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There is nothing mythical in what I said. I worked as a producer in a post production company in LA from 1999 - 2004. The company I worked for did commercials and film (though I almost exclusively worked on commercials). I am not talking about local commercials - I'm talking about superbowl ads and cutting edge 3d work. I am sure in the last few years there have been some technical issues that have simplified things for many shots - but to be cutting edge you have to be pushing the envelope. That always requires specialists.
I NEVER said they modeled everything from scratch - in FACT almost NOTHING was modeled from scratch - hence the CAD model from the car manufacturer example. Every car commercial we did we used the CAD model. They stripped it and did some touch up modeling and of course all the rigging. There are databases of models to shop and we had subscriptions to all of those models. Every single project used most models from prexisting models - that were than touched up for the particular project. Those models came from many different sources. Databases, old projects, purchased models from other post production houses.
My whole point was the part about rigging and getting models to work in professional end set ups is difficult is not true.
Content is useful for professionals. But the technical challenges presented to the hobbyist (Me) is different than those that occur to the real pro houses. For example we had three full time computer techs that did nothing but updates for software and communicating with Aliaswavefront to get bugs worked out. They wrote code to fix compatability issues - sometimes for free (if they would use it in general) or at a cost if it was only for us.
I just should add one more point - When I wrote "they do not need daz models" I mean there are all ready premade models of high quality available (and have been available for over a decade).
I know that sometimes they even used poser models in some film shots (where I worked), so I am not trying to say that "genesis" would not be used by a film studio or commercial house. They probably have been and will be. But the issues of getting a model into another program might be solved by a tech or a p.a.
They might use them. And I bet they do for storyboards and for pre-vis. When I moved from LA I had never scene a pre-vis or storyboard that use poser (that doesn't mean no one used them).
Anyone care to guess (actual facts would be better!) if we are going to get an updated 8.5 on the 14th, or just an extension?
Some additional Genesis fixes would be nice. Just bought a bunch of Genesis stuff that was on sale - but can only get a few to work right.
Wow.
You guys are talking about two completely different markets, and saying that the entire world is that way. It's not.
To say that what Namrettek described is a myth is just nonsense - for the market he's describing. And of course, on the other hand, in the lower end markets, guys who do commercials for Bob's House of Used Toyotas on a local cable channel at 3am have completely different needs, budgets, schedules, etc. So they grab what they can get that meets their needs.
Anyway, how did we get into this discussion anyway? Last I saw we were talking about 8.5, and someone was talking about the future of Carrara and why DAZ seems to be steering full steam towards solely content. Nothing about that has to do with professional vs. hobbiest, and who models from scratch.
Anyway, OF COURSE, when you're doing a feature film and have characters that are going to be speaking and acting throughout a two hour film, you model and rig from scratch, using some extremely complicated and detailed modelling. You need to show slight inflections as they speak, to show emotions, etc. You wouldn't dream of using V4 for that. So you do something like what Namrettek suggested, and get some guys slaving away at modelling, who then hand it off to some riggers. And to say that's a myth promulgated to increase the "wow-ness" or whatever is just absurd. I realize most of you guys don't have much professional background, but geez, at least try to check your facts a little before posting.
eyeofSolomon for example does car sales, waste collection etc commercials etc using Carrara
http://www.youtube.com/user/eyeofsolomon/videos
so people certainly do use it for proffessional use.
Lol!
You're right, that discussion shot way off base...
I addressed it because it sounded like namrettek was saying that Carrara is old technology and the pros don't use DAZ content, so what's the point if it makes it past 8.5 or not.
And to me, DAZ content is FABULOUS for hobbyists, and Carrara is an excellent (only??) tool to use this content in.
Maybe I misunderstood the point.
I'm not really sure what the point was, then, TBH.... :-\
Didn't mean to get off topic. Of course there are different levels of working professionally with 3d.
But Daz content is not aimed at professionals. I don't think there is any disputing that.
That doesn't mean you can't use it for professional projects.
But I do think it is unrealistic to expect Genesis to become the next big thing in the world of CGI.
Or Carrara for that matter.
At least not any time soon...
I just thought that the complaints against Daz and Carrara are not very realistic.
Again, I think you're focusing on the wrong market...
