change to a character in frame 5, it will not in any way whatsoever change the character in frame 0,1,2,3,or 4.

If you decide partway through that you want to change a character's morphs, or textures, or hairstyle or clothes, you can apply those changes to all of those shots, easily. No need to go back and open potentially dozens of different files, or use third-party plugins to edit them! You can have the entire sequence animated, and then go back and add new props, or change the environment settings, and it's not a big deal at all.

So yes, you can make a comic by using a new file for every frame, saving dozens or hundreds of different files, and queuing them all up. No, it's usually not even close to the best workflow for that kind of thing. Unfortunately, DAZ's constant desire to snap back to TCB interpolation, and the various weird quirks associated with TCB, make it very frustrated to try to have multiple comic frames in a single scene. I really hope that DAZ improves their timeline, so that other workflows become more viable!

 

Zelrish

An all this happens mainly because of the interpolation and the impossibility to change the default setting... such a waste
the fact that creating keyframes takes soooooo loooooooong too is for me completely unexplicable.