What do you guys use for animation?

[rickiricardo]

What do you guys use to create and render animation?

I'm working with daz studio but animating (and rendering) is really crappy. I'm looking for a decent solution for this - either keymate2 (which i could not find on any torrent) or a 3rd party app like motion building or anything else. Motionbuilder seems to have a built in 3d rendering engine which would make rendering animations much much faster.

So what would you suggest?

[Kooroe]

I have never tried my hand at animation but some of my favorite animators use maya.

[rickiricardo]

I have never tried my hand at animation but some of my favorite animators use maya.

yup, that would be the way to go, but maya is rather complicated (for me, to learn) - and transferring from DS to maya (or even motion builder) is still a pain in the ass as the skeletons are different so you basically need to reassign everything.

[wolfenspiel]

Well, I'm considering Blender myself, but not sure if anything from Daz will transfer over well, if at all. There's a lot of different programs out there with pluses and minuses. Best bet is to try before you buy. Go to the Daz site, and see what programs they advertise in their pipeline, because that would *most likely* be something with an easier(?) transference. Carerra, maybe?

On learning curves though, ALL 3D animation programs have them, MOST of them have basically the same style interface and/or functions, and many of them do things in the same or similar way...all expect you to learn some sort of model creation in books/tutorials, and anything more detailed than Daz or Poser is going to be a bigger learning curve.

If you want to learn/create animation, unless you have a super-high-end computer, and even then, honestly? For the price, as well as increasingly better functionality, I'd go with Blender and learn from scratch.

[Fathead2016]

Carrara is geared more towards animation than either D|S or Poser, bit of a learning curve but at least it lets you use native DAZ products, well at least up to Genesis 2 (DAZ has not updated Carrara to accept Genesis 3 as yet and they seem to be dragging their feet on this matter)

[3duser0]

try iClone works very well with Daz Genesis 3

[rickiricardo]

try iClone works very well with Daz Genesis 3

any torrent or place where i can download iClone? looking for the latest version (6 or 6.x - but i could only find 4).

also, does anyone know where i can find carrara 8.5?

[CocoaDoll]

For animation, I tend to use the motion capture animations from mixamo.com.

And Blender is my go-to for rendering.


Realistic(?) render from Blender Cycles



Toon Shaded render from Blender Cycles

[racoon]

I´m also interested in this topic. Blender has the mcjteleblender plugin to transefer between daz and blender, but I dont know what parameters get transfered.
As someone already mentioned I think iclone has support for dazrigging.
6.5 is available over at cgpeers, so is carrara 8.5  

Does mixamo work offline without the account? They say you need to upload your mesh to their site.

on a side note, I am interested in rendering with a cel/toon style, but not as severe as most renderers seem to do out of the box. Is that something cycles has parameters for? (I mean for example the abrupt change between light and shade, I want that level of simplification but a bit more gradient between the two tones, but not a full realistic render.) I do that in post now, but it would be awesome to get it from the renderer.

[sikotikxiii]

on a side note, I am interested in rendering with a cel/toon style, but not as severe as most renderers seem to do out of the box. Is that something cycles has parameters for? (I mean for example the abrupt change between light and shade, I want that level of simplification but a bit more gradient between the two tones, but not a full realistic render.) I do that in post now, but it would be awesome to get it from the renderer.

ToonCam and/or ToonyCam Pro for 3delight have the functionality you're looking for. I know they used to be floating around on Kat, and probably a few other places. Assuming you wanted to do it all in Daz Studio right off the bat, of course. I remember settings for how many levels of gradient  and how drastic an outline you wanted being some of my favorite features for the short time I used it.