Yeah, it was flattering. But we didn’t let it go to our heads too much.

However, the closing interview question started a discussion that we felt should be shared with our readers here on Posermocap.com. It was an inocuous enough question–”do you have any closing advice or comments?” but it opened up two interesting threads.

The first suggestion that we gave was never to look at doing a project all in one program. We’ve used Adobe’s After Effects for compositing for a dozen years now, and it’s become such a part of our workflow that it’s tough to imagine doing even a single animation without it. The control that compositing provides over final image quality is far, far more powerful than trying to do everything in a shot “in camera.”

Compositing is simply combining images or footage and it’s based on the concept that the final footage is two-dimensional. With a two-dimensional image, we can layer images on top of each other using Adobe After Effects or another compositing program (Shake, Fusion, Jashaka) and handle each layer separately. Each layer can have its own effects, animation, colour correction, timing adjustments, etc. Compositing allows tremendous flexibility in handling the final footage.

At its basic level, you could render out the background as a separate layer or pass, each character as a separate layer, and any special effects as yet another separate layer. At a more advanced level, you can render out different buffers for each layer separately – colour, diffuse, specular, transparency, and so forth, and do a custom mix of each buffer to give you ultimate control over the final composite.

You can extend the advice of never doing a project all in one program even beyond the scope of compositing. You can also work out different elements of a shot in different programs. It’s not unusual for Poser and Daz|Studio artists to use programs like Vue and Bryce to create natural-looking backdrops for their characters, but there’s no reason to stop there. You can also use a 3D animation program like Lightwave or 3DS Max or Maya to create 3D elements as needed. As long as you can match camera data, you can even create seamless moving camera shots that no-one would ever know were created in several different programs.

Even though you may be working in 3D, your final footage will be 2D – so take advantage of that.

The second suggestion was to always try to work with other people. Not only will they provide a useful set of eyes to provide constructive criticism, but they will also be able to bring their own talents to the mix and allow you to finish your project faster. Their strengths may allow you to avoid the roadblocks that would stop your project dead in its tracks because you, as an artist, have different strengths. If you have expertise in character animation, but no skill in modelling, how much faster would your project get done if you were able to have a collaborator who could build the models you needed rather than having your project bog down while you were working on modeling rather than character animation?

Doing it all by yourself is great if you have a small project, but if you have larger projects, then a team is a great way to really accelerate production and get your project done.

Any thoughts?

Now, if you go onto any CG Animation forum on the net, you’ll likely find that lower-cost programs like Poser and Daz|Studio are not held in the same esteem as more expensive programs like Maya, 3DS MAX, Lightwave and Softimage. The perception is certainly out there that “good” animation needs expensive software and that the more expensive the software, the better the animation.

While it is true that the more expensive programs tend to have extensive toolsets, the capabilities of lower-cost programs have been expanding tremendously over the past few years. And for programs like Poser and Daz|Studio, they can indeed be used to make movies.

When it comes to making movies as opposed to still images, you have to worry about two things:

• Ease of Use
• Render time

Ease of Use: Both Poser and Daz|Studio have one tremendous feature that really has to be explored for its impact on animation to be fully appreciated. That shared feature is the massive library of low-cost and even free content created by users. Now, we’ve written about the content libraries for these programs before, but when it comes to making animation easier, easy and inexpensive access to pre-existing assets can do a tremendous amount to accelerate and simplify the animation process. Rather than spending time building all of the necessary assets, you can instead add in the pre-made content and get started animating immediately. This is a huge time saver, especially for independent animators who literally have to do everything in their projects. Whether you are using pre-made characters and clothing, props, or even our Motion Capture Moves Packs, the ability to compile animations out of all of these assets can make your animated projects quite a bit easier.

In working on animated projects in the past, we would always run into one massive hurdle, and that was creating new content. It’s one thing to be creating one or two assets, but when you have to create dozens or even hundreds of assets before you can start creating even a single frame of animation–that can halt a project in its tracks and relegate it to your own subdivision of Development Hell.

Render Time: When animating a project at 30 frames per second, render time is a huge issue compared with still-frame renders. An animation that takes 2 minutes per frame to render means that a 10-second animation of 300 frames will take 10 hours (600 minutes!) to render out. Imagine if that same animation would take an hour per frame to render–that means that the same 10-second render would tie up the computer for nearly two weeks!

