Animation Help- Turning off Daz auto pose changes?

sunnyjei

Hello all! Trying out Daz animation tools but running into a few issues. Trying to animate a leg lift, kick and turn. Daz does a great job of creating basic movements between the initial pose at frame 0 and the final pose at frame 20. However when I go back and hand tweak each frame in between Daz also goes behind me and tweaks too T_T. Is there any way to get Daz to help with the initial movement between the frames and then get it to stop editing it after so I can make final adjustments it doesn't touch?

benniewoodell

If your issue is what I think it is, it's one of the huge problems with Daz only having three splines, TCB, linear, and constant. I'm learning how to animate in Maya right now and there's more spline options that enable you to have better control at the in-betweens, as well as a graph editor that actually works well to adjust the splines. In Daz, what you're going to have to do, lets say you want the leg on the ground at frame 0, up in the air at frame 15 and you want it to hold in that position for seven frames until frame 22 and then come back down on frame 30. Probably not what your animation looks like but hopefully this example will make sense. What you're going to want to do is copy the keyframe on frame 15 and paste it to frame 16, and take the keyframe from frame 22 and paste that onto frame 21. Now highlight frames 16 and 21 and change the spline from TCB to linear and Daz won't move the leg in those frames, but it will keep the ease in and out from the motion up to frame 15 and after frame 22. Granted, that's not what you're going to want to do with the leg in the air as you want that nice settling arc at the top which Daz would give nicely from the TCB spline, but anytime you want to hold a limb in one place, you have to copy the keyframes you want held and turn the pasted keys into linear. It's a ridiculous method that no other program would have you do, but it works. I hope stuff like this gets an overhaul when Daz 5 comes out. 

I hope that makes sense. And if that wasn't your issue, I'm sorry. 

Richard Haseltine

I'm not sure what you mean, but Daz Studio will interpolate - by default smoothly using TCB interpolation - in frames between keys for each property; you can either add more keys to pin it down or use the Timeline tools to edit the interpolation type/values.

sunnyjei

Thanks :) Benniewoodelll that seems like good info for smoothing the transition speed so I'll keep that in mind. My issue is simplier (maybe?). I have these three poses. Daz does a good job of creating inbetween inital poses. So I create the poses at frame 0, frame 30, and frame 45 and Daz fills in the rest.

After Daz fills in the 'empty' frames between my poses I want Daz to stop changing frames 0-45. I want those frames to be locked to Daz's own manipulations so when I make changes to what Daz did Daz doesn't make other changes. Is there a way to tell Daz to stop interpolating? Also is there a way to clear the timeline without losing my characters morphs? (everytime I hit 'clear figure' my dialed in character's shape goes back to the initial character shape it was before dialing in changes.) Thanks!

benniewoodell

I see what you mean. The only way that Daz, or any program really, would stop redoing the in-betweens for keyframes would be if you went in and selected all the limbs and set a key at every single frame, but that would take forever as sometimes it takes up to a minute to click set keyframe for me when I have a character selected. But if there's a keyframe set to every frame, Daz wouldn't be able to change what's there, but then you're also kind of blocked from making changes to other limbs unless you went in and deleted those specific keyframes for, say, the arm that you want moved. 

There might be a quicker workaround than keying every single frame but it involves aniblocks and my knowledge of that is even worse than bare bones. But in theory, you could create an aniblock from your 45 frames, and then in the aniblock timeline bake those to studio keyframes and then back in the timeline, there'd be a keyframe set on every frame. Maybe someone who knows how to create an aniblock can chime in and help, but I know when I bake to studio keyframes from an aniblock walk, there's a keyframe on every frame for every limb. 

And as for clearing the figure, just click clear figure pose or zero figure pose. It took me a long time to figure that one out, I used to have the same issue as you are right now. Just make sure you click the pose option and you'll be good! 

sunnyjei

Thank you. I got animate2 but still trying to figure it out too. I will try baking the animation back into the timeline to get it to animate each keyframe and see if my edits stay or get changed again- so far I have this. It isn't smooth yet-like at all, but towards the end where the foot dips is where I want to fix it and not have Daz 'fix' it back. This is pre-aniblock/animate2 fixes will edit after to see if I could get it to work.

https://youtube.com/shorts/wNkVdAM-5pk?feature=share

 

benniewoodell

Hmm, looking at what you're doing, you could try going to the halfway point between the two keys and pose the foot with with the toe flexed to be on the ground, or the toe touching the ground as much as it can, that might work better than keying everything and going that route. It would force the interpolation to at least go in that motion and it might not dip under the ground plane. It's definitely a good start! 

sunnyjei

I took your idea of making a keyframe for each edit in the hopes Daz wouldn't change it. It looks like that works as long as I don't add more frames at the end with another pose- then Daz went back and made changes. So my next attempt will be to create aniblocks of pose 1 to pose 2 then another block of pose 2 to pose 3 and build from there and hope Daz doesn't change it too much- or maybe just render out the poses that work and put them all together at the end in Davinci. Thanks for all the help! Slightly better edit :)