Collaborative Unit – Character Animation
With this idea, there would be 2 animations that I had to work on. It’s going to be the first time I work intensively on animating realistic character, so despite my lack of experience, this is something I’m excited to learn and try out. I already have made a character of my own in Daz, opting for using the software for animation as well as I know animating on Daz is a bit more intuitive than traditional animation, which can help me save some time.
I decided to use 30fps (since 25fps is too realistic, and 60fps – which can be perfect for slow motions, yet might be too heavy and taking too long to render later on), aiming to make the final video around 1 minute long. That would be around 2000 frames to work with. 1000 frames for the running animation, and 1000 frames for the giant girl.
Running Girl Animation
This animation was thought to be an easy one, as I found a few running presets in Daz, ready to use. However, those animations are pretty fast, and I wanted the sequence to be slow so that we can showcase more of the environment and the movement of the character.
I spent a lot of time trying to slow down the running girl animation, opting for manually moving each and every keyframe just so I have more control over the flow of the sequence. I wanted the first few seconds to be significantly slow, where the camera would zoom into her face, her slowly opening her eyes then start running. Overall, I reduced the speed to 〜4 times for the animation to fit into 〜1000 frames range, adding some eye blink animation and expression as well.
I intentionally left 200 frames at the beginning, in case we need to do any cloth/hair simulation later on. The screenshot shows the overall keyframes of how this animation plays out.