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This is a common argument. What many people are failing to consider is that whether one can animate in Daz Studio is orthogonal to whether one should. If you were capable of producing such a nice animation with Daz Studio, I can only imagine what you could have done with Maya, and how much faster you could have done it.
People are arguing based on their fondness for Daz Studio and their personal comfort zone, perhaps not appreciating or at least not putting into practice that any software that you keep using will eventually become your new comfort zone. I still have not heard of a person highly competent in both Daz Studio and, say, Maya, use the term "good" when referring to Daz Studio. Someone like the OP, who is deciding on where to devote their precious time, should really take note of that.
Come on guys, are we really going to say that Daz Studio is in any way comparable to Maya, Motionbuilder, Blender, or even iClone for animation? I can't grok why this is even a topic.
Gotta admit, though, that animation was nicely done.
Yet another cogent example that really should have ended this question, but somehow won't.
Well said, @padone.
If you are not making any money, but just doing it for your own enjoyment, not many has thousands to invest in commercial programs that may or may not suit the way you do things - Anybody remember Kai Krause Interfaces?
Out of the ones you mentioned, only Blender is free and the interface is not the friendliest either.
It's a topic because DAZ Studio isn't that terrible for animating as you think.
I did that animation you defined "nicely done" only with DAZ Studio's tools, no ready to use BHVs or AniBlocs... So those tools aren't that bad after all. 
Of course a 3000$ dollars software got way better animation tools, nobody says otherwise. Blender is exceptional too but it's so hard to use that it need a school course just for learing how to set the interface (which gets remixed at every third-party blend file you load, dear God!).
It's not matter of "affection" but matter of facts. If I can make a "nice" 3 mins lenght animation in few days with DAZ Studio it means its tools are good enough for that.
And of course those tools needs some improvements and fixes, but still they are good for animating.
nobody disputes that, your animation is nice and so are Ivy's it's just much easier and faster to do elsewhere, even I if so inclined could do hour long iClone or Unreal animations each day on my rig, I just lack the creativity to do so.
I do render lots of boring Walk arounds and fly arounds with YouTube music lately up to an hour long that I put on the alt Dreaming Kitty channel nobody watches
but not claiming any creativity or originality there, it's just animated wallpaper people can play while doing other things.
Not exactly ASMR more music with moving images rather than someone's stolen artwork with dust particles like many do.
something like this renders very fast in Unreal Engine 4
Sorry about sounding like such a noob, but where do we get the Diffeomorphic plugin and which application makes use of it? I looked on the link you provided and some of the other pages, but I can't figure out what it is that I'm supposed to download or where I'm supposed to use it.
Click the header "Daz Importer Version 1.6". It has a link to the Dropbox and instructions on installing it on Daz Studio and Blender.
See what I mean? Everyone also proficient in other softwares understands this.
1. Things you do for enjoyment should be just that. Perhaps you consider rote fiddling with key frames instead of implementing your artistic vision at a higher level enjoyable?
2. Maya Indie is $289 per year and is the same as the studio version. Not sure where you got "many thousands"... maybe after 10 years.
3. Sometimes someone else's way is better and what you'll gain in return for the investment of your time to learn software that liberates your creativity by removing barriers is worth it tenfold.
4. It doesn't happen right away, but when you've accomplished a few things that would have been extremely difficult or impossible in DS but were accomplished easily in Blender after just stopping and thinking about how to do it for a moment, you'll realize that The Blender devs are thoughtful, intelligent people and the UI isn't that hard after all, but rather is consistent and makes sense.
Your results are a testament to you, not to Daz Studio.
Blender is free, and Maya in $289 per year for the vast majority of people.
Blender is not hard to use. But you do have to sit down and learn it, just like any other worthwhile endeavor in life. Once you do, you'll see that it is incredibly powerful and well thought out.
You say that about Daz Studio not because it is some universal truism, but only because that is the software you sat down to learn to animate with. It may seem like it is quicker, but it is also a fact that there will always be a crossover point where the better tool's advantage will more than pay for the time it took to learn it, no matter how long it takes to learn it. That's just a property of linear equations.
I just find it worthwhile to pause the actual endeavor to learn how to use the best tools available to benefit me in that endeavor. It's still a hobby for me, but I still want tools that enable my imagination instead of making it more difficult to express it.
