Loyalty Reward December 2020 - BWB Animation

Hey guys, I'm happy to show you my first "decent" animation attempt!  

While obviously not perfect, I've learnt quite a lot with this experiment which I'll talk about in this post! But first off, here you have a link to the original file(s) to download: https://mega.nz/folder/8JlmWIIB#GHbD9TtGMSV6C1hTjhmdiQ 

Included is the 5 second version and a shorter 2.8 second version as this one is closer to a realistic speed.  

What I learnt

• It's not impossible to animate something even with my current equipment. It took me two days to pose/animate and 3 days to render. Especially the posing part will become much quicker eventually and is just a matter of practice but given that I have nearly no experience with the DAZ animation interface (and honestly, it's a nightmare) it was alright for what it was. But in the future, 5sec animations shouldn't take me longer than 1 day honestly.  
• Higher resolutions are not impossible. Originally I wanted to render this in 720p (1280x720px) but given the time I had to make this animation, my tests lead me to believe that 1080p was also an option. However, the render turned out "alright" in 1080p, but you can still notice pixel flickering in some of the areas (especially the eyes), which is just a sign that the render wasn't really perfect. So in the future 720p should be my go-to if I don't want to increase the render time.  
• This 5 second animation in 1080p took 24h to render in total meaning 30 frames per second x 5 ends up being ~10 minutes of render time per frame. I believe if I keep the render time and reduce it to 720p, the render should turn out to be more polished in the end. Now that I know both the time it takes per frame + the optimal resolution, I can make better predictions on what kind of animations would be possible. 10 seconds would take 48h, 20 seconds 96h and so on. Although it's also worth nothing that BWB is one of the most demanding scenes I had worked with as it features 3 characters. A well lit scene with 2 characters should also render faster.  
• Animation pace is something I have to get a feeling for. As you see, the original 5 second clip looks like slow-motion. The issue I'm facing in program is that DAZ won't let me preview a complex scene like this in real-time. Instead all I see is a laggy slideshow. So to get a feeling on the pacing of a scene, I simply need to practice more and get a feeling for it. That's also the reason I included 2 versions in the link above. The second version is sped up in post to give it a more natural pace (and 60 fps).
• I'm quite satisfied with the overall facial expression of the girls, but within the first second you can see a bit of an abrupt head movement of Allison which must've been due to a key-frame error. Things like that shouldn't happen when I have more practice in the program, but unfortunately these are also things that are hard to spot during production due to it being a slideshow in my preview.

Conclusion

Animating a scene isn't impossible for me right now, but it is quite time consuming so before I can do this regularly, I need to upgrade my rig and safe for a RTX 3090. This should increase the render time significantly. Given the current pricing of this GPU though, it might take me a 3-4 months to save enough money for it - but this will be my next goal! 

Until then I'm happy to test around more with animation and maybe have next months Loyalty Reward also be an animation of another album.

Let me know your thoughts on animated content and on what you've seen so far!