Do I need a super computer to make animations with DS?

Sfariah D

Do I need a super computer to make movie length animations with DS?

DrunkMonkeyProductions

Depends on what you plan to do.

If it's just something you're going to slap together, nah, a relative 'potato' computer could crank it out in a few days or weeks to months, if you know what your'e doing with the software.

If you're looking to do something like Avatar, then yeah, a super computer is pretty much a must.

 

Just to toss out some numbers,  a 90 minute movie would be ~129k frames, figuring 24FPS(Frames per second).

At 1 minute per frame render time, that's ~89 days, of 24/7 rendering.

Take it up to 30FPS, and you're looking at 112 days of render time.

Accoriding to some reports, it took over 5 million render hours( ~569 years) to complete the first avatar, with supercomputers of the day.

 

Animation requires three things, time, patience, and a fairly deep wallet.

 

Pickle Renderer

I would add to what DrunkMonkey says with this: Don't animate in Daz.  Do it in Blender.  Use Diffeomorphic to import/export.  It's overwhelming at first and will take time.  May be a considerable time, to become familiar with its workings but it's worth the effort.

Daz is very weak when it comes to animation and Diffeomorphics Cycles shader setup is almost as good as IRay (almost indistinguishable actually).

Silver Dolphin

You can also animate with a game engine render. Check youtube.

Padone

I would add this, being a old dog. In time animation always required a "supercomputer" to be done, but it is also true that a "potato" computer today is comparable to a supercomputer of the past. What changes is "expectations", that is, the quality you want to achieve. If you lower your expectations then a potato will be fine.

The second issue is that the market has its own expectations as well, so a model of today tends to require a supercomputer. So you have two options here, either use new models then spend a lot of time simplifying them for your potato, or use old models which are already simple. In this sense using genesis 1 or victoria 4 will in general require less resources than genesis 9.

kpr

Silver Dolphin said:

You can also animate with a game engine render. Check youtube.

1st time I've seen someone else post this

Yes you can. I used  Unity - has a Daz Bridge for characters etc - and made a 5-min short in "a couple of months". High quality look and feel, fluid motion... about the only thing you need to source outside of Daz content* is scenery and mocap (Unity store has lots and lots of the former at decent prices). If you've a little money - to supplement the free MoCap you can get online - you can make some brilliant things quickly and easily... It's just a case of getting use to "pathing" and camera work - Unity does so much else for you.

* If it's animation, not a game, you're making, you don't need interactive licenses.

Give it a go... like with Blender, there's a steepish learning curve, but I did find I could produce better results more quickly with this technique.

TheMysteryIsThePoint

Do not try to make movie length animations in DAZ Studio.

1) Join the Blender Studio and educate yourself on how people who are serious about making movies... make movies. There's lots of behind-the-scenes advice and best practices that are the difference between short clips in DAZ Studio and a bona fide movie.

2) Use the best tool for the job. Because of the Genesis framework and its incredible PAs, DAZ Studio is debatably the best character creation platform available. Credit where credit is due. I can't think of a better app with as strong a value proposition as DAZ Studio. But it lags far, far behind other tools in every other important area. This will translate into frustration as you go along trying to implement your artistic vision and DAZ Studio either cannot do what you need, or it is a much more  difficult or cumbersome.

3) So use DAZ Studio to create your characters. You'll get as close to the idea in your head, for the least amount of money.

4) But for everything else, use a leading tool. For most things, that'll be Blender with its professional, advanced IK rigs, a wonderful addon called Animation Layers, and its EEVEE Next and Cycles renderers. You can get your characters there with miracle tool called the Diffeomorphic DAZ Importer by Thomas Larsson. Unbelievably realistic cloth sim with Marvelous Designer. Mocap editing with unbaking in Cascadeur. Lots of VFX and other things in Houdini. Compositing in Blender. Color grading in DaVinci Resolve. Facial rigging and animation with the FACE-It addon in Blender together with NVidia's Audio2Face. Audacity for sound mixing.

5) There are two courses you'd benefit greatly from, both by Pierrick Picaut: The Art of Effective Rigging (I believe there's a follow up to it as well), because I've found that most issues with rigging are simply not that difficult to solve if you actually understand the fundamentals of how rigs work and you can then fix them yourself when you'd otherwise be stuck and frustrated, and Alive!, which is simply the best course on Animation that I've ever taken, hands down. Pierrick is French, VERY French, and kind of hard to understand at times, but he is charismatic, extremely knowledgeable, and explains things well.

This is a considerable undertaking, there's a lot for you to learn, but you'll probably enjoy every second of it. Just remember that thinking that one can, or even should, do all of this in DAZ Studio probably means that one doesn't appreciate everything that is involved.

Lastly, Good luck! Welcome to the obssession... you're in for a ride :)

 

nonesuch00

No, you don't, unless you render the animation stills with some sort of ray tracing engine. 3DL, EEVEE, and such will render relatively fast.

Sfariah D

I have been wanting to make a movie length animation since I was a kid.  I think blender would be much easier than paper, pencil, pen and paint?