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Cinematic Animation in Daz Studio and DaVinci Resolve - WEEK 6

Week 5 - Background Actors

It's true that, during our adventures we'll be running across other significant characters that our main character interacts with. We treat this the same way we work with our main character - even make special places for them in our custom library.

This week, we'll be looking at a different sort of character - Background Actors.

These are normally not our secondary characters that help us tell our story, but rather people who are used in the background to sell the fact that our character is around more people than just him or herself - a moving painting of background made up of animated people.

For this we use more simplified techniques in our animating process and render them using much faster settings as they will be a blur in the backdrop, simply there to fulfill a need for a "Crowd".

I take this a step further and also run Scene Optimizer on these Background Actors - making their texture maps only a fraction of their original size. Even more, I often use figures that have lower system resources right from the start - allowing them to render Incredibly Fast! As we see during the session, my groupings of eight goblin creatures were rendering faster than one frame per second!

Also demonstrated in this session is how I started creating a background character - Petty Officer Sapphire - who will now also become a secondary character in the story. Inspiration comes at a constant rate as we do these things more and more.

We didn't have time to explore the options that I've saved for this character, or the progressing of First Officer Slater's character evolution, so we will explore that in a separate video below. The result is that we'll have High-Resolution and Low-Resolution versions of these characters to be used as necessary - Low Resolution for background actor shots, and the higher resolution versions for the scenes that require character interaction with the camera focusing on these new characters in the story.

We also see in this session how nicely the system that we've been putting into place starts helping with everything we do. We're adding our own custom areas to the library and using these loaders as we work - taking the "Development Stage" out of the process when all we need is a stage that fits with the story. We'll get more into this Development Stage next week. The main point here is this: As we Need things, we develop them. When we're done making these things that work for our story, we save them to our own special spot, so we can access them with a click, rather than having to repeat the same process over and over.

It has the added benefit of Getting this content out of our libraries and onto the screen, where they belong - why we bought this stuff in the first place!!!

It's a Deep Dive

It's meant to get us all used to the idea of working quickly with background actors using muscle-memory, and then rendering them out very quickly for use in whatever scene we may need them in. As long as we don't go overboard on the length of the animations, saving these Scene Subsets to our custom libraries takes very little room on our system drives, and saves us massive amounts of time when it comes to using them.

Make background actors using figures that we're comfortable using - so that we can quickly load our aniBlocks, set the camera(s), and render! It's a Beautiful, Magical Thing!!! :)

The best way to get into animating (with any software choice) is to Animate, and Animate Often!

We've reached a point in all of this where we can start thinking about making animations for a story. 

The more we start thinking along these lines, the more inspired we'll become towards which aniBlock(s) to select for the Main Animation before we start 'sculpting it into our own'.

The more we play around with this, the more practice we're giving ourselves.

The more practice, the more experience. The more experience, the easier and faster, and BETTER everything gets!

When Trevor first joined the course, he left a message - a wish - a goal.

I loved the idea from the first reading of it and knew right away that I wanted to use this concept within the course. It's a valuable outline of an idea - and idea that someone wants to put into motion. And that's what we're all here for!

Not wanting to lose the message, I used the little three-dot menu on the upper right of the message and chose > Share > Copy Link. To give this link a home, I've started a new message - a place where we can all jot down ideas and/or refer to others by sharing links to them in the same way. 

Link to an Idea

I've also had an idea to use one of Kathleen's image posts as a means of a Storyboard from which we can launch an animation. So to that end, I've added that in a comment to the main message. :)

I have a small start on Trevor's idea which I share by clicking the button below:

"WalkFemIP" is my special nomenclature for animations that utilize Havanlibere's Walk Feminine walking motion, for which I have made a special rig for. "IP" means that the character is using the In-Place version of the animation - hence the need for a camera rig that moves the scene past the cameras as if Rosie was walking through 3D space along the Z axis.

In-Place walk animations means that there is no forward (Z axis) motion, but that there is a walking animation.

The WalkFemIP camera rig contains many cameras.

These cameras are intended to be used on Rosie when she is using the Havanalibere Walk Feminine "In-Place" animation. They are to help facilitate camera moves (or not moving at all) that work well when filming a walking actor for a movie or show. 

TrnTbl - a Turn Table camera that looks up at Rosie from the ground. A null that is centered on Rosie's position rotates the camera around her evenly.

REV - REVEAL - Name was changes specifically for this course to assist with clarity.

...Under Construction