Digital Art Zone

I’m trying to figure out the best way to set up puppeteer presets for genesis.
I started by making separate layers for Major body parts - torso, neck, head, shoulders, arms - and you can get nice fluid motion of multiple areas by taking multiple recording passes. 

But it seems there must be a major role for individual poses as well, where you need to carefully position the hand on the head, or the hands together without intersecting - or use the vast numbers of poses many of us have accumulated.

I was wondering if anyone had worked out some best practices.

The goal would be to have several set poses that you want to hit at different points in the animation, and then have some less specific motion in between those (moving the arms, looking around, etc) But all of those extra, non-specific movements have to be ‘zeroed out’ at some point so they wouldn’t mess up the next fixed pose.

It seems as if Animate2 could be able to help with this, but I’m not sure Puppeteer integrates with it very well - seems Puppeteer wants things baked to the daz timeline first (or done directly onto daz timeline with animate closed) for best results.

Any suggestions would be welcome.

I use Puppeteer to setup/store each of my individual poses. Then I use Animate2 to build aniblocks for different pieces. Puppeteer is an incredible tool, but aniblocks are WAY more useful for assembling the overall animation because they stack and you can easily drag things around. Making changes in Puppeteer requires a lot more work.

Mosk you can make a AniBlock from the Timeline with AniMate. You can get what you want.

cridgit - 11 October 2012 05:02 AM

I use Puppeteer to setup/store each of my individual poses. Then I use Animate2 to build aniblocks for different pieces. Puppeteer is an incredible tool, but aniblocks are WAY more useful for assembling the overall animation because they stack and you can easily drag things around. Making changes in Puppeteer requires a lot more work.

Hey cridgit and Jaderail -

First off, Cridgit, thanks for the awesome Posemaster toolset you created.  I’m still pretty new to it, but it’s already proven invaluable.  I plan to get the metadata tools you’ve generously made available as well though I’ll probably hold off on that for a few weeks till I get some other work done.

I understand you can store poses in Puppeteer, and that you can make Aniblocks via puppeteer. I also appreciate the flexibility of Aniblocks, which can be stacked, and can have specific body parts selected on a per track basis which really enhances mix and match utility.

I was hoping to find some way to combine Puppeteer’s ability to easily generate live motion which you can record while listening to a synched audio file / script, so you could easily work in appropriate gesture in a live recording.

Right now it looks like making a bunch of basic aniblocks with puppeteer (like crossing legs, putting hands on top of head or whatnot), and then positioning those blocks on varied layers within Animate2, setting which body parts to effect, and building up the animation that way.

In between the key poses, I’ll often want some background movement so things don’t look too stiff.
Animating one part (like right forearm) at a time gives maximum flexibility, but it disrupts your ability to hit precise poses (like crossed arms) that you might want later in the animation.

If you could use Puppeteer inside of an Aniblock, you could set down all those specific key poses, note the times, and then just stop recording puppeteer motions before those poses and let Animate blend between the poses - but that blending doesn’t happen if you’re just on the DAZ timeline.

Was hoping someone might have figured out a better way to use Puppeteer and AniMate2 in tandem.

Mosk the Scribe - 11 October 2012 08:26 AM

First off, Cridgit, thanks for the awesome Posemaster toolset you created.  I’m still pretty new to it, but it’s already proven invaluable.  I plan to get the metadata tools you’ve generously made available as well though I’ll probably hold off on that for a few weeks till I get some other work done.

I was hoping to find some way to combine Puppeteer’s ability to easily generate live motion which you can record while listening to a synched audio file / script, so you could easily work in appropriate gesture in a live recording.

Right now it looks like making a bunch of basic aniblocks with puppeteer (like crossing legs, putting hands on top of head or whatnot), and then positioning those blocks on varied layers within Animate2, setting which body parts to effect, and building up the animation that way.

In between the key poses, I’ll often want some background movement so things don’t look too stiff.
Animating one part (like right forearm) at a time gives maximum flexibility, but it disrupts your ability to hit precise poses (like crossed arms) that you might want later in the animation.

If you could use Puppeteer inside of an Aniblock, you could set down all those specific key poses, note the times, and then just stop recording puppeteer motions before those poses and let Animate blend between the poses - but that blending doesn’t happen if you’re just on the DAZ timeline.

You’re very welcome and thank you for supporting PoseMaster. I hope you saw the thread about the People Pack that’s on its way?

For motions such as slight movement, blinking and breathing I mix things up into a separate aniblock and layer that over the others to add a little of that “alive” effect. So I’d suggest you build your animation with aniblocks and use Puppeteer to create a separate aniblock for the background movement. For smooth, almost random type actions Puppeteer has got to be the coolest tool ever.

I’m not sure about posing one body part at a time - that sounds like a lot of effort. I would suggest you pose say the upper body and create an aniblock from that, and do the lower body separately. PoseMaster helps enormously for animation to keep specific body parts in the same pose between keyframes. Then you can position the aniblocks to synch certain poses with key points in the song, e.g. touch head at 4 seconds.

Hope that helps a bit more? Sounds like a fun project you’re working on.

Also, there was a post from mjc about auto animating to music. Can’t find it now but you might want to keep an eye on that.

Cridgit -

Posemaster PeoplePack - no, I hadn’t seen that, but I’m subscribing to the thread now and would put in a plea for some animal and monster packs as well - but I’ll do that in the other thread so this one doesn’t get off course.

Thanks for your animation tips.
I think I’ll try creating a few of the basic motions I need in puppeteer and saving them as aniblocks and try piecing things together as you suggested.  (The audio also works without a hitch within Animate2 whereas I’m having some problems with it and Puppeteer).

My only problem, for which you are entirely to blame, is that I have a bunch of things I want to get done over the next month.  But now that I’m getting a feel for what Posemaster can do, it’s making me want to stop everything, change over all my thousands of poses and expressions, get them neatly arranged etc.  I’ve already changed some v4 and v3 ones and can now get the expressions to work in Genesis inside the Carrara 8.5 beta which is huge.  Was also going to try to create some of my own character transfer files so I could share poses between cats, dogs, horses etc at least to use as starting points, but if you’re of a mind to do those as well ???

Anyhow, thanks for the help and for the great product.