Animation: It sucks.

privatesugarplum

I did an animation where the camera does a walk-through of a house.  

1. Point A, set up the camera position and rotation
2. Point B, move here, point here
3. Point C move here, point here
4. and so on.

Set up the render, 600 frames and go.

What then happens (45 minutes later, thank God for cartoon render) is the camera does the move from point A to B with a 360 degree x axis roll.  In fact, with about 25 points in the chain, the camera did 3 rolls, and one time doing a 30 degree vertical axis rotate went 330 degrees in the wrong direction.

I was using "Timeline" animation, not anim8 lite or anything,

WendyLuvsCatz

DAZ studio's camera always puzzled me until I realised it tweens from every transform individually along the timeline and if there is no keyframe on that parameter at the start it will tween from the next one.

So you need to add a keyframe for every value at every point be it x rotate z transform etc and most importantly at the start!

so slightly tilting the camera halfway along the timeline means it would apply that tilt at the start or tween into it from the previous point add a y rotation you will get a spin.

do a few y rotations and a few tilts it will go ballistic!!

 

Tobor

To do any meaningful animation in D|S you need keyMate and/or graphMate, plus maybe some of mCasual's animation scripts for streamlining your work. Trying to do animation in basic D|S is a quick way to die young.

mikael-aronsson

You don't need to bake every keyframe (just starting and ending of changes and as said above, make sure you do a copy of the previous keyframe if you don't want the change to start from the previous keyframe), DS does not work anything different from most other software, it always takes the shortest distance from A to B, it does not know if you want to rotate 270 or -90 degrees, the end result is the same but the path to it is very different, so make sure you keyframe rotations at any time when the rotation is >90 degrees to be safe, if you make sure you never rotate that much between two keyframes you will be fine.

As said above, keyMate and graphMate is very helpful.

 

privatesugarplum

th3Digit said:

DAZ studio's camera always puzzled me until I realised it tweens from every transform individually along the timeline and if there is no keyframe on that parameter at the start it will tween from the next one.

So you need to add a keyframe for every value at every point be it x rotate z transform etc and most importantly at the start!

so slightly tilting the camera halfway along the timeline means it would apply that tilt at the start or tween into it from the previous point add a y rotation you will get a spin.

do a few y rotations and a few tilts it will go ballistic!!

 

ok, this is odd.  First time through, I used the Parameter dials.  Second time through, I deleted all the keyframes, and "flew" the camera through by selecting a frame, then using the camera tweekers in the preview panel (translate and shift-translate, and shift-rotate [rotate without shift orbits the look-at point - very hard to use.  shift-rotate just turns the camera in-place])

When I flew the camera through, it just worked.