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Cinematic Animation in Daz Studio and DaVinci Resolve - WEEK 8

Week 8 - Bringing It All Together

We begin this week with a lengthy overview of how important it is to follow through this course from start to finish, learning and practicing the main concepts of each week before moving on to the next.

Even if we do push forward before we're ready - we always do - it's what makes us Human - it's important to fully understand the lessons, and learning these concepts and workflows in the order that they are laid out here can truly help in building a solid set of Muscle-Memory workflows that makes animating in Daz Studio are real treat!

Going back to our first week, where we started to ease our way into DaVinci Resolve, we revisit that basic technique before jumping into the Fusion page, where true Visual Effects happen in DaVinci Resolve.

With most new release of the software, more and more of Fusion's incredibly functionality seeps into the Edit page. But when it comes to layering several elements together to create a singe video clip, Fusion is clearly the more organized and easier to manage way to go. We demonstrate this by adding animated candle flames onto a still image with still candle flames. Just adding those flickering flames that we've rendered out of Daz Studio using Josh Darling/DimensionTheory's VDB Essentials: Prep and Animate, turn this beautiful, warm image into a believable animated backdrop!

We've also explored the DaVinci Resolve Learning Page, here on this website, to reveal that it has actual courses with course materials that we can partake in to get deeper into our learning and understanding of DaVinci Resolve and all seven of its incredible 'rooms'. 

When we've gotten this far in this course, we've covered how I work in Daz Studio and in DaVinci Resolve to bring my Daz 3D Content to Life!

Going back through and filling in little areas that may need improvement or a refreshing of understanding can and will help us all to become better, faster, and much happier with our animating experience - and we're proving that Animating in Daz Studio is a Lot more of a formidable art than it gets credit for.

We're not jumping through hoops any higher or more difficult than in any other animation software - it's just a different workflow. That's all.

It's a Deep Dive

Letting go of common practices that we may have been using before can and will become the most difficult obstacle to overcome. Truly - folks that I've worked with over the years still just feel the need to begin with a huge scene full of assets and features that they've labored over for hours, days, sometimes even longer - and then start animating their people directly inside that scene. Such workflows have been deeply engrained into many people - thinking that this is the way it works - and that is simply not the right way to go about this.

Week 1 attempts to (and begs us to) convince us to start with an empty scene - always. Animate the character fully before bringing anything else into the scene - if at all. Personally, I normally render the character in that empty scene so that I can use that render in DaVinci Resolve in many other environments, which are each also rendered by themselves. As we dig into the homework, we're treated to some of my completed renders to work with in Resolve. This was a purposeful act to show, first-hand how I render out my assets.

In Week 2 we dig into Daz Studio and our Content Library and start setting things up into a comfortable work zone for our animating experience. Avoiding clutter and adding useful tools to Daz Studio was a pretty big part of the session. Even more important, however, is the idea of Our Own Base Scene. It is our Base Scene that will make the HUGE difference on how we work from this point forward - because it sets up our render settings and designates the HRDI Dome that we're currently using to render our Main Character. We have Daz Studio open with this Base Scene, and whenever we start a New scene, it will load our Base Scene. The beautiful part about that is that, as we make changes to how we're rendering our main character, we can apply these changes to our Base Scene and save it. So whenever we're working we're using our Current, preferred settings. That's the Magic!

Week 3 signifies the importance of having our own, favorite Main Character to work with and animate. Practice, Practice, and Practice Some More!!! We want to practice animating, rendering, and exploring the possibilities we've been gaining with this more simplistic, but better organized workflow. To illustrate this, we make an imaginary Main Character and start building our new home for him in our Content Library. In doing this we see that this custom place within our library conveys another form of Magic to this whole system.

As we push on into the other weeks, we're exploring different aspects of products from out libraries. As we find things that we want to use in our current stories, we add them to our new custom location, creating new sub-categories as needed to keep everything nice and clean, neat, and orderly. I good organized flow is what we want.

Week 4 and Week 5 delve deeper into making our animations better and more believable, without adding piles of frustration. We're using simple logic and wonderful tools along with our new, easier way of working with our characters. We're making corrections using Pose Dials including Custom ones - having my current setup available to you to see for yourself how amazing this way of working can become. Using those same methods, instead of just 'making corrections', we can also start changing things up entirely! In Week 5, I even show how to make these wonderful dials. I had to do that to show you how easy it can be to make such Powerful Tools on our own!

Week 6 is a look at how easy and fast it can be to paint motion into our scenes using Background Actors, and show how some of these are so cool that we add them also as supplemental actors that will eventually be interacting with our main characters. This is a Lot of fun and makes our finished videos look So Cool!!!

Week 7 attacks the problem often referred to as Writer's Block head-on with techniques that we can use whether suffering from this dilemma or just need additional imagery for our videos or more creative ideas on the possibilities of what we can do. Inspirations, here on this site, is Loaded with documentaries with professionals explaining their craft in some form or another, or showcasing the wonders that they've put onto the screen... this sort of entertainment is loaded with things that can cause our minds to create new ideas for what we want to try in this whole arena of making motion pictures!  Exploring our own content libraries so that we know what we have and where we can find it is something that we all owe to ourselves anyway. So why not use our creative-mental-block periods of time to do just that. Use a search query or just start browsing - exploring and getting to know all of our content can only make us stronger as artists, and it allows the money that we've spent on these things to get put to good use - render it out and use it for... something!!!

And so here we are on Week 8 - the finale.

We explore the importance of going at our own pace through this entire course - learning what comes from one week before moving on to the next. As we adopt this workflow and everything becomes faster because it's easier, better because it's more efficient, and we start putting out more and more videos because we're having so much fun - if we look at what we're doing, we're doing things as the weeks progress in this course - and, for the most part, in that order. It also starts to become more and more clear as to why the lessons from the previous week(s) are so important to understand before becoming fully immersed into the techniques that follow - it all just starts to make sense and work into what now becomes our very own "Common Sense" - and that's when we're really having a Blast!!!

To really conclude this thing in the right way, we continue on and explore the very basics of how real VFX artists work - using Fusion for compositing. If all we're doing is plunking a foreground shot over a background, maybe even getting a little more involved, it's fine if we only want to stay in Resolve's Edit page. Many YouTubes who require compositing for their videos work entirely in the Edit page, and that's perfectly fine. But I personally find it easier and faster using Fusion - for just about everything related to compositing. So we explore what that sort of workflow looks like at a very basic level.

Since time doesn't really allow us to explore too deeply, we also explore the wonderful DaVinci Resolve page, here on this site. It's loaded with everything we need to dive deep and become very well trained in using all that DaVinci Resolve has to offer - which is a LOT!!!

For fun, we've also taken a look into my legacy Fusion page, which is still a great place to visit if you ever want to see some training videos by professionals in the VFX world! :)

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