Keyframing & Animating in Daz is a slog - is there a better way?

bigbadzone

Was having issues loading and rendering with Daz on my GTX 1080 / 4790K system with 32GB RAM, so I upgraded to an RTX 4090 / AMD 7950X / 128GB RAM.

Daz sucks to pose with the timeline. I must be doing something wrong.

I have tried changing rendering settings to make things load faster. These are on scenes with 1-3 G8 figures. The characters aren't wearing any clothing, accessories, hair or geomorphs to make it easier to animate. The scene where the render takes place uses minimal props to establish the scene. Each figure uses about ~40 morphs, out of ~300 total.

Moving joints with these characters can take up to ten seconds just to get the joint to respond.

When I try to keyframe animations, Daz freezes up. When I look at my task manager while this is happening, Daz3D reads "Not Responding."

My CPU usage is at 8%. My GPU usage is at 18%. It hangs in this state for every single keyframe.

What's going on? Is there a way I can use more of my CPU or GPU to animate these keyframes? I clearly have the memory and the processing power.

Gordig

bigbadzone said:

Daz sucks to pose with the timeline. I must be doing something wrong.

It's not just you; DS is poorly optimized for animation.

I have tried changing rendering settings to make things load faster.

Render settings only affect rendering, not how fast things load or pose. 

These are on scenes with 1-3 G8 figures. The characters aren't wearing any clothing, accessories, hair or geomorphs to make it easier to animate. The scene where the render takes place uses minimal props to establish the scene. Each figure uses about ~40 morphs, out of ~300 total.

The trick is that posing activates hidden morphs called JCMs, or joint-controlled morphs, when you bend a limb. And morphs are the issue here: it's having the 300 morphs, not so much the number of morphs you're using on a given character, that causes long load times. You could cut down on your loading and posing time by creating a separate runtime that only has the base G8 character, and possibly not even the JCMs, or using Turbo Loader to do the same thing. That way you can load and pose your characters quickly, then copy the animation over to your fully morphed and accessorized characters for the render. I'd also recommend animating in Cascadeur instead of DS.

My CPU usage is at 8%. My GPU usage is at 18%. It hangs in this state for every single keyframe.

What's going on? Is there a way I can use more of my CPU or GPU to animate these keyframes? I clearly have the memory and the processing power.

Just to be clear, are you animating in Iray preview? That's a terrible idea even if you work out all the other kinks.

TheMysteryIsThePoint

The better way is to use an actual animation package to do... animation. In my opinion, DAZ is a superior character creation platform, the best generally available, but it is simply terrible at animation. No one who has used a proper animation package would dispute that.

If I can give anyone advice, it would be to consider: If you're serious about animation as a "serious hobby" or better, take the time to learn the proper tools. Some compete with DAZ Studio, so I won't list them; I'm sure you know what they are. The point is not to try to animate in DAZ Studio; it is not a viable animation environment for anything but the least ambitious projects.

WendyLuvsCatz

make sure they all are base resolution too

I work in the unshaded view on bald naked figures also

(even if I just hide the hairs and clothing)

you can also set the rest to visible in render but not visible in viewport likewise the subdivision level in render can differ 

bigbadzone

 

These are on scenes with 1-3 G8 figures. The characters aren't wearing any clothing, accessories, hair or geomorphs to make it easier to animate. The scene where the render takes place uses minimal props to establish the scene. Each figure uses about ~40 morphs, out of ~300 total.

The trick is that posing activates hidden morphs called JCMs, or joint-controlled morphs, when you bend a limb. And morphs are the issue here: it's having the 300 morphs, not so much the number of morphs you're using on a given character, that causes long load times. You could cut down on your loading and posing time by creating a separate runtime that only has the base G8 character, and possibly not even the JCMs, or using Turbo Loader to do the same thing. That way you can load and pose your characters quickly, then copy the animation over to your fully morphed and accessorized characters for the render. I'd also recommend animating in Cascadeur instead of DS.

 I like this recommendation. Do you know how well/if geomorphs/geografts translate to Cascadeur? I know geografts can be a bit of a headache in blender and UE5 in my past experience.

Just to be clear, are you animating in Iray preview? That's a terrible idea even if you work out all the other kinks.

Oh god no, viewport/texture shaded only. To be fair, iray only takes a second or two on top of loading time for posing. Posing is just a nightmare, part of the only reason I do it in Daz is to have access to the posing presets.

bigbadzone

WendyLuvsCatz said:

make sure they all are base resolution too

I work in the unshaded view on bald naked figures also

(even if I just hide the hairs and clothing)

you can also set the rest to visible in render but not visible in viewport likewise the subdivision level in render can differ 

Absolutely hate posing them bald but yeah, the response time to hiding hair may be about 1fps faster imo. I always have subd level set to base

bigbadzone

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

The better way is to use an actual animation package to do... animation. In my opinion, DAZ is a superior character creation platform, the best generally available, but it is simply terrible at animation. No one who has used a proper animation package would dispute that.

If I can give anyone advice, it would be to consider: If you're serious about animation as a "serious hobby" or better, take the time to learn the proper tools. Some compete with DAZ Studio, so I won't list them; I'm sure you know what they are. The point is not to try to animate in DAZ Studio; it is not a viable animation environment for anything but the least ambitious projects.

