At the moment I'm forum administrator of a drum n bass internet radio station called Krisis DnB which has a java chatroom with animated logos that can be used by typing in certain words. I believe these need to be GIF files for it to work, which it does very well. 

Well, the other day I showed my latest DAZ Studio image to DJ MX, one of the founders of the station and he liked it so much it gave him the idea to have a new dancing girl logo for the chatroom. There's one already but it's just a 2D anime style dancing girl, so he thought I could try and create a 3D animated GIF using DS and V4. 

Firstly, I'm not sure if you can even export to a GIF in DS as it's only just dawned on me and I haven't checked yet. But if you can then I'd probably/definitely need a V4 compatible dance animation preset, as I can't really dance myself and wouldn't know where to start. lol 

It'd need to be a fairly sexy dance, but not like a stripper, just cool looking. The GIF would only be a few seconds and looped to make it continuous. Also it'd only be 200x200 pixels at the most, because it's for a chatroom. 

I've been looking on this site and DAZ3D and I noticed there's a couple of motion packs for sale that might be appropriate. One is called Motion Pack 1 which apparently includes a gogo dance which may be suitable and the other is a walk designer for V4, which I could maybe edit to create a simple dance. 

The thing is though, I haven't got Poser yet and would need to do it in DS. Could anyone who knows about animation in DS and even the 2 motion packs I mentioned please help? Any advice is greatly appreciated. 

Cheers.

I had the same questions not too long ago. Being fairly new to D/S and not having Poser, but wanting help with animations, I was weary about purchasing animation packages for fear they would not work in D/S.

I have yet to buy any of these products, but I have found several for free to experiment with, www.es3d.com and www.renderotica.com. They all seem to be nothing but a series of Poser -pose files so just like normal pose files for Poser, they work in D/S in my experience.

The only thing I have noticed is that they have been difficult for me to modify. If an arm is say, to close to a breast, you have this problem for how ever many frames this problem occurs. Because it is a preset pose, I have not been able to make adjustments like I normally would by tweening, meaning I had to pose each frame individually. This can be tedious when you have this across fifty frames or more. This is not to say there is not an easier way to do this; I just have not found it yet.

The good thing is,  you can  save  the frames you want individually and use them outside of the complete animation.

As for your gif question, I have not seen any way to output a gif from D/S, but I have taken my images from D/S and imported them into GIMP, www.gimp.org, which is free and one heck of a program. I use it almost as much as D/S nowadays. If you have not tried it yet, I would highly recommend it. It has a bit of a learning curve, but it's well worth learning.

I hope this has been helpful.

Hi mullman,

Thanks very much for your excellent advice and for introducing me to ES3D and Renderotica. 

I actually bought Poser a few days after my original post. It has more features and options than DS of course but I still like to use DS aswell because it's quality is just as high as Poser in my opinion. I also purchased a motion pack for Poser from this site. It was only £6 and it includes about a dozen dance animations. Unfortunately I don't think any of them are suitable really, so I'll have a good look at the 2 sites you mentioned and hopefully find something else.

As for exporting, I've been exporting animations to AVI and using 123 AVI to GIF converter (a nice little program). Gimp looks interesting though, so I'll check that out shortly.

I'm finding that when I render my 200x200 animations I have to do a preview render rather than a higher quality. This is because often there's several hundred frames and to do anything other than a preview render would take far too long (on my computer anyway). So it's a bit of a shame that my animations look nowhere near as good as my still images, but having said that they're adequate for a chatroom. Apart from that I should have it done soon when I find a cool enough looking dance. :)

Thanks again.
Darren

Good for you on getting Poser. I’ve been thinking about getting it, but I have over a half dozen programs now that I am still learning, so I think I’ll perfect working with what I have already. I bought Bryce six months ago and have only done a handful of renders with it yet.

I got to thinking after my last post that I hope you weren’t trying to do an animation with a bunch of frames. One of the things that I haven’t been liking about the animations I have been finding is that they use a ton of them…that and the fact that they don’t loop. Loop animations are a good way to get a movie of infinite length with only a few seconds of animation.

This is just my opinion and I am still quite new at this, but I find it daunting the number of total frames some of these sets come with. In my own efforts I have gotten decent animations without using hundreds of frames and I am quite pleased with the results.

The other thing I noticed is that most animators seem to like 30 fps. I have found that 15 fps works pretty well and it’s a lot easier to render a 10 sec animation with 150 frames than one with 300 frames. You can’t really go any lower than that however, or it starts looking bad.

