Daz studio used for a series of still images
snakegrab
Posts: 11
Is there a way to turn off for a project the animation support in DS. I often use a studio project just to collect a series of shots for story which will be a collection of images but often when I go back to rework a previous frame chages to subseqent images of alter the frame. I understand why this happens but for certain projects I would like to turn this/these features off. Saving serpate projectgs for each shot seems like overkill. Is there a straight forward way to do this?
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That was how I used to work on Poser (10+ years ago) and when I moved to DS, I tried using the same method, but the DS timeline didn't really support that kind of approach and overall the function of the timeline has been going downhill since 4.11/4.12.
One of the side-effects was that the savefiles of the scenes started getting huge (3-4 GB's with over 30 min. loading and saving times) when you had to pin everything in every frame, not to have unintended changes along the way and after I lost a 20-some frame scene due to running out of space while closing a scene and saving it at the same time, I made each frame a scene of it's own. Can not update the figure now for all the scenes at the same time, but...
Does it work the way you want it to if you change the keyframe interpolation type from TCB to Constant?
@Barbult I don't know. I will give that a try and do some experiments. Ideally I would like to just have a button that changes the mode from animation to a story board mode. Per PerttiA's comment it is often very convenient way to mak changes to a charcter if all the images are in one project.
You could submit a help request and ask customer service to submit that as a feature request. There is no assurance that the developers would add that feature, though.
I create animation in image series . This has been my best solution for your question
Under the render settings you can set the render type as either still or current frame render only once. Or you can set it to Image series and then pick your images as needed from the renders
There is a AVI movie setting as well if you want to make a short animation saved as Uncompressed AVI
The timeline does not really have a start/stop render edit button on it. But if you render in image series you can stop the rendering at any time during rendering & chosen point on the timeline you want and then make your changes or what ever as needed & restart or continue the rendering from where you left off you can pick where to start point or stop point for the renders at on the timeline in the render settings
at least thats what I do for my work flow
edited for spelling
@Ivy, the issue is not how to render individual frames, but how to prevent changes in one frame from affecting the object on other frames.
Oooo! ! my mistake.
So it is not really a render issue but rather a timeline issue. I don't do much animation and what I do is very simplistic and yet I find the timeline limited even for my humble purposes. I have noticed times when I wish that I could position something in the scene and not have it affected by changes I make earlier in the timeline but I have no idea how to do this nor how granular the control might be. For example, I might want to "lock" one arm in place but let the interpolation work out for the rest of the body. I'm not even sure whether that makes sense but it is all very nebulous in my mind.
You can bake the scene into a keyframe and then advance 1 keyframe ahead and change your scene and bake that new scene and the only changes that will acur is that of the changes you made from one keyframe to another . there no way to to stop the interpolation between keyframes on the timeline dopesheet though. thats what make animation work in the first place.
prop's & Objs should not move unless you keyframe them to do so. so if you relocate the objs in the scene when you have the timeline scrubber advanced that is where those objs will always move to on the keyframe. with things moving around between key frames changes during the interpolation of sequences.. there no way to stop that on any timeline i know of.
The best I found for preserving characters posistion is save the character movements/pose on the keyframe you want to preserve as a pose preset and use that save pose preset to return the characters back to the original position in order to form a seemless loop in animation cycle.
I am not sure if saving your scene obj would do the same thing preserving. if you save it as a pose preset for the keyframe you want to preserve the prop location for. . But objects usually only move if you keyframe them to .character mesh on the other hand is another story I can only preserve that positioning as a pose preset. that way the same pose can be duplicated on as many keyfraames as needed. that would properly be my work around
Changing the keyframe interpolation from TCB to Constant does prevent tweening interpolation between keyframes in my experience. You need to change keyframe interpolation setting on the keyframe at the beginning of the unkeyframed section, to prevent interpolation on that segment of the timeline. The animation will then stay with the first pose until the second keyframe is reached and then jump instantaneously to the second keyframed pose.
A sample scene file with G8F in various poses with constant interpolation is attached.
You can tell when a keyframe has been set to constant interpolation by looking at the lowest level keyframe. It will have a C on it when it has been set to Constant. (screenshot attached)
I gues your right changing the TCB to (0) would delay interlopation https://wiki.synfig.org/TCB
Nice catch . I learn something new everyday in these forums
Wow! It is a red letter day when I can teach Ivy something about animation! I'm glad I could point out something useful to you.
Haven't had Poser installed since around 2012, so I cant check, but if memory serves, I remember the timeline pinning anything you moved/changed in that frame and the interpolation options allowed that status to stay unchanged until you moved/changed it again and pinning it in that frame, at which point Poser created a linear interpolation between the two pinned status.
The first problem I encountered in DS was that even when moving/changing something in a frame, there was no pin created for it, which meant that changes in later frames changed what had been intentionally done on previous frames, hence the need to pin everything on every keyframe (page of the storybook), which caused the massive increase in filesizes.
Another problem was that I couldn't copy a keyframe and place the copy between the copied keyframe and the previous one if I though the story needed something in between - Left usually three unused frames between the keyframes just in case I needed to add something in between and it was easier to copy one of the keyframes to a 'vacant' slot than start changing all the interpolated values in that 'vacant' slot.
I am not really a "know it all" I just play one on the internet,
LOL, you do a good impersonation. You know a lot about animation, from what I can see.
I would think that it is not desireable to have a jump at each keyframe so I can't imagne an ideal solution. Would some kind of NLA help where different body parts can have independent animation timelines? I think Blender has that but I don't really know much about how it works.
The subject of this discussion, is using the timeline to store a separate scene in each frame, not to do animation at all. A jump at each keyframe is desirable. No keyframe should affect any other keyframe, when used for stoyboarding purpose.
Yes, of course. In that context it makes sense.
Thanks barbult
I gave it a try today your right you do have to change the setting at the begining of the timeline to set the rest of the tcb. . very nifty trick,
I want to add that now that the Environment Options is under the scene tab this trick makes keyframing HDRI rotations for back grounds a snap because you can keyframe the rotation. when setting up story sequances. Oh Boy' is thats going to speed up storyboarding
I wonder if you ever utilizing puppeter for your need . Yes it will need takes more times for saving each element pose but in most cases it help when doing long projects . It also possible to assign thumbnails for each dot for easy visual guides . And you can use layer to save separate informations
Sometimes some elements doesnt need to change in several shots , only camera POV/lens parameter changes . With pupetter you can create all camera shots dot then reuse it everytime you need it . Same tricks you can apply with pose - expression or positions