Newbee question

hien.henryn

Hi forum,
I am new to DAZ. I ve seen lots of animation posted here.
Evidently I can ask a few question since you guys have been
there and done that.
I am making a 10 minutes animation using Anime Studio.
Somehow I ended up here looking at DAZ and thinking, um,..how
about including 10 seconds of 3D opening,
that would be nice.
So I went on, testing the water. Its has been nice so far.
I loaded up Genesis, dress her up, made her punched, kicked,
and moved around the provided prop. I like it.
Then I render to high res image, the quality is great.
Then I made a 10 second test avi to high res as well
with a default screen size (1080x607 ?). It took 10 hrs
on my old computer to finish.
Here comes the question: DAZ won't take Xvid-MPEC-4 codec
compression, was it because of the 1080x607 dimension or because
of the 30fps setting?
I can render again with a shorter footage and different dimension
but if someone can tell me why, and that would be so great.
It's viewed Ok'ed on VirtualDub thought, but re-setting frame rate
won't do anything.
Thanx

Richard Haseltine

It's always best to render to an image sequence, rather than direct to an aniamtion file. If you need an animation file you can then stitch the frames together, or you may be able to import the frames directly.

Ivy

hien.henryn said:

Hi forum,
I am new to DAZ. I ve seen lots of animation posted here.
Evidently I can ask a few question since you guys have been
there and done that.
I am making a 10 minutes animation using Anime Studio.
Somehow I ended up here looking at DAZ and thinking, um,..how
about including 10 seconds of 3D opening,
that would be nice.
So I went on, testing the water. Its has been nice so far.
I loaded up Genesis, dress her up, made her punched, kicked,
and moved around the provided prop. I like it.
Then I render to high res image, the quality is great.
Then I made a 10 second test avi to high res as well
with a default screen size (1080x607 ?). It took 10 hrs
on my old computer to finish.
Here comes the question: DAZ won't take Xvid-MPEC-4 codec
compression, was it because of the 1080x607 dimension or because
of the 30fps setting?
I can render again with a shorter footage and different dimension
but if someone can tell me why, and that would be so great.
It's viewed Ok'ed on VirtualDub thought, but re-setting frame rate
won't do anything.
Thanx

This is just my 2 cents of what I have experienced in animating Daz4 with animate 2.
3Ddelight only offers 4 codex for saving in AVI. (There is a 3rd party reality plugin with more options).

The best setting i found for me is 1920 x1200 dpi for HD animation. when rendering is done I save in "Cinapax codex by radius" or "Mircosoft AVI uncompressed codex" which will give you a bigger file size. both those codex's can be read by most movie editing software.

I have also experienced that Daz4 has some issues with actually animating gen 4 character in genesis I think most of it is because of the auto-fit tool. so in using Daz 4 i would do as Richard suggested and render one key- frame a time in sequence to make sure you catch all the poke through and deformities that take place during the animation process if your using auto-fit.

A big PLUS rendering in PNG sequence will allow for easier post-work of each key-frame graphic if post work is needed.
Most Daz4 user I seen rendering animation on youtube do theirs in sequence frames, mostly still art in a slideshow. or animate their sequence frames in short 1 or 2 second animations at 24 key-frames per second which will help speed up your rendering, time But may give you a little more choppy finished animation.

This is my preference for when I render a large scene, say 10 seconds or more. I always save in AVI "Cinapax codex by radius". I had found putting together 300 PNG graphics(for 10 seconds of film) in a movie editor like my Adobe premiere @30 key frames per second is a very lengthy process and you mise well save in AVI.

That has been my experience that has served me well for my animation using Daz studio.