I'm not even animating. I'm using the timeline to do multiple poses on one file and be able to scrub through them to pick the best shot for a render. Once I get to two or three frames Daz freezes up.

One of the most disappointing things is that Daz is using bare minimum CPU usage, rarely peaking beyond 12% - even when posing on one single frame, which is really disappointing optimization wise. I always thought it was my machine that wasn't powerful enough--hard lesson to learn that Daz isn't built to scale to hardware. Daz doesn't even really feel that much faster on my machine, despite the huge increase in processing power, RAM and VRAM. Only iRay is where I'm seeing a meaningful difference in ray tracing.

WendyLuvsCatz

use the opposite settings to these  except performance 

they are the ones on my Filament Render machine not my iray one

(which is busy rendering )

 

Saxa -- SD

Have for example 10xG8s in test scene with morphed geografts, hair-clothing, not base res and 200 frames. Though base-res recco is a good one. Search forums and you'll find script. Think was technical forums.
And have an obscene amount of morphs for anyone making scenes.  That will get reduced to bare bones visible to DS later.
300 morphs? Did you enable show hidden in parameters to see other JCMs etc also active?

My PC specs are similar to yours.
Animation is single threaded for all software.  
So that heavy hitter CPU is only using one core.  So fastest CPU is still best in 2023 for animation. Eyeroll bigtime.
RAM amount is good, but ram speed is the most important for anims.
GPU has zero bearing on anim manip - unless it bottlenecks - which higher end GPUs don't generally do.

Click IK bone in filament and drag.
Takes about 5 seconds holding the mouse dray button the whole time and then bone posing moves normal speed.
However there is a moment with all these chars&morphs where up top at DS menubar says 'not repsonding'. Happens at about second 3-4.
While still holding down mouse button drag a smidge. Non response disappears and now easily move.

Moving anims out of DS means the whole game of export, are all bones there, all morphs, geografts working render appearance for mats change.  
And learn new software.

Feels hilarious to say in 2023, anim-users are still limited to single-thread for anims and moving assets around to get them fully recognized is still a lifestyle time-wise.

Also, wendy's screengrab is one of they key parts.  Play with that. That and draw style pane.

Gordig

bigbadzone said:

 

These are on scenes with 1-3 G8 figures. The characters aren't wearing any clothing, accessories, hair or geomorphs to make it easier to animate. The scene where the render takes place uses minimal props to establish the scene. Each figure uses about ~40 morphs, out of ~300 total.

The trick is that posing activates hidden morphs called JCMs, or joint-controlled morphs, when you bend a limb. And morphs are the issue here: it's having the 300 morphs, not so much the number of morphs you're using on a given character, that causes long load times. You could cut down on your loading and posing time by creating a separate runtime that only has the base G8 character, and possibly not even the JCMs, or using Turbo Loader to do the same thing. That way you can load and pose your characters quickly, then copy the animation over to your fully morphed and accessorized characters for the render. I'd also recommend animating in Cascadeur instead of DS.

 I like this recommendation. Do you know how well/if geomorphs/geografts translate to Cascadeur? I know geografts can be a bit of a headache in blender and UE5 in my past experience.

Haven't tried yet, although I'll definitely need to for the project I've been gearing up to work on.

bigbadzone

WendyLuvsCatz said:

use the opposite settings to these  except performance 

they are the ones on my Filament Render machine not my iray one

(which is busy rendering )

 

I saw a noticeable improvement from these settings, thanks Wendy.

bigbadzone

Saxa -- SD said:

Have for example 10xG8s in test scene with morphed geografts, hair-clothing, not base res and 200 frames. Though base-res recco is a good one. Search forums and you'll find script. Think was technical forums.
And have an obscene amount of morphs for anyone making scenes.  That will get reduced to bare bones visible to DS later.
300 morphs? Did you enable show hidden in parameters to see other JCMs etc also active?

My PC specs are similar to yours.
Animation is single threaded for all software.  
So that heavy hitter CPU is only using one core.  So fastest CPU is still best in 2023 for animation. Eyeroll bigtime.
RAM amount is good, but ram speed is the most important for anims.
GPU has zero bearing on anim manip - unless it bottlenecks - which higher end GPUs don't generally do.

Click IK bone in filament and drag.
Takes about 5 seconds holding the mouse dray button the whole time and then bone posing moves normal speed.
However there is a moment with all these chars&morphs where up top at DS menubar says 'not repsonding'. Happens at about second 3-4.
While still holding down mouse button drag a smidge. Non response disappears and now easily move.

Moving anims out of DS means the whole game of export, are all bones there, all morphs, geografts working render appearance for mats change.  
And learn new software.

Feels hilarious to say in 2023, anim-users are still limited to single-thread for anims and moving assets around to get them fully recognized is still a lifestyle time-wise.

Also, wendy's screengrab is one of they key parts.  Play with that. That and draw style pane.

Found the script. Noticed my 5 second loading when moving a limb is down to 2 or 3 now, and turning the cam in the viewport is closer to 20fps versus its previous 5 fps slog.

Definitely considering using animation software for the rest of this project, but not really sure what my next best steps should be.