Puppeteering multiple figures: a workaround solution: DazPuppeteerHelper

peter_2762644

In my opinion Puppeteer is a really cool feature for creating animations off the existing possibilities in DAZ-Studio, such as Animate, Keymate, etc. It’s easy to use, intuitive and especially the movements succeed very natural.

Unfortunately, there is a huge disadvantage: It's practically impossible, to animate scenes with more than one figure. If they have to interact with each other (e.g. a dancing couple), their movements must be synchronized. Otherwise, the result is completely useless.

My idea was the following:
1. Carefully pose all figures in all Puppeteer “Points”.
2. Record the first figure as usual in the Puppeteer-Pane and let an application track the mouse-moves.
3. Than let this application repeat the whole movement exactly as done in the step before for the other figures.

This is actually not very difficult. Therefore, I am bit surprised that at least this possibility has never been programmed in DAZ-Studio.
After hours of work, DazPuppeteerHelper does exactly this and it works quite well. 

The program is written in C#, tested on a PC: Windows 10, 64bit, DAZ-Studio 4.9.
Available is only a Windows Version (sorry Mac-Users :-( ).
It has no setup. Simply extract the zip-file in a directory of your choice and run DazPuppeteerHelper.exe.

Maybe someone find it useful, too. Suggestions are welcome :-)

 

ShelLuser

I had this issue myself as well when I started messing with Puppeteer; I missed out on overlays and such (so basically allowing multiple scene entriesd to 'do' things). But then I discovered Animate blocks and resorted to that. So basically I keep on moving 1 character at a time using Puppeteer, but then record the whole thing as an animation. Then I record the second character and edit the animation blocks / timelines accordingly.

It's not perfect but that solution often works for me (do note that don't do much with animation, most of my stuff are still renders).

 

DelanRivals

Much thanks peter much thanks.