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I would hate it if the timeline only showed what was selected. Yikes!
I must say, after getting more used to animating in Daz Studio, it starts to get easier.
The way that default TCP tweener works baffles me though.
Sometimes if I copy the entire hierarchy from one spot in time to another, with nothing in between, it contorts to rigging so vastly out of wack that DS sits n' spins forever.
I also think it's kinda clunky that, while I can select the triangle key markers, I can't do anything short of copy/paste/delete unless I drill down to the round markers - but at least it's doable.
I love the new bounding box that the devs made for Carrara 8.5. We can select a number of keys and they get surrounded by a bounding box. We can scale that box up and down to make the changes more or less - example being joint rotation: If we scale down the box, the joint will move less along that rotation. Scale it up and it will move more.
Not using the bounding box, we can hold Ctrl/Cmd to the right to make the frames take longer to complete (stretch them in time) or to the left to make them happen quicker. Alt + Drag to copy/paste them.
Here are the curve handles and bounding box in Carrara's graph editor
Having Noise tweeners is essential to be able to set two keys, and let the noise function determine any value in between throughout the timeline. Awesome for star ship console lights, flame flicker, etc.,
Oscillate gives us various options for repeating the two keys (two keys for each selected aspect) back and forth. Sawtooth works perfect for having a video repeat. 30 frame video at 30fps would have two oscillations to complete 3 seconds at 30fps. The first run, and then two more oscillations. Bounce uses a curve to determine how smoothly the animation goes from A to B, with B being at the climax that sends it back down to A using the inverse of the first curve, which can be editing for timing purposes. Perfect for creating things like jiggle, jello bouncing, etc., Sine is more like a Bezire that repeats as many time as we ask it to.
Bezier should have ease-in, ease-out, tighten-in and tighten-out paremters, unless is comes equipped with handle to adfjust the curve manually.
Even a Linear tweener should have settings for Ease-In and out.
I am able to sculpt out some cool animations using aniMate 2's tools along with Pose Control morph dials, but in either case, aniMate 2 or the Timeline, I haven't found an efficient way of (for example) retiming the action of the legs or arms vs the rest of the animation, which is super easy to do in Carrara just by stretching and pulling around the selected range of keys.
Richard, could we animators see some bug fix on animation tools now?
And perhaps on that pesky, crazily-jumping Frame Selected tool? Aliases on Puppeteer? Deformed GeoShell/Conforming props when Chest/Abdomen size isn't 100%?
I'm getting tired to be stuck on 4.12.0.86 for making my animation works.
@ DartanBeck
Actually the default tweener is absolutely perfect for human motions, I can assure you this. I agree to add some more tweeners like sawtooth and bezier or adding handles on the graph, but "fixing" the overshoot would be a great error.
If nodes are made invisible in the scene (i.e. click the eye icon in the scene tab) they are apparently intended to become invisible on the timeline, however this does not happen immediately. I think it might happen if swapping between timeline and some other pane and back but it definately happens if the scene saved after the scene is opened next. There is a relatively new (I think) "Refresh" option on the timeline which currently does nothing (well, nothing that I can detect). Making things invisible on the timeline seems to be irreversible; once they hare gone, they are gone. I'm pretty sure this is just a bug in updating visibility.
There was a bug in one of the 4.14 series IRC that cause the TCB to be copied without correct recalculation of the (internal) TCB control points. The contol points ended up at infinity; this could be seen in the saved scene file because the control point values were reported in the file as "inf" or "-inf" (a widely used representation of positive or negative infinity). I reported this to DAZ Productions and I thought it had been fixed, but maybe not. Yes; puttting the frame on one of the bogus points caused DAZ Studio to stop for a long time. The fix, which I was doing for a while, is to select all the control points after the copy, convert to linear then convert back to TCB. As I said I don't think this happens any more in 4.15.
That's @Imago's bug reported on page 2 of this thread, which I explained in more detail above. It's not clear what the exact repro is; Imago suggested an unset property has to be at the end of the hierarchy below a node to make that node immovable, but I'm fairly sure that the property has to be completely reset (not just unset on that frame) and that in fact the node is *unselectable*. @Richard presumably encounted the bug hence his suggestion to use marquee selection on nodes, but that doesn't property select the node either - even though the node is highlit it still can't be moved!
