Is daz studio 4.12 good for animations or should I use another app like blender?
ps2000
Posts: 278
So the older daz studio versions weren't very useful for doing animations (I think that was the general consensus).
But at least the advertisement states that 4.12 improved in that regard (keymate and graphmate seem now to be included). Is that true?
I am indecisive what to use for animation. I am already familiar with daz studio as opposed to blender. Also the importing process into blender seems to be a chore and the interface not very intuitive.
There seem to be very few tutorials on how to animate in daz-studio (I especially miss some good tutorials that explain the use of keymate and graphmate) contrary to many tutorials on how to animate in blender.
On the other hand I already bought animate2, keymate and graphmate.
What do you use for animation?
How good is daz studio 4.12 regarding animation compared to blender?
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It really depends on how you intend on going about animating. Do you prefer using pre-made animations like BVH files or do you want to to do frame to frame animating yourself. DAZ has improved alot as far as adding IK and integrating key mate and graph mate, but is it as robust as Iclone or Blender for animation...........in a word, No.
well DAZ studio is the only app you can use HDmorphs with joint controlled morphs and correctives.
so there is that
its unimportant to me but vital to a lot of users who want realism, especially sexy girls walking and dancing
with perfect bends
for those people getting animation from other applications into DAZ studio is vital and Motionbuilder seems to be their choice
I want to do frame to frame animation mostly. Maybe I will use some pre-made animation but there is not much choice there apart from some walking animation aniblocks I think.
And I am really not keen to invest a lot of time in learning blender to be honest.
In my limited animation experience, DS can do animations, but it comes down to lighting and rendering and if going for any kind of realism, DS and Iray is painfully slow
I like to use 3DXchange to get motions into DAZ. The Iclone support and community is fantastic.
Thanks for the tip. I will take a closer look at motionbuilder.
Yeah, blender seems to be faster. But I also fear that there will be a visible difference between the animations done in blender and the stills rendered in daz studio.
But I also noticed that by using only some hdri images for ligthing the render for a frame is really fast (if I only use figures and no scenery). Maybe it's a solution to add the background afterward with a video editing programme (naturally thats only possible if the background is static).
depends. Cycles is very close to iray and should give good results, although i don't know how fast it would be. I have been doing tons of animations in unity with BVH files and loving the instant results since it's a game engine and not a render engine
Thanks for the tip. I will look into 3DXchange.
Does someone know a good tutorial for keymate and graphmate? The ones that I could find are not very helpful. I'm an animation beginner and not really familiar with these tools.
If you're going to use Iray and you have an RTX graphics card, you can use the post denoiser and generally set the completion percentage to 60-70% and it'll look as if it were 90% completed, you can't do that with the GTX cards as the post denoiser doesn't calculate the dark areas the same frame to frame, so it gives a lot of what looks to be aliasing. Now if you render in layers and just do characters by themselves and then the background seperately, you can get renders down to 1-2 minutes for each layer. Or, see what it looks like to render the shot together and see where it's at after two or three minutes (or however many layers you would have done, just keep adding an extra or two for each layer), if it's good and then you don't have to render it multiple times and just let it run. It's totally doable and looks great, especially if you want the iray photorealism.
I just made the switch to Blender not even a month ago really and I already have nine minutes completed and rendered of my animated short film. Eevee is incredible. Some full shots take 2 seconds to render each frame. Once you figure out the pose control and where the keyframes are, it's great.
Here are four screen shots from the animated film I'm doing right now. I'm doing more anime style renders, but these characters look virtually the same as in Daz, it's all lighting.
I don't own or use MoBu BTW just saying it's the weapon of choice for those bringing mocaps in DAZ studio
I don't render those realistic HDmorphed people
I do base resolution in iClone or UE4 or use Carrara without the correctives etc that don't work there either!
Well, the images are really impressive. I think long term blender may be the better solution. But the time I have to invest to learn animating in blender, urghh.
ps2000 if you can afford to buy a moderately priced platform, the animation tools in Iclone are very good. The foot and hand contact that exists within Iclone is featue that many of wish DAZ had. They have incorporated a curve editor to that makes precise key editing much easier.
