1. Open Bryce 5.5 and setup any Bryce/Imported object animations, make sure the fps in both Bryce and D/S are the same.

2. Enter D/S and animate your figure, make sure frame is at zero then go back to Bryce.

3. Set the time scrubber to frame zero.

4. Go to render animation and set it to bmp sequence, enter the frame you are on in both the start and end then click the check. This will render only that frame and automatically name it sequentially.

5. Return to D/S and advance the frame, then return to Bryce.

6. When you get back to Bryce the frame may be reset to zero, just advance it to the corresponding frame from D/S.

7. Repeat setps 4-6 until finished.

8. Use another program to put the individual frames together into a movie.

Since the code is there then it should be easy for DAZ to create a macro/subroutine to automatically do the mouseclicks, etc. thus essentially importing Poser animations easily into Bryce and once the Bryce side of the animation is ready a simple click to "render poser animation" should do.

The attached GIF (sorry for the size but at 60 frames it was the biggest I could get it and stay under 200K) was made using the above method. The ball and cone are Bryce primitives.

Message edited on: 06/02/2005 21:35

Neat! I found Natural Pose once, but lost the website and couldn't find it again. Would you mind giving me a link to it so I can at least realistically consider buying it? And I still think it's too much trouble. I'd much rather just make my environment in Wings, and then make and render the animation in Poser. Easier, faster.

Natural Pose is no longer on the market which is why you couldn't find it. Susanna MAY still be around but I haven't checked....so that leaves for all intents and purposes the manual way. Oh and that 60 frames (2 seconds @ 30 fps) took about 2 hours to do but I wasn't constanly doing it either. Once I got the rythm down it went fairly fast.

Message edited on: 06/02/2005 22:04

Tedious... Still easier IMO to just make the surroundings in Wings and/or Bryce (what it can export lol). Just another thought, if DAZ makes boolean exporting for Bryce6, we won't have to do it the manual way either, because we can render in Poser. It would also be great for DAZ, because then we could give them more Poser stuff to sell (stuff we make in Bryce6). Since we all know that DAZ is basically just a big Poser content store, with a bit of software thrown in as well lol...

I really feel sorry for you guys having to go throught all of this just to get animated poser figures into Bryce 5.5. I hate to think of the work if someone wants to make an animation with a number of people in it. By the way your title isn't correct at all "5.5 can import Poser animations" Bryce 5.5 can import D/S animations. If you want to get your Poser animations into B5.5 it's even more tedious to do so.

Message edited on: 06/03/2005 02:41

...and annoying. =)

Aye, and useless. Bryce doesn't support morphing, and since each frame of pose has it's own geometry, you can only run a few frames before it would bog down the memory on the PC. And I don't think you can animate "Hidden", although I could be wrong... So you'd have to animate the transparency layer, which would suck. Either way, it's pointless and not worth the effort. In 1/1000th of the time it woudl take, you could do it in a program made for such things. It's nearly neanderthal to even try! (But it's awesome that someone did, Aldaron! Mr. Patience!)

...a program such as Poser and Wings. =)

Technically yes it's D/S that allows the animation to be imported but it's still it's easier to just say Poser since most people are more familiar with that and that is where it all started. 1. The point wasn't whether there are programs that do this easier. Hell there are many other programs that do things easier than Bryce (your example of Wings). 2. The point was CAN it be done in Bryce? Yes it can. Is it easier to do in 5.5 than earlier version? MUCH easier. LSD, not so useless if all you have is POser and Bryce and prefer to render in Bryce. And as my tutorial at dawnstarproductions shows you don't need to import all the mesh frames at once. You import, render, delete, advance frame, import, etc. With 5.5 this process is made much easier with the intergration of D/S and as I said above has opened the door for this to become all automatic without the tedious frame by frame import/render.

