Is animate2 faster than the daz timeline?

James

Is animate faster than the daz timeline to work on?

Are they connected?

crosswind

aniMate plugin was developed by another company. It uses aniBlock(s), well an aniBlock is just a block, with no keyframe, properties, etc., so it's faster than Daz Timeline though they're not really 'comparable', and aniMate is with much less functionality for sure.

aniBlocks could be baked to the timeline and vice versa.

Dartanbeck

In the timeline I go to the right side little hamburger menu and make sure to check "Play All Frames", which makes the timeline play back slower than aniMate, which can playback in realtime if you don't load the character up with hair and stuff. It also previews aniBlocks when hovered over - something we don't get with animated pose files. 

 

aniMate is really nice in that we can blend and also mix animation data using those blocks before then sending it all to the timeline.

Even more, we can speed up or slow down the action, give it high heels or remove the high heel angle of data that already has it, reverse it, swap left to right....

(these are all Very Short videos)

Foot plant between two animations

The blocks are Non-Linear Animation data containers. I've never used the free version of aniMate, having bought aniMate when I first started, but we can open up the blocks and edit the keyframes within.

And the aniMate functions on the top of its timeline will also let us layer own our key frames over the existing data, and blend how the change comes and goes within the block - which is a really nice function to have.

Without even opening a block, however, aniMate tools also allow us to view any joint of the figure's skeleton as a path. Each key frame of data has a point on the path that we can move around with a mouse, altering how the motion goes.

 

So when I have animated pose files other than aniBlocks, I load those onto the figure and create an aniBlock and save it. Work through the rest of the animated poses so they're all saved as aniBlocks as well. Now I can preview the motions before applying them, combine them, like putting an idle before, during, or after a walk, and also make partial aniBlock for only some of the figure's joints - like writing only the arms of an agry animation so we can add those arm motions to a walk, or any other motion. It becomes a powerful workflow. 

 

During this whole process, we're baking the data to Daz Studio's timeline. For one example - making a partial of those angry arms - we'd load the Angry animation and, if necessary bake it to the timeline where we'll select the keys for the joints we want for the partial, copy, clear the whole animation, paste, go back to aniMate and "Create aniBlock from Studio's Timeline" > Right-click the block > Save as New

 

Some things, like dForce simulations for example, don't "See" the effect of aniMate. That's when it's necessary to bake to the timeline. To put control back into aniMate, just re-enable the track in aniMate. 

I'm always (Always!!!) going back and forth between them.

 

There's a bunch of those useful little aniMate videos