3rd party software to animate on DAZ3D?
James
Posts: 1,044
Trying to animate on daz3d, but it's to slow.
Almost impossible to scrub to see.
Anyone who has experience on daz3d animation, do you use any 3d party software?
Post edited by James on
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So many things to say about this. Firstly, if you're animating in Daz do it without clothes and hair on the figures (you can keep shoes, especially heels if your character has them). Secondly, make sure you reduce mesh resolution to zero. You can bring it all back when you're done with animating.
Second thing to say is do your future self a huge favour. Learn how to use Diffeomorphic's Daz to Blender exporter (it will take some effort) and learn to do animation and rendering in Blender. When it comes to animation, Blender is superior to Daz in every way. Blender's Cycles is as good as iRay. Daz is great for characterising, clothing and accessories of course.
another option is Unreal Engine, still free but may not remain so for movie creators only game developers according to a talk by Tim Sweeney
(Epic losing money)
a dear option is Reallusion iClone
DDI + Blender. Powerful and free.
you can render in Filament but it doesn't look anywhere near as good
Do you mean to base resolution?
If not, how to zero resolution?
What is DDI, google doesn't seem to know what it is.
Unreal engine?
Fuhh... that's a tough one. I tried play with it once. They say it's so powerful.
To me it's so confusing.
DDI - Diffeomorphic Daz Importer, a must-to-have AddOn for exporting Daz assets to Blender.
Yes, the base resolution.
Okay, I've installed DDI.
Export a character to blender
NOw how to pose it?
I'm in pose mode, select a bone, rotate, the body not posing.
Many bones not selectable either.
No big difference in terms of manipulating poses... usually there're a couple of ways:
1) Pose mode, select the bone, R key to rotate on different axis
2) Rigify, e.g. rigging with MHX addons
3) Load Pose Presets (Import Pose) from DS
4) Load Animation Preset or Animated Range on Timline (Import Action) from DS...
Then furthur manipulate your animation on the timeline.. There're quite a lot of DDI tutorials in here - https://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/
Does DDI also export the corrective morphs?
Can I import the animation back to daz3d again later?
Yes, almost everything but also on demand. There's Morphs option - Import JCMs as Shape Keys that enable auto-correction.
Yes, you can import animation back to DS, via Posing - Save Pose Presets with Use Action option.
When I came from animating in Carrara (which Rocks for animation) I was a bit stumped at first, but I've created some cool workflow techniques that allow me to stay in Daz Studio to animate, get great animations with a really nice, comfortable flow to working. Even better, staying in Daz Studio allows me to stay completely compatible with all of the Daz products, which I really like.
Paul, at Digital Art Live made it possible for me to share the workflow in a nice, streamlined manner.
Here's my course at Daz 3d
I use the paid version of aniMate 2, which adds a Lot more functionality than the free version that comes with Studio, then I bake my results to the timeline and 'finish' the animation, which is often a Lot different than the original motion capture. So I created a way to do that without having to fumble around in the graph editor. I'll still use the graph editor if I have to, but that's usually either very rare, or something incredibly simple and fast.
Some of the biggest parts of the animation process that really slowed me down was in Studio's timeline. So in the first part, during a walk-through of me animating a full sequence start-to-finish, I stop at those horrible moments in the timeline and demonstrate how I make it simple and fast, instead of slow and cumbersome - headachy.
Here's the animation reel I made using the methods demonstrated in the course. The second video is the Intro to the Course.
Paul liked my crazy commercial announcer guy voice, so I made a little promo for the course - the third video.
I can't recommend Cascadeur highly enough.
Strictly speaking, Cascadeur is a physics-assisted animation tool rather than an end-to-end animation solution. If cost is the 2nd priority, Daz + Cascadeur + Blender could be a good combo... but still depending on what kind of animation you wanna make.
I have yet to find any software that'll export animation back to Daz "correctly", which is why I suggest using Daz to characterise and then staying in Blender for rendering too.
BVH and FBX 6.1 (I think it is) both import really nice into Daz Studio in my experience. I even wrote Reisormocap and thanked for the addition of the actual BVH. Worked like a charm for figures that were out of the mainly supported figure range of the product. FBX 6 from Mixamo came in like a charm using Genesis 2 FBX from Studio. Import the resulting FBX and save as a Genesis 2 Pose duf. Then apply the Genesis 2 Bone Minion to the figure I'm using and... voila freaking Awesome!!!
