looking for an animation programm which offers easy daz3d reimport
ps2000
Posts: 278
Hello,
so animating in daz3d is a pain in the butt in my opinion. So I am looking for an alternative.
But no matter what animation programm I look into (blender, maya, Iclone7 with 3dxchange, motionbuilder), the import of the daz3d character seems feasible and sometimes easy (for example with diffeo for blender).
But the reimport of the created animation seems really hard i.e. the animation isn't imported back correctly (as fbx file or bvh).
Is there a programm/way which allows easy reimport of the animation into daz studio? I couldn't find an established workflow/tutorial.
Or is there a programme which offers comparable iray rendering/lighting?
My problem is, that if I render for example in blender my scene lighting is different than the stills I render in daz-studio because blender doesn't support iray.
Thanks
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Comments
Well, until now I didn't really try it. I looked for the best way to do it. The applications (apart from blender) are really expensive and I want to buy one which offers an easy solutions to import animations in daz-studio.
Concerning blender according to different tutorials and threads I looked into it seems really hard or nearly impossible to import an animation back into daz3d because of the different rigging/bone structure and the not so good daz importer?
Other users who tried it reported distorted or screwed up, sliding animations after importing back into daz3d.
I thought Iclone 7 with 3dxchange would be a good solutions but there is a 3-page thread on the realilussions forum of someone who really tried to import a bvh file animation to daz and failed miserably. Nobody could help him. So I am not sure if I should invest a lot of time and effort in a method that seems destined to fail.
I am interested if somebody has a surefire way/workflow of importing animations back into daz3d and is maybe willing to share it.
the problem isn't so much the other apps, it's the importing into DS which means it has more to do with Daz Studio. It's my understanding that most animators export items OUT of DS and never import them back in.
I do not know what problems you may have read about with Iclone
3Dexchange But has built in true retargeting template profiles
that recognize the Daz genesis figure upon import and retargets Iclone motion to them for export as BVH.
My advice is to never take the advice from a person about an animation
method who cannot provide online video examples of how it does or allegedly does not work.
The link under my post is to a 93 minute feature length
animated movie where Daz genesis ,1, 2, 3 figures were imported into
Iclone 3DX and the exported Iclone BVH files imported into Daz studio.
the Iclone/Daz animated figure were ultimately exported back out to Maxon C4D for the final rendering.
my secret with 3D exchange is to use genesis 1 for the export and import, thanks to another user move the root bone to 0,0,0 with the rigging tool, save and load on genesis 3 or 8 and use pose controls 45°arms down 6°legs out on genesis 8.
I hope DAZ appreciate how much you and a few others do for this community. I'm sure the DAZ customers do so I would hope that DAZ is taking note of what these customers want.
The only thing I've gotten is deafening silence to all my technical questions at its best, and something akin to "I don't know what your problem is, other people write plugins" at its worst. Appreciation? Help? Nothing remotely like it. I swear, if I didn't love DS so much, I would hate it.
Daz animation has light years to go before it gets anywhere close to its nearest competitive neighbour, but that's not to say its recent efforts to make it better should be shirked. It is useful for the average hobbyist who may just want to plug in a store bought dance move, but for anything more serious it's completely unwieldy, IMO. After much frustration I turned to Maya and Motion Builder. Everyone has their favorite, or go to, animation software, so I can't say one is better than the other, but I have spent most of the summer learning these packages and am really glad I did. Super powerful...but there still isn't a bridge that actually produces worry-free, faultless results back to Daz3D, in my experience. Huge drawback is these software packages are expensive, but I got a good deal for an autodesk media package so I jumped in.
@Empty
I agree completely.
Even with the Built-in profiles that recogonizes
the genesis figures upon FBX import into Iclone 3DX.
There are frequent anomolies in Daz studio with BVH import
that require alot manual fixing with Daz's Spline graph editor.
and the problems became much worse after the introduction
of G3 and even worse with G8 and the new default "A-pose"
This is one of many reasons why I Migrated to the CC3 Figure Eco system entirely After "Galactus Rising".
My CC3/FBX to Blender pipeline is so much more streamlined and PREDICTABLE
and appending new animation to existing actors
( via Blenders action editor), makes CHaracter animation production so much faster.
To say nothing of working in the near realtime environment of EEVEE
and the everything else Blender offers over Daz studio.
Since there seems to be no easy way to reimport animations, is there a way to export the whole scene into a programm, animate it there and then render it with iray?
3dsmax seems to support iray rendering. But I am not sure if there is an easy way to export the whole scene with lights etc. Blender unfortunately doesn't support iray.
Its important to me that the lighting of the animation is the same like in the stills I do with daz-studio.
Well, it's sad that you don't get any support by daz. Animation is the next big thing since gpus and cpus get stronger and stronger. If daz isn't able to deliver a good integrated animation solution it should be in their best interest to have at least a good bridge to another animation programm for easy export/reimport.
I can confidently say that amateur animation is much more in demand than pro shots. At the present time fewer and fewer people read books and comics. More and more people are watching movies. If a 3d artist wants his story to be seen by as many people as possible, he should make animation, not comics. But, unfortunately, there is no way to make animation in daz3d yet.
