Puppeteering multiple figures: a workaround solution: DazPuppeteerHelper

In my opinion Puppeteer is a really cool feature for creating animations off the existing possibilities in DAZ-Studio, such as Animate, Keymate, etc. It’s easy to use, intuitive and especially the movements succeed very natural.

Unfortunately, there is a huge disadvantage: It's practically impossible, to animate scenes with more than one figure. If they have to interact with each other (e.g. a dancing couple), their movements must be synchronized. Otherwise, the result is completely useless.

My idea was the following:
1. Carefully pose all figures in all Puppeteer “Points”.
2. Record the first figure as usual in the Puppeteer-Pane and let an application track the mouse-moves.
3. Than let this application repeat the whole movement exactly as done in the step before for the other figures.

This is actually not very difficult. Therefore, I am bit surprised that at least this possibility has never been programmed in DAZ-Studio.
After hours of work, DazPuppeteerHelper does exactly this and it works quite well. 

The program is written in C#, tested on a PC: Windows 10, 64bit, DAZ-Studio 4.9.
Available is only a Windows Version (sorry Mac-Users :-( ).
It has no setup. Simply extract the zip-file in a directory of your choice and run DazPuppeteerHelper.exe.

Maybe someone find it useful, too. Suggestions are welcome :-)

 

Comments

  • ShelLuserShelLuser Posts: 748

    I had this issue myself as well when I started messing with Puppeteer; I missed out on overlays and such (so basically allowing multiple scene entriesd to 'do' things). But then I discovered Animate blocks and resorted to that. So basically I keep on moving 1 character at a time using Puppeteer, but then record the whole thing as an animation. Then I record the second character and edit the animation blocks / timelines accordingly.

    It's not perfect but that solution often works for me (do note that don't do much with animation, most of my stuff are still renders).

     

  • Much thanks peter much thanks.

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