by Tecknophyle » August 24th, 2012, 1:56 pm
Okay, I'm assuming you use Poser, although DS (or most software) would work pretty much the same way.
Let's assume you have a big fight scene with multiple characters, camera moving around, lots of action, but all in, say, a warehouse. This is the way I'd do it
1. First, set up your sets and props that aren't going to move, your lighting and so on. Perhaps add one or two of your characters to see how they render, moving them around to different positions where they might be in the final product to see how they look so you know if you have to adjust lights or whatnot. Don't bother posing them, just move them around. Depending on the quality of your rendering, you may have to spend a fair amount of time doing this or not. If you look at my series here in the free area, you'll note it's fairly high quality (in terms of shader effects, lighting, and so on), so I have to take the time to get it right. If I pumped out a render in 30 seconds due to my settings, I probably wouldn't worry as much about this step because it wouldn't take long to fix things up on the fly. When I'm spending anywhere from 5 to 8 minutes to complete a render, however, getting it right at the start saves me an enormous amount of time later.
2. With your scene set up, import basic figures to represent your characters. I know you use Victoria 4, so instead of using a finished V4 character, use the basic, no-morphs-loaded V4. Give it some basic colour to indicate what character it is. No clothing, no props (except ones like weapons that will be used), no hair. Just a basic dummy. Do the same for all the characters using their base models.
3. Make sure your animation palette is open. In frame 1, pose all your character proxies the way you want to start the fight (and anything else, like camera position and moving props or whatever). Now go to frame 2, and move and pose them as you want. Then keyframe everything. Go to frame 3 and repeat, then 4 and so on until the scene is done. If you have characters entering or exiting the scene in the middle of the fight, keep them out of view until the frame where they show up, and then move them into position. If they go away, in the frame after their last appearance, just move them somewhere out of view. Out of the scene, into another room, hell into a crate if you want. The important thing is to make sure every frame and everything in it is keyframed. If you do it right, when you select a frame in the animation timeline, what you see should be exactly what you posed for that frame.
4. When you've got your fight scene finished the way you want, go to each character in it and save their pose, including "all frames" (I forget what the exact wording is there) and "body transformation". You should have one pose for each single character.
5. Delete all your proxies, and load the actual characters into the scene.
6. Make sure you're in the first frame, and then give each character the pose you've saved for them. If you've done everything right, when you move the slider to another frame, all the characters should move into the proper position and pose you'd set up using their proxies.
7. Now you can go through the fight frame by frame and make small adjustments as necessary for what you see in the camera: moving flowing clothing, for instance, doing expressions, tweaking poses due to body morphs or high-heeled boots, whatever. Make sure, again, that everything is keyframed in every frame.
8. And now render. You have two options: you can render a frame, manually move to the next frame and render, and so on. Or you can render the scene as a movie: simply create an animation that uses the render settings and export it as a series of images instead of an avi or mov or whatever. Then tell it to start making the movie and go do something else. When you come back, you'll have your fight scene rendered.
The advantage of doing it this way is that you, essentially, have a saved file for every single image--so if you have to go back and redo one or more of the images, you can--but it's all in a single file. So, say if your fight scene comes out to 10 images, instead of ten saved pz3 files of a few hundred MBs each, you have a single file that's only a bit larger than one of those single files because the animation of the 10 frames only makes it a little bigger. The advantage of using the proxies to do most of your posing is that, if you have many characters, you're setting things up and doing most of your moving the camera and things around with smaller files, thus less memory needed and you don't have to wait for things to happen.
The process is, to anyone who's worked in the field, basically treating what you are doing as if you were directing a play, a television show, or a movie. First you set up the set. Then you run your "actors" through rehearsals, and then at the end you run the final take.
Now there can be variations. The above is what I'd do, as I said, for a big scene with many characters, all of them doing stuff. For a situation with only a few characters, or there's only a few images and/or not much movement, my computer is beefy enough I'll load the final character for the "rehearsal" bit instead of using proxies (which means I can skip the saving the poses step).
Give you a concrete example. Take the second scene in Episode 8 of my series, the one where Carol takes control of O'Meara. There's 14 images in that sequence, and here's how I built it.
Setup: conference room lighting and hallway. Do some test renders to make sure I have the lighting at the levels I want. Place characters in the initial pose you first see them in.
First frame: Dennings and O'Meara. Carol is in the same pose as when she first appears in frame 2.
Second Frame: Change in camera position, change in O'Meara and Dennings poses and expression, open door, see Carol.
Third frame: Changes in Dennings and O'Meara poses and expressions, and door pose. Change in camera position. No change in Carol because you see her from the back, so I don't have to change her expression or pose.
Fourth frame: Door closes. It stays closed so I won't have to touch it again. Dennings in not seen again, so I don't have to worry about posing him any more. Change in Camera position. Change in Carol and O'Meara poses and expressions.
Fifth frame : Change in pose and expression for O'Meara. Slight change in pose for Carol (dropping arm from handshake). Change in camera position.
Sixth frame: Change in pose/expression for O'Meara, change in camera position.
Seventh frame: Change in expression for O'Meara.
Eight Frame: Change in expression for O'Meara.
Ninth frame: Change in camera position. Change in pose for Carol (don't see face so can't see expression, so no change needed). Slight change in pose and expression for O'Meara.
Tenth frame: Change in camera position. Carol and O'Meara change pose and expression.
Eleventh frame: Here I set up Carol and O'Meara in the poses and expressions you'd see them with in frame 13, including making O'Meara's clothes invisible and adjusting her body morphs accordingly. For this frame, the camera is focused on Carol's face. What you don't notice (since you can't see Carol's lower body, and there's no shadows or reflections to give it away) is that she'd nowhere near a kneeling position: in fact, she's hovering a few inches above the floor.
Twelfth frame: Camera move for focus on O'Meara's face. No other changes.
Thirteenth frame: Camera move for full view of Carol and O'Meara.
Fourteenth frame: another camera move: slight change in O'Meara's pose (her head/neck goes back) and change in expression. Carol has no change in expression (since you can't see enough of her face to tell), her head and neck is bent forward, and her entire body is moved to get her head into the proper position: now she's not hovering over the floor, she's sunk into it.
Instead of 14 files, one file with 14 animation frames. Here's where the advantage of doing it this way came in: after everything was rendered, I realized I wanted O'Meara to have a slightly different body position in frame 10. Since the file was saved the way it was, it was an easy fix to re-render. If I want to change the lights or the colour of the table, I can do that as well by going back to first frame, making that change, and then stepping through the rest of the frames and re-rendering them instead of having to make the change in 13 or 14 separate files, or trying to re-create the images by reposing everything again (if I hadn't saved a file for each image), which were perfectly fine except for the colour of the table.
She has appeared in the reposted Mr. Cryptic comics and in Mctek comix on this site. She's appeared over on hipcomix, are you still planning to keep Ishtar on ice here on this site ??? 
I recall you saying that it was not your intention to have Ishtar be out of commission as long as it's been, I think it's been close to two years since she has appeared as the Goddess Ishtar in the Victory City series!! C.L.
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