How well does Bryce pro work with Hexagon and DAZ?

drcharbonneau

As time goes on I would likely need to climb up the software and hardware ladders both. The commercial animation thoughts are way toward the vanishing points on the horizon. Likely the work done in all these would likely be a matter of resolution. Vue seems to have that high end res capability.

All input is appreciated at this point.

Dave Savage

A lot is made out of Vue's relatively easy to achieve professional animation capability.
I certainly found it to be very capable of some stunning things during my short exploration of it.
However, to get all the bells and whistles to produce professional animations on it, you really have to buy all the modules and that mounts up to quite an investment. Each module you load slows it down so you then need a bigger faster computer etc.

Bryce can render at resolutions that comply with HD standards, but again speed isn't going to be your best friend.
Rendering a high res still picture can take an average of 4 or 5 hours (that's with minimum complexity and optimised materials).
At 24fps you're looking at more than three days to render each 1 second.
Now if you were prepared to invest, you could buy half a dozen machines just for rendering and using Bryce Lightning, set up your own render farm across a LAN.

Another great option for animation is Carrara. It's physics simulation is impressive and multi-threaded rendering is quite fast.
It's interface is not as classy as Byrce (it's a bit cluttered and confusing) but there are plenty of online tutorials (as there are for Bryce).

At the end of the day t would all depend on what you wanted to animate. At present Bryce doesn't support model rigging so moving people around in Bryce is not easy, Getting text into Bryce has to be done via import (so if your were thinking of animating commercially for TV and those animations had text, you'd maybe better looking at Adobe Premier or Live Type).
Also when your raw footage is rendered you need good quality video editing software to put it all together.

I'll echo LHD here and say grab Bryce while it's cheap (last year it was free so that would have been even better for you).
Play with it, watch some of David's tutorials and see what it is capable of. You may decide it'll only do a small proportion of what you need it to do and even then it'll only do it slowly.

Some random clips I animated in Bryce
Some random animation test I did using Carrara
A random animation I made with Vue (except the last clip which I could only do in Bryce)

drcharbonneau

I checked out the first video. Pretty cool! Wouldn't it be possible to render your rigged animations in DAZ, then overlay them in a frame editor? I agree about getting the software while it's hot. Somewhere I mentioned that my first efforts are going to be for a novel I wrote, with the second finished, as of the first draft and the trilogy's conclusion begun. I could have sent you to it (it's cheap online @ $12) but the company that hosted my sites pulled a "bad faith" number on me, so I have to start from scratch. If anyone actually emails me with a request for a review copy, I'll send them a pdf. It's copyrighted in my name, so I can do as I like with it.

I think you'd like it, Savage64. With the water rising above the monolith gods, you'd get a peek at what I believe is ahead of us all. Someday, I may take a sabbatical from everything else and sit at a good machine with Delphi's most advanced compiler and write a renderer. You'd like my clone of ProE5, but it has too mny bugs to go handing around just yet. Blender actually has a much wider portfolio of effects than I could hope to incorporate into it as of yet. I'm lucky to be able to wrap bitmap textures around an object gracefully. It'll export an .obj, though, and would do your spaceships a lot of justice.

Vue, like you say, and I think I've even mentioned, can be pricey. XStream is like $1500, so... it'll be a while.

Thanx for the input.

Dave Savage

drcharbonneau said:

I checked out the first video. Pretty cool! Wouldn't it be possible to render your rigged animations in DAZ, then overlay them in a frame editor?
Oh there are always around problems. You could render the animated person/people in Daz against an alpha backdrop or green screen and superimpose them with the Bryce render in a video editor. Tough job if you've got moving cameras as there isn't an easy way to sync up camera motion. It doesn't help that Bryce uses it's own units of measurement (the BU or Bryce unit, so even doing it mathematically is a big ask). And then if Daz is good enough quality for people why not just do the whole thing in Daz? I guess it'd have to be done through an external unbiased renderer for the best result. Again, it depends on exactly what each project was as to the way you did it.

drcharbonneau said:

I agree about getting the software while it's hot. Somewhere I mentioned that my first efforts are going to be for a novel I wrote, with the second finished, as of the first draft and the trilogy's conclusion begun. I could have sent you to it (it's cheap online @ $12) but the company that hosted my sites pulled a "bad faith" number on me, so I have to start from scratch. If anyone actually emails me with a request for a review copy, I'll send them a pdf. It's copyrighted in my name, so I can do as I like with it.
Well for renders of stills I would certainly recommend Bryce (but I am a bit biased). :cheese:
If you're learning an app from ground level, Bryce is easy to pick up and it's interface encourages creativity in my opinion. I don't like being faced with graphs and too much data input, Bryce's quirkyness is a real benefit to me.

I think you'd like it, Savage64. With the water rising above the monolith gods, you'd get a peek at what I believe is ahead of us all. Someday, I may take a sabbatical from everything else and sit at a good machine with Delphi's most advanced compiler and write a renderer. You'd like my clone of ProE5, but it has too mny bugs to go handing around just yet. Blender actually has a much wider portfolio of effects than I could hope to incorporate into it as of yet. I'm lucky to be able to wrap bitmap textures around an object gracefully. It'll export an .obj, though, and would do your spaceships a lot of justice.

Blender when used by people who know what they're doing is great. Apparently a steep learning curve from what I've read (I did download it once a few years back and it was really buggy in the Mac version so I binned it after having a very quick look at it's complexity and having it constantly crash on me). I've been particularly impressed with it's motion tracking capability, but it does seem to do everything special effects and animation/video wise.

Vue, like you say, and I think I've even mentioned, can be pricey. XStream is like $1500, so... it'll be a while.
If you can get to a position where you can make money from doing still pictures (either fine art or commercial illustration like I do), then you'll have a better understanding of which way to go and how much you can afford to invest in doing it. If I was to be offered work doing a lot of animation stuff and the income from it was going to be large, I think I'd invest in Vue... But even though I enjoy playing with animation and in the past I have had a few jobs that required it, It's not something I seek out.