Let's talk about Daz's animation feature

windli3356

I believe not many Daz folks use the animation feature(AniMate/Timeline) that's why the animation feature of Daz is always overlooked.   

Like many indie guys, I'd like to keep my tool pipeline as less as straight forward as possible, so far I found DAZ to be the best one, because export character with tons of morphs to blender/IClone etc always cause issues here and there. But one thing I really love to do with DAZ one day is able to animate,

So far the default animation tool set is not cleaning, not well organized, too slow, too buggy and lack of some major features to make DAZ a true all in one tool with animation production tool like IClone.   

1. Can't delete a key as whole from time line no matter what, I do know there's a "delete key" feature but it only deletes partial keys, can't delete a whole key frame from a frame, so this feature doesn't work well.   

2. save is not animation friendly, a scene is always saved from frame 0 and more often than not, won't save a hard animated scene properly.   And then, you can't edit out a certain animation block and save them. 

3. Can't animate a figure properly once you rotated his hip, and that's just one figure, a large scene with 5-6 people on screen is impossible to complete.  

Now, the only decent animations I saw made from daz were the ones from those motion captured sold bundles, or with premade blocks, almost never any good ones from custom made.

Please take animation feature into your consideration Daz.  I love it and sincerely wish it to be better. 

 

Edit: imaging the market place potential once you got the animation feature right 

FSMCDesigns

personally I'd love to see those into animations going to Daz Studio instead of away from it. Unfortunately from what I see, that is one of the main reasons for the new bridges, so users can get models out of DS and into other apps to animate then.

Gordig

FSMCDesigns said:

personally I'd love to see those into animations going to Daz Studio instead of away from it. Unfortunately from what I see, that is one of the main reasons for the new bridges, so users can get models out of DS and into other apps to animate then.

And yet, surprisingly, there's no bridge to Motionbuilder, which is useful for those wanting to animate within DS.

Ivy

windli3356 said:

I believe not many Daz folks use the animation feature(AniMate/Timeline) that's why the animation feature of Daz is always overlooked.   

Like many indie guys, I'd like to keep my tool pipeline as less as straight forward as possible, so far I found DAZ to be the best one, because export character with tons of morphs to blender/IClone etc always cause issues here and there. But one thing I really love to do with DAZ one day is able to animate,

So far the default animation tool set is not cleaning, not well organized, too slow, too buggy and lack of some major features to make DAZ a true all in one tool with animation production tool like IClone.   

1. Can't delete a key as whole from time line no matter what, I do know there's a "delete key" feature but it only deletes partial keys, can't delete a whole key frame from a frame, so this feature doesn't work well.   

2. save is not animation friendly, a scene is always saved from frame 0 and more often than not, won't save a hard animated scene properly.   And then, you can't edit out a certain animation block and save them. 

3. Can't animate a figure properly once you rotated his hip, and that's just one figure, a large scene with 5-6 people on screen is impossible to complete.  

Now, the only decent animations I saw made from daz were the ones from those motion captured sold bundles, or with premade blocks, almost never any good ones from custom made.

Please take animation feature into your consideration Daz.  I love it and sincerely wish it to be better. 

 

Edit: imaging the market place potential once you got the animation feature right 

It takes a lot of patients to work with daz studio in animation.  But thats true for any animation tool.   Plus a lot of great animations are also done with team of people no matter the software.

you might visit this thread https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/358051/the-animators-assemble-thread-for-daz-animation-wips-clips-and-tips/p1   

Animations in daz studio requires a lot of work around's, because daz studio is not a complete suite of animations tools like Autodesk or unity or even iclone. so most of the work around in a daz studio animation  are still very old school tricks from the 2d drawing animation era. if you can create animations like that, then you will find  daz is great animation asset..  daz is just a art tool to get you images for the animation in the form of keyframes that are rendered one at a time in a series of png's..   the film editor is really where the magic happens & your skills as a film artist of course. :)

 I have more than a few animations completely done with daz studio https://www.youtube.com/c/IvySummers. some of them are pretty entertaining. some not so much.  but never the less depending on the type of animation you're looking to create maybe the limiting factor for you using daz studio... you may not be able to create a Disney type quality animation with daz studio . But you can make better quality than a south park or Saturday morning cartoon type animation with daz studio. So it really depends on your needs or requirements & the expectations of the final results whether if daz studio is the proper tool to use for your animated project or not .  

edited for spelling I am very dyslexic sorry

TheMysteryIsThePoint

Gordig said:

FSMCDesigns said:

personally I'd love to see those into animations going to Daz Studio instead of away from it. Unfortunately from what I see, that is one of the main reasons for the new bridges, so users can get models out of DS and into other apps to animate then.

