Digital Art Zone

IMHO, an animation program is not complete without a curve editor. If you are not familiar with this, it is a graph that show the curved motions of a joint. Since I started animating, curve editors have been my main way of editing animation, and the best way to see the oddities in movement to produce the smoothest animations possible. All of my final checks and edits of an animation, especially motion capture is done in curve editors.

I will list a couple of examples below.

The 1 above is from Poser and it will only show you 1 axis at a time, which is kind of dumb, if you don’t mind me saying.

Below is an opensource program that I LOVE to edit animation in, and it puts all three axis in view to edit from.

DazStudio4 is quickly becoming my prefered program to edit in, but it is frustrating that it lacks some very convinient features. The most important being the curve editor, and adding and substracting frames at will.

DAZ studio 4 could definitely use a lot of improvement in the way of animation tools and I hope that DAZ plans on adding a few things like this very soon.

I think Casual has some free goodies for animation in DS. Check his threads in Freebie section for a site link.

I thought Animate2 had a curves editor in it. I could be wrong, I also think those addons Skiriki is talking about are built for DS3 only. It would not hurt to check. I might be wrong about that also.

(Sorry, haven’t yet worked out how to put the images in the right order.)

The third image is the curve editor in Geppetto, a free plugin for DAZ Studio 3. I believe someone is updating it for DAZ Studio 4.5, but it’s not out yet.

The first image is the curve editor inside an aniBlock in aniMate2.

Geppetto allows you to change the interpolation. The second image is with linear interpolation rather than TCB interpolation. There is also a script by Casual, which will probably work in DS4 to change interpolation.

There are no bezier handles, such as you find in most 3d programs.

Geppetto is the best hand animation solution so far - there is also an option to clear the scene, moving the last frame to the first frame. aniMate2 is excellent for pre-made blocks, and for Non-Linear animation. You can use Geppetto to hand animate, then use aniMate2 to create blocks, which will slide along the timeline as necessary, and you can speed them up or slow them down.

I believe all Casual’s scripts will work in DS4, but his plugins won’t. I think he tries to make scripts rather than plugins now for this reason. You can find all his scripts here:
https://sites.google.com/site/mcasualsdazscripts/