- Aug 17, 2019
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It's not particularly bad or even not smooth. I suppose the question here would be, what exactly do you mean by smoother? The ship flying in and slowing down? If the attached video is what you're after, I think the smoothness is fine.
Seeing as it's not a looping animation (I'm guessing, at least?), I think the issue here is the lack of movement (unless you're going for a security camera-esque look) from anything but the one ship is sort of 'lacking in life' so to speak. Perhaps animating and having the camera tail the ship flying toward the bigger ship. Something sort of like this (ignore the shit quality, it's pretty heavily compressed for upload purposes):
The basic idea is that the camera following the action creates movement, thus creating a less stiff environment around the ship and camera. Think something like the (below) scene from The Expanse, where the camera tails the kamikaze ship towards Marco Inaros at the 1:30 or so mark. Obviously, nothing needs to explode, but (once again) the idea lies in the camera itself following the ship (you could always add some wiggle in After Effects/Premiere Pro afterwards to give it a handheld look, if you'd like). Again, not saying you need to have some wild explosions or anything. Just some other kind of movement beyond the ship.
Seeing as it's not a looping animation (I'm guessing, at least?), I think the issue here is the lack of movement (unless you're going for a security camera-esque look) from anything but the one ship is sort of 'lacking in life' so to speak. Perhaps animating and having the camera tail the ship flying toward the bigger ship. Something sort of like this (ignore the shit quality, it's pretty heavily compressed for upload purposes):
The basic idea is that the camera following the action creates movement, thus creating a less stiff environment around the ship and camera. Think something like the (below) scene from The Expanse, where the camera tails the kamikaze ship towards Marco Inaros at the 1:30 or so mark. Obviously, nothing needs to explode, but (once again) the idea lies in the camera itself following the ship (you could always add some wiggle in After Effects/Premiere Pro afterwards to give it a handheld look, if you'd like). Again, not saying you need to have some wild explosions or anything. Just some other kind of movement beyond the ship.
- May 5, 2020
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Try adding a motion blur. But I'm not sure if this is possible to do in post-production, you might need to re-render the scene.
- Jun 25, 2017
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I don't know how you've set this up, exactly, but, to me, the issue is that the right-to-left velocity is a bit jerky. I think what happened is that when you went to start the rotation of whatever-those-are on the sides, keyframes also got set on the lateral movement of the spacecraft, with the result that the deceleration of the space craft wasn't smooth.
What I'd probably do is to remove ALL the keyframes on the (x,y,z) position of the spacecraft except the ones at the end, and then adjust the curve of its position so that its deceleration was smooth. If you can't do that, then at least look at things in the curve editor and try to adjust the keyframes and the shape of the curve between them so that they don't have obvious breaks in the rate of change of velocity.
- Apr 18, 2021
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Only major problem I see is I can tell where your keyframes are. Why does the ship slow down at 1 second in right before the sponsons rotate. Looks like you did a couple changes in speed of slowing down where you would have been better served just doing one final key and interpolating from the beginning since in space, velocity is constant.
If you really wanted to sell it, just add some retro thrusters firing off in the front which would explain any jerk or irregularity to the movement with it slowing down.
- Jun 25, 2017
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Certainly. Basically, there are two things involved here. One is obviously "on which frames do I keyframe something." Keyframes are set on the timeline. The second is "what do the motion curves look like between the keyframes." This is where you use the graph editor. In programs like Blender, you have tools you can use to "shape" curves - you can "grab handles" at each of the keyframes and reshape the Bezier curve. In Daz Studio, the graph editing is somewhat more primitive - you may have to shift keyframes around (either in "time" or in "value") to get what you want. Your goal, however, would be to have a relatively smooth deceleration of the space ship, meaning that you wouldn't want to see the slope of the curve change radically at any keyframe. A smooth deceleration would give you a quadratic-shaped "position" curve.
- Sep 30, 2021
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Thanks for the info, you also just reminded me how much I enjoy linear algebra. I'll spend some time in blender, I haven't done much in it apart from creating a pink doughnut, it is a great program.
- Jun 25, 2017
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Blender is one of the most awesome free programs I've ever run across. Granted, it's a lot easier to create scenes from scratch using Daz Studio, since it has so many pre-built assets. But in terms of overall power and capability, Blender beats it hands down. I'm reasonably good in Daz - I'm learning Blender now so that I can try to integrate it into my overall workflow, to take advantage of what Blender can do that Daz doesn't do well. But, Blender isn't necessarily for the faint of heart. It's kind of like "Daz will sell you a Toyota. Works very well, within its limitations. Blender gives you a Formula One racing car, but in kit form, and you have to assemble it yourself."