Dartanbeck In The Studio
A Digital Art Live Experience
Now Available at Daz 3d - a Special new educational course that I've been anxious to share with everyone.
Paul Bussey, from Digital Art Live, offered an amazing opportunity for me to tell my story of how I've unlocked the key to a super-easy approach to animating in Daz Studio - something that a majority of animators consider to be nearly impossible, and for good reason.
Daz Studio is set up differently than traditional animating software, making it feeling clunky, even unfriendly to folks who are used to animating.
Check out the whole story on my Dynamic Character Animation in Daz Studio page
For Carrara users, the tools that are the highlight of this entire workflow also work in Carrara, since they get added to the actual Base figure, and we can put these tools on anything that has an articulate rig! Sweet!!!
I'm really looking forward to its release, and really looking forward to seeing what animations you all come up with using this fun new way to animate figures!
Animating has Never been So Fun!!!!
Let's get focused on mastering “aniMate 2” in DAZ Studio! AniMate 2 combines a user-friendly interface with sophisticated features, making it a valuable and core tool for animating your visual stories.
Dartanbeck uses AniMate 2 at the heart of his workflow and reveals in this tutorial set how to make the most of this and other hyper-useful tools such as LimbStick, Bone Minion and Mixamo for effective animation storytelling in DAZ Studio.
This tutorial set by Dartanbeck is for you if...
You're interested in uncovering the hidden and often overlooked powerful features of aniMate2, enhancing your animation capabilities in DAZ Studio.
You want to learn how to efficiently use aniBlocks, including advanced techniques like trimming, blending, and customizing motion paths for more dynamic animations.
You're keen on exploring the vast potential of aniBlock packs, cross-generation animation conversion, and integrating unique movements for characters and vehicles.
This is for you if you want to accomplish:
Making the most of aniMate2, ensuring a solid foundation for creating professional and intricate animations in DAZ Studio.
Expanding your creative horizons by learning how to modify and combine aniBlocks, achieving impressive new motions and animations.
Gaining expertise in leveraging specialized tools and resources like Motion Captured Animations, LimbStick, Bone Minion and more, to elevate your animation projects
This was a Fun exploration of Many ways that we can address the problems that many people face when trying to organize, find, install, backup... whatever they wish to do with the content they've purchased.
My friends and I lead the way into many different possibilities within Daz Studio itself as well as the wonderful Daz Install Manager, which I use All the Time to help get the most out of my content - including using it for inspiration.
This is a two session workshop
Paul and I are at it again! We thought it would be a Great idea to demonstrate ways to Really perform some Cool Magic with your Daz Studio work, whether it's animated or still.
This is one session you won't want to miss!
There are many ways to build, save and render our Daz 3D scenes.
In Movie Magic we’ll explore workflows for creating specific, separate renders that are purposely made to be melded together into a single, final image.
Whether for you’re making still images OR animations, these practices add Magic by allowing us total freedom over the look of Every element within the scene.
You’ll see how much Faster we can work – how much more we can get done with an efficient workflow.
The additional tools and elements demonstrated are not essential to the course, but shown to inspire creativity in using them. The main things that we will take away from all of this can be achieved with your own library of content assets.
The Creative Cart
A Massive undertaking - Paul Bussey and I are broadcasting Live webinars each month, demonstrating cool content from the Daz 3D store.
These webinars are free for the public via a free ticket - which is how you get the meeting link, with an option to upgrade which gets you a recording of the show.
Since these are a one-time thing, but we'd like to give everyone an option later to add a show to the collection, each show then gets edited and sold at Daz 3D at a low price - simply to cover the cost of production. Paul and I want everyone to have availability to these fun, well-presented shows.
Please see my Creative Cart page for more details and the index to published and upcoming events :)
Coming Soon to Daz 3D - Dartanbeck
Starry Sky Iray
A Different Way to Render Stars in Daz Studio Iray
Starry Sky Iray is an entirely different, unique way to deal with the appearance of having stars in our Iray scenes in that, instead of the stars being a projected image, they are little 3D objects that have been carefully replicated in various ways around the world center of the scene.
The Biggest difference that you'll notice right away is that the stars have now become entirely separate from any backdrop and/or Iray environment dome.
This opens up an unimaginable amount of possibilities for having stars in the scene.
For example, we can render the entire background as a transparent alpha channel and use HDRI dome settings to light the scene in any way we like - either via dome map or Iray's Sun/Sky feature.
As Huge as that is, it doesn't even Begin to touch what we have to work with here!
Loads with a Click
The two main ways to load Starry Sky Iray are:
Starry Sky Iray SubSet
This loads the entire system we see below as a grouped set of props without changing any settings of the current scene. This is really handy for people like me, who have a particular base scene that includes our favorite scene settings - it just loads the system and we're ready to render, or further set up our scene.
This means we can load scenes that we've saved previously, load in several thousand stars with a click, and render the scene in a whole new way - perhaps darken the current sky a bit - perhaps not.
Starry Sky Iray Scene
This loads a whole new scene and changes the Iray Environment settings to Sun/Sky with the horizon lowered and the Environment Intensity set to 0.00, leaving a black background that can be altered via the Sun/Sky settings or switching to Dome and Scene and using an HDRI dome, or even switching to Scene Only if we prefer.
The Starry Sky Iray System
Starry Sky Iray loads in with its own group: Starry Sky Iray. This is what we can manipulate if we want to animate or simply change the entire system at once. Its origin is 0x, 0y, 0z, so that we can rotate and/or scale everything from point zero in the scene - which is Incredibly handy for creating space travel animations or simply rotating the sky for a different look.
Within the group are the following six elements:
Earth-Like Constellations - 223 Stars
Extra-Solar Patterns - 115 Stars
Inner Star Field - 3,798 Stars
Outer Star Field - 4,547 Stars
Nebula Prop - incl. 3 Morph Dials - Stretch, Farther/Closer, More Curve
Outer Space Sphere - Giant outer globe that can be used to control the darkness of an otherwise bright scene
Each of these elements also originate at 0x, 0y, 0z, making them very easy to work with if needed - for each element is entirely individual from everything else. Rotate, scale, translate (move), duplicate, instance, hide, delete... we can do anything we want with any of them.
All of these thousands of stars occupy only five surface materials:
Star B - Blue Hue
Star Y - Yellow Hue
Star R - Red Hue
Star Dim - White Soft
Star 5 - White Hero Bright
Each star in the system is assigned one of those five surfaces and semi-randomly emitted into space into their own star field - inner, outer, earth-like, etc., so that space has a very natural appearance. In other words: if we change one of the surface materials for one star field, the changes will be made fairly evenly throughout space - their neighbors being assigned to one of the other materials - and the changes will only apply to the selected star field. We can easily select more than one star field for broad changes to all star fields, as in the way it comes set up.
Some Promo Images - Article to Be Continued