I am still waiting for the person who is proficient at both to refer to Daz Studio as "good at animation". What I've heard so far is "good enough for my modest endeavors", or "I'm really good at Daz Studio, even with all its bugs". Either position can be justified, I suppose, but let us try to remember that the OP has apparently not yet invested the time to learn either yet, and their question was whether or not they should. I think in this context, the answer is clearly "no".
People have preferences and priorities. Let's not turn this into a persecution of the heretics, please.
Just FYI.
when you open somone elses Blender file using "File>open",
you can choose to ignore his UI setup and Blender will use your default
Nice to know, thanks. I'm using Blender only for texture painting lately, I used it a lot in the past (when I was trying to learn it...) so I don't know everything.
@ Richard
Creating a flame here is the last thing I want. My goal is to make clear that DAZ Studio isn't that bad at animating, it just need some more learning compared to other softwares.
I find unfair that any new user interested in animating in DAZ Studio gets scared away so fiercely.
Just send them to me I'll teach them how to do.
It is not just the OP. A lot of us who are, perhaps, familiar with DAZ Studio and have been using it for years are not familiar with animation would like to know the best route forward. I've had difficulties getting scenes into Blender although Diffeomorphic continues to improve. Essentially, I would want the figures with their clothes, geografts and shells, etc., to work as they do in DAZ Studio but I think we are a little way short of that right now. For a start, the clothes don't have dForce in Blender and, by all accounts, the Blender cloth sim needs work.I've said all this before but suffice to say that I am much more comfortable maniplulating DAZ content in DAZ Studio than in Blender.
And that is the whole point for me. It is why I don't even try to export to Blender to animate althouigh I know the animation tools are more advanced in Blender. While it is true that Blender has a ton of tutorials out there for free, there is not much by way of using DAZ content. The new tutorials from Krys Kringle look excellent but we need more. In the meantime, there's also not much to help budding animators in DAZ Studio so, even now, I'm not sure what it is capable of. The huge show-stopper for me is the way that body parts just twich and move around when I use the DAZ timeline. I have to spend a long time trying to tweak them back to the right position using the Graphmate and Keymate but it just shouldn't happen in the first place.
So, for me, neither is a happy place for the novice animator.
Great Job @Imago
Great Job Wendy. I always love your stuff ... Its always so orignal
Well dforce support was added some time ago now, may be you missed it. As for the blender cloth sim needing work I agree, but it's the same with dforce. Both can be used nicely once you get to "tame" them.
https://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/2021/04/dforce-simulations.html
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/issues/410/better-dforce
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/issues/506/add-jiggles-for-hair-breast
Thanks!
Thanks @Padone - you are correct, I had not read about the dForce import addition.
It looks to me like it uses the Blender cloth sim modified by interpreted dForce parameters from the import - is that how it works? So it is using the Blender cloth sim (of course - what else?).
Hey guys,
Thanks a lot for all the great feedback and tips, I really appreciate it.
I think the replies sum up my initial thought (and reason) why I put "can/should" in the title.
I realize that's a broad question, because yes, of course you can animate.
Can you do it as easily and quickly as with other software, and with the same level of quality...that seems to be a different matter entirely.
And I mean no disrespect to the Daz animatiors in here, but I have to agree with @wolf359 on this, based on what I've seen and experienced myself.
I hope that Daz will improve on this in the future, as it would be great to have all-in-one solution.
Until then, I'll definitely give these suggestions a try, both within Daz and outside of it, to see if it helps.
Thanks again!
I want to be optimistic the terrible IK/animation workflow is due to their outdated Qt framework, and it'll be fixed when Daz Studio 5.0 comes out. But Daz3D don't tell us anything about their roadmap, so I will continue to steer clear of it until I see some official communication the problem has been addressed.
I'm trying to be optimistic too. I hope DAZ people will give us animators a bit more stuff to work with.
This is just my opinion on using daz studio for animation.. I have truly only seen a handful of people that truly animate films for revenue. There are plenty of demo artist & teachers & wanna be amateur animators, but not many actually producers animators artist so to speak. I suspect maybe because it really take a studio full of people to really produce 3d animated films for high end production. Not something many of us here at daz forums have access too.
I've been using daz studio for animation for about 12 years. and Yes you can animate with daz studio very well. its not easy. But no animation software really is . its the learning curve that gets me,. IMO Daz Studio give me pretty good results for what I am using it for. which is 3d animations.
