Chapter 3 - Progress update #15

To be honest, this week was the best and at the same time the worst I've had in the entire production of Chapter 3 so far. It started off extremely positive. I was a little apprehensive about starting the animations as this time I am creating everything from scratch without any templates and completely on my own. When the first 2 animations were finished in 2 hours each and then a day later the rendered results looked very positive I was quite happy (please don't expect professional animations though as I am still very much a novice in animations). But when the results of the next animations were ready I had to realize painfully why I haven't seen any good dForce animations from others so far. The reason is that dForce is not loopable, i.e. clothes and hair simulated with dForce look different from the last frame to the transition back to the first. This leads to animations “jumping”. 3 days of rendering time wasted. At that moment I remembered that within the last 2 weeks I had seen a product in the daz store that contains dForce improvements. I went to the store and bought it straight away. In the description and the preview videos it was shown, among other things, that this extra tool makes it possible to loop dForce animations. Perfect, at least that's what I thought. But when I tried it out intensively, I realized two things.

The positive first. In future chapters, i.e. from chapter 4 and beyond, I will be able to use dForce simulated clothes and hair in animated loops (if the chosen hair is compatible).

The bad thing, the product (hair) used by the character that has an animated scene in chapter 3 does not work. I contacted the creator of the product who confirmed my suspicions. The hair in particular just doesn't work. This does not mean that the hair does not move in the animations, it will be like in chapter 2 that I can move it up and down manually with the sliders implemented in the hair. Sometimes it will clip a little, or won't look as fluid, but I'm handicapped in a technical sense, sorry. When you see the automatically simulated versions in the future you will understand why I am so frustrated about it. It just looks so much better, more natural, more fluid.

Since the animation creation process itself is smoother than expected, I chose variant 2 from my last post: fewer camera angles but more animations. This time, "more animations" really means more. They won't just be the same animations with different speed settings; they will be truly different animations with slight changes in position and movement in addition to changes in speed. Also, unlike last time, I'm using four-second loops instead of two-second ones.

That's it for this time. Until next week.