Animation agitation, frustration, and condemnation to tarnation

mavante

I swear to Disney, every last video "tutorial" I can find about animation in Daz Studio either:

A) Starts with the utter, unshakeable conviction that nobody in the world ever animated any character—or ever would want to animate any character—other than by plunking that character into an empty, blank, boring, dreary, grey background with a white grid to stand on, always at universe zero, and/or,

B) Starts in as though you already know everything anyway, and/or,

C) Subjects the viewer to alleged "music" worse than fingernails scraping on the inside of a lead casket lid, and/or,

D) Has no talking at all, just a ghostly cursor that runs around the screen doing jerky little "dancing" motions repeatedly over menu items being selected—which invariably are completely unreadable, even at full screen.

Too much of this can lead to screaming and damaged computers.

Even the ones that actually managed to show how to create an animation with a character, either pose-to-pose or with aniblocks—always in a sere grey empty background—never get around to even mentioning how to get any such animated character placed into any kind of worthwhile scene at all. The closest anyone came to it that I could find was by a tutorialist who normally is excellent, who created an animated figure doing a walk (drear, grey, blank, basic default background), then merged a huge "city" prop into the scene with the animated figure—and then (listen up) moved and rotated the entire "city" around, up, down, left right, until the city was where he wanted it in relation to the character.

[Blink] Neither he, nor anyone else I can find anywhere in the cyberverse, ever tells how (or even if it's possible) to animate with aniblocks a character that is already positioned in a scene, well away from 0-0-0, and far along into other animations already in that scene.

Last night I was working on a ~230-frame animation. I have a character in the scene that is not in view of the camera until frame 131, at which point she must get up from a couch, stand for a moment, and then walk forward a few steps and assume a pose. I animated pose-to-pose her getting up from the couch and standing for a moment. So then I wanted to simply insert an aniblock to have her walk a few steps. I re-saved the file.

The moment I even clicked on the AniMate2 pane tab, my entire animation was wiped out, with the entire scene now being only 30 frames long. I was stunned, so I immediately went to REOPEN that just saved file, specifically NOT saving it after that catastrophe. And when I reopened it, ALL the original animation had been erased from it, and even in the timeline it was showing as only 30 frames long, with no animation at all.

I threw in the towel. It can't be just me. (Well, maybe it can.)

Does anybody have any idea at all about how to apply an aniblock to a character in situ, well into an animated scene file, without destroying everything already done?

benniewoodell

The way I've mixed aniblocks with keyframe animation takes an extra step but you have a lot of control. At the beginning of the timeline, I put every aniblock I might need there, just one of each, and bake to studio keyframes. Then in keymate, I go and delete any values that might bring the character back to 0 (you can easily move the character on the x or z axis while the walk is happening and it looks naturak). Then I go to frame 1000 and start there just to have some space, and then you can do all the poses you want, then go into keymate, copy the keyframea of the aniblock and paste them where you want them and your problem won't happen!

mavante

Thanks, Bennie. I don't know that I honestly follow everything you said, but I will try to parse it tomorrow when I'm able to do it with a T-E-S-T version of my latest save of that file. Meanwhile, I think I've discovered there was a problem with AniMate2 finding duplicate aniblocks, that problem going to another problem with @#$%^&@!(* Daz Connect. Trying to deal with that has been a Sisyphian task so far tonight, and I think I've had all the boulder shoving I can stand for one night—as soon as I start another thread about @#$%^&@!(* Daz Connect.

WendyLuvsCatz

Mmmm connect could be the issue here too, I don't use it but presumably the blocks need redownloading every time the scene is loaded

Padone

I do not use daz studio for animation, but I understand you have to bake your animation to an aniblock first, if you want to use aniblocks. As for moving the whole scene and animation to the world center, it is because iray has issues rendering refractions far away from zero coordinates. I agree this is odd.

mavante

Padone said:

I understand you have to bake your animation to an aniblock first, if you want to use aniblocks.

I think I was a bit muddled and not very clear: I'm not trying to use an aniblock for animation that I already have completed with keyframes in the Daz standard Timeline; at the end of one section of animation that I manually created, I'm trying to add a preexisting aniblock animation sequence (of a short walk) to the same figure. Once I can accomplish that, I likely will bake it to keyframes in the timeline and finesse certain parts of it, such as hand gestures—but I haven't got there yet.

