Messing Around in 3D - and failing

[Akrystos]

Hello there!

Ever since Skalla-Grimm posted his first 3D works (some year and a half ago?) I wanted to try my hand at some animations of my own.

I got an older version of Poser from an art college friend, bought some morphs and messed around. Conclusion: 3D animation is hard. Very hard.
Props to people like Skalla who are able to crank out so much stuff in a reasonable time. I can personally attest that creating let alone animating 3D models is quite a lot harder than it looks.

Mind I have no experience with this kind of software. I did everything I did by checking out tutorials online or pressing random buttons and see what happened, so maybe I am doing things wrong or inefficiently.

I have attached the bits and pieces I have made over the months into a semi-coherent video. It's very raw footage with no sound and only minimal post processing done, but there are some parts of which I am proud
I don't know if I'll ever continue working on this animation, but I still wanted to share it with the community.

Enjoy


Edit:
The forum won't let me upload it as a AVI. I have no idea how to export the video into any other format, so I converted it online into an mp4 format. I hope it's still playing for everyone.

[Rei-Lin]

I don't think it's bad at all. There's a lot of emotion going on in this, with great reactions and heavy breathing it seems. I wouldn't mind if you decided to make this a full 100% transformation clip. You're already on the right track with the animation, so I think now it'd just be a matter of time to finish it and make it perfect with the sound and music effects added in. Good stuff and hope to see more work from you!

[TF-Viewer]

I really like what I see so far. There's some good stuff here. I like the dress hitting the floor, that's a nice touch, it's a good way to kick off a TF. The full moon looks great, and the heavy breathing is very well done. Also the facial expression and posing is excellent. It's got the potential to be a great TF animation if you're willing to keep at it, and I hope you do.

[Skalla-Grimm]

That looks pretty damn good IMO. What you have here looks better than my first attempts, which I have not made public to spare everyone's sanity .

If you ever have questions feel free to ask away!

[no-name]

I really liked the muzzle TF and the rest of the video was good IMO.

[Dog_Girl_Kari]

Holy hell! That was awesome! I mean...geez, I know it's hard but you pulled it off well.

[WuschelWolf]

You really should start to "fail" more often then. I like the muzzle change. :3

[Tyger]

you sir, sell yourself short!

[Skalla-Grimm]

I just thought to add: if you're afraid that everyone will see the bazillion little details you got wrong and so will recognize you as the utter poseur that you really are....that's how I feel every time I post an animation.

[Kantomaster1111]

Excellent, hopefully you'll continue with this. And as I tell Krusty and Skalla, make sure you add tail growth! But seriously, loved the snout growth. If this is you shooting in the dark, some more practice would allow you to do wonders!

[thisguy18]

Seriously. You are selling yourself short! For a first attempt this is some great work! I hope you finish it!

[Akrystos]

Thank you all for the nice comments

But keep in mind these are the only passable results I had after almost two years of experimenting. And it's not like I can work any faster now. Most of my shots are still done with trial and error and have about the same chance to turn out bad they had a year ago.

@Rey-lin: I wanted to make a full transformation clip, but I am constrained by the morphs I can find and use.

For those who don't know how how Poser (and I think DAZ 3D too) works: You have a model (of a woman in my case) you can apply different morphs to, preprogrammed by the maker. These are things like nose length, body fat, musculature,... all controllable with a slider button. Unfortunately there is no "transform into wolf" morph available.

You can buy certain morphing packs who add different morphs to an existing model. I heavily used Creature Creator, which let me morph the ears, nails and a bit of the muzzle. Unfortunately there is no really an option for "Wolves". The creatures are more akin to trolls, goblins and gargoyles. That is the reason the muzzle is only as short as it is. I couldn't make a good wolf head with those.

Creature Creator add ons gave me wolfish looking legs, but to my disappointment those weren't morphs but separate 3D models you had to "tack on" your existing model (after deleting the original legs). So I haven't found a way of morphing the legs yet.

I have seen other peoples animation and most of the time there is a foot transformation of some sort. I don't know if those people made their own morphs or used existing ones, but any help/tips/information about those would be helpful.

@Skalla-Grimm: Yeah, in each video I can see a million faults. The pacing is wrong, the arm moves in an inappropriate way or the hand moves trough the body in frame X. The problem I have is that once an error pops up in the middle of a clip (like a shoulder dislocating) I can almost never correct it without deleting all the keyframes that come afterwards. And at that time most of the time I prefer starting over since fixing it would mean manually adjusting about 50 frames.

I know you use DAZ 3D studio. I never got that to work for me, so I stuck with Poser. Do you know of a difference between those? Do you have a manual or instructions for DAZ?

@Kantomaster1111: Sure there has to be a tail, but I can't find a method that works though.

I have attached two pics of how my tails look at the moment. The stump looks a bit cactus-ish, but still looks OK, but the full tail just looks wrong to me. I used a free model of Krystal of which I shrunk the body so only the tail was left and attached that to my model. But something goes wrong when I try to change the colours. The hairs become a bit transparent I think, so you can see the solid model underneath.

The texture room looks something like this:

And I still don't understand what any of this does.