We decided to put together a short animated clip showing the workflow of animating in Daz|Studio and rendering through OTOY’s Octane Render plugin. We used our own mocap files and Daz3d’s Genesis figure to create the following animated clip. Octane produces some very attractive images at amazing speed. Bringing Octane into the workflow required a few small tweaks to how we did things, but things worked very well when we did the finishing in Adobe After Effects. Have a look below:

Here are some observations about the process:

1. Octane fits very easily into the production workflow, although as an unbiased renderer, it gives more of a temptation to do everything “in camera” as opposed to rendering in layers and bringing it all together in compositing software.

2. It does take some pre-planning, but rendering out illumination from each light source separately gives a lot more flexibility in applying effects. The primary illumination was done using an HDR image. Illumination for the muzzle flash was done by first creating a muzzle flash prop as an OBJ file and parenting that to the rifle’s muzzle. Then, this was turned into a light emitter and the frames where the shot happens were rendered out with the emitter opacity set to zero. This gave the illumination without the emitter being visible in the scene. By rendering out only those frames where a gunshot occurs and compositing those with the main footage in After Effects, I was able to create the “flash” without burning any more render time than needed.

3. Any motion blur was done in After Effects using the Re-Vision FX Reelsmart Motion Blur plugin. No suprises – it does play nicely with Octane footage.

Here’s the assets that were used in the shot:

Michael 5 – We used Genesis with the Michael 5 morph to create the figure. The face was custom generated in Facegen.

Cody Hair for M6 – This is a Fibermesh hair that worked very well with custom Octane hair shaders to give a very realistic look under Octane’s Pathtracing kernel. It took a little bit of adjustment to get it to fit with Genesis, but once in place, it was just fine.

Unshaven Beard for Genesis – Again, a Fibermesh hair product that adjusted well to the custom facial morph and took the octane hair shaders as well.

War Dog for Genesis – The War Dog outfit by Luthbel is a great set of clothing for military and paramilitary characters. The straps and other accessories were turned off, and the pants had a custom color map created.

ICE Pack Three – We grabbed the rifle and eyewear from this set of military accessories for M4. This is an outstanding set that can give your figures some great-looking modern military gear.

Car Ranger – The vehicle Genesis uses for cover in this shot is the Car Ranger. A great-looking modern SUV. Octane also comes with custom car paint shaders that you can drag and drop onto the prop to get that perfect new car look right out of the box.

Behind the Neighborhood – Daz Studio artist DzFire did an amazing job on this environment. The brick buildings combine to give a dirty and grungy feel of a decaying urban alleyway –  the perfect place for a shootout.