Category Archives: animation

Alien Lizard Soldiers from Another Dimension!

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This is my first try at AI animation. I rendered it with Stable Diffusion and the Deforum plugin. I’m trying to see if I can create interesting shapes that morph from one object to another over time. There are a lot of amazing things going on in this short sequence, including a bit around 30 – 40 seconds where the objects at the bottom of the screen morph into a bizarre split screen. I love that kind of stuff.

It took about two hours to render out all the frames for this one minute video. I also rendered out six versions, changing the prompt and the render settings each time to get this one which was the best. That’s a lot of tedious rendering but I’m learning quite a bit.

 

Midjourney “thinks” and creates a portrait of a cyborg with an electronic brain

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Watch as Midjourney “thinks” and creates a portrait of a cyborg with an electronic brain.

EricSusch_portrait_photo_of_a_cyborg_with_electronic_brain_and__8541faa7-7d06-4d58-831d-7a269f35beaf#Art I made with #Midjourney #AI

 

Color Correction Test

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Run (CC test)For most of the films and television shows I’ve worked on the goal of color correction was to make the picture look technically correct and pretty – healthy skin tones, bright colors, maybe a bit “hyper real” but still normal.  Anything that degraded the image was bad and needed to be fixed.  What I’m trying here is relatively new to me.  I want something more stylized for this animation.  I’ve thrown in some grain and even a faint hint of scan lines to roughen up the super clean CGI.  I’ve also washed out the skin tones in favor of the blue and orange.  For comparison here is the original render before color correction.  (Click both to embiggen.)

Run (no CC test)I’ve been using the CC tools in Lightroom for most of my CGI work to date but since this is an animation I’m using the tools in Adobe Premiere.  I’m finding it much harder.  I love the CC tools in Lightroom.  They’re more intuitive than the controls in Premiere or photoshop.  I wish Adobe would create Lightroom style CC tools for all their products.

If this were a still image I probably would have gone a lot further with the grunge but it has to work as an animation.  It has to look good in motion and on all the other close-ups and wide shots too. I’m pleased with it right now although I’m a little concerned that the grain will be lost when the video is finally compressed and uploaded to youtube.  We’ll have to see what happens.

Created in DAZ Studio 4.8
Rendered with 3Delight
Color Correction in Adobe Premiere

Figures used:
Aiko 6
XTech for Genesis 2 Female
Modular Sci-Fi Kit 01 + 02

 

Animating a Complex Camera Move In DAZ Studio With keyMate and graphMate

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This is the video that goes with my article in the December issue (#18) of DS Creative magazine.  My in-depth tutorial was based on this shot.  Check out the article on page 72.

I originally developed this shot to test a complex keyframed camera movement in DAZ Studio.  So far it looks like the DAZ software will be able to do the kind of animation I want to attempt.

No One Told You When To Run

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No One Told You When To RunI’ve been spending the last few weeks experimenting with animation making a few test shots of people running down long hallways.  I’m going to put them together and make a short video but I want to add sound and music so it’s going to take a few more weeks.  In the meantime, I found an interesting frame in one of the animations and set a camera for a still shot.

Fast and Hot!

This piece is rendered with nVidia Iray which I’m still learning.  It took about five hours to render which is considerably faster than my previous high-rez image which took a full twenty-four hours.  Why was this one faster?  I bought a GTX Titan X graphics card and added it to my system.

EVGA GTX Titan X croppedIray can use both the computer’s CPU and the graphic processors on the video cards to compute the render, eliminating the need for a render farm.  (…at least for now.)

I managed to get my old Quadro K5000 and my new Titan X graphics cards to both work in the system at the same time, which some say can’t be done because the drivers conflict.  So far it’s working for me and both cards chug away when building the image.  The new Titan X ended up doing two and a half times the work of both my old Quadro K5000 graphics card and CPU together.  It’s a significant boost but boy the Titan X runs hot!  It screams at eighty degrees Celsius while building the image.

V6 runs - rendering heat monitorIt turns out that if I render with the door on my computer closed, the Titan X throttles down because of the heat.  I’m going to have to build a custom vented door for my system with maybe a fan or too.  For now I’m working with the door off.  At least I won’t get cold this winter!

Don’t Go Too Far!

I had two major problems with this render.  The first was a strange shadow around the eyes caused by the photometric fill light I was using on the character’s face.  It was as if the spotlight didn’t see the transparency part of the lashes.

V6 runs 07 ECU2 frame 305 disc key light - eyelash and hair shadowTurns out this was a combination of increasing the size of the light making it soft, and the distance the character was from the center point of the CGI world.  It’s a crazy bug that DAZ3D has promised to fix in the next version of DAZ Studio.  In the meantime, I had to grab the entire scene – sets, cameras, lights, everything – and drag it all back to world center.  Thanks to everyone on the DAZ forums for helping me debug this problem.

Strange Honeycomb Dot Pattern

The other issue was a strange honeycomb dot pattern appearing in the wall texture.  (click to embiggen)

V6 runs 09b wall problem 01Looks like Iray was compressing the wall textures too much.  There’s a Texture Compression setting under the Render Settings / Advanced tab.  I had to raise the Medium Threshold to 2048 and the High to 4096 to make the problem go away.  Apparently this increases the RAM needed on the graphics cards during the render but my system didn’t have a problem.  It also didn’t effect the speed of the final render.  I know because my system built this image twice!

V6 runs CCCreated in DAZ Studio 4.8
Rendered with Iray
Color Correction in Lightroom

Figures used:
Victoria 6
Liquid Halo on Sky 16
Utopia Deck C