Aye, I suppose it CAN be done in this method. But what you're talking about is an unproducable animation. From an industry standpoint, this is entirely unacceptable. Having to do this much work for each frame makes key-framing completely pointless. And you couldn't network-render the animation, and there's no automation. You could draw cel animation faster than this. The purpose of 3D graphics IS animation. The purpose is NOT to waste massive, massive amounts of time doing something over and over and over that SHOULD be automated. Computers are number crunchers, and this Poser-to-Bryce method is an example of the human doing all kinds of work that should be automatable by the PC... Do you think any studio in the world would put up with this method as a viable, lucrative form of animation? What if you had to make two or three people interact? I'm just saying that for how long this process takes, you could never do an animation of any length or quality... It would be better to do the character animation in Poser/DAZ, and the background in Bryce, and composite the two in post... especially considering you're gonna have to piece it all together in post anyway. Might as well use Paint and draw each frame, one by one.

LSD, who mentioned industry? This is for a hobby and yes as you pointed out it easier and more effecient to use another program. Again that wasn't the point. Like most anything in Bryce there is an easier and faster way to do it in another program. Look at Ornlu's liquid renders with metaballs. Hell that probably took a hell of a long time to setup and more to render when in Maya for example it could be done in a few clicks with particles and physics. The challenge is to reproduce stuff like this in Bryce. Not whether it's better but CAN it be done....period. When I get some more time I will do a multi-character animation. Rendering it shouldn't take anymore time than did the single figure.....it's the setup that takes tons of time. And again as I stated above, DAZ has the setup to make this automatic if they can just add the subroutine. Personally I like Bryce's render better than Poser, not sure how 5 & 6 are but Bryce is much better and easier than 4 which is what I have. Thus rendering in Poser really isn't an option for me. And I certainly don't have the cash for the big boys.

Aye, Poser 4 doesn't support raytracing. Poser 5 does, although horribly. Bryce is a much better renderer than either. I guess I just hate Poser, that's all. It's a stupid program. I don't know why I hate it, probably because it sucks. But there could be other reasons. Could be because there's nothing to it, takes ten minutes to learn. I could be getting paid to hate it by other companies, like DAZ or Alias. Or, I could just be babbling because of lack of sleep! But really, it just sucks. Thing is, Aldaron, you could ALSO make a scene with 1,000 spheres with all different, random volumetric materials and a big spherical volumetric light and ten volumetric spotlights and turn all the volume qualities up to 100... Just to see if it CAN be done. Think it will be worth it?

Attached Link: http://www.datamike.com/susu.htm

Is it as easy as clicking 1 button and the computer do all the work? No

But it is a hell of a lot easier than in 5.01 and before and certainly nowhere as tedious. For one it's a straight import from D/S, if the figure moves in D/S when you go back to Bryce it moves the same amount. So the only hard part really is the animation intergration between the 2. That is if you even have any interaction bewtween the figure and the Bryce objects.

Camera tracking can be done by using a hidden object (ex sphere) and simply importing the frame zero object from D/S, set the sphere, then import the last frame, move time scrubber to last frame in Bryce and move the sphere. You need this work around because once you change the pose of the figure all linking is erased.

Well that's some good work, Aldaron! You've made a believer of me, especially given the time it took. That's "acceptable" by my ridiculous standards... That said, Susanna looks much more potent and powerful. Might be worth a shot for anyone doing character animation in 5.01, at least...

Yes once you learn the pattern and use the keyboard shortcuts it goes pretty quick.

My tutorial for doing it manually was inspired by Susanna. Susanna just automates the process of the keystokes but essentially does the same thing.

Now if DAZ in Bryce 6 would use the same thing Susanna does to automate the keystorkes this would essentially make the whole process doable with 1 click of the mouse (rendering the animation that is).

I was kind of disappointed in 5.5 when I found the render times not as fast as they originally said it would be and in fact takes longer in some situations. This feature here made it all the worthwhile for me. As well as some of the bug fixes, material organization, etc. So now I give 5.5 a thumbs up :)

Message edited on: 06/04/2005 15:09

Sounds good to me! Can't wait to see your next big animation project, my friend. And I hope I wasn't too obnoxious in this thread, but just the right amount?!? (grins)