Just to throw another option out there, I stopped using Norton many moons ago as a lot of baddies would slip through just browsing yahoo, and it would slow to molasses speeds all the time. Anyway, a free alternative that I've installed on my last four machines is AVG. It hasn't flagged any downloads of either daz or Rendo content, or forboden installs, which I've throughly tested (coincidentally) as my main rendering machine has tons of ShareCG content in addition to paid stuff from both sites.

I have heard from other folks of at least two different AV softwares that get tripped up with Daz's installers, but as others have said, Daz is going to the Zip format.

Attached Link: http://fav.me/d50itb5

Let's see if I can get the image to display first time out

If it doesn't work: DA link at top

Helloooo everybody! Just got back from vacation and I haven't read the full thread yet. Just wanted to waive my 'howdy' at all the folks from that other place, and welcome the new folks to the Reality House of Blue

Have to catch up with y'all later. We're off to see The Avengers tonight! Woo hoo!

There's quite a lot you can achieve with facial morphs. I agree, getting the texture right for your look is important, but don't be afraid to venture into the settings of the sidepanel. M4 really is the man of a million faces. Start with your base texture, and with just a few adjustments, he can look like anything, age included!

I'd reccomend just going through the market place with a simple search for 'M4 textures' and go from there. I'm headed out of town tomorrow otherwise I'd look a bit deeper for you, but in the mean time, do a little sluething and see what comes up.

Just for my own .02, I'd work on the standard M4 texture to mock up your character, as in that image you posted I can see of bit of M4 already. Grab a facial hair pack and I bet you'd be closer than you think.

I found this M4 texture. See what you think: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/agdar/86533

Pale, masculine, facial hair Looks like he's based around 'battle and romantic' renders, as the vendor included in the description. There's also some vampire guys by this same vendor.

Either way, in your morphs section, just adjust for your character the cheeks and cheekbones, or the jaw to fill out his facial features to however you please. Add your curly hair, and it should get the job done.

Interesting that you mentioned Pixar, as I was going to throw that in too. When I was building this rig again, I was doing a lot of reading about GPU rendering and also went with an asus mobo with SLI. Very interesting, if you get the chance to research it. It really will be the next big leap for rendering, but at the moment, the only commerical product that doesn't cost a fortune is Octane. I looked at it during their beta, and its limited to Nvidia cards with CUDA. Fortunately, I selected twin GTS450's with 192 cuda cores.

Short story is GPU rendering like having all the available cores of your video card doing real time rendering. The only hang up is that you're limited to the on-board capacity of the card(s) memory. Mine are 2gb each, so you could run a decent sized scene in about 45 minutes. I've been really into Luxrender, using Paolo Ciccone's Reality plug-in for Daz studio. Matter of fact, it just came to Rendo very recently. Lux supports GPU rendering with what they title SmallLuxGPU. It's in its developmental infancy, of sorts, but functions well enough. Anyhow, Reality supports animations also, and the renders you can achieve are as close to photo-real as any stand alone render engine out there. Matter of fact, I've all but abandoned 3Delight in the last year except for mocking up scenes.

Sorry, got off on a tangent there. :) Back to Pixar...

So, while I was reading up on GPU stuff, I came across an article about Pixar and ILM's renderfarms. As it turns out, aside from their staff of animators and whatnot, each employ renderfarms with greater than 5000 cpu's. Massive processing power! One example was that ILM, while working on Transformers, used said 5000+ cpu's to render an animation shot that took almost a solid year to render (not sure what the length of the animation was, but dare I suggest, it was large).

That's what kinda killed my movie making prospects, but then again, doing it in Studio and not Lux is far easier and less time consuming. I've got a hex(6) core AMD black chip, overclocked to my usual 3.6ghz for stability. Watercooled, it never goes over 38 degrees at full load :D  Not quite 5000 cores, but with GPU, that could be 384. And with a hybrid CPU+GPU, you can do some serious rendering!

Now its just a matter of time until the development gets more stable!

Sorry to keep volleying back and forth with this, but it's exciting to see the prospects of the future.

Edit: Also, my first animation experience was in Vue 8. My intro scene ran at a piddly 1024x720 and took 21 hours for 45 seconds of video @ 24 frames per second. Ugh... This does bring up an idea though. One shortcut is reducing the size of your resolutions to make it faster. If you're doing one for web, like youtube, 840x680 or whatever the equivalant of 480p is will speed it up greatly. I like your idea about 2 minute sections too. You could collect those and roll them together when the project is completed for a feature length or 30 minute short!

Okay, rant completed.

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

I don't have any of this set, but camera manipulation is pretty standard. I don't know what you may or may not know about Studio's camera system, so some of this might be redundant to you.

When you load a fresh scene, you should get at least a default camera if the set doesn't come with more. The others (top, side, perspective) aren't true cameras. You can go to the light/camera tab and add more with the camera icon. In the top corner (left if you're in DS3, right if DS4) are the camera manipulation tools. Pretty easy to see what they do, experiment if unsure. Both right and left mouse buttons work and have separate functions, in case you can't quite get the angle you want.