And yet, surprisingly, there's no bridge to Motionbuilder, which is useful for those wanting to animate within DS.

I've found that FBX works well to export to MoBu. And MoBu groks the G8 armature wierdness and so you can import good BVH back to DS.

wolf359

REDACTED DUE TO SOFT BAN

Richard Haseltine

windli3356 said:

I believe not many Daz folks use the animation feature(AniMate/Timeline) that's why the animation feature of Daz is always overlooked.   

Like many indie guys, I'd like to keep my tool pipeline as less as straight forward as possible, so far I found DAZ to be the best one, because export character with tons of morphs to blender/IClone etc always cause issues here and there. But one thing I really love to do with DAZ one day is able to animate,

So far the default animation tool set is not cleaning, not well organized, too slow, too buggy and lack of some major features to make DAZ a true all in one tool with animation production tool like IClone.   

1. Can't delete a key as whole from time line no matter what, I do know there's a "delete key" feature but it only deletes partial keys, can't delete a whole key frame from a frame, so this feature doesn't work well.   

What do you mean here? keys belong to properties and can be deleted. If you mean you want to delete the keys for every property on a bone in one go then you can multi-select the keys.

windli3356 said:

2. save is not animation friendly, a scene is always saved from frame 0 and more often than not, won't save a hard animated scene properly.   And then, you can't edit out a certain animation block and save them. 

If not saving the data properly refers to the way it is currently dropping some keys, there is a workaround (save a preset) and the change log does show the bug as fixed in the latest build (which is not yet released).

windli3356 said:

3. Can't animate a figure properly once you rotated his hip, and that's just one figure, a large scene with 5-6 people on screen is impossible to complete.  

Now, the only decent animations I saw made from daz were the ones from those motion captured sold bundles, or with premade blocks, almost never any good ones from custom made.

Please take animation feature into your consideration Daz.  I love it and sincerely wish it to be better. 

 

Edit: imaging the market place potential once you got the animation feature right 

 

windli3356

Ivy said:

windli3356 said:

I believe not many Daz folks use the animation feature(AniMate/Timeline) that's why the animation feature of Daz is always overlooked.   

Like many indie guys, I'd like to keep my tool pipeline as less as straight forward as possible, so far I found DAZ to be the best one, because export character with tons of morphs to blender/IClone etc always cause issues here and there. But one thing I really love to do with DAZ one day is able to animate,

So far the default animation tool set is not cleaning, not well organized, too slow, too buggy and lack of some major features to make DAZ a true all in one tool with animation production tool like IClone.   

1. Can't delete a key as whole from time line no matter what, I do know there's a "delete key" feature but it only deletes partial keys, can't delete a whole key frame from a frame, so this feature doesn't work well.   

2. save is not animation friendly, a scene is always saved from frame 0 and more often than not, won't save a hard animated scene properly.   And then, you can't edit out a certain animation block and save them. 

3. Can't animate a figure properly once you rotated his hip, and that's just one figure, a large scene with 5-6 people on screen is impossible to complete.  

Now, the only decent animations I saw made from daz were the ones from those motion captured sold bundles, or with premade blocks, almost never any good ones from custom made.

Please take animation feature into your consideration Daz.  I love it and sincerely wish it to be better. 

 

Edit: imaging the market place potential once you got the animation feature right 

It takes a lot of patients to work with daz studio in animation.  But thats true for any animation tool.   Plus a lot of great animations are also done with team of people no matter the software.

you might visit this thread https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/358051/the-animators-assemble-thread-for-daz-animation-wips-clips-and-tips/p1   

Animations in daz studio requires a lot of work around's, because daz studio is not a complete suite of animations tools like Autodesk or unity or even iclone. so most of the work around in a daz studio animation  are still very old school tricks from the 2d drawing animation era. if you can create animations like that, then you will find  daz is great animation asset..  daz is just a art tool to get you images for the animation in the form of keyframes that are rendered one at a time in a series of png's..   the film editor is really where the magic happens & your skills as a film artist of course. :)

 I have more than a few animations completely done with daz studio https://www.youtube.com/c/IvySummers. some of them are pretty entertaining. some not so much.  but never the less depending on the type of animation you're looking to create maybe the limiting factor for you using daz studio... you may not be able to create a Disney type quality animation with daz studio . But you can make better quality than a south park or Saturday morning cartoon type animation with daz studio. So it really depends on your needs or requirements & the expectations of the final results whether if daz studio is the proper tool to use for your animated project or not .  

edited for spelling I am very dyslexic sorry

Hi~ thanks for your input, be advised that this is actually a product/feature suggestion thread rather than a complaint thread :D   Daz is already so rich in all other features and I just hope they would put some effort on their animation pipeline in the next update so I(and many many animation lovers) it can finally became the "end all" 3D app so I wouldn't need to swap between blenders/iclone/octane etc.  