Well, if you already know how to animate in Daz, all you need to know for Blender is you change it from object view to pose mode (there's a little box in the top lefthand corner of the screen) and then hit the record button on the timeline next to the play/stop/rewind and every movement you make sets a keyframe. Then you just manually set the keyframe for the x, y, and z access, same as you would in Daz, and you're on your way to animating. With lighting, same principle. If you use HDR's, click on the world button in the toolbar on the right hand side, and place your HDR there under environment. Lights, click shift A, and add a light or a sun. The concept is no different between the two programs, you can get used to it in an hour or two easily, what might take time is utilizing all the other features of blender like cloth sim, mantaflow for water, etc, but animating itself is a cakewalk if you already know Daz.
Take a night, download the diffeomorphic bridge and bvh importer. You just save the character in Daz as a scene file, then you'll also have to save it in the blender preset that comes with the bridge. Then import it into blender using the import daz button in the menu on the right. Then shift click on all the parts of the character and click merge rigs, then make all bones posable and the face one (do the toes too if you want). Then under morphs, click the load morphs and then load the expressions and facial values. Then go under finishing and click add rigify. Rigify makes everything super smooth. Like if you want the character to bend down, you can move the torso from up to down without the feet or hands moving, then you go back to the first frame of the motion, and move one leg how you want, then the next, then the hands. It's so easy once you play around with it, and it helps you keep the body in a natural movement because if you go in an unnatural position, the legs or whatever will bend out of whack, so then you rotate the hips slightly to get it right. I did a shot of the girl in the above photo climbing up to the top of the rail on the bridge that I never would have been able to get to look as smooth as it does in Daz without rigify.
You can also pose the character in Daz and save it as a pose preset. There's an option in diffeomorphic that you can add a pose. So you can bring in whatever pose from Daz and it'll add it the character! Want to animate in Daz for the broad strokes? No problemo, save the characters animation as a pose preset and bring it in through the action pose button and your movement shows up.
Want to use BVH files from Mixamo? It's at your disposal. Save it as a .dae file, bring that into Blender and scale it up to 1. Export that out as a BVH. Bring in your daz character (make sure it's saved in the A or T pose), click on the load and retarget in the bvh bridge from diffeomorphic, load the BVH you just exported and viola, Mixamo works on G8 and G3 characters without a hitch, and then you can continue to move them however you wish by changing some keyframes.
And then for rendering, use eevee, and just click everything on. Ambient occlusion, refraction, reflection, bloom, just turn it all on and your images will look great! What do some of these do? Hell if I know, but it makes a difference and it's what all the tutorials I watched on Eevee rendering kept saying to do lol. It might feel overwhelming, but with three years of Daz under my belt, it really took me an hour or two to figure out how to get Blender to work for me and what I want to do and then it took about a week to figure out the diffeomorphic stuff, but I laid everything out pretty much above that you're going to need to know so you won't really have to spend much time putzing around.
So the option's there if you choose to give it a shot, but if not, Daz works good too!
Bennie !!!! You strike again! Always batting 1000. Wow.........Great information! I know I'm trying this. I have a few concerns though. What about texture looking right in Blender the same as they were in DAZ? Also, I love using VWD as a cloth sim, do you know if any of those simulations could be exported into Blender somehow like maybe the image series to obj. script?
I don't think it's a "better" solution, it complements Daz Studio perfectly and you'd be wise to use both for what they are best at.
1) Daz Studio is the best character creation environment there is. Full stop.
2) Blender is a world-class animation environment (at least for keyframing).
3) You don't have to choose. With Thomass Larssen's (and others) Daz Importer, it is literally two simple steps to get a G8 into Blender, with a few materials caveats, but with those all-important JCMs working perfectly. I am hesitant to say that its only shortcoming is that it doesn't set up IK for you, because I've said it didn't support things in the past just to have it turn out that it did and I just didn't know it :)
4) There's Alembic, as well. They JCMs are baked in and you get in Blender exactly what you had in Daz Studio. You can use the materials that the Daz Importer took a stab at as a starting point in Cycles, and they'll be pretty close.
Unfortuantely quite true... but at least Maya can do 99% of what Mobu can (given more time), uses the same HIK and characterization process, and has an indie pricing model which I believe was recently continued and expanded. Yet another thing for which we can thank Blender.
They're the only softwares I've used that simply NEVER had a problem retargeting in an aesthetically pleasing way and exporting a BVH that I could merge directly into Daz Studio for the JCMs, and export back out to Blender. 3DXchange didn't produce the best results for all but the closest matching skeletons proportions.
This is a very good question.
There is something to keep in mind. Current professional documentation can make a huge difference in the learning time. Classrooms and teachers are no longer an option. A decent book or two can make the difference between six months and five years. I don't think that's an exaggerating.