What do people here use to animate?
peteanderson1212
Posts: 75
Daz timeline is unintuitive, functions are almost overly complex and not easy within average standards, I want to know what people use to animate complex animations in Daz.
Daz sets 0 example in being a standard for animating literally anything. Inability to do a lot of basic things is utterly ridiculous. Lack of documentation is even worst.
Here I am sitting after wasting hours on it realizing that it can basically do only the least amount of things possible that you could look for in an animation product.
- I can't move keyframes. As extension I can't move an animation across timeline.
- I can't partially set keyframes to modified nodes only albeit to what this post says - [https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/947833/#Comment_947833]
- I can't convert a two-framed animation to multiple keyframes
A sad piece of feature if anything Daz's timeline is.
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Comments
Cascadeur.
it's better than it used to be
they added a lite version of Keymate and Graphmate, before that it was best to not have anything sharp you could gouge your eyes out nearby
Yes you can, but you need to select the actual key(s) first - you can't mouse-down on an unselected key and move it at once, or work on the marker for multiple keys.
I'm not quite sure what you mean, but if you set the Key Craetion Scope to Properties and click the Set key button it will key only the seelcted proeprties. Auto-created keys will also be on the changed properties, not all properties.
You can certainly add frames. Are you wanting to retime, inserting keys? I think that is not possible in the UI, but therea re scripts that will do the job.
It isn't Lite, it is - as far as I know - the full version, with bug fixes and integration.
I animate daily in Daz, begrudgingly because my clients want it, but the only way I can make it work is to animate in Blender or Maya and bring the keyframes back into Daz to apply to the character as it's such a headache in Daz itself. If someone is just standing there talking, I can do arm movements and head movements just fine, but anything that involves the center of gravity can't be done in Daz. But even though I animate in another program, it's still not perfect as there's still feet slippage either way in Daz and it's the most annoying thing ever to have to adjust your framing to accommodate it. I'm hoping Daz 5 fixes it's IK issues so there is no movement when there shouldn't be.
After selecting the keys then what? In the timeline once I select the key(s) and try to drag it just keeps using the marque tool to select the keys. I can't drag them, sorry. Can you elaborate or show a small video/example on how you do that?
Set Key button? I only see a button to create keys not Set Key. I tried using the Properties scope and then clicked on Create Key, nothing happened actually, so I'm unsure what button are you talking about, did I miss something in the timeline?
What I meant was auto-creating of keys within two frames.
For ex. I set a pose A at 0th frame and then a pose B at 10th frame. Now that creates an animation indeed but I can't modify anything in between if I wanted to using the graph editor for fine tuning it. Because the graph editor needs the keys to be there.
Now only if there was something that could auto create the modified keys only throughout a range of the timeline that would have been helpful.
Also, while saving a scene it would have been helpful if I could select the timeline as well - partial saving of timeline doesn't necessarily need to be something of a thing possible only with poses. SO that really sucks ass.
That sounds as if you are not clicking on one of the selected keys. If you want to move files in a browser you need to click on one of th seelcted files, clicking elsewhere clears the selection and drags out a marquee - it's the same here.
Create, not set, was what I meant. Do you have proeprties selected in the dope sheet? You need to tell DS which proerpties to key if you want to be selective.
I am still not following this - you can edit the existing keys interpolation, or you can create new keys. What features are you missing here that other applications have?
While I can see that being able to save only some keys with a scene might well be useful, that is a feature request (which is more likely to be taken seriously if couched in civil terms) rather than a bug or defect. I wouldn't be surprised to find that Casual had a workaround in a script, however.