While most of what you said is true, yes, I do know Daz is designed for art render and prebuilt asset library.  But their animation tool is quite interesting and already embedded some robust features, it's just the other half needs the right push so DAZ users can unitize these feature fully, it would be a shame to see all these well developed feature gone to waste if they don't evloves based on what they have 

 I just started using Daz in July, so I'm not entirely sure how animation workflow was before, but I did noticed Daz had some big push to their animation pipeline by buying out their 3rd party vendors' plug in(keymate, aniMate, and graphickey) and integrated them into Daz by the time I installed it.  However even with those awesome feature Embedded, Daz still lack some essential building block features to animate efficiently. As much as I like the animated stuff in your youtube channel, most of them still suffer from the things bothers me 1. floor binding issues 2. figure position issue when any aniblocks applied 3. video render is waaayy to slow.  etc.   Technically you can have work around on problem 1 & 2, but it'd be too time consuming and too inefficient to animator’s workflow, that's why I bring this up in hope to see a good push on their animation tools in the next update :D 

windli3356

wolf359 said:

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

Gordig said:

FSMCDesigns said:

personally I'd love to see those into animations going to Daz Studio instead of away from it. Unfortunately from what I see, that is one of the main reasons for the new bridges, so users can get models out of DS and into other apps to animate then.

And yet, surprisingly, there's no bridge to Motionbuilder, which is useful for those wanting to animate within DS.

I've found that FBX works well to export to MoBu. And MoBu groks the G8 armature wierdness and so you can import good BVH back to DS.

 

Indeed, as Does Iclone 3DXchange and without any bloatware "bridges" from Daz .

Also I recently Discovered a simple mistake I was making when exporting a straight FBX animated export of the G3/8 figures to Blender that caused me to incorrectly report that G3/8 FBX export was "broken" ..it is not.

However the OP of this thread is NOT asking about exporting Daz figures to other applications ,Including Carrara, so lets respect the OP's stated intention.

If we are going to have an honest,Adult discussion about the NATIVE animation options of Daz studio lets start with the fundamentals.

Human IK Foot/Floor contact solving:( yeah.. there I go again), The new "IK/ manual reach effector/pinning" system that appeared in Daz 4.12 is a radical departure from anything that the character animation industry would Charitably call an "IK system for biped characters" and IMHO fails in that reasonably expected purpose.

ALL of the native tools functioning fully with your current generation of Character rigs

Bondware just published a feature list for the upcoming Poser 12 and they are removing the vestigial poser "Face Room" And the path creator /"walk designer".

those features did not function with their defacto Flagship figures "Lefemme & Lehomme"

The DAZ animate2 system is a decent Non linear motion dev system ,it is better than C4D's nonlinear motion clip editor and much better than Blenders NLA system!!. very nearly on par with Iclone's Powerful motion clip system.

Alas it is a third party Addon by a company that apparently no longer exists, and does dont fully support G8 with body part filtering when creating custom motion clips

Native Lipsynch/facial animation tools..NOT expensive third party systems restricted to the Apple hardware eco-system or Discontinued and/or 32 bit options or 64 bit options that do not natively support using pre recorded audio see my video review of the NATIVE Lipsynch tools here and ask yourself why you do not see alot of spoken Dialogue in the videos from the few Daz studio animators who are actually active.

Rendering options and viewport performance:

We are in the age of Realtime/near Realtime rendered viewport display Sorry but that is the reality and setteling for openGL and waiting to see full on "test renders" is a thing of the past.

With an Old 3Dlight and Brute force pathtracer tied to ONE graphics hardware manufacturer as your only options Daz studio becomes even less attractive to many aspiring animators

In summary the NATIVE tool set is not complete compared to the other external options already mentioned, and to many who's focus is animation, the compromises,manual workarounds, needed are enough to just send them looking elsewhere.

Completely agree! Thank you for bringing up IK/PS issues, one I forgot to mention.  It's quite interesting that DAZ actually has some robust animation features but still lack some essential building blocks, For example, DAZ's animation system is heavily on pre-built aniblocks and edit the keyframes from timeline, but unlike other tools, character's position from aniBlocks is always a problem, floor binding always require manual work to correct, and hip rotation breaks everything, etc etc, all these require tons of manual labor. I truly believe the heavy reliance on DAZ's native figure posing workflow is the cause of all animation problems.   Again this is not complaining about DAZ's posing tool which I find to be awesome and it is what DAZ is known for.  

So my suggestion to DAZ's animation system, in order for it to become an "end all" ulimiate 3D tool.  

1. I'd like to see DAZ build another sub module outside of DAZ studio that is dedicated to animation only, like they did to Hexagon,  so essentially imaging CC3 = DAZ studio and iClone = Daz animation. 

2. Add another save file extension that can properly saves all animation data.  

3. Add another "save pose for animation" that doesn't touch character's standing position. 

Ivy

windli3356 said:

Ivy said:

windli3356 said:

I believe not many Daz folks use the animation feature(AniMate/Timeline) that's why the animation feature of Daz is always overlooked.   

Like many indie guys, I'd like to keep my tool pipeline as less as straight forward as possible, so far I found DAZ to be the best one, because export character with tons of morphs to blender/IClone etc always cause issues here and there. But one thing I really love to do with DAZ one day is able to animate,

So far the default animation tool set is not cleaning, not well organized, too slow, too buggy and lack of some major features to make DAZ a true all in one tool with animation production tool like IClone.   

1. Can't delete a key as whole from time line no matter what, I do know there's a "delete key" feature but it only deletes partial keys, can't delete a whole key frame from a frame, so this feature doesn't work well.   

2. save is not animation friendly, a scene is always saved from frame 0 and more often than not, won't save a hard animated scene properly.   And then, you can't edit out a certain animation block and save them. 

3. Can't animate a figure properly once you rotated his hip, and that's just one figure, a large scene with 5-6 people on screen is impossible to complete.  

Now, the only decent animations I saw made from daz were the ones from those motion captured sold bundles, or with premade blocks, almost never any good ones from custom made.

Please take animation feature into your consideration Daz.  I love it and sincerely wish it to be better. 

 

Edit: imaging the market place potential once you got the animation feature right 

It takes a lot of patients to work with daz studio in animation.  But thats true for any animation tool.   Plus a lot of great animations are also done with team of people no matter the software.

you might visit this thread https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/358051/the-animators-assemble-thread-for-daz-animation-wips-clips-and-tips/p1   

Animations in daz studio requires a lot of work around's, because daz studio is not a complete suite of animations tools like Autodesk or unity or even iclone. so most of the work around in a daz studio animation  are still very old school tricks from the 2d drawing animation era. if you can create animations like that, then you will find  daz is great animation asset..  daz is just a art tool to get you images for the animation in the form of keyframes that are rendered one at a time in a series of png's..   the film editor is really where the magic happens & your skills as a film artist of course. :)

 I have more than a few animations completely done with daz studio https://www.youtube.com/c/IvySummers. some of them are pretty entertaining. some not so much.  but never the less depending on the type of animation you're looking to create maybe the limiting factor for you using daz studio... you may not be able to create a Disney type quality animation with daz studio . But you can make better quality than a south park or Saturday morning cartoon type animation with daz studio. So it really depends on your needs or requirements & the expectations of the final results whether if daz studio is the proper tool to use for your animated project or not .  

edited for spelling I am very dyslexic sorry

Hi~ thanks for your input, be advised that this is actually a product/feature suggestion thread rather than a complaint thread :D   Daz is already so rich in all other features and I just hope they would put some effort on their animation pipeline in the next update so I(and many many animation lovers) it can finally became the "end all" 3D app so I wouldn't need to swap between blenders/iclone/octane etc.  

While most of what you said is true, yes, I do know Daz is designed for art render and prebuilt asset library.  But their animation tool is quite interesting and already embedded some robust features, it's just the other half needs the right push so DAZ users can unitize these feature fully, it would be a shame to see all these well developed feature gone to waste if they don't evloves based on what they have 

 I just started using Daz in July, so I'm not entirely sure how animation workflow was before, but I did noticed Daz had some big push to their animation pipeline by buying out their 3rd party vendors' plug in(keymate, aniMate, and graphickey) and integrated them into Daz by the time I installed it.  However even with those awesome feature Embedded, Daz still lack some essential building block features to animate efficiently. As much as I like the animated stuff in your youtube channel, most of them still suffer from the things bothers me 1. floor binding issues 2. figure position issue when any aniblocks applied 3. video render is waaayy to slow.  etc.   Technically you can have work around on problem 1 & 2, but it'd be too time consuming and too inefficient to animator’s workflow, that's why I bring this up in hope to see a good push on their animation tools in the next update :D 

I believe you missed my point and that is okay.  I started with daz studio for animation in 2010. I have made hundreds of animations using just daz studio. even commissioned films which did not include using other 3d software in my work flow.  I also have a introduction corse to creating animation with daz studio available in the daz  store https://www.daz3d.com/daz-studio--getting-started-with-animation

 I can't & do not speak for other animators or artists, we all have our own way of doing things. So i speak from my own experiences using just daz studio to create my animations with. & not blender or iclone or a combination of them together with daz studio.

So with my experiences with all the years I have been working with daz studio & working with all the tool you have mentioned you have been using like aniblocks, the animate2 plugin the mimic plugin , animated texture plugins also  volumetric & water simulation plugins, animated poses & FX scripts have all been 3rd party tools offered as 3rd party products and not actually offered by daz3d.com or as part of the daz studio software.  without the 3rd party additions daz studio would not have any animations compatibilities

Unlike blender, Iclone or Unity or the unreal game engine & even poser pro which will offer all these plugins as part of the software tool set.  But with daz studio right up until this year with the new implement of the new daz native timeline improvements & the ik-chain  there was not much in the way of animation tool  for daz studio software it self.  Everything was all offered as 3rd party add-ons.   Everything animation in daz studio has relied on 3rd party  additions to the studio software to make animation work.  that was my point.  with out the 3rd party support you would sill have to make animation using daz studio the old fashion way 1 frame at a time.  in a sires of PNG's images put together in a film editor. and not expect a final out put of a mp4 ready to use video. The best daz studio can offer is AVI output and that will crash the studio software 99% of the time. 

So if you want to truly to make animations with daz studio It will be best doing it old school and to try to find work arounds for problems that arise & not expect to have great fx or soft body physics or even a hard surface pinning solutions unless you or someone else developed them & offer them as a 3rd party plugin  Daz studio has been that way ever since i started with it & I do not expect that to change anytime soon. .  so you are better off doing as I have mentioned in my first comment. that was my point.

edited for spelling I am very dyslexic sorry

Kevin Sanderson

Daz bought Hexagon and Carrara from those developers, windi. They incorporated Hexagon into Daz Studio with a bridge. Animation is better in Carrara, but they have pretty much stopped work on it. I'm glad they are still improving Daz Studio for animation. I just hope they can get the fixes they've made in a beta rolled out soon.

WendyLuvsCatz

as a user of other software I have to say DAZ studio timeline needs more work.

A lot has been done in it the past year but even Poser still has a more robust advanced timeline you can edit keyframes in albeit tiny twiddly blocks.

This is not to say skilled people like Ivy cannot work with it's limitations and create awesome stuff, people can create awesome stuff with the most basic of tools if they have the skill and determination.

But it is not because the software is good rather the user,

I agree with the OP it needs work.

Lots of work so everyone can easily use it not just the very talented.

Kevin Sanderson

Bennie is the exception among the new users. I'm not sure many animators venture here. Wish I could get excited about Blender, but it has too many frequent changes in the the past. iClone is interesting but when you watch the independent videos and read the forums, the problems surface. Cost then becomes an issue and cost is still an issue for Maya, though not as bad with Indie, but for how long.

Diaspora

I gotta ask, I'm still using 4.12.0.86 , I rollbacked when a couple versions ago DAZ Studio had a severe bug that made it fail to save keyframes...

Does the newest version of DAZ Studio still have keyMate and graphMate? I welcome the timeline being improved and what not but I find those two bits of UI very useful and don't want to give them up.

Kevin Sanderson

They're in the Advanced view of the time line. They were rolled into Daz Studio. You should have them.

 

Robinson

In summary the NATIVE tool set is not complete compared to the other external options already mentioned, and to many who's focus is animation, the compromises,manual workarounds, needed are enough to just send them looking elsewhere

That reminds me, I was going to force myself to spend hours and hours and hours in Maya working with animation (it's simply a question of time to get the hang of things isn't it).  By the way, an extremely annoying aspect of the Daz keyframe system is quite often if you've got an angle at 180 and your make a change somewhere else along the timeline, it'll flip it to -180, which is of course the same angle but it gets interpolated across.  So changing one key often results in having to change other keys so that doesn't happen.  There should be a way of telling Daz that no, when you said 180 you meant 180 (I think it's the "if" keyword in C++) because you didn't change that from the previous keyframe.

 

Anyway I digress.  Probably hundreds of thousands of man-hours have gone into the Maya (for example) animation system.  No doubt it's 18 months work for a single dev to get a fast, robust and accurate IK implementation up and running.  Building on the work of others if you can cuts this time down considerably I'm sure.  But for a business it's all down to opportunity cost isn't it.  Does the Daz store benefit from this?  I don't see it has much competition in that respect.  Animation is nice to have but unfortunately if you want to get into it you really have to learn a new package, or learn how to work around Daz's idiosyncratic implementation.