 

Padone

May be I can't understand what your problem is. You can either bake a timeline animation to an aniblock or bake an aniblock sequence to the timeline, as is shown in the video I linked. If you want to use aniblocks then you have to first bake your animation to an aniblock. To add an aniblock into a sequence you simply drag and drop if this is your question.

mavante

Padone said:

May be I can't understand what your problem is. You can either bake a timeline animation to an aniblock or bake an aniblock sequence to the timeline, as is shown in the video I linked.

Yes, you are correct: you did not understand it. The entire point is you cannot "bake an aniblock sequence to the [DAZ Studio] timeline" (from the AniTimeline) if you already have non-aniblock animation in the DAZ timeline that you do not want erased and do not want converted to an aniblock. The reason that is impossible is because the instant you add an aniblock to the AniTIMELINE in AniMate2, it instantly destroys all the work you have done so far, animating frame-by-frame or pose-to-pose in the DAZ Studio timeline.

Neither the video you linked to (which I already had seen several times, along with all the other videos in that series), nor any other video anywhere I can find, makes that expressly and unequivocally clear. That, alone, is a gross oversight.

I've made it expressly and unequivocally clear here, and I hope it will help others avoid the frustration and broken files I have experienced.

 

Gusf1

    Is it possible to bake the Aniblock you want to use to keyframes in a scene WITHOUT your 230 frame animation and copy that to the scene WITH your animation? 

                           Gus

mavante

Gusf1 said:

    Is it possible to bake the Aniblock you want to use to keyframes in a scene WITHOUT your 230 frame animation and copy that to the scene WITH your animation? 

                           Gus

Hi Gus. Thanks for the suggestion. That's exactly the tack I have taken—except I don't think I would know how to, or would want to try, "copying to" the long animation scene.

Here (in necessarily broad strokes) are the steps I've taken to work around this:

• Saved the pose of the "heroine" at the last moment (in the original long animation) before she is supposed to start her walk.
• Created an entirely new scene, making it a little over 100 frames long.
• Brought the "heroine" of the piece into that new scene, matching her location to where she is supposed to start walking from in the long scene.
• Aniblocked her walk cycle as I wanted.
• Baked that aniblocked walk cycle to the Daz timeline.
• Deleted all the frames after her left foot hits the "floor" after a few steps.
• Moved to a later place in the timeline and applied a pose that is weighted on that left foot.
• Moved all those keyframes down a bit toward the and of the timeline.
• Went to frame 0, and applied the saved pose to the heroine; saved the scene

If I wrote all the little tweaks and nudges I had to do during the above (such as the aniblock mysteriously making the girl walk above the floor, and the "foot adjust" tool in AniMate2 not doing anything at all at any setting)—well, none of us have time in our lives for that.

So now I'm taking the original long scene and doing the following (based on advice in these forums from a user named barbult seven years ago):

• Save file with new name.
• Go to frame just before she's to start her walk, where she is in the pose cited above as "the saved pose."
• At that frame, select everything in the scene—including cameras and lights, the whole shebang—and select from the Edit menu: Object>Memorize>Memorize Selected Object(s).
• Set the total frame length to 1 (which erases all the animation for everything).
• At frame 0, select everything in the scene again, then select from the Edit menu: Object>Restore>Restore Selected Object(s).
• Delete the "heroine" from the scene.
• File>Merge the earlier saved animation of the girl and her pose-walk-pose sequence into this new scene that has all the original geometry, architecture, furniture, lights, cameras, etc.; Save.

Then it's going to be a "fix it in post" matter, using several different cameras in this new animation to capture her walk and ending pose, then using creative crossfades or cuts in FCPX to make it look like one seamless batch of activity.

I think I have a headache now. Anyone who read this and doesn't have one may not have been paying attention.

Padone

mavante said:

The entire point is you cannot "bake an aniblock sequence to the [DAZ Studio] timeline" (from the AniTimeline) if you already have non-aniblock animation in the DAZ timeline that you do not want erased and do not want converted to an aniblock.

Because this is not how it is supposed to be used. However you can bake your animation to an aniblock, then create the aniblock sequence you need, then bake back the sequence to the timeline. But in general you use the timeline to create aniblocks then work with aniblocks to create the final animation. Again I do not use daz studio for animation, but this is the same in any animation package.

 

Steel Rat

I have much more basic frustrations with animation, specifically deally with IK and pins.

I pin both feet, they're supposed to pretty much stay where they are, then I move the hip X or Z trans, just a little, one of both feet decide "We don't need no steenkeen pins!" and go whereever I didn't tell them to. I can't even get a very basic animation going because of it.