Come learn the art of 3D computer generated art and animation. This blog deals with the lessons learned and the art created by Robert G. Male using DazStudio from Daz3D.
Also covered are the ancillary software, tools, techniques, and processes needed both before and after rendering in the 3D software.
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I had thought to carry on with talking about questions I need to seek answers for, but this little bit of thought came across my gray matter. I maintain a couple websites where I gather research material in the form of links. One of them is on technology and related things. It is called TechStop™. The other is of strictly of more interest for horror topics. It is called WraithStop™. This article I found is in vein for TechStop but isn't really up to snuff for what I want to highlight or focus on there. However, it is something of interest to us here at Artzone. The article is… PhysX coming to GeForce 8/9 owners soon
I tried to do some reading of the wikis, manuals, and tutorials for Daz3D this past weekend. I ran across a tutorial on animating snow that I'd like to try out sometime. The above article has to do with, somewhat tangentially, the software encoding involved in the newest video processors for our computers. That would be the PhysX part of things. These new GPUs (graphics processing units) are able to understand the physics of visually creating affects within nature such as the mechanics of water, whether it is ripples on a watery surface, or drops of rain and flakes of snow, and how wind affects them. It is interesting to note that they are looking at multiple video cards (or so I gathered) though that should coalesce to a point where they are dealing with multi-core processors/GPUs just like the current trend in CPUs.
I'm going to have to hit the forums I think. I have a whole lot of questions ranging from the mundane to the highly technical and specific. I have for instance no ability it seems to use a video compressor in DazStudio. They call come up with an error. They have for several revisions of the DazStudio (meaning they worked at one point) software despite my installing different sets of codecs and removing others since the first trouble. This means I always have to save my videos uncompressed which means that 20 some seconds of animation is enough to fill an entire CD-ROM. Makes playback on the computer almost impossible at that many megabytes for a single second.
Then I have other questions, like how do I actually use my Mimic file in Daz? Just yesterday I discovered a need to know how to create a skeleton in Daz. I had a bunch of primitives and set a tonne of motion parameters. I then wanted to export all that motion as a bvh, but was unable too because though I parented many of them together it still said I needed to select a skeleton node. On another note, I really have to ask, what is the point of making a sphere or a cube (primitives) rotate from the bottom. It is particularly irksome for the spheres. They rotate the way I think they should in the y-axis, but in the other two they spin around a point at the bottom. It's very annoying to have to attach all these spheres to planes because only the planes rotate what I would call intelligently.
I'm just going to think out loud here. I should probably dig around for the answers, but if anyone reading this has answers I would greatly appreciate them. The thing I am pondering today is about what it takes to run the newest Daz Studio. I have a definitely aging computer. It's 2.6 GHz with half a Gig of RAM and the video card/chip has 64 Meg of RAM. As I mentioned seeming ages ago now I could take 15 minutes or so to render a frame with shadows for a video in Daz. I suspect the computer's processor and not the video chip does most of the processing. Can anyone verify that? I then have two divergent thoughts. People are always touting how much better Linux is on hardware requirements. Does Daz3D's Studio and the other programs (Mimic or Bryce for example) work in Linux, maybe under an emulator? Is it worth the effort?
The other thought I have leads into a whole series of questions when it reaches the point I have to go out and buy a new computer. Some of the new machines are coming set already with 256 Megs of RAM for the video processor. The big question is does Daz Studio handle multiple processors yet? There's not a lot of point in getting an 8-core machine if only one core is ever going to be used by the Studio software for the "foreseeable" future. I would like to see faster rendering so I can especially make videos but as I said last week it might be good just to have folders open like they should and faster response time to type in save names or numbers into the dials. I guess any improvement in the video card might help with that though I fail to see how that much video processing goes on when the scene in the viewing window is static.