There is a HUGE market, comprised of approximately 1.46 GAZILLION hobbyists (and semi-pro/low end professional users) that, at least in numbers, is far larger than any professional market. At least I believe it's pretty clear that there are more hobbyists than pros, though hobbyists tend to come and go rather quickly, while pros hang around for a while....
Add up all the Poser users, and Blender users, and DAZ users, and any other inexpensive/free CG software users, and I'm sure the numbers are huge. Those are the people for whom the content market is targeted. That is why stuff like Genesis is, at least in numbers, such a huge market, and why it certainly is arguably the next big thing in the world of CGI. Not the high end professional world, but the larger hobbyist world. The high end professional world couldn't give a damn about it.
I think you misunderstood me.
I am a hobby 3d artist. I spend tons on content. I am not disagreeing with you.
My initial response was referring to people who keep complaining about Carrara. People who say they are tired of Carrara and are going to buy Maya.
Then someone wrote that I was spreading a myth about specialists. That is where I got of topic and started talking about professional studios.
I believe there is a huge market for Carrara. I use it all the time.
hey you guys,,,,i think the mane point is that if your a hobbist and you just like doing this sort of stuff,,,,then stay with daz and carrara,,cause yu wont make it any further than right here. if your a pfoffessional then its a dead horse for you to use unless you just want to play around,,i was with daz and carrara for 5-6 years and had taken a year off with some surgery and couldnt get carrara to consistently act right or do any thing that i could actually post up to be sold,,,really sad,,,i didnt faile this product ,,this product failed its user.
haveing said that,,,i still use it and love playing around with it,,i do wish it was more dependable,,i would us it more,,cause i am moveing into other programs and i dont think i will actually purchase 8.5 this time when ever they get it out. i really hate to say that carrara was my first thrall with 3d,,,but after i tryed to get some thing together to actually sell...wellll...what do you think?
The "myth" I was talking about was that the "specialists" don't use canned content. There is a perception, enhanced and spread by certain elements, that "professionals" create their own models. This has never really been true. Even as far back as the release of the Video Toaster on the Amiga there was canned content and this content was used in "professional situations."
I'm under NDA's so I can't elaborate too much, but lots of places use significantly more "off the shelf" content than they want known. This is especially true where "real world" environments are in use. One might be surprised at how much "scene filler" is added to scenes in recent years. If one looks hard enough at content created in "HD", one who is accustomed to working in CG will easily see these "props." Many places have started using green/blue screens instead of sets and digitally adding the environments later.
I'm going to stop here before I get into trouble. It is not beyond the pail that DAZ brokered content would be used in these situations. Don't discount the possibility of more use in the near future.
Kendall
The "myth" I was talking about was that the "specialists" don't use canned content...
Kendall
I think then there was just a misunderstanding -
I said - big studios use purchased content, and have for over a decade.
I did say they would not need Daz content.
I may be wrong about that.
The truth is I have no idea how many big studios currently use Daz content in final scenes.
But I love using Daz content and Carrara. I want carrara 8.5 and I want Carrara 9.
I will not be making any money any time soon with my 3d, but I do have a lot of fun with it, and I do not have 3500 dollars for Maya or years to learn it.
MMM toast.
Imagine on the Amiga was the first 3d program I ever used. It took hours to render a ball. I quickly lost interest...
I also had Vista pro.
Couldn't afford a toaster, though I had a friend that had one. It was really cool.
MMM toast.
Imagine on the Amiga was the first 3d program I ever used. It took hours to render a ball. I quickly lost interest...
I also had Vista pro.
Couldn't afford a toaster, though I had a friend that had one. It was really cool.
I had an early model Toaster, jumper wires all over the PCB. Pre-transporter effect software. They shipped us the Toaster before Lightwave was ready. Lots of Genlocking going on around that time as well. Just imagine rendering at 7MHz on a moto 68000 with 512K of memory in HAM mode. Yup, did that, and got paid for the results too.
Funny thing was... 7Mhz was blazing fast at the time :-) Then we got our beta Amiga-2500UX from CATS. Sys5 Unix and a 14Mhz m68020, but we had to send it back after testing :-( I was on several teams writing early 3D software for the Amiga back then. I wrote a beta of a GUI 3D wireframe modeller for the C=128 in Z80 CP/M mode... too bad the C=128 died (edit: market, not machine) before we could get in through C= testing. Still have the (working) C=128 boxed around here.
