Animation Tools - Any Preferences?
Gemini Queen
Posts: 263
My skills with making Daz stills is getting better, so I'm looking into buyiung some of the tutorials here for better lighting and portrait shots. However, I'd also like to start working on my animation skills again, and found this product in my never ending wishlist -
https://www.daz3d.com/movie-maker-ds-4-6-edition
I saw the Youtube videos on it, and it looks nice, but also for an older version of Daz possibly? It does say that it's compatible with Daz 4.15, but I figured I might as well ask to see what programs other people use that are either here or on another site.
Ps. I also really just wanted some feedback on people who've bought this and actually like it/have some thoughts on their experience with it.
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If you plan on doing key frame character animation, get yourself a copy of Richard Williams' The Animator's Survival Kit" - a book teaching you about how motion works.
Softtware is just a tool.
Animation is knowing how to move stuff. And about how living creatures move.
The difference between interpolation between good poses, or interpolation between bad poses. (And you will need ease out and ease in in your interpolations, unless you want things to move mechanically.)
(I used to be a professional pencil animator, and also did some 3D animation in Maya. Unless you use motion captured files - which is basically using animation someone else animated and editing that together - you need to know about the principles of animation. That are independent of the software you ues.)
All depends on what is your goal or what you would like to achieve as an animator. It makes a huge difference whether you would like to make Genesis dance like a puppy with an aniMate Block or to understand how motion works.
Sempie did put it in a nutshell and I can recommend his approach. Animation is knowing how to move stuff and professional pencil animators know what they are talking about and are one of the best resources to teach you in my view, the same is true for caricatures, if you want to learn caricatures you should learn from professional cartoonists or caricaturists, e.g. a good caricature must be instantly recognizable as the subject regardless of the exaggeration the artist applies to the subject's features, The Mad Art of Caricature (Book) from Tom Richmonds, the same is true for animations.
Software can never replace talents and skills, but to come back to your question, I own the Movie Maker DS 4.6 Edition, but it's just a tool to do some sort of very limited fake animations with a background picture, but the creator of Movie Maker himself (Dreamlight) has very good tutorials and skills to teach you and how you can achieve some sort of good looking animations with minimum effort and I can recommend his tutorials too before you consider to buy MovieMaker, since this is a very rudimentary tool to do some kind of fake movies and shouldn't be your first source to get better and serious animation skills.
By the way, I will definitive buy the book recommondation from Sempie as we all know we never stop learning and refreshing existing knowledge. Ok, maybe this was a little too much of just pure theory and not really what you were looking for as an answer, I don't know really.
Don't try to animate in Daz Studio, beyond the simplest things. Invest your time in learning how to get your content into Blender or Maya, or some other tool used by people who do the type of animation that you want to do. Seriously, don't try to animate in Daz Studio. It's the best character creation platform there is, but it is an unqualified terrible at animation, beyond primitive.
Press for specifics anyone who tries to tell you differently, and how ridiculous their assertions are will quickly become apparent. 100% of them will make an argument based on knowing Daz Studio and not a proper animation package that has tools to do in seconds what Daz Studio would require hours to accomplish, and suck the joy of the whole endeavor right out of you.
Do not try and animate in Daz Studio.
Use Blender instead. It has proper IK, which is essential for walking or interacting with the environment. IK in Daz, on the other hand, always snaps back to the position of a limb, which is... no. Just, no. It doesn't matter too much for static poses, but with interpolated ketframes...? Absolutely not.
While Daz studio 4.15 is abysmal at animation, and superior for character creation, my hope is that Daz turns studio 5 into a true animation and character creation powerhouse, but even then if you're siht at animation there's nothing any 3D program can ever do for you!
Yeah, I hope Studio 5 actually makes Daz a viable option for animation as I love rendering in iray. I animate in both Daz and Blender, but I would do it 100% of the time in Blender if I were able to. I know Diffeo has the capability to animate in Blender and bring it back, but I can't get the simple IK rig to export no matter how many times I follow not only the instructions from Thomas on the blog, but also the bug fix post that Padone had done and laid out what he did and what the other person commented they did to work. I have no clue what step I'm missing but something isn't there in the outlines lol. I can get the MHX to transfer back, but the IK doesn't fully transfer back to FK and so I'm stuck if I ever need to show anything below the waist.
