Animation Question
glennblackphotos
Posts: 160
I am just starting my animating journey with Daz Studio and I am wondering what makes a frame.
For example if I have a camera movement and a character blinking thir eyes in the scence is al that movement one frame or separate frames for both elements?
thanks.
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Comments
I think you mean a keyframe - a frame is just one step of the animation. If any property has a value explicitly set in a frame (that is, at a certain time) then that frame is a keyframe for that property; that is distinct from frames in which the value is not set explicitly but is interpolated from the previous and/or following keyframes for that property according to their settings.
If you want to do an eye blink, for example, on your first frame you set a keyframe for the eyelids by clicking highlighting the eyelid in the parameters tab and clicking the little plus on the bottom of the timeline, move two or three frames and close the eyelids which will automatically set a keyframe. Then go two or three more frames and open them again and you got yourself an animated blink!
excellent thank you, naturally I am watching youtube videos but wondering if using Daz to animate is the way to go.
!! Mod Edit !!
:- to sort out the quoteNo prob! I've been animating in Daz now for a few years and animating in Blender for a short film I did earlier this year was a heck of a lot easier with the rig there, I keep coming back to animate in Daz because I use dForce hair and clothes, which is a lot easier to work than the cloth sim, I've found, plus I use Face Motion for facial mocap and I can't get those keyframes to leave Daz so it takes me a little bit longer to get things right, but you can do it in Daz. If you don't have experience animating in anything else, you can easily get used to it whereas I think if you're used to animating in Blender or Maya you'd have a much harder time getting the rig to work how you want it.
As you seem to know both DAZ and Blender animation, what are the advantages of each? I have done a few short animations which were hand-keyed in the DAZ timeline. I have Keymate and Graphmate so I use them in preference to the same features now built-in to DAZ Studio. But it was mentioned somewhere that Blender is a true NLA system and DAZ Studio isn't. I'm not experienced to know whether that makes much difference.
Also, I've discovererd that there are some things that can be left to the video editor if it is good enough. I use DaVinci Resolve (the free version) and am finding that it can do things like add frames, loop, composite and adjust the playback speed. I really would like to get into animation more but I have been putting it off until I can buy a GPU card capable of rendering scenes fast enough. I'll probably need to learn how to composite too but I'd be interested in whether you use Eevee or Cycles in Blender to render your movies.
I have mentioned before that I found your diffeomorphic tutorial helpful but I wonder if it has moved on since then - does it still double the size when importing poses, for example.
Hey @marble! You know honestly, there's some new features in the diffeomorphic plug-in and though the basics of it would still work with my tutorial, I think there will be some differences in new features and such. I haven't played around with it since September, I downloaded the newest version of it, but I've been busy on some other things. But I would be curious at how close my tutorial still is to the current release.
And yes! I do so much in davinci and after effects. I honestly don't render any frames fully, I do everything in layers. Unless there's a prop that the person is holding onto, or being blocked by a building, or a head on a pillow, stuff like that, I always render the character by themselves, then the background by itself, and finally foreground objects by themselves and comp them all together. When a frame could take 20-30 minutes to get to completion with everything rendering together, you can get frames done anywhere from a minute and a half to five minutes each. Now with my 3090 graphics card, that minute and a half is knocked down to 15-30 seconds at times. Yeah, if you want to animate, learning how to comp things together is essential to being efficient. I do also many times find after the frames render that things are too fast, so I slow things down in post as well. Glad to hear you've noticed how helpful editing software can be! I've been making films now for almost twenty years, got my degree in it and all so a lot of these things I just naturally looked at and knew I can do this or that, or like the idea to comp all the images came about from shooting on green screens and knowing how that works.
When I do use Blender though, I've been using Cycles because none of the transfers from either diffeomorphic or D2B look good in Eevee. Diffeomorphic did look great for an anime style back in March when I first downloaded it, but then something changed for one of the updates and it never looked as good as that first version I had. The short I did, Lost Souls, was rendered in Eevee before I updated the bridge and the characters never looked like that again. But I also use quixel a lot for textures as well as stuff from Kitbash 3D and they don't look good in Eevee either really, so I've been doing everything in cycles. And even now that I'm animating character work mainly in Daz again, I still do most of my background work in Blender and comp them together because I find it easier to make the backgrounds look amazing, plus if I build something in Blender for a scene I don't have to figure out how to get it into Daz properly with scaling and all that stuff.
But as for the pros for animating in Daz or Blender, that's such a constant inner battle for me. I really want to animate in Blender because the character rigs, whether you use Rigify, MHX, the D2B rig, or autorig pro, they are all super easy to work with and make it a breeze. I can have the characters hands placed on a table, move the entire body and those hands will not move from that spot unless I move them. So there is no going frame by frame and trying to keep things lined up exactly where they need to be, the rigs do what they're supposed to. But in Daz, as I'm sure you've found out, it's incredibly difficult and time consuming to keep feet and hands in one place. So the biggest pro for Blender is the ease in which it is to animate in the first place and if I could animate all my character animation in Blender and transfer it back into Daz to render, I would in a heartbeat.
But I always fall back to working in Daz because I'm never happy with how skins look in Blender, I don't think they transfer well. Some do look amazing, but for awhile I was keeping a running list of every character I had that had skin that didn't transfer over. Or to get them to look almost like they do in iray, it takes so long to go through all the material settings and make tweaks and I could have set up an entire shot and started rendering in Daz in that time. So that is a pro for Daz is there is no tweaking, just set up your materials and you're off. The other major thing that I need to stay in Daz with is being able to do facial mocap with Face Motion. That script is amazing and was worth every penny. It has saved me so much time the past month as it also controls some chest and abdominal movement so you don't have to do much in terms of making the character look alive. Those keyframes I can't get to transfer to Blender at all because they're morphs, so I'm stuck in Daz if I want to utilize that. Plus dForce. Yes, I figured out how to do cloth sim in Blender and create my own hair and simulate that, but the amount of time it takes me to weight paint the garment and figure out still why it's not simulating correctly, because there's always something that goes wrong, I could have had both the hair and clothes simulated in dForce in Daz as I've kind of figured out how to make that work for me, and having flowing hair and clothes is something very important to me to bring my animation to life.
So I guess to answer your question more succinctly, I animate in Daz not so much because I think it's better (save for iray looking better due to the characters being made for it) but because it has some tools that make my life easier as a whole to work faster. But the second there's a way to animate in Blender and port it back into Daz to render in iray, I will be doing that every step of the way.
aniMate2 can work as an NLA in Studio letting you easily build up your characters motions using layers, so you can have more complex animations...doing different things at the same time.
I understand the improvents in Blender, but again when they make a change as in Eevee you run into one of the big negatives and bad surprises.
I still think Daz characters look the best rendered in DS with Iray. And I was looking at some renders done with wowie's old plugin in 3DL that were not bad. With the tips of other animators and the faster Nvidia cards animation is more doable. Free Nomon has figured out how to get some OK results in DS with Filament and has light sets to improve the look over on his YouTube channel. He hopes to have the plugins in the store soon. His Iray speed tips are great as well.
With the motion capture files site iClone has setup now, if you can afford it, it's possible to get more done if you can get their files into DS. But it's not an easy export option yet but with Unreal, Unity, Maya, Blender options maybe they'll add Daz.