Kendall
Ooo, do you have a secret decoder ring too? :)
NDA's make no difference. It's no secret that people use other people's work in some professional situations. It's only a secret if they're doing something they shouldn't (eg, licensing), or some other reason that might be slightly nefarious. But there are tons of above board, professional situations where people use others' work. No secret whatsoever. And it's not a bad thing, people use what they need to use to get the job done. Just like people use 3D software to generate the images. They didn't write every line of code of that software, did they? No, and the software does 90% of the work of generating the image. So unless they, pixel by pixel, generated the image by hand, they used a LOT of other people's work to make it.
But if some goofy modeller out there is trying to convince everyone how great he is at modelling when in fact he used some DAZ content, I can assure you he's not "the industry".
Ooo, do you have a secret decoder ring too? :)
NDA's make no difference. It's no secret that people use other people's work in some professional situations. It's only a secret if they're doing something they shouldn't (eg, licensing), or some other reason that might be slightly nefarious.
Now you're showing ignorance. NDA's exist more to protect business practices moreso than "nefarious" activities. Most companies don't want their methodologies to be known by their competitors. I only mention the NDA to explain why I had to be vague about details, otherwise, some here will attribute "other" reasons.
And no I don't have a secret decoder ring, but I DO have contract codes that I have to use to validate my access to certain information. And for some clients, magneticly encoded access cards. Nefarious enough for you?
Kendall
So that's what they are... I never really knew what all those initials and stuff meant. I kinda thought it meant, like, don't say "nada", or "Never Divulge Anything". Cool, thanks for the info. :)
Actually I've had to fire people twice in my career for doing stupid stuff and breaking their NDA's. And I've also worked with legal guys to draft (actually revise) NDA's. So yeah, I know a little bit about them.
My point was that you don't need to break your NDA by explaining the generic reasons why some people might choose to use other people's models. It's no secret, and fairly obvious.
Thinking along the lines of the professional demand, or lack thereof for Genesis. Now I've never been in a studio and have no idea how they go about things, but have seen their work in adverts and feature films, on TV and the movies. Something which strikes me is that, never in animated adverts and very seldom in feature films do we see any attempt made to portray "real" humans or animals with "real" motion. They are invariably cartoon style, and pretty much proprietary.
See a lot of "real" CG humans in stills in print media - usually in crowd scenes in visualisations.
So, is it only us amateurs who strive for reality with realistic humans and animals, or are the pro's so good that they can pull it off without it being spotted?
Millions of years of evolution has caused us to notice the tiniest facial ticks. We are programmed to search out the face of our mother in the first few seconds after birth. We see faces everywhere and study them. Babies love to sit and look at faces for long periods of time.
CG People just don't look real in close up shots. They creep us out at a subconcious level. We might not know why something looks wrong - we just know it. I don't think it has so much to do with the textures and materials in different levels of light we can't even see sub surface scattering on skin. I think it is mostly tiny muscle movements that are missing. Hairs on the face that fail to bristle, nostril twitches, different breathing patterns while speaking. blinking, biting the inside of our lips, swallowing - a real person might make hundreds of motions in just a few seconds.
We have no problem with an animated character not looking real we accept their universe, but something that is pretending to be like us, but is not falls into that uncanny valley which tends to disgust people - so real and so NOT real. Our subconsious says that creature pretending to be human is NOT breathing.
Stills CAN fool us, medium length shots, especially motion captured (and blured) action shots can fool us if done well and quickly. This happens quite often with head replacement on stuntmen. It's hard to spot. but it doesn't even require CG. It can be done by a talented compositor.
@Kendall Sears and Joemamma2000
The funny thing about all these discussions are - I started them by complaining about people slamming on Carrara, I didn't really have any agenda about "profesionall artists".
We are each describing parts of an elephant. I'm talking about the trunk, your talking about the foot and the tusk...
The world of professional CG contains a lot of different levels. People do what it takes to get the job done as quickly and as cheaply as possible.
Sometimes cheap means spending 500 dollars for a model instead of 10. Especially if your artist cost 2500 dollars a day and you don't want to "try" something out...
And sometimes cheap means spending 10 dollars and working for 25 hours to get that something to work.