Anyhoo, there's ways to make the Daz animation timeline work decent and close to what any other program does, but TheMysteryIsThePoint is spot on about taking hours to do what Blender can do in seconds. I did a short for the Movember contest and I wanted the character to simply step up onto a ledge. Took me a few hours and you'd see in the final film that the best I could get it had the feet were still slippin' and sliding all over the place. Just to test it out if it was my skills or Daz, I ported the character into Blender and did the exact same movement and had it absolutely perfect in less than five minutes. Sadly the shoe materials didn't transfer over and I had already wasted far too much time in Daz on the animation that I literally had no time to figure out how to get the shoe materials to show up and had to use the sloppy Daz animation.
So yeah, if you're just starting out, don't learn Daz as it is, learn animation in Blender. I started learning over four years ago before there was a viable way to import characters into Blender, so I learned animation in Daz so I've picked up all these tricks to make it quicker along the way so it's not the end of the world for me with most things, but I'd never recommend anyone animating in Daz until they fix it as the frustrations can get high.
As for advice on animation, reference, reference, reference. Record yourself doing whatever you want or find video of someone doing it and plot out your keyframes when the poses change, screenshot those moments and slap them onto a plane behind the character and pose your character in front of it to get the poses perfect and just count the frames in the video in-between to get proper spacing. You don't need to buy anything, just use reference!
Came across this tutorial the other day and it illustrates a nifty looking product worth trying.
https://www.daz3d.com/spring-dynamics-for-daz-studio
If you absolutely need to animate in Daz, there is an mcjCasual script for IK that's pretty useful. It's not the best solution, since it's one-and-done -- i.e. you press a button and the limb snaps to the position of an IK handle, rather than actively tracking the handle while you're posing -- but it's probably the best you can do until Daz updates its animation features.
Beware, if you character is walking, you will probably need to use it to keyframe the feet on every single frame, thus defeating the purpose of interpolated animation.
Sure a lot of daz studio animation Nay Sayers here ( shakes head)
You can animate very well in daz studio. I do it everyday, even commissioned animation. It just takes knowing the daz software to make your image series and what can be done with the timeline to make your image series move correctly .Then what you can not accomplished in daz studio such as partical effects, you can port over to a software that can do physics or particles etc. like blender or after-effects. Does daz have issues with some of the animations creations tool? of course. But name a software that does not have its quirks. Most high end animations software have such a steep learning curves it takes a 4 years college course to understand them.
I do recommend what @Sempie advised and get Richard Williams' The Animator's Survival Kit" https://www.amazon.com/Animators-Survival-Kit-Richard-Williams/dp/0571202284 it will be a valuable resource for the how too's & the tip and tricks for animation no matter the animation software you decide to use. I fall back to The Animator's Survival Kit quiet often.
For my own work flow, I use a mix of software resources for my animations. Daz studio 4.12 , Poser11 &12 & Blender 2.8 though i hear 2.9 has improved the UI,
The main thing in creating animation is how you create the the PNG images series and how you film edit those images into animations. so any 3d image creation tool will do animation even Photoshop. hence why keyframe rates are important. Think old timey page flip style animations Disney use to do back in the 50's the concept has not changed any just the apps that make the images that you turn into animations have improved. 24 kfps make a more choppy animations while a 30kfps tend to make a lot smoother animations.
I also recommend on getting a good film editor, one that is easy to work with. and allows for multiple videos & audio tracks I recommend adobe premier pro . But hitFlim express pro will do the job just as well at a more affordable price. your film editor will become your main editing tool for putting those images together to make your animations no matter what software app you decide to use to create the images. so choose wisely. The windows movie maker is very limited & does not save in HD.