There's also a sort of 'snap to' sortcut key command if you get tired of using the arrows on your characters to position them. Say you have a spot light or camera where your scene takes place. With your light or camera selected (either in the Scene tab or double click) hit control+c to copy the location of your camera, then select your character and hit control+v. It will mover your character to the location of your cam or spot light. If it's on level ground, like a street, control+d will drop your character to the ground of your scene. In your case, with multiple ground levels, just use the Y axis or green arrow and lower them where you want. 

Back to your original question, especially if you're animating, just focus on one set at a time. That's all you can really do anyway until all your characters are in the same scene. Think like a movie crew makes a film. They do all the shooting that occurs in that location, even if it shows up at different times in the script, until completed. This cuts costs and having to load and unload, set up equipment, or rental costs, etc.

Granted, we as 3D artists don't have to worry about that, but it is more efficient to work on one scene at a time rather then cutting back and forth to four different sets. It's also easier on your computer resources!

Anyhow, again I don't have your sets, but they may not have been intended to line up at all. If that's the case, there's an additional reason just to animate/pose/render et cetera the scene in that location and put it together in your choice of movie editing/compiling software later, which you're going to have to do anyway if you're stitching scenes together.

Just some food for thought...

Quote - Hello.

I just released a quick video that shows exactly how simple is to get started with Reality 2. 

This can be used by people who are considering using this plug-in but need to see it in action.

The video is available at YouTube: 

 

http://youtu.be/CDs-siVyyXA?hd=1

You can also subscribe to out YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/PretA3D

 

Cheers.

Hey Paolo! The places you pop up! If the internet had frequent flier miles, you'd be a rich man ;) 

Are you opposed to working on a copy of your original texture, if you are not already? That way you can simply select the face is the surface tab and use your face paint texture in the diffuse color slot and not have bump active on just the face.

If that doesn't fulfill your criteria, I'd also agree on making a dedicated bump or even a normal map from your painted face texture. The normal map will read nice and smooth if you use your face painted texture as the reference base, rather than the original.

Add: I've not done my own face paint texture map for skin, but there's several I've experimented with from Hero Morph. There's a Harley Quinn face texture there and a joker if memory serves. Both produced a fairly 'filled in' look that is very smooth.

Are you more interested in piecing a character together from available sets?

I'm not familiar with the source material, but if you can find a head to toe picture, I/we could reccomend a list of pieces and parts.

Off the top of my head, Rendo seems to have the best period clothing option, followed by rDNA. Lots of folks here have an interest in the fantasy genre, or so I've noticed from the gallery pictures. You might do a general search in the gallery and see what pops up with your criteria.

Aye Aye, Sir Richard! ;)

Quote - There's no need to do anything to the files in DS4 - it now seea the Material library, and reads mc6 files (though that doesn't enable it to extract any more information than before, sadly).

It seems like its more of a problem with older poser content. Newer stuff seems almost interchangeable, but I've got loads of freebies that have never worked in studio 3 or 4 until I changed the mat extension to pz2. 'Free Car Shaders' was one that could be found in my file tree (file only, no thumbs) but never worked until editing. There's many more, but that one stood out due to the number of materials in it. And that was in DS4.

Quote - With DS4 the Surface selection tool also selects the item, so you no longer need the two step process.

You'e right, that was a ds3 trick, but I turned that function off as it was super annoying to have your whole screen flare up with yellow. Sometimes Studio4 was not terribly precise while differentiating between a character's surface and the giant wall of pipes behind them, for example.

I have noticed that sometimes it does pick it for you, but sometimes not. Seems like a crap shoot by model/prop.

Speaking of, for anyone who has the same problem, you can go to your tool tab next to your scene tab in the left hand side window and change that from bounding box and surface to bounding box only, should you wish.

One of the things that I had to learn very indirectly was how to set certain shaders to figures/props/etc. For example, there's a great freebie called Cloth FX (I don't recall where I found it at the moment but Google will get you there) that you can use to set clothing items (or any surface, really) as either a leather effect or spandex. In order to do that, however, you first have to select the figure it's going on in your scene tab, then swing over to the surface tab and highlight what surface material you are going to use that shader on.

Now for the hidden part: Holding down control, click on the shader thumbnail in your file list/tree, and a pop-up box comes up. There's two selectable drop down options. The Top box has 'Surfaces' with the option Selected or All. (in this instance, we only want one or a few surfaces of your chosen item with the shader, so 'Selected' is clicked.)

The other box is 'Map Settings'. This is how it will work with the texture map or UV map of the item. The options are 'Replace' or 'Ignore'. Again, this time one would use 'ignore' which the shader with go over top of the texture map beneath, creating something of a dual layer image.

The control part and clicking on the thumbnail to activated it was the important part of all of this.