Animation path
Jovanni
Posts: 87
in The Commons
I'd like to animate a car chase through the city. I need to lay out the route the car will take. Can anyone advise a plugin or script for this? I understand that the regular means DAZ can not do it
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Daz Studio can animate a car chase, a plane flying, a dragon soaring ...
This should help.
https://www.daz3d.com/car-chase-aniblocks-for-animation-four-wheeler-template
Export your city model to Blender and use annotations to draw the route in 3D space.
I'm not even sure Daz Studio can handle this on a technical level so you may be better off animating and rendering in Blender anyway.
You can create car chases and more with daz studio I do it all the time. Just like everything else in life, it just take s a little patient and a whole oot of learning the curve to use daz studio for animation. ;)
Though I never used car chanse aniblocks they look very interesting. though.
I have some sample I have done over the years with daz studio that have cars in them. All of these are completely created and rendered in daz studio. & the animation was hand keyframed
click to play best viewed in 1080HD
@Ivy All of those were made with 3Delight, I assume?
Iray suffers from floating-point precision loss when models are too far from world origin. You can fix texture problems for a still render by changing Instance Optimization to Memory, but I don't know if that works for animation. Furthermore, there comes a point where the precision loss starts to affect the vertex coordinates, and changing Instance Optimization can't fix that. If OP plans to put models in a city environment several kilometers away from world origin, the meshes will visibly degrade.
Blender also has this issue, but since it uses meters instead of centimeters as its default unit it's much less of a problem.
The street race was rendered in 3delight the rest the animations i posted were all rendered with Iray :) I put in my film description if it was made in 3delight iray or firefly :)
The ony issues with the street race animation I had was I forgot to shut off the perimeters limits of the wheels turning which give me bad results of the wheels turning ina few scenes . but that was my fault not the daz studio programs fault.
I learned with daz studio and especially when working with iray. you can pr- render backgrounds and then reuse them for the back ground scenery on a bill board or pane or make them in to HDRi in Photoshop for the animation , in this process it reduce resources used on the gpu for iray, & greatly speeds up render times. I can get as fast as 12 second a keyframe. that is about 10 minutes of rendering for 300 keyframes of images. or 10 seconds of animations . in a 3 minute film it could take you weeks to render other wise. the bouse is that you can use older poser and 3dmax models sets in iray as a pre-rendered backgrounds on a pane without causing bad texture effects in iray using older 3delight & firefly models . Besides its not hard to convert 3dl mats to iray. Also using hdr 's you can greatly reduce foot slip in animation by setting your HDR floor level. using perimeters and Ik-chains just like in blender. This process I use also speeds up rendering time by 10x, plus use's a heck of a lot less computer resources so you can biuld massive scenes with details , This in turn this process gives you much better results when rendering with iray, then direct model placements in the scene. its all like putting a puzzel together. this would be true for any 3d program. Its a Disney old school way of doing 3d animations before they went to Ai rendering .
Yes you may need to spend a little time in pre production set up doing your pre-render back grounds or environments before the finely animated scene is to be rendered But that is why you work from a story board.
The time saved in rendering and the results you get are worth it. and HDR's are very easy to make in Photoshop. Pretty clever huh?!
Thanks for watching :)
edited for spelling sorry I am very dyslexic
Except that the OP said they want to "lay out the route the car will take", implying they want to do it as one continuous animation on a single city model. So your techniques don't really help.