Anyway, if you key+ a node it will remain selectable until you reset properties or change the timeline property "Types" list. If you TRSOAH key+ a node with node-hierarchical and avoid doing "reset" then that node and everything below it should work 'fine'. The only issue is that if you TRSOAH key+ at Object level or Node Recurse on the character it's "come-back-later" time. The delay is related to the character load time; time to Object key+ TRSOAH on a G8F is comparable to the time to load a G8F, time do undo it if you did it accidentally (as I have done) is even greater.
It looks like DAZStudio stores control values for the TCB (Tension, Continuity, Bias) I'd assumed DAZ used some sort of Bézier internally but it doesn't look like that's the case from the AutoDesk documentation. What that documentation does show is that DAZ has internal settings for Tension and Bias which aren't exposed in the UI; IRC there are two control point values which can, maybe, be altered and perhaps they are visible in the API. Being able to set those would seem to be an easy option for DAZ and maybe they are set/changed when we copy/paste groups of frames rather than being constant values.
Then it wouldn't be linear; it would just be a TCB with very high "Tension" (see the AutoDesk link.)
I use the timeline for dForce simulation. The keys I add are to avoid character anatomy intersections, linear works best. With TCB if I key+ an object between two frames which have also been key+'ed all the intervening values of the TCBs change. This is easy to demonstrate with a Null; make X and Y go from 0 on Frame 0 to 1 on Frame3 then open the timeline graph (i.e. the thing at the bottom of the timeline pane) and select "X Translate" and "Y Translate" properties in the node selection dialog above. You get a graph of X and Y in different colors, the two curves exactly match. Now select Y translate and key+/Property at frame 1 and 2. Add X translate to the selection and examine the graph - the curves are no longer coincident. Marquee select the two Y keys in the graph (not the node list), key- them then use undo/redo to rapidly swap between the two graphs. The effect is small but visible and can be significant when trying to arrange a hand to be at least 0.2cm away from an abdomen.
There is rather a lot of conjecture here - and I'm not sure what some of it means.
If you want to compare values in the UI (and TCB exposes three values) with the actual data to see if they are diffrent look at a pose preset.
A new, over the top timeline is the very definition of a new process, esp. when it just adds to the workflow. The jump from 4.10 to 4.12 brought this headache on and here we are on 4.15 and still your choices are basic=useless, intermediate=mostly useless and advanced=unbearable in complicated scenes involving 5 toons and a roomful of objects, lights, cameras spanning 1000 frames. In editing a scene, fine tuning 1000 frames with all the assets went from a few clicks to fix to a PROCESS that involves, clicking, scrolling, highlighting (when it is even possible to highlight owing to solid black line of keys some of my objects have) just to do what used to be effortless. Whatever bugs you encounter has nothing to do with my complaint which is make a functioning intermediate that just shows the object selected and the ability to delete without highlight. Really is that simple since it used to work that way before Daz turned the timeline into a structured mess by thinking that complication equals win.
Why? Does the timeline really need to show that vase that has been sitting there statically for the past 10 saved scenes? Or the 150 other static assets that I have in a scene for that matter? That is the problem with the 3 timelines, your choices are useless, next to useless and over the top and that could be resolved by having the intermediate function like the 4.10 timeline. I can see why new users would be put off by the timeline for it would not take long for a new user to realize that intermdiate is not very usefull for animation and advanced is horrible in the added steps for basic editting.
I don't think there is any conjecture in that post. I did have a hypothesis in an earlier draft about why the "unselectable keygroup" bug seemed to appear in 4.15 but I removed it.
