Thought I’d share a little teaser animation intended to both show a new updated look of the main characters for my Star Trek fan series: Aurora, that I recently completed and tested out using CC and iClone. (Some of you here may remember the older Daz designs). I decided I wanted to make the characters a little more stylized-looking, which I hope will allow for a bit more emotional range/clarity, and just general all around “appeal” (as Disney defines it for animation.) I imported the original designs from Daz into CC, and added in about 30% of Toon Neutral Female, plus other tweaks, to try to retain their original identity, but give them that more stylized look. Let me know what you think!
Thanks, Anabran! Yes, Redshift. I was already happy with the way that Redshift simplified lighting by adding Global Illumination and filling in what otherwise might be featureless shadows, but I learned on this piece how quickly and easily it renders Depth of Field–that used to take ages to render in the standard render, and was a bit wonky, but it was a piece of cake in Redshift, and barely added to the render time. Stupid me, I now wonder how long I’ve had this ability and not used it LOL.
In any case, the new lighting, and the new character design, has allowed me punch up the colors a bit to give it a little more saturated and “animated” feel without–I hope–getting too cartoony. Tho, of course, the original Star Trek was full of saturated colors and nonsensical splashes of colored lights everywhere, so it’s almost a natural look for animation. For the characters, it took a lot of iterations to try to strike the balance between realism and stylized. More realistic characters I think work well particularly for games and game cut scenes, but most animated features out there are more cartoony. I didn’t want to go too far in that direction, since that can limit the level of seriousness, but I also wanted a clearly “animated” look, so we’ll see how well it works going forward!
Yes !!
I love computer animation that looks like “computer animation”
people’s obsession with UE5 and “photorealism” has no appeal to me personally and the slight stylization
give’s you the potential for more personality in your character performances. ,( see “K-pop Demon hunters”)
Good to see you still harvesting & importing Daz assets as they remain some of the best price/quality values available in the 3D content market.
Exactly! Photorealism can be technically impressive, but the truth is that there is virtually no example of a truly successful animated film starring realistic-looking characters (but plenty of bombs–Beowulf, Polar Express, Mars Needs Moms), while movies with stylized characters make billions. Even in Disney’s “Inside Out”, the world outside of people’s heads is supposed to be “the real world” and more “realistic” than the very cartoony emotion characters, but the characters and environments in the real world are still very stylized. And with current technology, you could probably make just about any story you wanted live action–even K-Pop Demon Hunters (which was shockingly enjoyable for me despite that I generally hate anime) could have been done live action, but the cartoony elements really enhance the story and make it way more fun than live action could have been, while at the same time, the characters weren’t too exaggerated to carry off the heavier moments–K-Pop struck a good balance. The new designs for Aurora are less stylized than that, tho now I’m wondering if I should have pushed them farther LOL.
Absolutely! CC/iClone are really great animation tools, but Daz has such great assets, and lots of them. CC does a pretty good job with importing Daz content, but I wish it were even better. It takes a lot of work in some cases to make Daz clothing to work well in iClone, particularly anything around the crotch area–pants or long shirts/jackets are always a mess, and take a lot of massaging (unless I’m doing it wrong). The new uniforms for Aurora really required MetaTailor to work, and even it created some issues, so it can be a struggle.
I did learn some important things about importing Daz hair while creating these characters, the most important probably being that after you import Daz hair as Hair, immediately change it to a Prop. Applying saved Daz hair as Hair to a CC+ character always conforms weirdly around the ears, and is impossible to fix. I also learned how to make very detailed Daz hair work in C4D/Redshift so that it not only looks great, but renders quickly, so really happy about that.
In any case, I’m looking forward to trying out CC/iClone on an Aurora episode and see how it looks. I’m sure it will be educational if nothing else!
The original Aurora series was exceptional for it’s time period
not only because of the good story but because it was the only production, I know of, that was using Daz/Poser figures rendered in a pro application like Maxon C4D
(other than My Galactus Rising film).
However I must say this new style
(with Redshift) pushes the aesthetic outside of the typical easily spotted Poser/Daz/Iclone look in a really good way.
My only only film making advice would be to Study cinematic shot framing
(the rule of the thirds) and avoid too many ,wide head to toe, framed shots that are typical of most Iclone productions we see.
With this quality lighting & render engine you can have tight head & shoulder shots when characters are speaking important or emotional dialogue in 4K.
There really is no hard rule that says you can’t “cut off” the top of a characters head in a close up.
I know you don’t care for Anime styles but here are some examples of how I tried to implement cinematic shot framing in my last full length Iclone film project
from two years ago.
With all due respect, I have to strongly disagree. Key sequences in The Lord of the Rings trilogy are entirely photorealistic animation and that was with 2001 technology. Those films made billions. The entirety of The Avengers saga (the good stuff, pre 2019) was literally 90% photorealistic animation, characters, costumes, environments, et al. The films made billions, with Avengers Infinity War and Endgame both in the top ten highest grossing films of all time. And let’s not forget that at this point James Cameron is going to be making Avatar movies until he dies, and yet again, both films are in the top ten highest grossing films of all time.
That having been said, I am making no argument against the appeal of stylized animation. In fact, I’m all for it. I absolutely LOVE the art direction of the Spiderverse movies, K Pop Demon Hunters, Arcane, not to mention literally the entirety of the Donghua genre. But then again, I’m for ALL animation styles. Heck, If I have my way, the theatrical film that I’ve long wanted to do with the incredible Justin Rasch will come to fruition and be almost entirely stop motion animation as my love letter to Ray Harryhausen, the very reason I wanted to become an animator in the first place. My point is that there’s room enough at the trough for everyone and since it comes down to the talent of the artists behind the art itself, wouldn’t you say?
Regardless… I am really digging your work my friend. Keep it up!
Yes, I keep finding new things it can do, and I’m sure I’ll keep learning!
Thanks! Yes, there seemed to be only a few of us trying (or maybe crazy enough LOL) to use Daz/Poser for long form animation, but I think we got some pretty good results for the time, and I am excited about exploring this new look for Aurora.
Framing is definitely good advice! In the case of this teaser (and the success of my intentions is up to the viewer, ultimately) I framed a lot of it wider than I normally would have because I was deliberately showing the “new uniforms” to the audience, and also wanted to show the empty bags on the floor, which were part of the gag. The times I cut off the tops of the characters’ heads are when I was trying to shift the attention to Kara’s uniform in the first case, and to the bag she’s holding in the second case. I may have been able to do this with more camera angles and cuts, but I was trying to make this really short, but again, it’s up to the viewers to decide if it worked.
Thanks for the link–another fun possible style! What I don’t like about anime, generally, is when they do those weird “reaction” faces that I often don’t understand (tho, strangely, they don’t bother me as much in 3D, like in K-Pop Demon Hunters–not sure why!) which you don’t have in your video, much like the original Ghost in the Shell, so I’m cool with this. I do actually appreciate the quality of the animation in many anime titles, but it seems like when they aren’t too goofy for me, they’re too violent–no pleasing me, I guess LOL
Sorry, I should have been more specific that I meant “animated features with realistic animated human characters in the lead acting roles.”
Agreed, and I’m not dissing anyone’s taste or efforts–I was just making a general statement that “most people” seem to prefer stylized human characters over realistic ones. Doesn’t make them right or wrong, just that’s what the numbers seem to show.
Thanks! At the end of the day, as long as we’re having fun, that’s all that matters.
When the voice reply came I thought that it was going to be a robot that not a female, other than that short but done well, nice animation and interaction.