Pretty wonky. No one mentioned it works with the PROPERTY keys only - yes it shows keys normally on the node but the key is actually made on the properties tab instead of the NODE itself so that was a bit misleading. Using the filtered selection to select the desired keys did the trick, sadly using marque tool only selects the NODE keys if the node is collaped and property is hidden. It wouldn't/doesn't select the key under the actual PROPERTY which is what moves.I'm not quite sure what you mean, but if you set the Key Craetion Scope to Properties and click the Set key button it will key only the seelcted proeprties. Auto-created keys will also be on the changed properties, not all properties
My hip bone and pelvis bones are keyed on the 15th frame, for the PROPERTIES scope to work I had to actually select the individual properties, just clicking the PROPERTIES tab doesn't work. As apparent, clicking the actual NODE doesn't work as well. So, how in the heck would I get auto-keys to affect the modified properties of a NODE.
As in above, my hip and pelvis bones are modified. They are keyed at the 15th frame. I wanted the key creation to creates keys for both of them on the 16th frame, and only these two bones. (for ex, I'm only using two bones here, but imagine if I had a couple more different bones). I selected the properties for hip bone only and tried creating keys, it created keys only for the hip bone not the pelvis.
So, please tell me the process on how to do so. It's selective - but it's the part about the auto-keys to create keys on modified bones - I'm not going to hunt down all the modified bones and select each individual property myself - so how do I create keys for modified bones only.
Even if I can have the auto-keys to work for all modified keys, that's me having to create a key for each individual keyframe one by one. Isn't there any other better way to do this?
Yes, you need to select the actual keys - which is what i said above.
Either
You would currently have to use Create Key in each frame, as far as I know - though that looks eminently scriptable so I would think there is a fair chance casual has a script. Being Create keys over a range certainly seems a reasonable thing to feature-request.
It might also work, if you have the full Animate, to create an AniBlock from the play range and then back it back to keys but I haven't tested that.
well for me it's wonky to say the least
I can in fact sometimes at least copy paste then delete the keys at the top of a hierarchy and other times not even the one at the root, sometimes it won't let me select keys at all
not having linear interpolation as default is probably the single most annoying thing though at least they added it
Animating on DAZ does get very tedious if you need to go back to adjust something - it just is not for that kind of workflow. You either animate straight ahead without looking back and hope it all works out.
I've found that using a combination of puppeteer and limited use of the editing features of timeline (particularly to set ranges), you can get some adjustments in but it is still not the most logical workflow. iclone, motionbuilder, blender, etc etc etc... they already have industry standard animation practices in place.
I would say that DAZ is the easiest animation program to start out with and prototype. Kind of like a broad sword. If you are looking for a swiss army knife, look towards Blender and the like. Without user made scripts to over come much of its shortcomings, DAZ is not a production type animation friendly workflow.
Copy and paste is broken, as far as I can tell, at least to some extent. The issue has been reproted and acknowledged.
Hold on to your hats, ladies and genetlemen.
And get ready to animate in Daz Studio like you've never thought possible!
Dynamic Character Animation in Daz Studio!
Copy and Paste works. I use it many times every day.
There are some little issues, like sometimes a selected key or keys refuse to become deselected, which can cause big problems. An easy solution I've discovered, as I explain in the course as well, is tio simply delete (using the delete key icon, not Delete on keyboard!) and undo that - it will now be deselected without the harm caused by deleting the whole figure by accidentally hitting the Delete key on the keyboard.
Oh man... I remember all of these animation woes and nightmares from just a very short while ago. I put my thinking cap on.
I did at that! Dynamic Character Animation in Daz Studio!
These methods go beyond characters once we use it. Everything just becoem So Much Easier... and we get to know and understand a little bit more about the Magic of Daz Studio at the same time! :)
You'll see, my old friend... my method Completely Changes all of this!!! Forward, backward... work with it until you Love it!
Even better, I enjoy this even more than I did animating my characters in my beloved Carrara!!! I never thought I'd be saying that!!!
In Part 1 of my course, which is a walk through of an entire animation, start-to-finish, I stop along the way early on and go through a really nice segment that makes "Working in the Timeline" a lot easier, more predictable and friendly.