One other thing, on higher quality renders, I sometimes set things up before I go to bed and let it run while I sleep. I also go into my task manager and shut down none essential programs to free up memory. Be careful if you are not used to this or you can turn off something essential. If nothing else definitely, turn off all running programs and screen savers, all of which can slow things down.

I can't afford it at the moment but I'd love to have Bryce aswell. I understand it's a serious 3D app. I hope you enjoy using it and get the results you want.

I tend to agree about the large number of frames contained in motion pack animations. The dance sequence I'm currently using (but not for long) is 560 frames and it's not meant to be looped either. So it's about 19 seconds and the GIF is about 5.5 megs. I really need something a lot shorter that can be looped, because 5.5 megs for a chatroom logo is too much to download really. I'll try and find a preset I like that fits the bill but I may have to create my own, without the use of a motion capture facility. It must be very difficult to manually create realistic human movements though.

As for the frame rate, I can quite easily adjust that in the AVI-GIF converter I'm using. I'm finding 30 fps is more appropriate at the moment, but 15 fps would certainly help with the file size.

That's a good idea to leave it rendering overnight for a high quality render. The thing is though, Poser doesn't actually tell you how long it's going to take in minutes and seconds, just how many frames have been rendered. So you have to sit and watch it for a while and work out if it's going to take hours or days. 12 hours is about the maximum I'd be willing to wait, so any more than that is not worth it in my opinion.

Anyway, I shall soldier on with it. :) Your thoughts about this are much appreciated and useful aswell.

Thanks,
Darren

One last thought...you know you don't have to render the entire animation at one time. One way to do it is to render it in sections and then take the parts and turn out a full AVI using VirtualDub,  www.**virtualdub.org. ** I have not used it in this capacity yet, but I use sometimes to do loops from other sources and it does very well.

I have heard that it is also usefull when you want to do batch processing of animation cells. I have one render that took me a long time to do and I messed up some frames towards the end, so instead of doing the entire thing again, I am just going to redo the frames that need it and recycle the good frames.

One other program that helps me is Rname-it. When I have a bunch of files I need to rename or reposition this helps me rename them to put them in the order I need. If you try any of these and have problems, I will help you as much as I can.  You can pick up Rname-it at www.pcworld.com.**
**

Thanks, I didn't realise you can render animations in sections and join them afterwards.

I'm sorry to say I've just left my position as forum administrator of the drum n bass site I mentioned, but I hasten to add that I'll still be doing the animated logo we've been talking about, just not in the immediate future. I'm still very interested in doing animations in DS and Poser and will pursue it alongside the still images I've been working on as I'm still a complete novice and need to learn more first.

Many thanks for your valuable assistance mullman. :)

Did U try the pupeter panel. It work by setting up poseses and adding a dot to the graph on pupeteer panel then aranging the dots in a way that when U move your mouse over the dot the actor moves to that position by tweening. U can move the dot around once U have them setup whith the pose in a way that's comfortable to U. U can pactice your move on the graph with the dots setting up your timing then record your actions once U have it down pat.
U can output the files as sequentle files and put them in any movie editor to piece them in to a gif. I use Photoshop's ImageReady to make the gifs.
There's a tutoral on the DAZ site using the Girl and expresions presets. There is also a Utube video where one of the DAZ people shows off the pupiteer with the emotionicon, he makes it dance.
What's really cool about this is U control the timing as you move over the dots U can go to any dot and the actor will tween between them at the speed you move over the dots, so play some music and move at the beat of the song how cool is that.

Tell me this BF, how much work have you done in puppeteer. The reason I ask is that I am trying to get used to it, but it throws me off at times.

I followed a tutorial on Daz on making a figure walk. It worked pretty well, but since I mostly work with Vicky 4, the result lacked something to me since the hips did not sway. In other words, my results seemed to me more like the strut of a male rather than a female.

I have done some research and it appears that in the feminine walk, the hips move from side to side and yet the head and shoulders stay pretty much still. In all of my efforts, both using puppeteer and with manual posing, the head and shoulders move counterintuitive to the hips. I have tried to correct this both by pinning and by compensating for the movements of the hips by moving the upper body to various degrees in the opposite direction to no avail. The head and shoulders always pendulum back and forth; what gives?

Victoria is a lot harder to work with then the cartoon style in the tutorials and a female has a lot of suttle movements then a male my guess is you have to break it down to more submove and arange the point in a better pattern also going on ether side of the point can make it  move differently. Also if you space the points out at can increase that moves timing.