Yes it does if you know what your doing...lol
you first lay out your srteets like you were going to render them directly. then, pre render them, then set up to animate within the scale of the back ground images, set your floor levels and go to animating. Dreamlights Movie maker programs works similar. and he animates cars. its the way of creating detailed animation with iray. I have a cheat prop set for free if you wanna give it a try your self
my weekend recreation video that was all done with bill boards and or HDR's using older Nerds 3dl sets I have pre rendered first. give it a try you might surprise yourself. the ground where i made the mud tracks was just a pane I added deformers to and then ran deforce whn the truck passed over the pane. simple solutions really if you know what your doing
https://sharecg.com/v/92902/gallery/21/DAZ-Studio/Ivys-Magic-Pane-prop
If you work from story boards & animation scripts you know what your scene needs to look like for your prop placements and you can pre render the back grounds to match. make sure you set your floor levels to get proper shadow alignment and the results will look the same as direct model placement. only time this metord does not work is if you need a moving background like a warterfall and a lot of times you can get around that using texture animator scripts on a pane. which I use a lot panes for moving god rays and light shadows that move on walls
Everything depends on pre production set up, nothing hard about it, I have been doing it for years I think my animations speak for themselves.
This is a example of bill board and HDR back ground in use for large scale animation I did other wise i would still be rendering thisn animation if i had used direct model placement.
This video is completely created in and rendered with Daz studio with Iray with 2 gtx 1080 ti's tooks me about a week from start to finsh 90% of the films back grounds are pre rendered HDR
click to play ~ Best viewed in 1080HD
You just have to know what your doing. which just comes with time.
After watching that convoluted workflow, I stand by my original statement that a complicated, realtime car chase animation is not technically feasible in Daz Studio with Iray.
Returning to the topic at hand...
If the OP exports their city model to Blender, they can use topdown view to get a bird's eye view of the streets The annotation system will let them draw, like using a marker, atop the 3D view to block out their car chase scene freehand.
Ok good luck with that
I don't need luck, I have Blender:
Police Chase Scene in Blender - YouTube
nice examples? is that your video?
Just something I found on Youtube while searching for "Blender car chase". It highlights several things Daz/Iray lacks including motion blur, procedural camera shake, and the ability to handle large environments without any rendering issues.
animation paths are awesome, I use them in Carrara, iClone and Twinmotion all the time
I can sometimes export them as Dazcollada from Carrara for DAZ studio
I believe Casual might have a script to do them in D|S though but I never looked into it not being much of a D|S user.
You know that Gaku Yajima is a graphic artist/photographer? I followed that dude around for a while on twitter he is smart he creates and uses Hdri's for his background in his 3D projects, he not really a animator either. He has some free hdrI he offers free on his site https://www.gakuyajima.com/index.php/hdri/
he has some good insight into making a car chase animations on his video site you should watch it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cziVXxcNfls Its the basicly same technquie as I use. just a different software. Nice find
That is one of the things I like about the walkit tool it created a path for the walk cycle animation you place the foot steps where you want them the characters follows the path
Yes, I think I saw that script too. But I don't remember it for sure.
Maybe I should study animating the car in blender. Hopefully I will be able to export the animation back to daz3d. Because, I'm not ready to learn how to work with materials and light in blender yet.
Thanks guys for your tips
You won't be able to bring the animation back into Daz really, or if it is possible it's going to be just as difficult as animating it in Daz itself. If you use the Diffeomorphic tool, all the materials will transfer over and be virtually comparable to iray. If you set up the hdri you want, that transfers over as well. If you have lights you want to use in Daz, set them up and when you transfer the scene, they will show up in blender but won't be emissive. But you can either set an emissive texture to them or simply put point or spotlights in the exact places they are so all there's really no learning curve for blender.
There is a learning curve in, say, using a modifier on an F-Curve to create handheld camera shake. But that's the price we pay for having an advanced animation program at our disposal.
As BennieWoodell said, materials transfer over with Diffeomorphic almost flawlessly, and when there is a flaw the Diffeo dev is active in the Blender subforum. As for lights, they're pretty much the same as Daz Studio with different units. You set the strength in Watts and the size in meters, but otherwise they're basically identical.
Oh, just to clarify, when I said there's really no learning curve, I was referring to the comment before that said "Because, I'm not ready to learn how to work with materials and light in blender yet." Sorry if that was confusing, I was just trying to make the point that if the person did not want to try Blender because of the materials and lights aspect, that shouldn't stop them as it's laid out pretty much for them already through Diffeomorphic. But you're absolutely right, there is a learning curve to actually work with paths and such, but the amount of time spent learning that is time well spent I'd say.