Good luck
edited for spelling sorry i am very dyslexic
There is so much to creating a animated film that I want to add to my comment above to clarify a few things
First that the notion that having a broken IK system in the app is not workable for animation is a fallacy. I have worked for years without a FK/IK solutions for daz. Though it would be nice to have a working hard surface pinning solution for creation of cycle character animation, & I have complained myself of the broken Ik solutions character interaction on the daz timeline. its still not really necessary to accomplish making an animation with daz. If you create animation in image series instead of trying to save as a MP4 or AVI video you can edit, cut,paste, remove replace or even add to images in a image series in the film editor timeline to make changes to a scene. So where you may need a fk/ik interaction solution with the characters, you can simple make the changes in the images series during rendering and don't bother with the fk/ik chains at all. My experiences has been its actually much faster creating animation in image series this way, which allows for post image editing in your choice of image editor i use Photoshop but there is gimp and Printshop as well. its almost impossible & very limiting to do post work to mp4 or avi rendered video
The reason I use PNG's images instead of JPG is for the transparency of the image, so I can add in mask or contrast image or even overlays in the film editor. to add to a animated scene. I found image series makes tracking for fx much easier. I much rather work with image series in After effects than avi or mp4.
But I hear peoples say this to me about every day. Oh you need to use this or that app to make animation. that daz sucks that you need to use something else & don't bother using daz studio..That such and such app is so much better. I say Ha! its just not true . Daz renders images in series just like Maya, c4d or vue & blender. What is true is how good you are or not at making your image series & putting your images together in a film editor. Indeed some 3d apps render faster than others . But do not all give the same results as iray so there is that. Also with the cloud autodesk app you have a basic render engine thats is horrid.. So Autodesk suggest you to buy or rent a Ray type render engine as a add on. But the good thing here is you can use about any render engine using the autodesk API tool. just depend how much you want to shell out.
I seen some of the worst animations ever made by people using Unity, Maya & Blender and yet I have watched some very well made animations done with just anime studio, & claymation & hand drawings. So the "you need to use this app over that one" is a big bunch of crap. Unless your a talentless hack. looking for the easy lazy way of creating animation then you may want a drop and drag animation tool like steam has. which any 4 or 5 year old can use.
The biggest reason large animation production studios use high end software is not because this one is better than that one . Its because they have teams of people ( think thousands of people) all working on one project to make a seem less running film . So they need software that has conformity that the team members can all interact with at the same time. with common file shares, that will connect to adjoining servers , whether they are a concept artist, Illustrator or a animator, you'll find that large studios use the high end software like autodesk suite or Unity for the conformity giving them the ability for the team members to be able to all be on the same page when making animations. Could you imagine Pixar trying to use daz studio which has no cloud access portals or allows for live content & scene sharing within the studio app, so other team members can share work files effortlessly . What a mess that would be having to email every scene file to each team member. grief. . But as a single operator artist/ animator , you can work with daz efficiently as blender with ready made content to make your image series for animations.
Also I want to mention that cloud Iray rendering has been opening up for daz studio and is growing everyday for large rendering project needs https://rentrender.com/iray-render-farms/ even a dedicated daz iray render farm is available https://irendering.net/why-choose-irender-service-for-daz-studio/ & https://irendering.net/ So its really all about how much time effort and investment you want to put into your animation.
For the record Disney uses a proprietary software and render farm to create their images series and use 1000's of people & artist to do post work edits for add in like special effects into the scenes during the editing so they can be put together for a final animation product. their render farm services take up huge warehouses with 1000's of computers. none of which a average daz users will have.
So you see there is a whole lot more to making animation than this app is better than another. you have to know what your productions needs are and go accordingly .
The real questions should be, Does daz studio have a timeline to create character motion for your image series. the answer is Yes. & does daz studio render in image series? again the answer is Yes!
Everything else is up to you and your talents as a artist no matter the app you choose.
But that is my 2 cent with the 12 plus years experiences i have in animation with daz studio. So take it for what you think its worth.
Ivy, this is a problem I spent two hours this morning trying to fix. I have the hands placed in a specific spot and a key frame at the end frame and at the spot where I need it to begin moving again, it should not move between those two keys because they're holding a box on a counter. Once I set a key frame for the pose after the second key, the hands move in and out during that entire section where it's keyed to be in the same place and a proper IK would not do that. I had to do a shot for a client a couple weeks ago where two people had to pick up a wheelchair and it was overhead so I couldn't hide the feet. Not once did a set a key frame for their feet to move and yet in the 40 frames of the lift, they glided everywhere and I had IK enabled, so I had to go and place a plane underneath the feet that was the exact width and length and go frame by frame and make sure it fit perfect and I spent like three hours on it. That wouldn't happen in Blender or Maya with their rigs. I've sent video footage to Daz showing these issues too, I'm not just complaining here on the forums, I'm pointing this stuff out to them. Of course no responses but that's besides the point.
