Digital Art Zone

Hi everyone does anybody know if you can use aniblocks on different models from a character?
For example there is a lion animation set I’ve found on a site for Daz and Poser that has walking and running animation. Will the animation from that model be able to work on another model as there are no Dinosaur animation sets? As i’m using a Stegosaurus model and need some walking and running animations for it as I cannot seem to be able to do it myself I’m not that experienced in that department.

If anybody knows the answer to this let me know chears, Ian.

The answer is…maybe.

Some will work and look good, while others will, being generous here, look bad.  If it is a free/low cost animation block, go ahead and try it.  I wouldn’t want to spend a lot on it, unless at some point I planned on doing some cat pieces, too.

Lots of the quadruped animations seem to work with more than the ‘original’ critter…some better than others.

A lot of the results will depend on how the bones of the figure are matched to the original animation. If they match well, it should work. But without trying it you won’t know for sure.

See this post for an explanation
- http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewthread/8256/#109178

Ok thanks for the info and help, just had a thought the dragon models have large legs do you recon that the animation sets for them would be a better bet for a Dinosaur model?

Perhaps, but keep in mind that the main problem with non prevalent figures (non V4/M4, etc.) is that their bone names vary widely and thus poses for one will usually not work on a different dragon/dinosaur. You will have to rename your dragon pose bone names so they match the dinosaur bone names, easily done in a text editor, but can be scary if it’s the first time you do it.

Hi

PoseMaster was built to transfer poses and animated poses between figures (among other things) and it does two things:
1) matches different skeletons as ReDave explained above.
2) adjust a transferred pose to account for differences between the figures/rigging.

I’ve just released a People Pack to transfer between DAZ people, and there have been numerous requests for an Animal Pack too, which I will look at during the next 2 months.

If you’d like to try PoseMaster out with two specific models, I could help you out with the transfer if you’ll provide links to the models (assuming I have them).

Here is a vid showing how to transfer animated poses (for people): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FguQAucPFO4&feature=plcp

These two vids show how to create a skeleton map and offset pose to transfer between two animals (Mil Dog and Mil Horse in this case):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVR8B-6pK2I&feature=plcp
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcZxfVcC62c&feature=plcp

Cheers

Chears for the info I’ll take a look at the vids

There’s also an older alternative ... BVHacker .... Export your animation as a BVH ... then edit with BVHacker ... you can add/remove bones, rename them, reposition the start, crop to certain frames, even move the end to match the beginning for loops. It’s easiest to remove the fingers and eye joints when doing this in Bvhacker, then manually re-keyframe them using face and hand poses when you bring it back in .... and BVHacker is Free .....

Ok thanks for the help.
I’ve been meaning to ask about time frames when doing a waling animation how many gaps should be left out to make a smooth walking animation, for example fame1 to frame5 to frame10 etc?
Also the same for the running animations.

I start off with keying every 15th frame but sometimes I need to add a key inbetween. Better to start off with less and add where you need them, than start with too many.

chears for that

You should place keyframes logically. DAZ Studio uses 4 keyframes to make a motion (although it can do a motion with just two). You can think of the frames between first and second keyframe as a sort of intro to the motion; the frames between second and third keyframe are the main motion; and the frames between third and fourth keyframe are the motion end. The interpolation is cubic spline so it tends to be curved/smooth.