Some artists are actually quite paranoid about how they get their job done. And with good reasonl.
Kendall you mentioned the video toaster. When the video toaster came out I think it cost aroun 1500 dollars. No one "professional" would buy it - I mean TV companies. They didn't believe something so cheap could actually work. In the end the video toaster built their own amiga shell (without the name Amiga) and packaged it together and sold them for around 10,000 dollars (I may be wrong on the exact dollar amount). They sold them like crazy to news channels all over the country.
There are reasons to not let producers know how you do your job. Not to trick them, but they can be completely CG stupid!
I had a producer (from production side) actually ask my inferno artist if he could pan the camera around behind the actor. The problem was we were viewing their FILM footage. That producer honestly did not understand that a compositor (2d) looking at their film (shot in a camera) could not move the camera angle. It's all magic to them!
One thing to never forget about feature films is "Merchandising!" in the famous words of Yogurt. Product recognition is a large part of sales, especially for impulse buys by, and for children. Making a character "instantly" recognizable, even from a distance -- or some would say, especially from a distance -- is an extremely valuable asset.
Children have a hard time discerning faces quickly, even so far as to mistake strangers for their mother in public. So to make a character uber-realistic would be counter productive for collateral sales -- especially where children are concerned.
Kendall
Yes, indeedily doodily. The original Toaster was right at $2000 MSRP, if I remember correctly, but sold for the $1500-$1700 range in most shops. It wasn't so much the price that held back sales, as much as the fear of computer graphics in general. Initially NewTek wanted all of us to sell the Toaster for "Grand Ideas" but the Industry CG as the time was pathetic, so everyone dropped back to selling the toaster as a Really Cool Genlock! for Weather Broadcasts and such. Local news organizations really snatched up the Toaster for video overlays, especially the built in "Over The Shoulder" preset. Dana Carvey's support of the Toaster helped greatly. As did the relative success of the effects for seaQuest and Babylon5.
If I remember correctly, the "bundled" Toaster systems sold in the $5K range, not $10K. This was more for making sure that working systems were shipped than for pricing measures. With the Toaster's success, a lot of PC shops tried to jump into selling Amiga/Toasters and they had NO clue what they were doing. I was helping to operate a C= repair shop in Louisville at the time, and we got oodles of fried Amigas from PC shops trying to install MFM harddrives into the Amigas.
(EDIT: Just verified via Wikipedia that the Toaster bundle was $5K. Maybe age hasn't affected my memory as badly as I thought :-) )
Kendall
I actually worked in high school and college as a commadore repair tech in the early to mid 90's (not for
Commodore itself of course but a computer repair shop in NM). We made so much money and so many happy customers.
I fixed mostly c64, 128, and occasionally an amiga (they rarely broke) and when you consider that most of the c64's I fixed were built in the mid 80's they were pretty well made too.
What does this have to do with carrara? I guess not much. Except that I bet a lot of people that use Carrara probably had or used an Amiga... ( I had four at one time or another).
Actually I do have a carrara issue. Does unshaven not work in Carrara?
I just tried it out and it just has a sort of outline of the beard and nothing in the render.
It only says Daz studio in the product info, but I was hoping with the whole genesis thing it would work in Carrara...
is a new beta dropping in the next few days or is there going to be an extension to the serial code? Seeing as it will run out in 3 days :)
That may be a shader issue, you may want to check that (look at the alpha).
Personally I think that's a redundant product for Carrara, dynamic hair can do much the same job. There may even be a dynamic beard product already.
That may be a shader issue, you may want to check that (look at the alpha).
Personally I think that's a redundant product for Carrara, dynamic hair can do much the same job. There may even be a dynamic beard product already.
There was no alpha in the shader.
There is a dynamic beard product for Carrara and it is really good - better than unshaven actually. It would be nice however to have characters that have the same beard instead of having to try to match the same look with different products.
Ideally everything could be done in one package. Unfortunately some packages are just so much better with certain things.
I put the question here because I don't know if this is a beta issue, or just a non compatibale issue...
I'm wondering the same. Working to a deadline of tomorrow and the code stops at midnight!
Fantastic upgrade BTW. So far v. stable on OSX Lion.
ok where is my new serial!!
will have to run it in trial I guess
grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr