Animation in DS should it be this Bad?

StevieD

I originally started using Daz Studio in the hopes to do some music videos. Animation was always my end goal. I must admit that I have progressed much slower than I had hoped. For the past year or so, I have been buying assets - like people, clothes props and sets. I have been trying to learn how to manipulate and work the software. I have even done some small animation tests to see what it might look like once I get everything down. Mostly I have been trying out the stuff I purchase and doing single renders to see what it looks like, changing things and again learning how to control things, making props that I can't purchase, etc.

Last week I did my first real animation in DS using the Ranger Car, with a genesis guy with some hair, clothes, and shoes driving it all across the Hilly Surround as a set with a sky dome. I animated the wheels, the car across the hills, the figure within the car, etc. I always output to image sequences in case of crashes or glitches and I went for a big HD frame size. Oh, I even placed some of Linda's Botanical plants in the foreground to fill in the area. I was going to start to animate them, too but I thought I'd just see how what I had would look like. I didn't even animate the camera.

I realize that with all these assets in the scene, viewing it in real time would be jerky, even though I have a pretty good MAC with 32 Gigs of ram and I'm ok with that, using it just to get the speed and movement right. Jerky is alright. I was able to do some pretty realistic turns and bumps, etc and everything looked good even at the screen texture. A little jumpy, yes but I got the idea. The render took 1 week and 3 days for 110 frames. 3sec 21 frames - 56+megs a frame. I don't mind that if everything looks great when it's done.

After the render, the image looked fabulous for what I did and the animation was smooth and totally clean. There were no glitches and it never crashed BUT the speed of the animation was twice as fast or faster as what I planned for in DS,,,,, Completely Off??

Yes, I did have the frame rate set to 30fps in the time line and the images did come into Final Cut Pro at 1 frame each. In FCP it is 3 seconds+ right around where it should be but the car is zooming across the field. It looks great and the movement is smooth but it's not the speed I had planned. I can not figure out why the speed is so off. I went back into DS and tried shutting off everything I could. Same speed there. I even looked at it at every texture mode there - Wire frame, hidden line, even bounding box (which was faster but not right). The speed never matched what it was after it was rendered.

Then I got really worried about syncing a drummer or a guitar player to music. Even if I just time it out by frames, not even using the music to place the animation, If when I output it and the speed is off. I can not very easily sync it up.. Any thoughts?? You are supposed to be able to sync it up with mimic and as such dialog, right? How do you do a conversation if the output will be a different speed? I don't see how you can do any kind of narrative if you can't sync up to sound. I'm confused. I believe I've seen some DS dance output but not much more than that. What might I be doing wrong?

Thank You
Steve

carolinebegbie

I haven't done much animation in the most recent versions of DAZ Studio, so I don't know why or if it's laggy. But just a comment on your surprise at the outcome - I would suggest doing test renders to image series using Open GL, which takes no time at all. (Render engine = Preview Render.) Then test that image series in your pipeline. Sorry I can't help with the main problem though.

WendyLuvsCatz

as far as lipsynch etc goes it should all match
the speed of your vehicle depends on the transform distance over time which is entirely arbitrary
you need to work out how many meters/feet etc you wish it to move and how many wheel rotations per sec
depending on your graphics the preview playback may not be accurate
not many 3D animation programs are
(Carrara which mostly I use is scarily laggy unless I skip frames likewise Poser, iClone which uses realtime rendering using the GPU is only one I have that is close to WYSIWYG)

for music
open your .wav file in a program like audacity to see the waveform and work out beats per minute
use the number of beats per minute for animating your drummer movements etc
in Carrara again I can see the wav form but most programs do not show this, you need to work out where to synch your movements by time alone, I still use Audacity a lot for this anyway.
Casual does have a script for Daz studio that aids in matching music to actions however that might be some use
https://sites.google.com/site/mcasualsdazscripts2/mcjaudiomation

StevieD

Thanks to both of you for the advice.

I didn't think I could use Open GL with my iMAC because of the crappy video card but after checking it out, I think it might be possible. So I have to look at that more in the future but for now,,,,,

I've been testing, inspecting and trying things out. I first timed the animations. In DS the time line is set to 30fps and is 111 frames which would be 111 divided by 30 or 3.7 secs. I got a stop watch out and at its fastest (with the bounding box mode selected), it runs right around 7 seconds and change. That doesn't work out mathematically. This is the sequence that ended up being 3 secs 21 frames when loaded into Final Cut Pro, after rendered. For the record, I was able to slow that down in FCP but I don't know if it would be accurate enough to match long sequences to sound. Usually with animation, you get the dialog down first and animate to that. I suppose with a little playing around, you could get it there but that's not very precise. I know,, what do you want for nothin'?

So I lowered the fps in the DS sequence to 15 fps and it seemed to go the proper speed, or there about. Of course all bets are off when I switched to fully shaded. It runs the 111frames at about 15 seconds. So I think actually animating to sound is not going to work unless this Open GL thing works better. In fact, properly animating anything without the speed going right, I think if not impossible, very inaccurate. Long Long ago, I used Maya and I don't remember having this problem. I never did any professional animating so I'm not sure what problems they have. Anybody know? Maybe it's just by sheer brute force of powerful machines. Live and learn.

Thanks,
Steve

Herald of Fire

Surely if you've rendered them out as a series of frames then the speed they run at is entirely dependent on the software you're using to splice them together? Or are you saving them directly to AVI, in which case your codec could be the one to point the finger at.

WendyLuvsCatz

what actually happens if you use lipsync?

StevieD

I like image sequences because if the machine crashes or a frame or two screw up, all you have to do is re-render the frames you need and slip them into the proper place in the sequence. They are saved to disc as they are rendered, labeled as which ever frame they are. If you have a movie rendering out and the machine crashes, etc., you have to start the render from the beginning and at 1 week and 3 days, that's a lot of wasted time.

Now, according to how the DS timeline is set, in this case 30 fps, so each second has 30 frames. I use Final Cut Pro for all video editing. The timeline is set at 30 frames a second (actually 29.97) and for HD. When I bring in the single frames they line up in order and the sequence runs at 30 frames per second. And as I stated in my previous post, the the sequence in Final Cut Pro ran exactly 3 seconds 21 frames just about what it mathematically should be according to the settings in DS. The car zoomed past going 50 miles an hour instead of 25.

I think my mistake was that I visually judged the speed of the car within DS which I now know was running very slow. Maybe it's my machine or maybe the software won't handle a lot of assets in the scene and display at the proper running speed. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to do some playing around in order to get complicated scenes to render right. Boo Hoo...

I'm going to have to learn to animate dialog or music alone in a separate scene by itself. Then import it into the more complicated scene with the animation.

Thanks
Steve

StevieD

I haven't actually tried to do a lip sync yet but like I said above, I think it might work all by it self then transfer it later to a more complicated scene.

I have a lot to learn and I have to figure out a process to put together big scenes from several small scenes.

Thanks
Steve.

WendyLuvsCatz

lipsync prob first thing I ever did in studio
just add a wav file under tabs windows lipsync in 32bit not 64 (unsure on Mac) and see how Genesis talks in preview
then you will get an idea of lag if any.