Digital Art Zone

I somehow accidentally set a 10 second animation in the DAZ Timeline in a scene I was creating. I only wanted a static scene, not animation. Now the view I want is on frame 299, not frame 0. I’ve been able to render a single frame, selecting frame 299, but how can I get rid of the animation and save my scene with only the single frame 299? I don’t know much about the Timeline at all, so it you can help, I’d need some pretty step by step instructions. Thanks.

Go to frame 299, select everything, right-click on the Parameters pane’s tab and from the menu select clear animation data.

Richard Haseltine - 21 August 2012 12:30 PM

Go to frame 299, select everything, right-click on the Parameters pane’s tab and from the menu select clear animation data.

Thanks for helping. I haven’t gotten this to work yet. When I select everything in the Scene tab and right click on the Parameters tab, my menu looks like the attached image. I don’t see “clear animation data”. I tried a couple of the available selections, but they moved everything around in my scene and made a mess of it. What am I missing?

EDIT: added image showing clear animation fly out submenu.

Clear Selected items should work - it should then keep the current frame’s settings.

Richard Haseltine - 21 August 2012 03:25 PM

Clear Selected items should work - it should then keep the current frame’s settings.

Clear Selected Items seems to change the origin of all my actors and props to 0. In the attached “after” picture, you can see that the default camera has moved to the origin, I believe. If I zoom out with the camera, I can see that all my actors and props are on top of each other in the center.

Hmm, I don’t think it should be doing that - but it certainly is. OK, there are two other options - which is easier will depend on how many frmaes are set and how many items need animation clearing.

1) Select all, as above. Now in the Timeline go to the frame you want to keep, click the Previous key frame, then the delete keyframe button, then previous keyframe, delete keyframe and so on until you hit frame zero. Go back to the frame you want to keep and do the same, click Next keyframe, delete keyframe.

2) for each item, save a Pose preset at the frame you want to keep, making it a single frame preset. Then clear animation data from everything and reapply the saved poses at frame 0.

Richard Haseltine - 21 August 2012 04:49 PM

Hmm, I don’t think it should be doing that - but it certainly is. OK, there are two other options - which is easier will depend on how many frmaes are set and how many items need animation clearing.

1) Select all, as above. Now in the Timeline go to the frame you want to keep, click the Previous key frame, then the delete keyframe button, then previous keyframe, delete keyframe and so on until you hit frame zero. Go back to the frame you want to keep and do the same, click Next keyframe, delete keyframe.

2) for each item, save a Pose preset at the frame you want to keep, making it a single frame preset. Then clear animation data from everything and reapply the saved poses at frame 0.

Well, I’ve been struggling with this for many hours, and I just can’t get there.

Using technique 1, I looked at my file and saw only one key frame (if that is the frame with the little black triangle beneath it). That one key frame was at key 0.  I deleted it. The keys buttons to go forward and back one key frame jump from beginning to end, so there are none in between. If I play all frames, it still animates and things still move around. I moved on to technique 2.

Using technique 2, I got my figures and cameras posed correctly on frame 0, but changes to lighting settings did not get reproduced to frame 0 by a pose preset for the light. Things like color and shadow softness were not restored by the pose preset or by copy and paste settings from the parameter tab menu. I no longer have figure motion, but when I render, the light isn’t right and I haven’t been able to manually find the differences in settings.

More Questions:
1) Is there any way to delete a group of frames in the middle of an animation sequence on the timeline?

2) Is there any way to copy EVERYTHING in a frame and create a duplicate frame? What if I wanted to loop an animation and make it go back to the starting state at the end of the animation. Like having a starting state at frame 0, having a terminal state key frame in frame 100 and pasting a new key frame to match frame 0 at frame 200.

3) Is there any way to copy EVERY setting of an item in the scene tab and paste all those settings? (So that I could copy all the attributes of my lights and paste them back into the light in the earlier frame, not just the pose or location of the light.)

4) Am I hampered in this effort by the fact that my DS 4.5 says it is standard and not Pro? We’ve already identified the missing Progressive Render check box. Maybe other capabilities are missing in my installation.

