Smooth animation in viewport ?
linoge8888
Posts: 71
I'm making tons of animations and it would help me a lot to visualize them smoothtly in viewport before rendering to make sure they look natural. Currently my 50 fps animations are more about 1fps when playing the timeline, whatever I choose filament or hidden line preview modes. Is it even possible to get a smooth animation with the best hardware ever ? Otherwise, how should I do ?
I add any morph is playing smoothly, but things get laggy as soon as a movement is involved.
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I don't know of a way to make viewport animation smoother, so here's what I do - with post denoising on, set a maximum time limit of 1-3 minutes per frame, pending how big your animation is. Then when it finishes, watch it and adjust accordingly.
The feature you need but that isn't in Daz, is for the timeline to record and play back the animation. Second best is rendering it to a set of .png using the OpenGL or new Filament renderer, then join the pngs using ffmpeg. I'm really not too sure why the performance is so terrible. I suspect like a lot of other issues in Daz it's the UI firing off a web of events whenever anything happens (I'm speculating of course).
What do you mean ? Is there a plugin or something ?
Well I'm used to render all the .png and it takes hours to figure out the animation is wrong eventually. I'll give kickflipsonly's solution a try, but I guess Daz isn't optimized for animations, or maybe I'm missing something (Im a newbie).
No. I mean packages that do a huge amount of work per frame, like Houdini for example (physics simulation) capture each frame so you can play it back without having to do the calc every time. What it's actually doing that's so expensive is kind-of mysterious, but again we come back to the "web" of events that get fired in the UI whenever anything changes. That would be a rough guess after working as a UI developer for 20 years.
This might help...Optimizing Viewport
Thank you all, you have been helpful!
I think the original poster was looking for wysiwyg realtime viewport previewing of animated scene items - even if in openGL or wireframe, if it would show an accurate preview of the motions/morphs in any manner.
My suggestion for future readers that animate...
Bottom line: lots of morphs in a figure really bog down the animation preview engines in DS. Note that the DAZ store 'GenX2' morph conversion tool has a little-known feature in the last tab that lets you disable and re-enable active morphs with checkboxes - handy but perhaps not worth the trouble if you have lots of morphs installed with your figure(s).
One option to help remedy this effect during animation work is to use a figure with few(er) morphs:
Create a dedicated content library with just the basic figure (G1 or G8, etc.) and as few morphs as you can get by with to validate your animations as you rework the motions, etc. Kind of a 'draft mode' for the animation.
Use that minimal library/figure for your base animation work by unmounting your full-figure library, then mount the new minimal version and rough out your core animation. This also speeds up puppeteer notably, and reduces the size of the puppeteer layers that are saved.
You can then save these animation sequences as scenes, scene-subsets, or 'pose-presets' that can be applied to your fully-populated figures in your real scenes. If you use aniBlocks, you'll have to save these reduced scenes as full-scenes if you wish to save the aniblocks tracks and layers ('merge these full-scenes into your final scenes later using the DS 'file->merge' menu command).
For your final runs, swap the figure content libs to use your *real* figure's fully populated content library, apply/merge the 'drafts' and finalize your work.
Also, in the timeline 'hamburger menu' in the upper right of the timeline tab, there's a 'play all frames' option toggle that lets you see a 'more realtime' version of your animation, but it happily skips frames to keep up the framerate. When it's set to show all frames, a figure with a lot of active morphs will bog way down, but it will be accurate to the frames.
hope this helps,
--ms
Wow! This one is gold! Thanks a lot!
On the newest version, they hid the command a level deeper - imo it should be front and center on the interface. Is there a way to do this? or hot key it?! Also, pleay stop should be selectable when the viewport is max size and the animation timeline is minimized.
Window>Workspace>Customise shows most of DS's commands on the left. They can have keyboard shortcuts assigned (right-click) or they can be dragged into toolbars or menus in the tabs on the right.