Preserving/Saving aniBlock sequences and tracks?

mindsong

As a long-time user of aniBlocks, I've found the only way to save existing and entire aniBlocks *tracks* in a reload-able/re-editable mode, is to save them in a full scene.

I often delete everything except the figure-of-interest (with its complex multi-block aniBlock tracks/layers) from a scene and save that separately, to 'simulate' saving as as scene-subset.

This works, but I'm wondering if there is a better technique or trick for doing so. Saving in any of the other sub-scene variants (pose-presets, properties, etc.), doesn't save the aniBlocks or tracks/layers.

I know you can 'bake aniBlocks to timeline', and save the result as a pose-preset, etc. but this loses the aniBlock tracks and any future aniBlock editability of that saved state.

Perhaps there's a cool 'save-all' or 'save-tracks'  feature I've missed in the Animate2 context, or a non-obvious DS save function other than the full-scene save that I currently rely on.

thanks in advance,

--ms

Kevin Sanderson

I don't know as I've not used it much but maybe you'll find your answer here. AniMate 2 has more functions than most of us know.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180413184339/http://www.gofigure3d.com/site/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=92&Itemid=86

mindsong

Kevin Sanderson said:

I don't know as I've not used it much but maybe you'll find your answer here. AniMate 2 has more functions than most of us know.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180413184339/http://www.gofigure3d.com/site/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=92&Itemid=86

Thanks for taking the time to dig up that page on wayback. Much appreciated.

I reviewed it, but found nothing related to my specific question - but there were a couple of other tidbits in there that make much more sense, now that I've been using animate2 for a while! :)

I 'PDF-d' the original a long while back, but am not sure where I archived it - useful scheme, that.

thanks again,

--ms

 

Kevin Sanderson

You're welcome.

Ivy

The best I found for saving animated scene la-outs is bake the animations and save them as aniblocks or animated presets. and if you have the animate2 full version you can go back edit the aniblocks the way you like. Subsets are a prefect way to save scenes but i tend to loose the keyframes in the timeline when i save as a sub scene so saving as a scene has been the only way for me to save keyframe animation for a entire scene. 

I agree its a pain &  I  have lost many hours of work for lack of being able to save animated tracks. I wish in daz there was a way you could break a part  & save portions of animation tracks like Maya timeline and save your animations in individual scene track . I think it be great to save just one part of a track of a animation instead of saving the entire scene or each character animation as a preset. it would allows for quick track cuts and cycle loops for faster animation development as well.

But until something new is developed for daz studio timeline maybe in daz 5  . The best I have been able to do is what you had described. saving as a scene or save each animation as a aniblocks. or animated preset.

sorry i can't offer more help

mindsong

Ivy said:

The best I found

...

 

sorry i can't offer more help

thanks Ivy,

There are a couple of folks in here who I assume would know of any such 'tricks' to ... save our work in DS. You are one of them.

After just learning a cool 'save animation point' trick in a nearby thread, I thought perhaps there was another such aniBlock related tidbit lurking 'in the ether' regarding saving aniblock layer-sets.

Alas, if the best don't know of such a trick, I imagine there is none. I'll continue to 'strip-and-save' my key scene element save-points as full-scenes until a proper solution is implemented.

We can hope - thanks again for your insights,

--ms

Ivy

@mindsong

lately I have been saving my animations as animated pose presets using the daz timeline. I learned if you save your animations as a animated pose preset  it will load the character exactly as you originally made it when you saved it. I rarely get those stupid hops or those location jumps in pose presets like i do with saving aniblocks.

Plus pose presets are helpful because you can use those animated pose presets for other characters.  Example would be, I could load a animation made for genesis 8 male saved as a animated pose preset and use it for genesis8 female . same as you could with anblocks. with out all that deformation you get with aniblocks . & add when saving the animated pose preset there is options for just saving a portions of the animations for like legs, or arms, neck, head etc.  plus you can assign start and end points for the preset animations. it just makes it a little more customizable later on.  and you can take or cut poses out of the animations without having to bake it to the timeline like you would with trying to save a pose from a aniblock.

Also if its important to you, as hard drive space can be sometimes a premium for us animators.. animated pose presets take up less Hard drive space than a complete animated scene.& easier to keep your animations organized by making labeled preset folders. &  you may already know this.  But you can save props and light rigs that have been animated as animated as pose presets as well where you can't save prop or iray light rigs as aniblocks  .

