Question about adjusting animation timing
SnowSultan
Posts: 3,773
This is more of a general question about 3D animation workflow, but someone more experienced than I am with animation will probably have some ideas.
If you're adjusting poses and creating keyframes in a 3D animation and then decide later that the speed of that action needs to be increased or decreased, is there a preferred way to do so? Going through and moving keyframes around would normally be the easiest way if they all weren't buried in the timeline under gigantic lists of body parts and parameters. I've tried saving the keyframes as Puppeteer dots and reapplying them where I want them, but that's a tricky process where you can easily end up with duplicate or incorrect poses. I also thought about just reducing the number of image sequence renders for that action, but if there are other things in the scene, their movements are changed too.
Anyway, just curious if there's a method that I'm overlooking that will help a little in making animation not feel like brain surgery - where one mistake can really foul things up. Thanks for any information
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Sadly the only thing I have gotten to work is just moving keyframes around, or rendering it and slowing it down to like 80% in After Effects as it doesn't look stroby slow motion slowing it down that far and see if that does the trick. But lately I just videotape myself doing the movements, put that into my editing program and make a cut every time there's basically a new pose. Then I count how many frames it takes and and copy what the pose looks like in Daz and it's been working really well.
If there is an easier way though to move keyframes once you have them set up, I would love to hear it as well.
That is quite a clever way to do it...like mocap, but without all the equipment. :) Do you record yourself at 24 fps or something higher and then just match the frame rate in the 3D software? I always have a problem trying to guess the length of time of any movement and it's always wrong, lol.
maybe DAZ can add some of Carrara's features like box selection and holding down ctl and stretching/shrinking parts of the timeline
using alt to duplicate selections
you wonder why I hate animating in DAZ studio? these simple things are why
(LOL those two actually work in other programs I have used too including things like Hitfim so pretty standard timeline keyboard actions)
The easiest way If you have animate2. create & Save the animation as a aniblock. then you when you use it, you can edit the speed, the orientation, the keyframes etc without destroying the original saved aniblock.
You could try saving the animation keyframe by keyframe and saving each pose for each keyframe and then reload them again at the keyframe length you need them But. that is a very long time consuming way of rebuilding a timeline. But if you save the animation as a aniblock you can edit it and reuse it. But you need animate2 to edit aniblocks
It is kind of like mocap! I'm trying so hard to figure out how to get mocap to work and get one of those rokoku things. Gosh that would be amazing to have. But yeah, I'm so used to 24 FPS because I've been making live action films for about twenty years, most of it shot on film so I never use anything but 24FPS. So yeah, I shoot in 24, and then in Daz I set the frame rate to 24FPS and it matches up really well! If you give it a whirl, let me know if it works :) I always had the same problem with guessing the length of time and everything was always way faster than it should, and then earlier this year I watched some videos from Sir Wayne on YouTube who used to work for Dreamworks and such, and he made a whole video on using video references and the quality of my animation was a night and day difference.
Ivy: Yeah I think you're right, I just reactivated Animate2, and although I've largely forgotten how to use it, I see that you can separate any adjustments into individual blocks and move them around (as well as cut and paste and box selection like Wendy mentioned).
Wendy, do you have AniMate 2? It does seem like it does a lot of what Cararra does.
Bennie: I still really like your idea, not sure if I can get a phone camera to record video at 24fps (maybe 30?), but I'd like to test it out soon. :)
I have it but rarely use it other than to add subtracks and bake aniblocks to keyframe
I don't find it very intuitive
DAZ still has a lot of work to do on their animation tools though it has improved immensely
I have also rediscovered AniMate 2 and I like it a lot.
It is very easy to create a longer animation sequences, export as FBX and use them in Unity.
In the past, I have tried to used AniMate 2 with dressed characters, but my computer
could not handle it. Using just bare Genesis (2, 3 and 8) with it is very fast.
Check your phone's settings and whatever framerate it's recording in, just use that, it'll work as long as frame rates are matching. Also don't forget to set the frame rate to whatever the phone is in your editing software as well. I would think though if you have any phone made in the last five years, it can do 24fps, and if not it's doing 30. It's not the biggest difference but I still come from the mindset of if you're making a film, it must be 24fps because 30fps is the framerate of video. It's not that big a deal anymore with how technology is, they all kind of blend together now, but it's been a 20 year habit of mine to automatically set everything to 24 lol.
Here is a short thread that if you read it will give the basics of hand drawn animation frame rates.
Basically, from what I read you animate 12 keyframes and duplicate them side by side to get the 24 FPS. Then if you need to smooth out an animation later you replace one of the duplicated frames where appropriate. You choose 24 FPS because that's used in cinema and you want to make it as easy on yourself as you can (one of them said). We all know (OK, we all don't LOL) that for video in US (29.97 FPS aka 30 FPS), Europe (25 FPS), and elsewhere (??? FPS) the conversion or playback mechanism (nowadays mostly software) can convert to the correct frame rate for the playback device. They say to use the other frame rates if a studio hires you and they require one of the the other frame rates, but otherwise, you needn't concern yourself with those frame rates.
Animation be in 24FPS,25FPS or 30FPS? | Animation World Network (awn.com)
I don't know how long ago it was that I used Flash for animation, but Macromedia was a company at that time. And I vaguely remember being able to just click on the keyframe and drag it somewhere else on the timeline, and that just worked. So I have been quite confused by how I can't do that with DAZ Studio, or I might have to click on somebody's foot to move a keyframe or whatever. It would help if, when clicking on a body part, only the keyframes affecting that body part would show. Or if, when clicking on a keyframe, the body parts affected by that keyframe would be highlighted.
Maybe there is something about the DAZ setup that would be better than the old Flash setup if I knew how it worked. Maybe it actually is better than I think it is and I just don't know. But right now it seems like you can't just click on a keyframe and move it to a new location to change the number of frames per second. I don't understand why they wouldn't have that ability. That would be way better than creating a keyframe, doing the pose, and then realizing the keyframe should have been further down but now all you can do is change the frames per second.
Or maybe it would be nice if they had what Macromedia called a Tween. So I could position the character into a beginning state on the timeline, position it to an end state somewhere else on the timeline, and create the "Tween" that tells DAZ Studio to create the animation from the first state to the second state. As opposed to having any movement I make seem to magically destroy anything I did previously.
You used to be able to do that with keymate, and then when they made 4.11 and merged keymate with the regular timeline you could still drag keyframes, but then for whatever reason once 4.12 came about and the versions after, that isn't an option anymore.
Thanks for the link nonesuch, I'll check it later.
Well aniMate 2 was really working out well, I could bend an arm on one layer, rotate it on another, and make a fist on a third, then reposition them wherever in the timeline I wanted...and then it crashed. And crashed again. And just as frustrating is knowing that this amazing tool is being neglected when it could eliminate the stigma of animation being a pain in the neck in DAZ Studio. :(
I wonder why DAZ 3D doesn't inquire about buying the gofigure code? I guess something happened to the author maybe. For the longest time I inquired to the gofigure support site but never got an answer so I guess they were out of business. Then I see old V4 / Genesis gofigure animation sets as products updated to Genesis 8 Female and as those are gofigure animations I wonder how that is and goFigure really be out of business?