best animation program to use with Daz?
Toobis
Posts: 966
While I understand Daz has its own animation side of it I am wanting to use something more in depth with more potential. I am eager to use the charracters and props and clothing from Daz and take them into another animation program for better and more realistic effects but am not sure what all my program options are and am hoping someone can help me. It has to be an animation program that will import Daz things and I am veering towards Iclone as its flexibility with Daz studio looks promising as well as its ability to make the movement of clothing whilst animating look free flowing and realistic. The cost does not seem too expensive but I am still not sure.
Any advice? should I go for Iclone?
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The easiest to use seems to be iClone 6 followed by Carrara. Blender is good too but you have much to learn to prepare and export DAZ characters to Blender and animate while iClone is especially made to make animation of DAZ characters easy for you. Carrara too but for now it only can handle up to Genesis 2 characters.
I agree with Iclone. Since DS has proprietary rigging, you'll likely have issues with most export options to other apps and rigging. Iclone seems to work the best with the least about of issues.
yeh I think I will go with Iclone. Thanks guys :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9Dyy7nsNng
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qS_aKgyuXZ4
Huge improvements in Iclone 6 animation. The mix moves is $eparate pack, which facilitates animation.
You will need 2 applications = Iclone 6 Pro, and 3dxchange Pro to import characters and props into Iclone,
Character Creator is unbelievable application (comes with Iclone 6 Pro)
Overall - the quality of content items by Daz3d artists is better than Iclone, so you will want the 3dxchange Pro or pipeline version. Pipeline is for export out from Iclone.
This is what you want...i
iClone 6 Character Creator Deluxe Suite - the Login link will take you there
Please login to see the member price
You should get better price, if you set up account - "free"
http://www.reallusion.com/store/product.html?l=1&p=ic
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Iclone is an application designed to facilitate video production and now games as well. In other words, if you seriously need to animate it is terrific.
If you need modest amount of animation and most of your work is static images and such, you might want to think about it.
You really are handicapped, if you don't have the Iclone 3dxchange pro or pipeline version. That is, especially if you have alot of content from Daz3d, poser, that you want to migrate to IClone.
Read everything carefully, and don't stretch your imagination. Reallusion is good about their information... if it says it ...expect it, if it doesn't say it don't expect it.
Good luck
Animating in iClone is simpler because (compared to Daz) all iClone anim toolsets are in-house.
IClone char anim is not necessary more efficient, it's designed for motion mixing, not creating motion from scratch or tweaking. Even the mostly under-serviced DS anim tools are better for fine-tuning animations
You mentioned 'realistic' effects. IClone's rendering is a few notches down from 3delight level of realistic. Joint bending is game res. Importing exporting optimizing props maps meshes for realtime will cost both time and cash.
You mentioned 'import Daz things'. Carrara is the only prog which keeps Genesis TriAx skin in tact.
Carrara could even import and render a whole Daz scene with Daz format items. Something to consider...
Daz Genesis to iClone is also a one way street. So far only G1 G2 motions can be imported back to Daz Studio.
Daz Genesis are supported, but advanced character anim options are available to only new iClone native rigs.
iClone 6 lipsync improvement and conforming clothing do not apply to imported characters. Not an issue if you go for their native rigs.
If lipsync is priority, render quality no issue, no time deadline, iClone.
If facial expressiveness is priority, Daz native format is important, time in short supply, Carrara.
K this just killed it lol.
K this just killed it lol. What do you mean with the part "iClone 6 lipsync improvement and conforming clothing do not apply to imported characters." so if I import a clothed Daz charracter into iclone then its clothing won't be able to be gravity morphable at all from the iclone options? maybe I am misnderstanding.
What's your timeline for being proficient at this? I'd be inclined and in fact, personally, I am waiting for Carrara native support for Genesis 3. Carrara does support Genesis 2 already and there are the VWD dynamic clothing plugin for Carrara to consider to that iClone doesn't have. For the price of a fully functional import / export iClone pipeline you can buy Carrara, VWD plugin, and a pretty good stable of Genesis 2 and Genesis 3 characters.