Here is my top, what is missing in daz3d for animation:
1. There is no real-time IK system. (The existing IK cannot be used, developers will have to rewrite the code from scratch. The "Twist" parameter in the thighs and shoulders is broken)
2. No profiles interpolation of the animation keys. (Daz3d=3 profiles. Blender=13 profiles)
3. No bezier handles for editing the animation curve.
4. Graphmate is still better for me. I want to be able to select a bone in the viewport. In the parameters tab, select the rotation axis, and have the curve editor show me the curve for that rotation axis. Opening the list in the timeline manually is tedious. It seems that the developers are not aware that animation is a rather tedious process that takes a lot of time. Therefore, we should strive to simplify this process.
5. No procedural animation. (Camera shake for example)
6a. No minus timeline. ( This is important if I want to make a perfect animation loop)
6b. There is no procedural animation profile - Cycle (as in blender). This could solve the problem in point 6a.
This is what came to my mind now. Maybe I forgot something. You can add to my list
7. Nonlinear motion clip system does not fully support current figure base
for body part filtering
8.No filtering options in the graph editor Jitter,parbolic etc
9.no native key frame reduction tools making baked aniblocks practically uneditable with dopesheet/spline graph fully populated with keyframes.
10.No decent native lipsynch tools, only pricy, third party, single point of failure plugins that are easily broken by by DS/Genesis updates
Even Reallusion's new Actorcore online motion library system does not support Daz studio. unless some third party creates a Middelware solution as was necessary for Mixamo and G3+.
Though I agree with you that Daz does have issues with it's animation that need to be addressed, I'm not disagreeing with your list at all, to say there is no way to make an animation in the program is completely false. I did this entire short in three weeks for the Movember contest. Everything was animated and rendered in Daz. It is possible, it just takes a little more patience than using, say, Blender or Maya.
(9) Peaches - A Daz 3D animated film - YouTube
Don't get me wrong, I'm waiting very patiently for that BVH exporter from Blender that themysteryisthepoint is working on as I would love to animate and Blender and then bring it back into Daz so I can use my facial mocap script on top of that, but where there's a will, there's a way and if you want to animate in Daz you will be able to do it.
@benniewoodell
Your peaches fim has very good renderl/lighting quality.
However sadly, the lack of a proper human IK foot/Floor contact solver
in Daz studio, is glaringly evident 31 seconds into the film as he squats down to pick up his groceries and his feet slide around underneath him.
At 2:17 his feet do not meet his cast ground shadow making him appear to be walking/floating 12 inches above the side walk.
Probably a slight oversight on your part but with a global foot /floor contact system like Iclone/MOBU you always notice that your character is not placed on the ground
And his aborted suicide attempt at 4:08 his feet never make solid contact with the ledge and slide around also.
I can tell you with absolute certainty that BVH imports from Blender will not magically create solid foot/floor contact solving on a G8 in DS even with everything baked to FK.
FBX Does a much better job of retaining the soldid foot planting FK movement fidelity ,in my experience with CC3 to blender, but DS has no useful FBX CHaracter importer ATM
@wolf359 you're preaching to the choir here, the feet thing is absolutely the biggest problem with animation in Daz. The ledge thing, what you saw was five hours of me tweaking and that was the best I could get it, and then just to test it, I then went into Blender and in five minutes had a perfect step without any movement. The only reason I didn't use that is for whatever reason, the shoe materials would not come into Blender as anything but white and I opted for continuity over a perfect foot step. But people who don't do animation that I've showed this to personally and mentioned that was my biggest problem shot, they all thought that he was waffling back and forth on whether to go over the ledge, they didn't think it was a problem with the animation. So people like yourself who are in the know, know it's the limitation to the program, but people who are just watching it don't really think about that. And that's what I've found in making movies for twenty years, the glaring problems we have, 9 out of 10 times no one notices when they're watching, so I just do my best and then move on.
I'm not disagreeing with anything you guys are saying in your list, except when I see someone say you cannot make an animated film in Daz, that's not true, you absolutely can. It might not be a perfect animated film like in Maya or Blender, but it's doable.
The floating thing though at 2:17 is because I rendered it all in layers and I haven't figured out yet how to make it seem like the person is still on the ground if I render them separately. I was in a time crunch to make the Movember deadline and opted to do it that way to render each layer in 30 seconds as opposed to like 5 minutes for the full frame if I did everything together.
But I looked at the file that themysteryisthepoint did with the BVH and the movement that he tested transferred wonderfully, I had the Blender animation on one monitor and the Daz import on the other going simultaneously. So I'm excited to see more of the script.
this it what is meant by moving the root to zero, it often but not always helps
@WendyLuvsCatz Thank you for posting this! It's very helpful to see what you were talking about. I'm knee deep in an animated commission right now that's taking up all my time, as soon as it's done I'm giving your suggestion a whirl :)
this is a video of how motions from 3Dxchange import for me.
the genesis 1 is pretty close but sadly feet slide on Genesis 8 even with root translation
but that frequently happens with DAZ studio motions for genesis 1 applied to 8 also
her arms are posed up 45degrees and legs out 6 degrees to give a base tpose like genesis 1
@Donald ( MITP)
In my experience,programs like endorphin and Iclone have
hard realtime constraints that are calculated in real time by the
native system of the physics /constraint/IK solver even during root locomotion or vertical /lateral movement of the hip.