I see Bryce even does them
http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/artzone/pub/software/bryce/reference/om_createpath
odd how it was never implemented in DAZ studio, I looked but cannot find a script by Casual to do it
hand keying you are fighting with bezier curves, it drives me nuts but at least there are other interpolation options in DAZ studio now
and hand keying is apparently what you are stuck with
I know Ivy does it, she is very patient
the OP was asking if animation paths existed though sometimes called spline paths because a lot of other software does have them and it is an extremely useful tool
one can even make busses follow rollercoaster tracks in some softwares
and traffic
.What I found makes hand keying things like that a bit easier. Is I first mark on the timeline how fast and long I want my motion to be then I try to make the car rout go as close as I can that I want the car to follow, It will look terrible at first...lol
But!! Then using graph-mate, I bend the car animations track to custom refine the curves using the graph editor to make the car do what you want like a slide sideway or sharp twist around the corner. Daz has that capability with the graph editor I just use graphmate because I am use to it . it does take a well rigged car to hand keyframe in daz other wise it looks kind of cartoonish. it helps if you render in image series because you can go back and redo any frames that did not come out right before final edit in to a mp4. I'm just a hobby person mostly so I don't need production value as some people would . I do the best I can with what little i know
Hey Ivy, quick question for you here. I noticed you said Daz has the capability with the graph editor but then you say you use graphmate instead...Daz has an actual graph editor? Like where I can take the handles of the keys and move the splines to adjust the curve? I'm learning how to use a graph editor in my class in Animation Mentor right now with Maya and when I went into Daz to see if I could recreate stuff all I found was graphmate and there's no handles to move, just the tension, continuity, and bias options at the bottom which I couldn't wrap my head around. If you know where I can find the actual graph editor, please let me know as it would be so very much appreciated to have that capability :)
You know how Daz Studio has those obnoxiously inconvenient, nigh-unnoticeable handles you can click to expand or collapse windows vertically?
Put your timeline into Advanced View (via the Hamburger icon) and look for that tiny little black rectangle at the bottom.
along the daz middle of the timeline there is a tab you can click that separates the keyframe(keymate)editor from the graph editor, its not easy to find but youwill have to feel around and you find it I found no clear way to open it
I hope this screen grab helps
Oh! Lol wow, I can't believe I never noticed that before. Thank you so much
The reason I said preferred graphmate over the daz graph editor is because i can undock graphmate move it to another monitor and I can full open the Daz keyframe editor to access all the properties in the properties panel at the same time and work with graphmate fully open at the same time. during a animation.cycle
I've never found away to undock the daz graph editor from the daz timeline so you can work with them both fully open at the same time , so for that reason i prefer the graphmate editor,. Keymate and the Daz Timeline editor are basically the same dopesheet.
Gotcha, whatever works! I had graphmate from a few years ago for like five bucks when it was on sale but never figured it out, and then when I tried to use it the other week and do the assignment I had a second time in Daz just to see how it would look, I couldn't figure graphmate out. Like anything though, I'm sure once you know how it works and how to make it work for you, it works like a charm. Having that second monitor setup is always nice as well when you can have everything spaced out.
Hmm How the best way I explain the graph editor ?
The Graph editor is really an addition to the timeline, it allows you to edit the timeline keyframes vertically instead of horizontally as the keyframe editor does. This makes the graph editor very useful for bending & cleaning up the motion on timeline dopeshheet as you move along the timeline you can effect the motions by bending the upper or lower bars on the animation. A simple example would be like if you animated a ball being thrown .. when you drag the ball prop from point A to point B on the timeline you will get a just straight line. you can bend that motion with the graph editor to give the ball a arch to the movement.making the animation appear more natural
Daz has a tut on the graph editor
I hope that helps :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7B7I5I_C0n8