The iClone will be a bit faster to learn and easier to learn and render faster if you are just wanting something to create FBXes that you have animated to export to use in other other products such as game engines then iClone is still probably the easiest way to go. The other products can do those things as well though.
Daz Genesis + Daz conformed clothing imported into iClone works nice. Import process is mostly automated.
Morphing, as in changing base character shape, is very limited. Morphing shape as expression, tedious process. Morphing as in "shapeshifting" animation, not possible.
Many Daz users soon miss all the DS render options. To find bringing the actual actors back here for iRay treatment, not possible to date.
You can't conform (or autofit in DazSpeak) newly created or unrigged clothing mesh to Genesis inside iClone.
You also can't conform/autofit Daz-rigged Daz clothing figures to your Genesis inside iClone. You can do this in Carrara, with G1 (and I believe G2).
This means, if you choose G1/2/3 as your character, it's one clothing = one character inside iClone. No spontaneous fitting clothes or shoes over there for Genesis.
Everytime you change your character clothes, another round of import and character profile loading saving via their asset importer (3Dxchange). Extra purchase.
The Genesis equivalent in iClone is "G6 CC" for Character Creator character. lol mouth full. It's a separate "plugin" purchase.
If you use CC you can't bring them back to DS. They enjoy the best new iClone 6 features like lipsync extras and conforming wardrobe autofitting inside iClone.
Genesis in iClone don't get these new iClone 6 lipsync and autofit/ auto-conforming features. Auto lipsync on Genesis pops all over the place like in old iClone 5. No morph sliders in iClone to fix them, so hand craft the mouth anim yourself if you care to.
Clothing poke throughs when characters start moving can only be fixed with awkward opacity map (paint it yourself in photoshop), no adjustment morph, no direct-to-iClone morph import, smoothing or deformer to fix. No sign of that changing soon. All these, are non-issue in Carrara.
Everyone uses Genesis differently. If your Genesis dont' change clothes, don't morph much during animation, don't emote on the face, just use body motion, then not an issue, go ahead with iClone.
Otherwise do more youtube research. Lots of user traffic between the 2 apps anyway.
If you are serious about getting into animation, I would probably avoid iClone. You will eventually hit a plateau, as I did. Although it is easy to pose a figure in iClone, it lacks important animating features, such as a "graph" window to adjust the transitional movements (This is a very basic tool that animators need. When I asked the iClone staff whether there was any future plans to develop this area, they said they had none). So without this feature, your animations will look mechanical and artificial. There is no getting around this.
Also, it may be worth noting that iClone's render engine (Indigo), as it stands today, only utilizes about 30% of the GPU. So you could have the fastest GPU in the world, but Indigo will only be able to utilize a small portion of its potential, and thus your workflow will be hindered by slow render times. If you want to do animation, you need fast renders. You need a fully capable GPU render engine (like Daz's iRay, or the Octane plugin).
This is not what you want to hear, but I think the easiest way to animate Daz characters is using Daz itself; no porting necessary. Daz has everything a serious animation porgram needs (with the purchase of Graphmate, Animate2, and Keymate). But if you must use another software, Maya is the industry standard for animation, although its learning curve is quite high and its quite expensive. Other than Maya, I do not know of another suitable software. Poser could be a good alternative if you're willing to purchase the Octane render engine. But it doesn't seem to offer any real advantage over Daz native. 3DS and Cinema 4D are more geared toward 3D modeling than character animation. Houdini has a high learning curve and is intended more for VFX. Perhaps Unity/Unreal that game developers use? But I am unfamiliar with it.
-P
Keep in mind DS was designed to be all in one with little to no thought of using any content outside of DS. So there are no seamless transitions for using any content outside of the intended app
Must respectfully Disagree.
it depends on how you plan to implement iclone into an existing pipeline.
Iclone Ik and foot& hand contact feature alone make it worth my while .