The reason know one has seen any new animations from me lately, is because the last couple of months I have been making and selling 3D Adult Animations on a number of 3d adult sites. which I am not allowed post here unfortunately.. & yes I use just daz studio for my adult animation, with dforce & spring dynamics for soft body physics & dynamic hair movements & I am getting great results, other wise I would not be staying so busy,. I figured that over the years and the amount I have invested in daz 3d content and time learning how to use it creatively in animation.. it was about time to put my skills to good use & stop talking about it.
I have seen people brag about making animations using this High-end 3d app or that low-end 3d software. that does not pay them any more than what I was making posting YouTube videos. So for me really if after the amount of time I have been creating animation & all am doing is posting YouTube videos & getting criticized for my efforts because they were daz. thats just crazy. I never understood what does it matter if someone is using daz studio for their method to create animation?. how does that make using daz studio a bad choice if its working for them?
All I was making is animation for YouTube. it was fun for a while until the trolls started having more fun than I did. & rarely sold rendered story animation as a product, I have made and sold 100's of animated presets and animated prebuilt scenes over the years. but not many finished rendered animation. & like most people I was not making any money from my animation work or 3d asset investments. so daz studio worked great for my needs when it came to animation,. no $30+ bucks a month cloud app fees..
Then I got pulled into the adult animations business. It started out innocently enough just making animated presets and few scenes and now I am up to making full 15 minute adult3d films using ?!! Yup you guessed it just daz studio & it has turned into loads of fun & I make pretty good money doing it for my efforts. with some pretty good feed back for my efforts. Its seems this is where my nitch is.
BTW, Sex sells , there is a huge market for Adult3d animated content. it been keeping me very busy the last couple of months, It maybe not a course in my art career I had planned on taking . But the money is to good & steady to pass up & daz studio fits this adult 3d market the best for me with ready made content and 12 plus years experience in animating with daz studio.Add poser pro, GOz & a Bridge to Blender to use for corrects in some of my complex animated frames. its a good combinations for animation.
The big take away with any animation using daz studio is it takes some old school animation skills The one frame at a time method for keyframe editing,.. mostly because the timeline is so old school. Add in tons and tons of patients and a bunch of Hardware modifications to render Iray & you can make animations and make money all day long using daz studio. Anyone that says you can't don't know what they are talking about...
First, @Ivy, congrats on finally making some money from your efforts. Adult animations ... why not? I would not be surprised to learn that the number one use for DAZ Studio and its content is of the adult nature.
Anyhow, to animations in DAZ Studio. I have never produced anything more complicated than simple animated loops because I couldn't be bothered to wait for days to render a few hundred frames. Now that I have a better GPU (RTX 3090, no less) I am tempted to be more adventurous but I am a little stuck. I have tried using the pinning tools but I can't get them to behave. Either IK or Active Pose seem to easily reach the point where feet and arms start moving wildly and past that point all sorts of contortions happen.
I know that I can keyframe each motion without using the pins but I have a hard time placing the foot that has moved - after a pose change - back on the spot where is was in the previous frame(s). That's why I wanted the pinning to work. I just wonder how you deal with that as I know you must have to deal with the same issues.
congrats on your success ivy
not my thing but certainly the most popular use of DAZ content for image renderers too so I am not surprised you are doing well.
The most used software for CG animated adult films is the source filmmaker followed by blender.
If there is any type of animation where IK is vital, it is that genre.
Trust me a G8 figure converted to rigify in blender, (via Diffeo)
is perfect for this "purpose"
..and BTW @Ivy is right( no surprise).
There are many animators ,in the Source filmaker Community
(producing in the adult genre), who are making thousands per month just from Patreon support, and one of the most popular sub genres are
Films featuring Characters from popular video game franchises like
Blizzards "Overwatch"
That is why I had mentioned you really have to have some old school film & animating skills to use daz studio. Because I am not saying someone should not try or use other types of 3d apps for animations. I'm just saying you can animate with daz studio. each app has its place. If your looking to make a Disney film then daz studio is properly not going to be your first choice for software. and you will properly need a huge studio of people to help you. But to make a 1080p HD adult 3D animated film!? then. Daz is prefect for a sigle artist to produce films. It maybe even better than using Autodesk or Unity for cost effectiveness for not having to buy a app subscriptions & having ready use out of the box daz iray assets that can be used over and over. Daz Studio as far as I am concerned was made for the adult animation industry,...
Thanks Wendy , it was something i kind of fell into . I agree daz girlies do make for some nice porn stars