Digital Art Zone

Hi.

Today I was experimenting with dynamic clothing and animations. I dressed a figure in Optitex clothing, grabbed a few dance aniblocks and produced a short animation. It turns out that Dynamic clothing requires the animation to be baked to the Studio timeline. From what I can see, this produces keys for every frame.

My question is: what might be the best way of editing such an animation? I can’t use AniMate2 to edit it because the cloth doesn’t move with the figure unless the animation is baked. So baking loses all the advantages of AniMate2 editing. I thought an answer might be KeyMate/GraphMate but it seems that GoFigure have created two tools (AniMate2 and KeyMate) which don’t work very well together.

Your best bet would be to animate and finalize using aniblocks, even inserting modifications to aniblocks where needed using the built in aniblock layers, before baking to the final version. Then, you can apply the dynamic clothing on top of that.

Posermocap - 30 December 2012 08:28 PM

Your best bet would be to animate and finalize using aniblocks, even inserting modifications to aniblocks where needed using the built in aniblock layers, before baking to the final version. Then, you can apply the dynamic clothing on top of that.

Yes, that’s also what I decided but then got frustrated because I kept coming up with changes I wanted to make after I’d baked it.

After posting this, I saw that some people are recommending something called Marvelous Designer - I’ll take a look at that but again, it is really frustrating that something that should be so straightforward has to be complicated.

[Edit] A quick look at MD confirms that the animation would be created in DS, baked and exported. I thought maybe the MD dynamic cloth was somehow an alternative to Optitex but it seems that it ceases to be Dynamic once imported int DS.

You could do it like I do in my animations. Maybe???? Well, I bake the animation from Animate to the timeline….then I look at the movements and the things I do not like.. For example: The right arm moves to much into the body and the dynamics freaks out. Then I select the arm, let’s say the shoulder. I move frame by frame to the badest position of the arm and move it far enough away from the body, so that there is no longer an intersecion of this bodypart. Now you have built a new keyframe at this point. then I delete up to 30 keyframes before and after the new made keyframe. Studio interpolates the rest and your problem should be solved…. I hope you understand my bad english??????? If not place questions here and I try to answer!!!!!!!

Allibaba - 31 December 2012 07:02 PM

... Now you have built a new keyframe at this point. then I delete up to 30 keyframes before and after the new made keyframe. Studio interpolates the rest and your problem should be solved….

Thanks for this. Perhaps I just don’t understand all of this well enough. I was under the impression that once you bake it to the Studio timeline, every frame is a keyframe? So what do you use to edit the keyframes? I tried using KeyMate and the animation stated going crazy - the scene was spinning around and the motions were erratic. So I gave up on that.

Marble, you will have even less control with Marvelous Designer.  First of all, you will have to create your own clothing.  You won’t be able to use what you have purchased.  You have to have the Base program and the animation plugin. You import your figure and the animation attached to MD and do the draping and dynamics.  Then you export the clothing object to DS and use a script that produces a morphs for each frame to move your cloth object. Its not animated in the sense that you can control how it moves.  If you change the animation after that, you have to go through the same process back to MD again. You will still have to bake animblocks to the timeline.  I have done it and was successful but it was alot of work.  Here is a link to my experiment:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4p-FXUsU4T0

Btw, from what I understand, Keymate and Graphmate are to be used with DS’s timeline from what I understand.  I bought them but have not installed them yet.

Yes, I read about al of that on their forum ... seems like a lot of time and effort to achieve very little. There was talk of a DAZ Studio plugin but you might say that there seems to be a distinct lack of commitment to that project.

As for KeyMate/GraphMate, I can’t find any decent documentation. The GoFigure site has a single page announcing that KeyMate is coming (even though it has been available for weeks). Nothing about GraphMate. There’s a short bouncing ball video and little else that I can find.

That’s a very nice little animation you achieved in that video clip, by the way. If only the work involved wasn’t so convoluted, I’d give it a try too.