If the shots allow you to hide the pitfalls, Daz is great (which I ended up moving the camera this morning on the box shot because I just didn't want to spend anymore time fixing things that shouldn't need to be fixed) but if you can't then you spend so much time doing unnecessary tweaks.
And I want Daz to fix this because I love the program and want to use it, I don't want to make it sound like I hate Daz, I don't, its just when you're spending ten hours a day animating in Daz and six of those is to fix issues from the program that shouldn't need to be fixed, you get annoyed really quick.
Hi Bennie yea those solutions can be a real pain. even doing them by hand But you can try this trick instead it will save you time I promise.
Make your animations as usual and for every keyframe where your hands need interaction with the wheel chair stop the rendering on that keyframe make the corrections or changes as required and resume rending which you can do while rendering in image series. this way you cut out the need for the IK interaction you fix the movement problem by correcting the problem area that is on that one keyframe and your running film will appear seamless once you put it together in the film editor . you may need to stop the render a few times to make the adjustments as needed but once you put the image series together in a film editor it will appear seamless I did this trick for a man picking up a basket of vegetables in my latest film it worked seamless and in a film where one of my characters had to take off a hat in another film i used this solution for ratty mouse to climb a dynamic cloth & to interact with another characters hand, as so to toss them in a fight seen. I learned to do this when i made my horse the eagle and the snake animation for the interaction between the egle and the snake.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9hvlwmLL_g
Other wise there is a work around for the daz broke daz ik-chain. & you can try to use the daz Ik-chain. for what you require by creating a null or empty primitive for each location on wheel chair & where the hands land on the wheel chair and one for each of the characters hands . and then add your ik-chains to each null or primitive and one for each hand as you move along the timeline and need interaction you can pin or unpinn to connect the ik-chains together using primitives seems to fix the broken interaction of pining and unpinning the ikchain. on the timeline please do not ask me why i have no idea. but the ik-chains interact with the primitives bettetr than with each other. but make sure you parent the ikchains primitives to make them adjustable
Plus as a added bonus you can adjust the primitives if need to center the location of the interaction for the ik-chain as you move along the timeline keeping the hand in the right place by move the primitive instead of the hand or ik-chain Its rather time consuming setting it up but its works pretty well Its a work around i watched on one of the blender videos on youtube and i just applied it daz studio and it seem to work fairly well though it is time consuming setting it up so i would only use it for animations using interactiosn longer than 300 keyframes
This kind of response was foreseeable. Respectfully, it is terrible advice and does not reflect reality.
IK, say, in Blender is extremely simple to set up, and it works. It is little more than selecting the bone you want as a controller, parenting it to the bone you want to control, and indicating the chain length. You might want to set up a pole to help the IK solver do what you want it to.
Pinning is just a constraint like any other and is as straightforward to set up as IK.
Hey Ivy, I'll try the method you talk about with stopping and starting, but that seems like even more work. I'm working for a company right now where I'm rendering like a thousand frames a day, and that's overwhelming to think of stopping after each frame to adjust, but I'll give anything the old college try.
And I did actually do the null object thing you're talking about with the wheelchair as I had seen some video about two guys shaking hands or something using IK and a null object like that and I had hoped it would work, but when the hip moved, the legs went dancing with no key frames when they should have stayed put. And the personal project I'm doing right now with the box is for a five minute or under short film contest from the Secret Movie Club in LA that's ending on Monday, I'm so behind and down to the wire because my mom was hospitalized and had emergency surgery right after the contest started so I lost ten days (which I'm in no way shape or form complaining as her health is far more important than any of this, but now that she's home and fine I'm in a mad rush to finish this by Monday's deadline) and though I wanted to do this in Blender as I knew I'd run into these kind of issues, the hair I wanted the character to have was taking six minutes to render in Blender where I'm able to get it down to about a minute in Iray so I stuck with Daz for the faster renders. I do need to figure out why my 3090 isn't killing Cycles like it is Iray.