BVH export/import into Daz studio
does not rigidly store those realtime constraints even when baked to FK.
when the hip makes major lateral/vertical moves the feet/hands slide along with it.
in my 6 year experience making perfectly foot planted root locomotion with a G1-2 figures in Iclone I get a fairly acceptable foot planting
( except for deep squats)
I get really good foot planting fidelity with Iclone/CC3 FBX characters exported to Blender
With G3/8 there is major foot slide in Daz studio when that solved(vertical /lateral) hip motion is imported as BVH into daz studio as @WendyluvsCatz clearly,demonstrates in her video.
You have motionbuilder Donald.
Characterize a G8 figure and create a simple animation with several deep squats with lateral hip swaying left and right
in MOBU and export that BVH out to Daz studio.
if you can retain accurate foot planting, as you did in MOBU,
PLease share your BVH import setting for Daz studio so others (Like the thread OP) can know them for future use with BVH imports
Hi @wolf359 Thanks for taking the time.
I wonder if that foot sliding is an artefact of the common denominators between you and @WendyLuvsCatz , i.e. 3DXChange and/or FBX.
As far as MoBu goes, you're saying you get foot sliding even with "Enable Translation DOF" selected, and "Write Translation" not selected? I didn't re-up my ADN subscription at the beginning of this month (a poorly spent $1400), am not going to get Maya Indie again (am hoping that my expert can figure out retargeting in Houdini), so I won't be able to try what you said. But that was exactly my pipeline, daz->mobu->daz->blender and I would not have been satisfied with that kind of foot sliding. I can't account for the differences.
I continue to think that the difference is that for a long time now, I've used *precisely* the same armature. But I'll finish the plugin and let others judge whether it works or not, and how well.
On the other hand, neither do I have any reason to doubt either of you, and so I really want to figure this out.
I would say BVH actually
it is worse in Carrara. the hip is frozen, but FBX is spot on
DAZ studio of course totally mangles FBX so we will never know
@Mysteryisthepoint
I dont have Autodesk motionbuilder.
However Reallusion leased the Maya human IK system from Autodesk
for Iclone 9 years ago.
My only point here is that no matter what external system you use
to create Daz compatible BVH, there are going to be "fidelity issues"
upon import ,particularly since the implmentation of the twist bones in G3/8.
This is not to say that Daz studio is not able to create decent Character animation.
and in the majority of cases my Iclone/3DX BVH was fine for film scenes shot
above the knees in "Galactus Rising" using Genesis 1-2
However people should realize the the best Character animations coming from blender, are the ones using proper Rigify or MHX rigs with controlers/Ik solvers or even some the the paid options like Autorig pro or the ROKKO mocap retargeting system.
None of which will completely/properly translate into daz studio
as FK only BVH Data as I explain in this short two minute video.
what about the iclone? i seen clips of daz figures in iclone
people want to render them in D|S using iray and having joint morph correctives
iClone is only bone rigged motion except for facial
It is natural for Daz studio users to want to keep everything in Daz studio
as Iclone/MOBU are not free like Blender and Daz studio.
At this time there are some hard limitions to the core DS Animation tool set and BVH is itself is a very limited format for importing complex IK based motions.
Just my opinion, but from my personal testing of Diffeo & MHX action loading
,The best /cheapest option for frustrated Daz studio animators, is to migrate production over to Blender and render animations with Cycles or EEVEE.
Maybe a stupid question:
But how do the creators of aniblocks which are sold in the shop avoid foot-sliding and how do they animate the figures?
I can't believe that they use daz3d for animation and there are some pretty amazing walk-cycles/animations.
It would be interesting to see their animation pipelines.
I would imagine the really good ones are using human mocap
with ALOT of manual clean up.
One of the store products literally boasts "Hand Made" animations .
Daz studio ,in its current iteration ,has the ability to create good animation for those willing to invest the time setting individual keyframes by hand.
For example the Current "IK system" has an animated reach effector where you could pin the feet for those frames that need foot contact and animate the strength of the reach effector to release the feet when they are lifted....
for each frame.
This is not the same as the realtime IK foot/floor contact solving
that we have in Iclone/Maya/MOBU.
DS animators like @Ivysummers use alot of manual keyframing in her work
and she has dozens of entertaining short films on her YT channel.
However most Daz studio users prefer automated solutions
( facemojo aniblocks,Mixamo)
Nothing wrong with automated solutions after all this is the year 2021
and there are are no trophies being awarded for slow,vestigial, masochistic
approaches if more efficient methods are within ones reach.
I have been using BVH files since the late 1990's with Poser4.
Poser/Daz/Zygote figures had much simpler bone rigs back then.
Genesis 8 is a much more complicated figure rig and requires more
complicated external motion transfer solutions than basic ,No labor, FK BVH import from Blender or even Iclone/MOBU.