 

By the way, I do quite like Puppeteer.  It's extremely useful.  Improving that would be great and probably low cost.   Also the bone tool is pretty good too.  That's kind-of OK, only it's not very accurate, with "pinned" items moving around.  Even including some mCasual tools natively on the animation timeline would be good so I don't have to use the scripts e.g. Autolimb and Keep-Orient style "pins".  Another thing that's nice is the symmetry dialog, so you can mirror and/or copy one side of the pose to the other.  You need to get into scripting to do this in other packages.

 

 

wolf359

REDACTED DUE TO SOFT BAN

Ivy

i prefer the 32 bite version of lipsynch but i have a old version of mimic pro still.and will re edit lip movements 90% of the time anyway for dramatic effects and facial expressions 

  The only features really love in poser pro 11.3  is the ability to add .MOV .mp4. or  avi  film clips as back grounds making use of blended 3d cartoon characters into the movie back ground image &  the only 1 feature of poser i wish daz studio had.

But with poser pro 11.3  you can use poser as a film editor, or image editor  , the foot & ik pinning options for hard surface contact solutions is okay but need improvements with the IK on the ik pinning. the poser timeline is rough, the layers options really is hard to use or understand when you have more than 2 characters. when switching from texture room to light room etc   much worst than daz studio or animate2 and maybe one of the reason i animate with daz studio instead of poser. the good thing about  poser it will use bvh files and miixamo files as easy as blender will & poser has native soft body physics & idl fx light sources. so I can use poser pro for converting motion files over to PZ3 files to use in daz studio.

The super & firefly render options are as slow if not slower than iray IMO & do not look as good in final renders. the real time preview is not as good as iray either.  but poser can use the Boris fx natively and works with Adobe AF bridges flawlessly . pros and cons of each software depends on what your needs are. 

I have always admire  your ability to use a mix of multiple software apps in your work flow wolf.   I have have many 3d software options to work with.  but i keep finding myself only animating in daz studio perhaps because i have become so comfortable in the use of studio that is my comfort zone now.,.   though i have zbrush 2020 & have been concentrating on learning zbrush for the last couple of months. So what ever i make with zbrush i am sure will be to use in daz studio in one of my projects. 

Robinson

Ivy said:

I have always admire  your ability to use a mix of multiple software apps in your work flow wolf.   I have have many 3d software options to work with.  but i keep finding myself only animating in daz studio perhaps because i have become so comfortable in the use of studio that is my comfort zone now.,.   though i have zbrush 2020 & have been concentrating on learning zbrush for the last couple of months. So what ever i make with zbrush i am sure will be to use in daz studio in one of my projects. 

I mean this is the thing isn't it.  You sit down to do something, maybe you have an idea in mind.  You can either do it in Daz, with which you're familiar, or you can immerse yourself in another piece of software with which you're not.  It takes real dedication and time to learn, as it has for me to get the hang over Daz over the years.  When I first started with it I found it kind-of baffling but one thing did impress me and that was the ray tracing, which I'd never seen before on my desktop.  So I stuck with it.  It's way harder to get to that state with a character in any other piece of software I've used.  I mean playing with it for under an hour for the first time and I had a ray traced figure, and could pose it.  So that's +1 for Daz. 

 

When it comes to taking Daz content elsewhere, that's where I had to write actual code.  I have a script to export FBX with the settings I use (Daz script) and then a 1,500 line long Maya script to prepare the character the way I want it, i.e. increasing the mesh resolution, removing things I don't need, fixing up names and so on.   There's still manual intervention needed though, as you need to do extra weight painting to fix certain issues, especially inside the mouth.  And that's my main gripe with Daz really.  The base mesh is too low resolution.  I'd like Genesis 9 to provide more polys to work with so I don't have to write scripts in Maya to send content out into other packages like Unreal.

 

Robinson

Rip.  Double-posted.

benniewoodell

I found what I like about Daz's animation is the power pose tool, that just makes my life soooooo much easier, but I love working with Blender for using Eevee for backgrounds with my animation. So what I'm doing for the project I'm working on now is I'm doing all the character work in Daz, exporting it with an alpha channel, doing the backgrounds in Blender and then comping them together. I would do the backgrounds in Daz but if I have any camera movement, it just takes forever to render 300 frames, but I can't get characters to look how I want outside of Daz so I figured I'll just treat it as if I'm shooting a film on a green screen. 