If those capabilities don’t exist, I think I’ll have to change my focus from fixing this one scene, to preventing this from ever happening again.  I need to understand what causes a scene to have animation frames in the first place. Is it caused by just having the Timeline tab open? Can it happen even if the Timeline tab is closed? Is there some preference to set that I haven’t found that controls the default state of animation (on/off) or the number of frames?

Thanks for helping me try to understand how this all works.

It sounds as if, when using technique 1, you didn’t have everything selected - keyframes belong to the thing that changes, so if the forearm moves you need the forearm selected to see the keyframe. In this case everything means every single node, it isn’t enough to select a figure and not its bones.

Saving a light preset, rather than a pose preset, should store every aspect of the light - and copy and paste should transfer everything. If it isn’t then that’s worth a bug report.

1) only by going to the keyframe(s) and deleting them, as far as I know.

2) not that I know of - to do the loop the usual method would be to set up the starting point with no other keyframes preset, then go to the end point, select everything and create a keyframe. Once the ends were pinned it would be possible to set up the intermediate keyframes.

3) As I said, for a single node item copy and paste should work fro everything in the Parameters pane - surfaces need to be copied separately. For a figure you can copy the whole figure from the Edit menu, then paste to another figure.

4) I’m not sure. AniMate Lite might have more features in Pro, but otherwise I don’t believe anything we’ve discussed is not in Standard.

Richard Haseltine - 22 August 2012 03:43 PM

It sounds as if, when using technique 1, you didn’t have everything selected - keyframes belong to the thing that changes, so if the forearm moves you need the forearm selected to see the keyframe. In this case everything means every single node, it isn’t enough to select a figure and not its bones.

Aha! You are correct. I did not know I had to expand everything and select all bones. I will try this again as soon as I get a chance. Thanks for sticking with me through this. I also got a new serial number today, so I am DS 4.5 Pro now, in case that has any impact.

Saving a light preset, rather than a pose preset, should store every aspect of the light - and copy and paste should transfer everything. If it isn’t then that’s worth a bug report.

Aha! A light preset - that makes sense.

1) only by going to the keyframe(s) and deleting them, as far as I know.

2) not that I know of - to do the loop the usual method would be to set up the starting point with no other keyframes preset, then go to the end point, select everything and create a keyframe. Once the ends were pinned it would be possible to set up the intermediate keyframes.

Oh, that is a good workflow tip for when I really do want animation.

3) As I said, for a single node item copy and paste should work fro everything in the Parameters pane - surfaces need to be copied separately. For a figure you can copy the whole figure from the Edit menu, then paste to another figure.

When I tried to copy and paste to selected for a distant light, it didn’t copy the color or shadow softness. I’ll try again.

4) I’m not sure. AniMate Lite might have more features in Pro, but otherwise I don’t believe anything we’ve discussed is not in Standard.

I have an Animate 2 license, but I was not using it (as far as I know), I only looked at the timeline throughout this exercise.

I got it fixed! Technique 1 still didn’t work for me, even after expanding everything and selecting everything. Maybe I’m still missing some nuance of how to do it. Technique 2 is what finally worked for me:

I went to frame 299 and saved a light preset with all lights and a camera preset with all cameras. I deleted all animation (everything jumped to the center again). I went to frame 1 and applied all the individual actor pose presets that I created the other day. I applied the new camera and light presets. At this point I had only one visible problem left - a linear point light that had been parented to a torch flame did not get reparented. I parented it manually without preserving the position and it jumped to the right place. In the timeline I set the number of frames to 1 and range 0 to 0. I saved the DUF file. My scene is back to just what I want, animation is gone, and I learned a lot.

THANK YOU RICHARD!

By the way, I tried again to copy and paste my distant light parameters, but the light color and shadow softness still did not get pasted in. This may be a bug, but I cannot report it. I’m unable to get a Mantis account set up. I tried, but never got the email to confirm. I’m pretty sure I didn’t enter my email incorrectly. I cannot set it up again - it says that username is in use.

Glad you have your scene sorted.

I’ll make a report on the light issue shortly.