I have only been saving animations as aniblock for animation loops and cycles. that I know I will use repetitively in other projects. & I save a scenes for only the project i am working on other wise i save it as a pose preset

 

edited for spelling . I am very dyslexic sorry

 

mindsong

Good insight,

I do some similar steps and use your recommended pose-presets (and properties presets) to good effect as well, depending on the context, but my current workflow has been *formed* around separating the animation elements into distinct layers (body-movement, personality/posture, face expression (4 layers), lipsync, etc.), and it was all literally built-upon the DS aniblock paradigm - so I have libraries of block-etts and a a way of thinking about the process that I can't practically escape (yet), and so for me it is not-so-efficient to transpose to a single-track timeline until the final bake and maybe some final fixit tweaks before the 'run'. For me to take a more 'bake-it' path, relative to my non-traditional layered workflow, would be like losing layers in Photoshop when doing complex image work, and it would cripple me until I changed my approach or tools.

Hence my original post question. How to easily save the entire aniblock timeline/layer-set for a scene node as a 'scene subset' of some sort. It's something I need to do a lot, and my current method feels more like a workaround to a missing capability than a well-thought design decision. I was hoping there was something I missed, or a clever trick, but alas - none so far.

Of course this is my own issue, and the value-to-cost analysis of using DS this way will keep me here for a while longer, which is fine for now. I envy the traditional keyframer animators in this regard. In some ways, my shortcut is not-so-short, although I enjoy the control and process, once I'm actively working with these tools.

That's part of why I'm still 'stuck' in DS, as the aniblock and puppeteer ideas are dead-on brilliant, but their implementation is incomplete to my experience - and the rest of the DS wrapper has proven to be pretty 'expensive' (although still amazing, considering) as they continue development. I paused at 4.12.0.86 and enjoyed the timeline updates, but have since returned to 4.11 to get work done with some reliability. Perhaps a 4.15+ hop will occur on a later project, but I can't afford to be doing the last 10% of the release version Q/A and still meet my deadlines. That said, it's silly to complain with this much power at my fingertips, but I do anyway :)

Iclone's curve editor is really close to being a viable replacement, and I use it for bone/BVH body motion to good effect, but Iclone misses on the morph editing and transfer back to DS for rendering (Its non-standard morph conversion only transfers *from* DS, and not back) so it's still more efficient for me to 'get it done' in DS, even with the Iclone-like workflow alternatives out there. I'm guessing you are up against the same kinds of exernal tool 'seductions' vs 'git-r-done' efficiency decisions too.

I'm already actively migrating my *render* work to Blender as frame-sequences (alembic via 'sagan'), and as I become more familiar with that world and its tools, I expect that I will someday settle there completely, as the Blender development direction and thinking are *far* more to my liking and logic-style, relative to where the current DS roadmap (?) seems to be going. To my eye, DS keeps behaving as if they really support animation - and they arguably do - but it's still very much like it's keeping 'just enough' animation capability (timeline/dforce/aniblocks) to enable the generation of beautiful static images, not for dedicated animation workflows. The recent FACS tools for G8 raised my eyebrows, but the animation feels like a supporting capability, not a core design value.

Given that *my* needs are hardly a call to change their business/market plans, I'm not going to plan for, or expect any such changes in that direction, nor will I begrudge them not humoring my wants - but I will happily poke at the ongoing 'sell' that DS is a comprehensive animation tool. Given the activities of their sister companies and their new content exporters, I don't see DAZ finding big value in the re-inventing of the animation wheel, when they can sell content that exports to the most powerful animation engines in the industry. That they still sell clothes and hair products with built-in morphs tells me everything I need to know about their current target market. It's too bad, given how close DS is to having some really powerful animation capabilities that *could* offer a nearly complete solution for users like me. So close.

best,

--ms

 

Ivy

yes there is a lot of good things with animate2 and aniblocks. It how I got started with animations. I love the layering animation capabilities in the animate2 timeline.   . But there are alot of limitations to aniblocks as well now with the improvements & development to the keyframe & graph editor, along with deforce and IK-chains  built for the use in the new daz timeline .  But its alwasy been that way anyway if you want to use deforce or dynamic clothing plugin or even VWD  you have to bake the aniblock into the daz studio timeline.   I guess that is part of the reason I went hand keyframing most my animations sequences. just to by-pass those couple of extra steps.   But you can always bake and save aniblocks at anytime as animated presets if you need to export the animation out of daz or use it with deforce so that is not really a big issue.  IK-chains do not work with aniblocks either so there that.

wouldn't it be nice if 3d software and apps follow a file format standard like  most image editors use JPEG or PNG as standard format.   then we would not need bridges or conversion tools or scripts . 

Hey it doesn't cost any more to dream big..