WendyLuvsCatz

the Poser timeline itself albeit tiny and difficult with it's little squares is far more accurate to expand and add, copy, paste, delete keyframes

D|S timeline does very weird stuff if you do that such as the 360 spins and tweening from nonexistent keyframes

for example I can take any point on the Poser timeline create a snapshot keyframe on everything and copy and paste it to the beginning and remove all animation afterwards creating a new start

doing that in D|S is challenging

Carrara I have even more options such as making everything an animation group, saving a pose or clip and completely clearing the timeline giving me a static snapshot/s wherever I please to use as a beginning

and remove all animation in iClone anywhere along the timeline does that too

these are the sort of things I would love added to D|S

and tracking, animation paths, animated textures integrated with a surfaces interface

wolf359

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wolf359

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benniewoodell

wolf359 said:

@benniewoodell

You may Already know that Diffeo ,as good as it is, Does not support export of morph based facial animation to Blender and its animated body pose import is very hit or miss(being charitable) and the official Daz "bridge" does not export animation either AFAIK thus you see very few Daz to Blender animations posted over in the new Blender forum.

If ,for whatever personal reasons,you dont care for animated FBX export from DS to Blender (which exports body and facial for genesis 1,2,3,8)
You may wish to investigate Blenders powerful motion tracking system which is designed to make your blender camera track the motion of animated elements/figures imported from elsewhere to match move with your Blender environment

@wolf359 Oh yeah, those are two of the three reasons why I decided to stick to animating and rendering in Daz, on top of power pose. I just picked up Facemotion 8 and it's awesome. I didn't realize I'd have to spend an extra 58 bucks for an app on my iPhone (I ended up spending 66 bucks because I tried the cheaper 8 dollar app first that does not work with it) but after the first shot of just my character looking around I saw a huge difference from what I had originally keyed, and the lip syncing is obviously quicker than Anilip 2 which requires a lot of tweaking. It's a shame that through Diffeo, none of the keys will transfer over to Blender for the facial animation. Padone said it worked for him back in like May when I was doing my short film, but I could never get it to work so I had to use Papagayo and it worked fine with Diffeo, but left much to be desired. If Diffeo could get the facial animation to move over correctly, I'd be a little more inclined to give it a whirl again. And every time I've tried to bring in an animation over through the pose buttons in Diffeo, the arms and legs always cross and I have to go through and reset everything and by the end I pretty much find I'm redoing the animation itself. I'd love to see more of what people are doing animation-wise in Blender, but you're absolutely right about seeing very few renders being posted there. 

And the Blender tracking system is exactly what I'm using to comp the camera movements in Daz in Blender! Look up IanHubert on Youtube if you haven't watched his videos, he has a couple of absolutely amazing motion tracking tutorials, as well as a bunch of other amazing tips like how to make buildings in like a minute using project from view in mapping, that made me realize I needed to work in this manner to get the absolute best of both worlds with Daz and Blender. I do set up a bunch of tracking marks as well to help Blender out as if I was shooting on a green screen in real life. Lots of good stuff. 

The best tip that I got this summer from watching an animator's Youtube channel, Sir Wade is his name and he mainly uses Maya but a lot of the principles apply, was to use reference video. He did a whole video on it and I so just to give it the old college try, I recorded myself doing the movement that I wanted to animate and I went through the footage and blocked out where every pose changed, I counted the frames and matched the poses precisely in Daz exactly how I acted it out and the animation looked so fluid and lifelike, that it showed me how good Daz really is. I don't know if many people use reference video, I never thought to, so I figured I'd throw that in here as well since that has really upped the quality and realism of my animation here in Daz. I did get the IK chain to work really well, but it's nowhere near as intuitive as it should be and the amount of time to set it up is a lot to go through. I do think that could still use some work. 

Diomede

wolf359 said   It was NOT an ideal situation as it showed me the value of doing as much as reasonably possible within ONE software/figure generation/eco-system or at the most two.

 

** This is why Carrara users had been so loyal despite Daz3D lack of continued development.  But now OS updates....

.

NOTE - Daz3D has stated in customer support tickets that they are not continuing support of Carrara at this time.

- Tutorials for animating in Carrara - https://www.daz3d.com/animation-in-carrara-video-tutorials

- Community devoted to animating in Carrara - http://www.bond3d.byethost18.com/?i=1

2015 Oscar-Qualified Example - Dinner for Few

- Dinner for Few - Daz3D Carrara forum thread by Nassoos Vakalis on international award winning animation done in Carrara - https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/34802/new-short-film-dinner-for-few/p1

- Dinner for Few - the animation - https://vimeo.com/288759859

Dinner for Few Description

“Dinner For Few” is a ten minute CG-animated film depicting a sociopolitical allegory of our society. During dinner, "the system" works like a well-oiled machine. It solely feeds the select few who eventually, foolishly consume all the resources while the rest survive on scraps from the table. Inevitably, when the supply is depleted, the struggle for what remains leads to catastrophic change. Sadly, the offspring of this profound transition turn out not to be a sign of hope, but the spitting image of the parents.