But I'll give that tip you mentioned above a try and see how it goes! Have a great weekend.
Good luck Bennie let me know if tyou need any help
Good post I found the link for it https://sites.google.com/site/mcasualsdazscripts6/mcjautolimb2015
I keep forgetting about Jacques scripts . does that script still work in daz 4.15? I do not have it installed in my 4.12 but i going to give it a try and see
Thanks I going to give it a try tonight for a tree climb scene
These ~500 words could save you years of your precious life-energy.
Before getting all triggered, I'm seriously *not* discounting the value of DS. Nor does the original quote above if you actually *read* the words that have been written by @TMitP.
DS wasn't, and I maintain, is not designed or marketed as a full-featured animation tool. It is a still-image generation tool, much like Marvelous Designer is for clothing. Both do a job, and both include animation capabilities relevant to their respective purposes. DS has a fairly complete set of animation features (aniblocks, dforce, etc.) that are useful in adding dynamic posture, clothing, hair, and similar elements to an artist's still images.
That said, a simple comparison of the Reallusion/Iclone website and the DAZ Studio website will make it starkly clear how different these product suites are, and how distinct their target audiences really are, regardless the perceived overlap.
Both have a relevant place in the marketplace, but to treat DS as a feature-complete animation tool is not based on any available evidence, and actual use confirms its admitted shortfalls. Yet it's still useful.
That said, using the animation tools in DS to generate brilliant still images and even 5 to 15 second animation snippits is great, a lot of fun, and often results in some great learning and brilliant results (see the DAZ still-image gallery!).
Using DS as the core tool for any extended animation projects is probably not the best choice when starting out, as even the most basic animation project management facilities are not available in the tool, as that's not it's purpose. Even graphic novelists would run into this problem, and it could be easily argued that DS was designed for that audience. The biggest animation successes (and there are a few) that come out of the DS eco-sphere are testimonials to the cleverness and tenacity of artists, not the DS tools.
FWIW, I do not believe anyone at DAZ Inc. would dispute my point or find cause to, even if some DS users will.
Besides the content on their website, just take a look at the animation-related updates in the DS S/W development release notes (v4.12 not-withstanding), the removal of the 'Animation' main forum topic a while back, the investment in data export and product packaging technologies by DAZ, and the lack of animation support in their online art gallery if you believe actual behavior is a useful analysis tool. There's no deception going on here.
I've rendered 10s-of-thousands of animation frames on DS and am actively rendering sequences on two DS 4.11 machines right now.
While I'm migrating my own workflows and content from DS to Blender/iClone, (using the DAZ-developed utilities), I have no dislike for the platform and will continue to leverage its strengths moving forward. I'm simply *very* aware of its animation shortcomings, I'm keen to observe and appreciate the actual behavior and words of the company, and I appreciate what their target audience is, and what it is not. All subject to change without notice.
YMMV,
--ms
*sigh* I really need to sign up at the @mindsong school of communication. Well put, sir.
sorry Gemini Queen,
I got caught up in the 'animation in DS' theme out of habit I suppose. Passionate opinions abound.
To your *real* question...
Movie Maker for DS 4.6 seems to load and generally 'do things' in the current 4.15.0.14 Pub Build Beta, so I imagine it works in any/all previous builds.
Note that the tool's worlds (backgrounds/lights, etc. are configured for 3DL, but I bet with some tweaks and surface/bill-board conversions it could be made to be IRAY-happy.
There were tutorials on making your own worlds for Movie-Maker, so that might also be useful if you can find them.
Dreamlight is also selling newer 'Movie Maker Iray' sets that don't need the plugin, but rather have Iray HDRIs and lots of pre-config'd cameras to accomplish the same thing with IRAY. Not as many pre-fab sets (yet?).
best,
--ms
(and thanks for the compliment, TMitP!)
FWIW, I just loaded/tried my Movie Maker 4.6 in the 4.15.0.14 latest public build, and the DLL loads and seems to operate as expected relative to my casual navigation and click-click-click exploration.
I have no idea how to do anything in it, but casual navigation and "what does this button do?" all seems to work.
Props to Dreamlight and DAZ devs/api if this old plugin still works fine from end-to-end!
YMMV,
--ms