I am only interested in Quickly creating and mixing locomotion
and natural gesturing Data the can be RETARGETED to Daz genesis 1-2 figures who will be ultimately rendered in Maxon Cinmea4D studio as .MDD driven animated .obj files.
IClone Lipsynch: Dont care!!! we have a solution that enables the venerable Daz mimic pro3 to use CR2 versions of Genesis 1-2 to create lipsynch.
Changing genesis character shapes& clothing etc within Iclone ??.. Again, DONT care!!! this is done in Daz studio we are only interested in the character body motion Data imported from Iclone
No graph editor in Iclone ??..ok would be nice but ultimately Iclone is a true REALTIME nonlinear motion mixer so any final tweaks are done with GraphMate& keyMate back in Daz studio before exporting MDD data to awating /obj files in Maxon Cinema4D studio
Iclones internal rendering options??..Dont care!! We are rendering our finals in maxon C4D.
I consider Iclone an affordable alternative to $$Autodesk Motionbuilder$$.
People dont complain that MB has no internal PBR or GI rendering options because they understand that is not its purpose ,
We have a similar outlook regarding Iclone Pro.
No this is incorrect...LOL
DAZ studio has no proper IK switcher
for proper foot & hand contact during manual animation.(see Iclone video above)
Sure Animate 2 is a nice nonlinear mixing option but it is only as good as the Foot planting Data contained within any particular "aniblock"and often results in major footsliding
and NO, those "pins" are a not a professional solution for this.
Poser animation tools have not effectively been updated since the late 1990's it primitive IK system is broken and can not be switched off after it is on with graphMate & keyMate you will have a much better tool set than poser and still be way below the cost of buying poser at its full retail price.
I respect Wolf's point of view. I know he renders alot. @Wolf359 will you say a little more about how you get the models and animation out of iclone into C4D?
Hi Thanks,
we dont actually export any models from Iclone,
we only use Iclone generated motion Data back to Daz studio.
I personally think trying to classify Iclone as complete replacement for Daz studio is the wrong way of looking at it
Iclones strength lies in its realtime character motion creation& editing tools.
After creating the motion I want with a realtime Iclone avatar
I export the Data to the 3D exchange application where I have only the skeleton of my genesis figures already auto converted by 3DX to accept Iclone motion data.
That data is then exported to a custom BVH file and applied to my orginal genesis 1-2 figures in Daz studio.any additional tweaks or lipsinc is added in Daz studio and the shot gets a quick OGl previs render before exporting the MDD data file out to C4d.
An .obj file of the character is already waiting in maxon C4D for its MDD motion data to bring it to life via a powerful object handler that we have for C4D.
Sounds like you have a pretty good workflow for animations. If I ever get into animations, I'll definately try this out. Thanks for the info!!
Thanks, Wolf.
Since I learned keyframing in after effects first, I have been aghast at the DAz studio timeline. Thanks, for sharing your workflow.
Iclone isn't free. It's $149 even if you join.
this is a very old thread
I myself would recommend Unreal Engine
using the DAZtoUnreal bridge and retargeting any motions such as Mixamo in Unreal is easy too
The other option I don't use but Wolf356 who posted in this thread now uses is Diffeomorphic and Blender
This maybe a little off topic because I am rather partial to using Daz Studio as my Primary animation tool with little to no issues But in case anyone is interested
There is a new tool that greatly improved Daz studio animations for keeping feet and hands in place. & the set up is 100x better than setting up ik chains solution in Blender. its improved daz animation capabilities 400% in daz studio its called LimbStick for Genesis 3 And Above https://www.daz3d.com/limbstick-for-genesis-3-and-above
I have been playing around with it and OMG I can do things now easily within a hour that would take me weeks to do by hand. If more things like this would be developed Daz would be more viable for animation creations.
I also have a lot of older tools in poser that I have been able to make work in Daz Studio that never was meant to work by changing a few file formats from .daz to pz3 or cr2
I know people hate on daz for animations with a lot of good reasons But personally I think its mostly because its understood..
for old animators like me that create animation old school daz is prefect. I am to old to learn a new complicated software..lol
Ivy have you ever found anything for DAZ that helps keep feet on a level plane when the character is walking or dancing? I think it can be done in Poser or Iclone but can the key frames in those platforms be transferd back to DAZ Studio?