EMMY award winning animation artist Nassos Vakalis directed and wrote the film and the animation was produced in the United States of America and Greece with the technical and artistic collaboration of Eva Vomhoff from Germany. “Dinner For Few” is produced and funded by Nassos Vakalis and his wife Katerina Stergiopoulou. The original music is composed by Kostas Christides and performed by the Bratislava Symphonic Orchestra.
“Dinner For Few” was inspired by the economic recession affecting South European countries like Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal. Nassos Vakalis grew up in Greece, where his family and most of his friends still live. “Dinner For Few” not only reflects his deep concern of the social and economic developments during the crisis but also highlights the inevitable and cyclical nature of the human affairs throughout history.
Through its festival run “Dinner for few” screened at over 250 international film festivals and won 78 awards. It was one of the 60 Animated Shorts that Qualified for the Academy Awards in 2015.

wolf359

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benniewoodell

wolf359 said:

@benniewoodell

Good to see you are using the powerful motion tracker in your pipeline.

Diffeo is good for reliable transfer of sets& props from Daz studio but yeah,.. it is not really useful for DAZ genesis Character animators.

I demand Facial animation & lipsync because I work with Dialogue driven sci-fi narratives and any character animation system that does not include at least a decent Audio based lipsync tool with phoneme editing is a non starter.

We have the optional Iphone based "Live face" plugin for facial performance capture Iclone but I am in the Android eco-system and wont be buying an Iphone just for one program feature.

Thankfully the CC3 Blender export preset sends over my iclone lipsync and face puppet animation as vertex animated Blend shapes to Blender so when it is time for a new animation/dialogue I can just copy the face keys from a new FBX import and paste/overwrite on to the current actor in the Blender Dope sheet.

@wolf359 yeah I hear ya. I just had to get a new phone a few weeks ago because my Google Pixel stopped ringing and the speaker phone wouldn't work. I was going to get a different android until the guy told me an iPhone 11 was going to be five bucks less a month than what I was looking at, I had just seen the youtube video about facemotion 8 and was like well, I'm here, it's actually cheaper and I can use it for animation, I'll switch. Otherwise if it wasn't going to be cheaper monthly, I wouldn't have switched to another apple product. 

I'm glad to hear though that the CC3 Blender export sendds over the keys so you can copy everything to use in Blender! Your stuff looks great, excited to see more! 

Kevin Sanderson

Bennie the old rotoscoping idea is still great and I hope to watch Sir wade's video when I get some time. Time has always been a problem and now my health issues for the past year. But I soldier on! Always thought I could use another form of it with motion cap files. Glad it's working for others in Daz Studio which has been problematic with some file types. Get rid of of all the BS and use what you need.

benniewoodell

Kevin Sanderson said:

Bennie the old rotoscoping idea is still great and I hope to watch Sir wade's video when I get some time. Time has always been a problem and now my health issues for the past year. But I soldier on! Always thought I could use another form of it with motion cap files. Glad it's working for others in Daz Studio which has been problematic with some file types. Get rid of of all the BS and use what you need.

Kevin, it's so true. I've been making films now for almost 20 years and if there's one thing I've learned is use what works best for you and what you're trying to accomplish and not veer off the path for something that works for other folks that you think you need. I had to catch myself earlier this year when I started falling prey to the thought of if I'm going to animate, I need to move to Blender or Maya, when in the end, for character animation, Daz is way more intuitive for me so why not use it. Sure, I'm using Blender now for environments and VFX stuff, but I do like the look of Eevee for those aspects, so it works out in the end. 

If you go on Youtube and search for Free Mixamo to Daz trial from Free Nomon, he has a sample of his new program for Daz that allows you to use Mixamo files, up to I think 150 frames, in daz studio. It works beautifully. I'm also next going to try and make a mocap system work with the Xbox Kinnect. There's another guy on Youtube that I follow religiously, Royal Skies LLC, and he just showed how to bring the kinnect data in to make an FBX. It's like 30 bucks for a used kinnect, so if it doesn't work, eh whatever, but if I can get the data into Daz, oooohhhhhh boy will that be a game changer! If I can get it to work, I will definitely let you know! 

And yeah, there's so many good videos from Sir Wade that give tips that are not just Maya specific but just in general for animation. I hope you find his channel as enriching as I do if you get the time to check it out. And you're right, when life throws us a curveball, all we can do is soldier on! I tell you what, my whole world got turned upside down last month and this is the one thing that has helped keep me grounded and sane. I hope to see some of your stuff soon! 

Kevin Sanderson

I hope you do as well. Thanks for the tips and encouragement! I'm still alive and hopeful with the limitations. Some of the docs thought computer animation was a good thing for my mind.