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Share your Daz animation tips.

RobinsonRobinson Posts: 751
in The Commons

Apart from learning Blender (which would be tip zero in this list), what are your hot tips for animating with Daz?  I've got a few:

 

1. If you copy/paste keys and your entire timeline is now messed up, with characters disappearing or turning into something from a John Carpenter novel, select all the keys, change them to Constant, then change them back to TCB again (if you use different interpolation types on your timeline, unlucky).

2. Same tip works for above if you import an animation and the timeline completely messes up.

3. If you copy-pasta keys and your scene goes black, go to the first frame and change your light colour from black back to whatever it was before (strangely Daz sometimes zeroes out the light colour, even if you're not deleting or moving the zero'th key).

4. If you see keys that look selected and won't deselect themselves and (like me) you're not too sure if this is a graphical or a selection bug, right click in the timeline tree on the left and hit refresh.

5. If you try to delete one or more keys and nothing appears to happen, chances are those keys are actually in Properties under your character, usually Pose Controls.  You have to manually find them in the tree and delete them there.

6. If your PC isn't powered by an aircraft carrier reactor, with Jay's Two Cent cooling solution and you're struggling with performance, take your character hair and clothes off (except for shoes/boots maybe, where floor contact is important), set their mesh resolution to 0.  You might get decent FPS on the timeline.  Hair is a big offender here, mostly due to the vert count.

7. If you want a foot or hand to remain stable, assuming you're not using extreme twists, sides or bends, use MCasual's mcjAutoLimb2015 and mcjKeepOrient to stabilise them.

8. If you want a head/neck to "look at" something, add a null and set the neck (lower) and/or head constraint to the null.  Remember if you delete the null Daz will crash due to the dangling reference, so if you're going to remove it, make sure you remove the constraint first (I think I reported this as a bug a while back...).

9. If you want to make loops including dforce, follow Versluis tutorial on exporting the .objs to blender (with .mdd if you've got aniMate2) and exporting them out of blender as individual frame .objs, which you can then reimport as morphs, or if you're a baller, import the morphs with the animMorph script (on github).  To loop dforce, delete the last five or so morphs and set the last morph values to the first.  It should interpolate from (frame - 5) to (frame) without a noticeable difference but the last frame will match the first perfectly.

 

That's all I can think of for now.  Anybody else?  Share your knowledge

 

Comments

  • RobinsonRobinson Posts: 751

    10. As long as you don't have any intricate movements (and why would you, it's Daz not Maya), it's probably OK to design your animation at 20 or 30fps and upscale it using one of the many AI-based framerate tools.  The one I use is called Flow Frames Framerate Upscaler.  30 to 60 fps, and you've only rendered half the frames you would otherwise have.  15 to 30 also works (15 to 60 is a bit dodgy, so not recommended).

  • rames44rames44 Posts: 332

    Thanks for #9 - looping animations with dForce are problematic that's one approach I hadn't thought of.

  • rames44rames44 Posts: 332

    A related one - if you're going to do a looping animation, go to frame 0, File > Save As > Pose Preset.  Then re-apply that pose preset on BOTH frame 0 and your last frame.  This pretty much guarantees that you have a keyframe on every property at both ends.  In the past, I've had problems when I set a keyframe manually at the end which was the same as the beginning, and then inserted keyframes in between - Daz sometimes seemed to forget the keyframe at one end or the other.  But even if it does, with this approach you can force both ends back to where you wanted them at the end of your work.

  • cridgitcridgit Posts: 1,757
    edited May 2022

    Redacted

    Post edited by cridgit on
  • RobinsonRobinson Posts: 751

    cridgit said:

    Puppeteer is a much easier way of saving/restoring poses without cluttering your drive with temp files. Its one of the most undervalued tools in Studio. It's literally easy as clicking to add a dot.

    You can even record simple animations with Puppeteer.

    Puppeteer is great but needs iterating as it creates a mess of keys on the timeline, mostly where you don't want them.  I put a script in freebies to delete pointless keys which helps a little.  It also needs a way of filtering to make layers actually useful.  I could bore for hours on this, so I'll stop there.

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