I can't find any TCB values exposed. I'm fairly sure the control points they generate for the spline used to be stored and that this was, somehow, the cause of the copy/paste infinity bug. I think I found them in the saved data, but neither they nor the TCB values are there now. Maybe that was the fix; I think I might have observed that it was pointless storing stuff like that when it could be trivially regenerated on load. Here's a fragment of an "animations" property for a Null:
{
"url" : "Null-1:#Null?translation/x/value",
"keys" : [ [ 0, 0 ], [ 0.1664583, -0.4745763, [ "LINEAR" ] ], [ 0.1666667, 0.7627119, [ "LINEAR" ] ] ]
},
{
"url" : "Null-1:#Null?translation/y/value",
"keys" : [ [ 0, 0 ], [ 0.1666667, 0 ], [ 0.3333333, 0 ] ]
},
The data has to be in "animations" because it's stored as [time, value] pairs. As the above shows these are qualified by a third array which does not exist for TCB (the control points or TCB values could be in there, but it doesn't exist above), only for other interpolation types. The first parameter (time) is in seconds; the second value in the list corresponds to frame 5 at 30fps (so it is one sixth of a second). The weird preceding value was obtained by dragging a T property for X translation onto a frame with an existing T property! The time is 1/4800th of a second before frame 5, I make no comments ;-)
Internally DAZStudio has to generate the control points for the spline, or something arithmetically similar, to do the interpolation. For example wikipedia describes generating two tangents (defined by points) for Kochanek–Bartels spline from the t/c/b parameters (note that the notation is -1 to +1 in the wikiepedia article whereas the AutoDesk/3DS one I think uses some kind of percentage.)
I'm not sure what you mean by:
The pose presets I have are compressed but I can save uncompressed presets. The save dialog gives the option of saving the animation or the current frame. In both cases an 'animations' list is saved (and that's pretty much all that is saved); both files are 11346 lines long, mostly consisting of records of the default values:
"animations" : [
{
"url" : "name://@selection/lSmallToe4_2:?translation/x/value",
"keys" : [ [ 0, 0 ] ]
},
Etc... Most of the keys in the full animation come from Animate2 and they are mostly "CONSTANT" on Frame 0 then TCB after that at 1/30th second spacings. The TCB keys are stored as above; [time, property-value], there is no record of the t/c/b values. I can't say that these are fixed; I have a reasonable suspicion that they are based on the changes that happen when an intermediate TCB interpolated key is added, but I can't be sure. What I can be sure of is that I cannnot find any way of setting them and that, possibly as a consequence, they aren't being stored.
Yes; and it does make the timeline somewhat unusable because the node list is vertical and the timeline is normally only functional if is short and wide. I can't see any good reason why the timeline not just show the current selection in the scene; i.e. the same as the "Parameters" pane, or, for that matter, the "Surfaces" pane. As it is there is a very confusing behavior where I can select nodes in either "Timeline" or "Scence" and the other jumps around plus, at the same time, "Parameters" and "Surfaces" change. The same thing happens with "Parameters" and "Surfaces" using the node-selection drop-down (top left) but that seems more like what I would expect.
Of course in your example you can simply hide the vase, but I guess that would mean that you can't see when a character knocks it over. DAZ could also add a "Visible on Timeline" entry to "Display" or even key the timeline entry off "Selectable in Viewport", but that seems like needless complexity. On balance I think just showing the selected node is a good, simple, UI and getting rid of the node-selection drop-downs on Parameters and Surfaces would also get rid of something I never use (I always have the "Scene" tab on view; it's the right hand of my screen layout!)
@jbowler you can just unzip presets with 7zip.
Btw nice to see some more people who use the timeline finally wording all the problems, things wont change if there's only one complaint every now and then.
Ah, thanks for that tip. I hadn't realized it was just gzip format.
Where can I find the full download for the standalone install of 4.15? I am currently running 4.14 Beta and want to get rid of it and get back into the real world
You need to chnage the TCB values to see anything, I did that on a test preset and the entry was then
instead of
Right: how do I change the TCB values? This is the point that escapes me; your screen shot makes sense, presumably [ "TCB", 0, 0, 0 ] isn't recorded explicitly and is default. The issue is I can't find the UI to change those three values.
It's "Download DAZ Studio for free" on the page https://daz3d.com. ; Do not replace the beta - you then have the choice of going back to it.
That link leads to DAZ Central
My Account\Product Library\ and Search for "Studio 4"
https://www.daz3d.com/downloader/customer/files#prod_13176
Yes, I hope they finally will take care of them.
Select the property and the key in the dope sheet section and edit the values in the text boxes (I don't think there is any kind of handle or slider system yet, I don't know if a script could get the selected key to enable a pop-up edit control of some kind).