With the release of Poser Pro and its Queue Manager, the ability to do background renders and network rendering makes the use of Poser Pro for an animation environment much more attractive. Rather than having one computer tasked with crunching out animation frames for a scene, the load can be shared among all the computers on a network. A simple two-computer network that’s likely to be found in many homes could cut rendering time in half. A four computer render network that’s within reach of small production studios cuts animation time down to a quarter. And because Queue Manager renders in the background, the computers can still be used to generate new animated scenes to be added to the render queue. (Daz|Studio has no network render function, but there are ways around that–that will be covered in a future post).

As you can see, Poser can definitely be used for making a movie. We’ll be showing off exactly how it’s used in a series of upcoming posts as we at Posermocap.com start creating our own short movie–and you’re welcome to follow along with us.

It can really be like strapping on a rocket engine to get you moving through your animated project.

Imagine being able start animating a scene in minutes, rather than hours. How many more scenes could you get done in a single day? How many films could you get done this year?

As exciting as Motion Capture is, there are some issues with the technology that have to be anticipated when you’re planning your production.

• Motion capture is just a tool in your toolset rather than being the entire toolbox. There’s an old saying that goes: “When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” This is as true of animation as it is of anything else. It is tempting to use mocap exclusively for animation, but there are times when you need a particular shot and you don’t have the right motion capture animation available for it–that’s when you have to break out the keyframe tools. Being familiar with those tools is especially important; and there are a number of excellent tools built right into Poser including walk and talk designers, dynamic clothing and hair, layer animation, and an extensive expressions library.
• Raw Motion Capture data can need a lot of cleaning and editing to get right. When you import a BVH file into Poser or Daz|Studio, it writes a keyframe for every frame. Editing the motion once it comes in to Poser would mean adjusting dozens of keyframes per channel in a single second of animation, or using animation layers to overwrite the motion capture data. It is possible. But one of the selling points of using our Move Packs is that we have done all the cleaning for you. Characters move properly and–here’s the key part–they hold props correctly. If you do need any adjustment, such as setting a character’s starting position, you should be able to add an animation layer and set a keyframe or two and start animating.
• Motion Capture is not just for your main actors–in fact, it really shines when you apply it to the extras in your scene. Need to animate a crowd of zombies menacing your heroes? One click of our Zombie Moves will get that horde shambling along nicely. If you use the data to populate and animate the backgrounds of your scenes, you can elevate your project up to epic status. Cecil B. Demille had casts of thousands for his movies–but you can use motion capture data and digital extras to get your own cast of thousands.

When it comes to getting an animated film done, you want to get the animation done as quickly as possible, and spending less time keyframing poses is one of the ways to accelerate your production speed.

To learn more about motion capture technology, you can look check out the Wikipedia Entry.

Yes, that’s right. Anyone.

While contemporary theatrical animated films can have budgets that reach nearly USD$200 Million, there is an explosion of independent animated films being released on the internet and direct to DVD by people working out of their homes on desktop and laptop computers with production budgets that might just reach upwards into the hundreds of dollars. Maybe. Powerful computers and powerful software, combined with gigabytes of low-cost content available online put animated filmmaking within reach of anyone.

It’s a true animation democracy.

If you’re a Poser or Daz Studio user, you already have in your hands some of the most powerful tools for creating your own animated films. For years, Poser and Daz Studio users have been creating mountains of content for use in rendering still images. Meanwhile, the software, which started as simple artist reference software, has become more and more sophisticated and includes talk designers, walk designers, dynamic clothing, animation layers–many of the character-animation tools that you would expect to find in high-end character animation software.
We’re going to show you how easy it is to make your own animated 3D or anime-style film. By using off-the-shelf software and content, we’re going to show you the process, step-by-step. And we’re also going to show you how to strap a rocket engine onto your back and get your production done faster than you’ve ever imagined. After all, that’s why posermocap.com is here–to provide you with motion-captured character animations and moves that you can drop in to your own works so that you can focus on getting your animation done, rather than spending time in pre-production.

And we’re going to be doing the same thing ourselves. We have animated projects we want to get done too–and you’ll get a chance to see these projects come to life before your eyes right here on the website.

Since we are a business and we have to pay for all of this somehow, here’s the sales pitch: We would like you to sign up for our mailing list. Those who do subscribe will get:

• First chance to buy any new Moves Packs that we release–up to 1 week before they are made public in our store.
• Special offers on Moves Packs and other store items.
• Exclusive content (Moves, textures, props) that will be available only to subscribers.

Join us, won’t you?

Now let’s go make some movies.