Then I always like to create a new aniBlock for the figure I used the Bone Minion on so I can work with it in aniMate if I want to. I always want to.
aniMate... tweak in aniMate... Bake to Timeline
Using the custom control dials we make in the course, (advanced "MorphForms, for a quick explanation) I correct any misgivings with the joints - this is most often the arms and hands.
In most situations, I'm altering the position and rotations of the arms and their parts without distrubing any of the original motion capture data - still sitting safely in the timeline as key frames, and the aniBlock is still in place, but disabled for timeline editing.
I think of it as if I'm using the graph editor, except instead of having to work out transitions in the graph (common practice for many folks is to delete several key frames), I'm just changing values on doals and selecting the best interpolation tweaner. All non destructive, otherwise works very much like graph editing - but using dials, and very fast (no having to delete key frames - unless we want to)
Fast. Fun. Effective.
Adding LimbStick to the equation along with Body2Hip (essential for Mixamo imports, as their character translation is on the body, not the hip) is total icing on the cake! just a gif, but still cool
DDI can if you've ever tried. Not for rendering in DS but it just can...
I didn't suggest otherwise. It is a 3rd-party tool to create animations for DS, which is what the OP asked for.
I'm always doubtful about exporting from DAZ Studio but then I know very little about animating in other software. My doubts surround clothing and geografts. Clothing content from DAZ is designed for dForce and, although other software has cloth simulation I'm unable to find examples of clothed characters exported and animated/simulated elsewhere. Most of the examples I've seen have been wearing tight fitting clothing which does not need cloth simulation (quite often I see poke through during the animation though). As for geografts which often come with their associated geometry shells, I have no idea how to approach that. I think that the above-mentioned DDI can import geografts into Blender but I don't know how successfully (including morphs, rigging, etc?).
Blender animation is a pretty difficult learning curve at the outset, then there's learning how to pose, perhaps simulate cloth and hair, adjust materials and lighting. That's a lot of learning and probably why people put up with the vastly inferior DAZ timeline.
Every article of clothing here is from Daz, and simulated in Houdini:
sadly I lost all these Unreal Projects along with heaps of other stuff with a 4TB drive that died, but one of many with a DAZ character ThirdPerson Player running around in realtime with Apex Cloth
Exporting to Blender, Unreal Engine or IClone:
Do exported geografts and geoshells work in other software?
I think that's beyond the last version you showed me, Gordig... looks good.
Hi Wendy, what's your opinion of Apex Cloth?
are a few issues as relies on collision objects and different surfaces are not welded but once collision etc caculated it works in realtime
Dforce using the actual mesh for collision is obviously more accurate but also overkill IMO
I have not used it or Unreal Engine for quite a while sadly due to hardware issues that occured before I lost that drive, my C drive also stopped booting and I had to get a new one and Windows reinstalled
leading up to that I was having problems already
Sorry to hear about your HW problems. You're stuff is always inspiring... you've got your fingers in so many 3D pies :)
thanks
I have been naughty lately and doing lots of Ai
but I aso have been filling the largest drive I have left chockablock with DAZ PA sale and now DAZ+ bargains, those lightning deals especially kill me, all those little >90% off purchases add up
have been trying to render some each day too
But to me, that's part of the problem that I, as a hobbyist, faces. I'm just someone who tinkers with animation from time to time but so far we have had Blender, Unreal, iClone, Cascadeur and now Houdini put forward as solutions. Then there's the various bridges to take scenes or figures from DAZ Studio to 3rd Party software - if they exist and if they work for "extras" such as geografts and even clothing. I'm not a professional and I don't have the resouces of a studio nor the unlimited time to learn half-a-dozen applications just so that I can animate a character sitting down on a park bench or getting into a vehicle. Indeed, if I were such a professional I would probably do everything in one of those sophisticated applications but that's a daydream - in reality I don't have a clue what a procedural workflow even means.
It is a pity that GoFigure (the people who developed Animate) went out of business because I don't think that DAZ has taken the good start they made and done anything worthwhile with it.
...and Houdini is vastly beyond my home studio budget. Yikes! If I claimed to be a qualifying student, I'd be lying. To go that route, I'd want the full version.
I use dForce for most cloth dynamic and Rosie and Dart's hair (and some others), and VWD Cloth & Hair for some other cloth and all of Rosie's (and others) soft-body physics. Works great!
3DS Max, Modo, Maya, Houdini... all well out of my financial reach.