It helps that I made the course while all of these woes were still fresh on my mind.
You'll see. Animating in Daz Studio is really fun and Uber Powerful. The key element that I've been missing all of this time was to think in a Daz Studio centric format. Once I decided to do that, I nailed it. Baby steps at first, making a few mistakes here and there as I was working my way into it, but then it all just made perfect sense, so I started over and my 'soon to be released' video course is the result of how it should be done, without the trial and error mistakes.
You'll see. You're not going to have to deal with a lot of the headaches you've probably come to expect from animation creation. It just makes everything a Lot easier - and like I said... Fun!
While I was animating in Carrara - knowing that it's impossible to animate in Daz Studio, I still used Studio for the wonderful tools it has.
So when I decided to start animating in Daz Studio (because of product compatibility) I ended up using some of what I know about Daz Studio's Magic Tools to help make animating easier.
Success!
Not just easier. a Lot easier. In fact, it's so fast and easy now that I've been taking my animations far beyond anything I've done before in Carrara.
Since I've implemented this workflow, I've been animating every day in Daz Studio. Every time I dream up something for my character to do, I run in and put the animation together - just like that!
That means you didn't bake to FK before exporting, or didn't bake correctly, remember that daz poses are FK so you need to bake IK to FK. Plus now Thomas is working to support hierarchy poses, so you can animate figures with geografts in blender then export the pose preset for daz studio directly from blender.
Then personally I'm not interested to import animations back in daz, I mean blender is so much better to animate and render.
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/issues/1603/
I totally did bake to FK before I exported, I'm following the instructions you've shown me before.
I agree Blender is so much better to animate in, but my clients need these animations rendered out quick and I can't get cycles to render nearly as good quality as I can render in iray in the same amount of time. I can render frames at 1920x1080 in iray in 45 seconds to a minute with the post denoiser on and it's looks perfect with no streaks, but I can't get cycles to render without it looking all water painter-like unless I bake for at least 6 minutes and I've gone through all the youtube videos on how to render out cycles faster, and I can't apply any of that to Daz models. So I'm kind of stuck needing to use Daz to render because the difference is astronomical in terms of rendering. For personal projects, I just let it run as long as it needs to in Blender, but I can't do that when clients want the turn around that they do.
Here's another of those YouTube videos just in case you missed it ... who knows, it might help?
I'm using Unity3d, it's requires a lot of coding but probably the most flexibity and I'm more confirtble coding anyway.
@benniewoodell As for feet sliding, I can't reproduce the issue here but if you believe this is a bug you can open a issue on bitbucket for Thomas to look at. As for cycles vs iray I personally get the exact opposite as you being cycles faster because of the better denoiser so I can use less iterations. You may want to try cuda or optix since cycles can work with both being optix better for new cards.
The texture blurring may be due to your simplify or pixel filter settings: render properties > film > pixel filter. There's also texture interpolation that you can set to linear instead of cubic to maintain crisp details, especially if you reduce textures.
p.s. Then with diffeomorphic you can also use sss instead of volume for skins, that will take some minutes to tweak the sss but then will render much faster especially for closeups or portraits where the skin takes most of the frame. That is, with cycles you can also optimize the shaders having much more flexibility than iray.
p.p.s. Then if you render animations it is most important to set render properties > performance > persistent data, otherwise cycles will reload textures and rebuild buffers for every frame that will save memory but is much slower.
Poser is excellent for animation. Though it does have its quirks. It used to be supported here on DAZ too but im guess they had a disagrement and went their seperate ways.
Ive tried animation in DAZ to help a friend who uses it but what a nightmare. lol
One thing I miss from Poser was that you can enable collision detection when posing. For example, I can move a hand to a prop but it would not 'phase' the hand through the prop or I can pose a foot on the floor and not have it pass through.
In DAZ, there is no such detection, sadly. It worked rather well in Poser back in the early 2000s when I last used it.