We need easy proxy characters for animation.
RexRed
Posts: 1,327
We need easy proxy characters for animation.
Wire frame, filament, texture shaded modes are all too sluggish.
I love that Daz characters are of the highest quality, but this makes animation out of reach.
We need to be able to push a button and have our characters instantly substituted with "very" low representations of proxy characters and clothing so animation can be smooth.
Then, right before rendering, change things back.
Decimator and Scene Optimizer do not help much, changing to low-res images does not seem to make animation much faster.
It is like the sluggishness is in Daz itself.
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Comments
Unreal engine 5.4
My Daz characters and their hair look terrible in Unreal. "Unreal"...
These assets are native to Daz... Some assets are only useable in Daz. (i.e. Ultra Scenery and many shaders/materials)
It takes me two hours fussing with Unreal nodes to make a simple marble texture or suitable glass...
And, once you bump up the quality in Unreal you lose your animation ability anyway.
This negates Unreal's usefulness.
A good image generally takes 2000 iterations to make.
There is no reason why Daz can't substitute proxies for characters and scenes and all of this animation be done in Daz.
Then right before render switch back to high resolution models. It would be nice to, with a push of a button/mode be able to toggle to an animation friendly rendition of a scene and back again.
Daz rendering engine and its environment is the best for its own assets in my opinion.
When you hide an asset in a scene, you should be able to hide it to a drive scene folder rather than it remaining resident in the project's data stream and/or video ram. A fully hidden asset should have no processing footprint whatsoever.
Have you tried using naked base character(s) set to Base Resolution?
or hiding the clothes, hair etc as well, I often do that and use smooth shaded view
You could use decimator to make a low resolution vesion of the figure/clothes/props, then rig the figure parts, fit them to their original versions, and use the Visibility settings to make the full items visible in Render but not in preview and the reduced visible in preview but not in render.
I don't think it's an issue with the models resolution or wearing things, though they don't help. I believe it's more a mix between Daz viewport not being very optimized (afaik it is still single threaded) and how morphs work. As far as I know, just having way too many morphs in your library, even if you are not using them, bogs down any animation endeavor in Daz because everytime you do something it basically keyframes if you are using them or not. I'm learning Blender now, sending from Daz full figures with hair, clothes, etc using Diffeomorphic, and posing the figure is fluid.
So, my advice if you are strongly opposed to just not animating in Daz (which is probably the best advice) is to use fully nude figures at base resolution like it has been already mentioned (and by nude I mean everything, including eyelashes, those bog down the character more than you'd think), and if that still doesn't help, reduce the amount of morphs you have by optimizing your library. You probably should separate your library into multiple libraries and when you are animating disable those with morphs not needed for the characters in the scene. Also you could convert your characters into a single morph, save those in one library and only have that library active while animating. Also, make sure you are not using things like automatic shape enhancer morphs while animating, you know, like the ones for better bendings, skin folds, muscles, etc.
I documented some benchmarks of different setups and fps on the viewport:
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/45407/smooth-animation-playback-on-daz-studio-timeline
Agree on the points about the optimization of the viewport and various animation tools (like puppeteer, timeline, etc..), this is long overdue. They need to be multithreaded. It is not just rendering times, users also spend A LOT OF TIME in the viewport. Making this a smoother experience would really make DAZ more popular.
Rex you have touched on the reason people use Daz Studio to begin with. Nothing else comes close to quickly making renders and shaders that look good. However, animating in DS is... horrible.
Personally all of my renders are done around 900 iterations using noise reduction, but I'm not going for photorealism.
Other comments are correct that we need better animation tools in DS. Interpolation between keyframe nodes does not always work or is buggy. A huge headache are phantom curves between keyframes which are impossible to see or edit. We need to be able to see the animation curve and what it is doing on the timeline.
Performance is a problem but it is just one of many when it comes to animating in DS. You have to use third party scripts for anything beyond the most basic movement. Why these tools are not added to DS proper is mind boggling. DS should hire MCasual and Riversoft Art or at least offer to buy their improvements to DS at this point.
Btw if you aren't using these tools, you should be.
Honestly if you're doing a project that requires a lot of animation, Firstbastion is right. You need to work in a program that has proper animation tools. Unreal/Iclone are options. For me I'm doing fake 2D/2.5D so I am going to be rigging everything via spline animation in my next project.
Exactly. DS is probably the best on the market for the things DS does well, but animation is absolutely not one of them. We don't know what DS 5 has in store, but it seems to me that DS would basically have to be rewritten from the ground up to be competitive in animation.
Don't forget Alberto, who's made basically the entire suite of physics options that other programs have that DS does not, as well as particles and booleans.