Has the processing image bug been fixed? Basically at the bottom right corner of DAZ, it will say 'processing image' (HDR environment file) over & over again.
We need a little more info than that, e.g. which HDR file, system specs, etc.
It's taken me a while to get a look at this, but when you say delete the .dsx files do you mean the ones in the Downloads directory? I remove all files from the Downloads directory to stop my C: drive from filling up. I keep them on a usb hard drive in just in case but DIM doesn't know where they are. If these are the files you mean there must be another problem preventing the update.
Are you referring to the general release 4.15.0.30? I assumed you weren't seeing the 4.15.0.30 beta because you seem to have decided to stick with 4.14 for the general release.
Yes, I did mean the general release. I haven't decided to stick with 4.14 for the general release, DIM has never offered me an update to 4.15. I have got the 4.15 beta release installed, up to now DIM has always offered me the latest versions of the release and the beta versions. I suppose I don't really need to update the generale release since I can use the beta but I wonder why DIM isn't giving me the option.
No; since January! 4.15.0.2 was released on January 7 (see page 1 of this thread, towards the bottom.)
Check Downloads and Ready to Install for hidden files, then, assuming nothing is hiding there, filter the "installed" tab for sku::13176 - you should see 4 packages, check the details for DAZ Studio 4.15 (mouse over the name), this will show Package Date, which should be sometime in 2020. Find the .dsx file for that package in your USB cache and the .dsx for the same package in the DIM Manifest Files directory. Examine both .dsx files in a text editor (Notepad works) and check the ProductFileGuid in the files they should match. Check the dates other than UserOrderDate too - if they aren't in 2020 somehow DIM downloaded something that was probably 4.15
If things don't all match up and point to one of the 2020 releases of 4.14 (or maybe even earlier) then that indicates where the problem lies.
If things do match up you can copy the .dsx and .zip files for 13176-2 back you your DIM Downloads directory and see if that causes DIM to wake up. If it doesn't you can de-install 13176-2, or possibly all four 13176 packages; at that point if stuff doesn't appear in DIM check for the product:
https://www.daz3d.com/downloader/customer/files#prod_13176
There is a download link for a windows installer at the bottom, but it's probably better to try customer service at that point...
For sure you should fix it, since it's been happening since January (if not before, I don't know which 4.14 release you have - check page 1!)
If I apply the filter for sku::13176 it shows the deafult resources as installed and the Daz Studio Application, Interactive Lessons and Scene Builder as ready to download but they are not described as updates. Since they are not in the update section they must be so far down the list of things to download that I'm not seeing them without the filter (I install Poser content manually so I have a long list of Poser stuff in the Ready to Download list that just stays there).
I did install 4.14 with DIM but it looks as if DIM is treating 4.15 as a new product for me rather than an update to 4.14, I assume that is not what everyone else is seeing. I'm thinking about running the install but I don't know if that is likely to cause problems if DIM treats it as a fresh install and not an update.
Put the .dsx files back. I trust you did check the .dsx in the Manifest Files directory and the date does match the version you have installed and the product version is identical to that on the USB drive, so maybe DIM relies on the two GUIDs not matching to signal an update. Disable Poser content in DIM or hide the files.
I didn't have a .dsx file for Studio 4.14 in the Manifests directory. I copied the one from my save directory into Manifests, restarted DIM and the 4.15 release update is there now. I don't know what happened to the original file in Maifests, I never touch that directory.
Thank you for helping me with this.
I meant the one in the Downloads directory. The one in ManifestFiles is the record of the current installation; that's why I had you check the ProductGUID and the dates in both files. Replacing the latter file with the .dsx [that you had saved] from the Downloads directory should not have changed anything about the currently installed package, because the GUID and dates are the same; it just prevents DIM from uninstalling the product. Maybe the .dsx in the ManifestFiles directory had become corrupted; that would explain why DIM reported a new product, not an update. Bear in mind that you may still have stuff lying around from 4.14 that DIM did not know to de-install.
The one in ManifestFiles wasn't corrupt, it just wasn't there. I only have one .dsx file so there wasn't anything to compare it with. This is the one that was originally in Downloads and that I moved to my backup directory after the original installation.