I tend to use Premier, but that has now become rental software. For just quick converting and changing sizes of things I tend to use Bink/Smacker. I also tend to render out to a still image format and then compile them into an animation, often with Bink. That lets me stop a render part way through, edit things and get a better video quality by not going from one compressed video format to another.

That was fun. I like the notice at the end.

Nice. Not only looks a bit like a tv ad, it's good enough to be one.

Great stuff. Saw it when you posted it on Lightwaves forum. My girlfriend was talking about making some Lego movies, so yours came to mind (even though they are cg) She loved them.

Ya, interesting. Guess an internet render farm might be worth it for a really large still image. Render farms really are great with animation. Daz seems to have a hard time getting people to use the program for animation. It does have some nice animation tools. lip sync/Mimic and AniMate2 are very nice. Movie Maker also looks good. I guess with out a modeler it's hard to look at it as an animation tool or maybe it's just that historically it's been a program for stills.

Render Farms are not just a fixed thing. A render farm needs access to all the files used in the render. With a remote render farm, that involves sending all the files to the render computer. Some programs have built in things that make this easy and with others it's a matter of just sending all the files and the scene file with render instructions. Local render farms are a different story. There are internal and external programs for running a local render farm. What I have always found to be easiest is to set up all the assets on a drive that is called the same thing on all the computers in your home network. At that point you can just fire up the program, call up the scene file and start the render or you can use a program that controls a local render farm.

I don't know of any one running a commercial render farm for Daz Studio, I'm guessing it would involve just sending them the scene file along with all the files used in that scene. Basicly the same thing you would need to do if you wanted to go over to a friends house who had Daz and use their computer to render out an image. You might be able to do a wide area network over the internet, where your friends computer or the commercial render farm can access your drive directly. Then you get into security things.....

I'm not sure it would be that much help with still images. I've mostly just seen it implemented for animation. I did an animation last week that was a bit over 100 hours. With 2 computers it would have been a little over 50 hours and with 4 computers it would have been a little over 25 hours. If you have more then one computer at home you can simply set up all your Daz stuff on a networked drive (always liked labeling networked drives starting with Z and going down) and fire us a copy of Studio on that computer, load the scene, start the render and go back to the other computer and work on other stuff.

Realistically you can't build models in DAZ. While you can do animation with DAZ, it lacks a lot of tools Blender has. Blender includes every thing you need to make animations, with the exception of good 2D image editing. DAZ is much less complex. With DAZ you aren't starting with nothing and don't have to build every thing from scratch. Sure there are some models out for Blender, but not as many and they aren't as adjustable as the DAZ ones.

It gets down to this, if you want to build models, you don't want DAZ. If you want a finished image in much, much, much less time DAZ will do it. As long as you can live with the adjustments that were built into the models DAZ is hugely faster and easier. Really there is no reason to make a choice between them, since they are both free:) A lot is about time. Look at some of the shorts done by the Blender foundation, they took huge amounts of time and resources to make. DAZ provides you with a lot of pre-done stuff that is easy to adjust, within limits.

I haven't played with iclone. The short answer is that Daz/Poser are programs for posing stills from pre-made models. Maya, 3DS, Blender and several others, are basically a group of programs all squeezed into one, meant for doing from beginning to end animation and movie/tv fx work.

It's more complicated, because Daz and Poser added animation stuff quite a while ago. They aren't as full featured as the others, but I've seen some really good work done with them. There are some basic modeling tools, but they are extremely basic and in most cases not of much use. When you get into the animation/fx softwares there are still things they don't do or don't do well. You will almost for sure want a 2D software like Photoshop or Gimp. A large number of people use external modeling programs. There are also external motion/animation programs that get used. Then you get into render engines and people are all over the place about what internal or external one to use.

In short, I have used 3DS, Max, and Lightwave to do animations, where I used no other program and no work done by other people. I've played with Blender enough that I think I could also do that in Blender. You realistically need stuff done by others to use Daz/Poser. But realistically it's unlikely you would use just one program and nothing from any one else, even if you are using Maya, 3DS, or Blender. ZBrush is used a lot for modeling and texturing, so are several others, including a lot of cad programs. Lip sync tends to be done a lot with external programs. Motion capture is a huge thing and is most often done by an external program. People use what ever seems to work well for them. You don't have to lock your self into one niche with one piece of software.

Daz and Blender are free, so they are a good place to take a first look. If your main interest is animation, then there are tons of free models to play with and you can exchange those between programs (with a bit of work). At some point you will want to adjust some models. You can only do that to a limited degree with Daz and Poser. The limit is a lot more then you would first guess, but it is limited to the morphs available and what you can do with some deforming tools.

I liked this. I've liked all the videos you've done. The breasts were very bouncy. Also you might want to bring the camera up a little or bring it in closer, to hide the skating and feet breaking through the floor. I also need to find out what airline that is, I never have that much room :) Thank you for sharing all those videos, I always enjoy them.