can i animate my daz character from scratch?

Comments

• Richard Haseltine Posts: 108,149

  May 2019

  Yes, though it's not a small task. You might well want to look at KeyMate and GraphMate in the store, as they allow ready adjustment of interpolation types and the individual parameter behaviours (Casual also has some scripts in the Freebies forum that do at least some of this).
• sanjibreloaded Posts: 7

  August 2019

  ok thanks for your reply
• nonesuch00 Posts: 18,744

  August 2019 edited August 2019

  I am doing the same things as you. In this thread I make a long-winded post about what's involved abstractly but not the specific UI elements in DAZ Studio and the timeline that you have to use to get there. To see the technical things in DAZ Studio timeline you should do 1st the DAZ 3D tutorials for animation mentioned in the 1st post in that thread.

  The way I'm approaching this now is a). I am using an old animation I found on YouTube to learn the DS timeline. Eventually, when I make my own original animations I want to take the approach of b). The approach of b) demands I find reference books or draw stick figures to illustrate an desired animation efficiently and correctly before I go about trying to do the animation on the DAZ Studio timeline. 

  As the DS timeline has bugs you'll find the plugin products keyMate & graphMate are helpful to work around those bugs. They are no longer in the DAZ Store though. The product animate2 is helpful and is still available in the DAZ 3D Store.

  a) Basically the process is you create potentially thousands of poses in a series of keyframes for a few minutes of animation, similar to how animators using to draw hundreds and thousands of fames to make a Warner Brothers cartoon. You don't create though the poses for every frame. You insert or delete extra frames to sync the animation with the audio track for the animation. That's all it amounts too so it's simple to understand but difficult to do in accurate execution. In an ideal world with ideal planning you'd eventually get so good at a) that your animation keyframes that you create would be the logical minimum number of keyframes with the correct number of non-keyed frames between them for speed and completing the movement you needed to create an animation correctly and so you'be be animating in a style like b). That takes experience, study, and planning though.

  b) You could take a different approach from the get go. Say that there was a video of a dance you wanted to animate. You learn the dance the old fashioned-way. There are books on dancing that chart the moves. You then chart the moves in the DAZ Studio timeline software. If the dancing book was written correctly than they will have only charted the start and stop locations of changes in body movement positions so you'll have a very nice set of concise illustrations that serve as a shortcut to make a concise set of keyframes for animating that dance in DAZ Studio. The tricky part of this for you & I though is the Book of How to Dance is not going to chart the time interval between the different poses that make up the dance you are learning. So if animating at 30 frames per second with each pose in the at one second intervals than the music is probably 1 beat per second so like a slow waltz or something. There are two cycle periods to consider here and a bit of math has to be done - the cycle period that is a typical movie cycle period of 30 frames per second and the superimposed cycle of the character animation of a person that is dancing to a 3/4 beat or something like that. The slowness of a video capture frame sequence and the brain's own simplifying math means that not all of the movement between keyframes will be visible/rendered.

  c) In doing a) or b) it is often true that dancing or other animations involving repeating motions on different parts of the body to different timeline cycle periods. One period is 4 seconds long while the other period is 2 seconds long for example. In this case you'd animate for example the legs & hip as they cycle to period of length y while keeping the rest of the body still. You save that work as an aniblock (via animate2) and such that if it's played in a loop it repeats the seamless motion smoothly.  Then you animate the upper half of the animation while keeping the lower half of the body still that is cycling to a different period x than the earlier lower body animation and save as an aniblock. Then you combine the upper & lower half aniblocks you created and saved into an animation where the upper and lower bodies are cycling to different periods as with some dances, walking while the arms swing, and so on. You'll find that lets you make different arms and legs periods to create different types of walks for different characters. I mean Michael 8 in most cases isn't going to look right doing the sultry model walk that is well known in DAZ Studio land is he? Give males & females different lower body animation walk cycles as dictated by their physics. Change that again for fat, skinny, tall, short, injured, or just for whimsical reasons.

  Case c) as a simplifier of case a) and case b) is very much needed if you are to eventually be productive. Just as animators of old hand draw cells had a set of hand drawn cells for some basic movements that they used over & over again, combining them in new ways to create new cartoons, you'll find c) helpful to create characters' animations in video games that can be used over & over & looped in those video games and also for creating your own original animated stories. It's true that you can buy most basic movements in the game engine asset stores but if you want to do anything unique then you'll need to learn to do animation yourself. You can use & edit to make unique those animations in those game engine asset stores and resave and re-export for use in games or animations. You'll find it hard to be creative outside their limited use cases though unless you learn to animate and edit animations yourself.

  d) There is also something called 'MoCap' but I can't afford that and so can't make a recommendation about technical merit of different mocap systems and their financial costs.

  I don't know how much of animate2's similar capabilities are going to be integrated into the DAZ Studio timeline capabilities but they aren't there now so it's would be helpful to you in the here & now to have animate2 if you can afford it. And keyMate & graphMate if for some reason they are back in the DAZ Store.

  So a lots of words in this post sorry, but to get started you need to learn the bare basics of DAZ Studio timeline animation as in the line in the 1st post of this thread. You can start a similar thread & we can compare progress & exchange tips.

  Post edited by nonesuch00 on August 2019