Radar_Foxbat opened this issue on May 08, 2012 · 9 posts
superboomturbo posted Tue, 08 May 2012 at 11:55 PM
Sounds pretty doable. You're free to do however you want of course, but all those cameras do sound like a headache. This is just me, but I've rarely found it necessary to have more than six and label them to their use (main, posing, face, ground, etc,) because, as you said, it can get confusing.
Some prop sets come jumbled together in literally hundreds of separate files, like any stonemason set. I've had to rename some as they come as jargon like u2building8204 or whatnot. I do the same with my characters, especially when I have multiples of the same figure on scene (two M4's for example), and parent all their effects when possible. That way everything moves seamlessly where they do.
Just one further note, and again, my apologies if you've been at this before, but rendering animation takes a surprising amount of time. Thirty second clips with all the lighting and shader effects on like ambient occlusion, raytraced shadows, etc, can take a really, REALLY long time. Be prepared to set aside some hours for your rig to do major computations. This is also a good time to assess your rig's cooling capabilities and needs.
When I built my main rendering rig, water cooling and massive case fans (2x 225cm main fans, one sucking in and one blowing out the top, among six various auxilirary fans) was a must. I put the best stuff I could afford a year ago, and I'm glad I did. There's a lot of good monitoring freeware available out there. I'd reccomend watching your temps and keep a close eye on them while you're running animations, as extended periods (think overnight) can cook a CPU real quick.
And above all else, have fun and enjoy the process!
Edit: I won't try to dissuade you from your project, as it's hugely gratifying to see it come together, but I ended up translating mine to a graphic novel approach with rendered scenes, text in post, then ran vocals and sound effects and compiled in Movie Maker. My rig could handle it, but I found my staff of 1 (me!) a bit too ambitious and overworked at the time. Its actually how I got into Daz studio, as I wanted to make a CG movie about one of my novels. I'm a movie 'enthusiast' as some would say, and this seemed like the only way it would ever come to life.
Now that I have more time and a better computer, I've considered picking up where I left off. See, look what you've done! Inspiration... =D
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