"Chambers" <ben### [at] pacificwebguycom> wrote in message 
news:48b40ede$1@news.povray.org...
> Chris B wrote:
>> You may want to add a few more words about what you're trying to achieve. 
>> Animating good looking human figures with hair, clothes etc. in POV-Ray 
>> is still tricky, but if you're only after little robots or toon 
>> characters it can be a lot easier.
>
> I've got a series of 8 - 15 second clips, each containing between 1 and 8 
> principal characters, and up to several dozen secondary characters.

Is that 8x15 second clips? So about 2400 frames and an average of 30 
characters per scene? That sounds a lot!
How real do you need the people to look and what sort of details do you need 
(hair, clothes, eye movements, lip movements)?
What sort of poses and animation do you need? Complex unique movements or 
cyclic movements?
Are all of the people moving or can you have some motionless characters 
(e.g. a couple of dozen lying on a sun lounger)?
How much time do you have?

Here are some fairly random thoughts:
  o  You can reduce the effort by re-using as much as possible, so repeating 
the same basic pose sequence (e.g. walking).
  o  If you can reuse the same characters and poses in all of the 
backgrounds (maybe changing their starting points, direction etc. to make it 
less obvious), that would massively reduce the work required. It may even be 
possible to use the exact same sequence, just rotating the entire background 
group so you're looking at it from a different angle in the different clips.
  o  You may even be able to reuse foreground characters and poses, e.g. 
looking over the shoulder of a character just showing the back of the neck 
and having the same character face on may not be too apparent.
  o  If you do a 20 second sequence for a 15 second animation you can offset 
the starting pose by 5 seconds to make it less apparent that two characters 
are following the same sequence.

> I could do still poses in Daz, but exporting individual frames for the 
> entire thing would be cumbersome at best.

With something like a walking animation, or climbing stairs, or climbing a 
ladder you can just export a single walk cycle, e.g. a one second cycle, and 
re-use it by using the sequence repeatedly (translating/rotating it at 
regular intervals as required so that the repeats move the character further 
along the walk path).

If DAZ supports the sort of Poser functionality that Mike described in his 
response then that would probably be the quickest thing to try. If you can 
use an existing animation sequence, step through the sequence and quickly 
export the character and props, then perform a batch conversion you may be 
able to get a single character animation sequence into POV-Ray in a 
reasonable length of time.

> I remember hearing about MakeHuman before; I'll take another look at it.

The currently released 0.9.1 allows you to create a character, pose it and 
export .obj files that can be converted with PoseRay, but there's no clothes 
or hair and no built-in animation functionality yet. This means that with 
MakeHuman you'd currently have to define each pose rather than use the sort 
of functionality Mike described for Poser to cut the effort required for 
generating your frames. If you've got lots of time and want to help exploit 
the future potential then this may still be a good way to go.

If you're on a tight deadline then it's probably going to mean a lot of 
tedious, repetitive conversion work to define a set of sequences that you 
can repeatedly reuse.

Regards,
Chris B.

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