You have always been able to parent /connect,/ glue or what ever the feet to the floor in a walk cyle or parent hands to a wall to climb a wall . ever since daz 3 . But the set up is extremely time consuming.,
To set something like that up you have to make a primitive for each & every place the foot or hand touches the surface along the keyframe you want to connect or glue to the surface. when you scrub along the timeline, On that keyframe Parent or Unparent the foot/hand to the Primitive signed for that keyframe , like i said it s very time consuming because you could end up having to set up 100's if not 1000's of keyframe primitives , Blender has a Hard-surface calculations tool that will calculate automatically where the geometry of the character mesh intersects with the floor or prop mesh and create the ikchain solution for you automatically. If I remember right Its like 4 clicks once you have your scene set up.
Witch this new limbstick tools is very simple. you only need to set up your primitives once for each hand or foot and run the script and it will calculate the movements automatically where you assigned the primitive for the foot or hand & the movements are connected to. So its not a real hard surface solutions or hard pinning per-say , but it does set up a simple limps sticking solution rather nice for daz studio
i did a quick demo of it
https://vimeo.com/653255463
Yep that still requires having the primatives placed where you need the feet to be at that frame in the timeline. Moving feet is not really an option in Limbstick.
Right you still have to make your primitives. To bad daz doesn't have something like walk designer like in poser. . The walkit tool works very well and is my go to for walking on hardserfaces. but still not a Hard surface solution like blenders.
I have tons of great works arounds for daz studio
walkit tool( sorry not allowed to post the link to it here) allows the feet to go where every place the print for the character to follow . Super awesome tool for 10 second walk cycles
Oh yeah, I know that tool. They are the same folks that have the "Sprite It" tool. I always wondered if Sprite It could be used to generate concert crowds ans audiences to go easy on rendering requirements. Walk It still could not fix feet when importing an MMD conversion. I would love to see the kind of animations you could do with MMD motions Ivy. I could send you some coversions if you ever inerested.
MMD in like MikuMikuDanc. thanks But I don't use it
if I had the money for the set up I rather use a xbox Kinect along with the "FastCap" software https://www.fastmocap.com/
paired with with Microsoft Azure Ai MS Kinect DK server https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/kinect-dk/#overview ,you can create motions presets cut out of any video or directly from body sensors. kind of expensive though but i already use MS Azure Ai Text to speech voice labs https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-services/text-to-speech/ for some voices actors parts so I can only imagine the motions lab is just as good for Kinects
But it cost nothing more to dream big right
I actually do have a mocap setup and have currently purchased brekel v3 which can use multiple kinnect v1 on one computer or network muliple kinnect ver2 on two computers. You should take a look at Brekel also. I think IPI Mocap works the best with the kinnect but it is very expensive for a perptual license. The new video to mocap software is starting to look promising but there not any stand alone versions that I have seen, most are some type og pipline platform.
That is why I would like to just try to use the MS Kinect DK with Azure Ai, yes it is a cloud based, service. But you pay for what you use, like a cloud iRAY rendering service. unless you have a large studio where you need multiple work station network portals. then maybe i can see the investment & MS does have monthly or annual enterprise subscriptions too.
But for a little artist as a IPO & small studio, I buy just what I need like I would for cloud rendering.
Its just paying $399 for the MS Kinect DC Ai ready device just so I can use the azure Ai service seems a little over priced. But i have no problem just paying for the core service minutes I need for a commsioned project it be cheaper than instead of trying to building or buying a server.
My needs are not that great.
Yikes! I just paid $15 dollars a peice for used kinnect v1 at a gamer store. Anyway back to the topic of this thread, my vote is Iclone as the best platform for animation. The only complaint I have for Iclone is not having the ability to transfer Virtual World Dynamics simulations into Iclone. I don't think the native Iclone cloth physics is that great.