More advanced animation tutorials?
SnowSultan
Posts: 3,773
Does anyone happen to have any more advanced tutorials or tips for animating with the new timeline/graph combo in DAZ Studio 4.12? Things like adjusting TCB falloff or timing suggestions for actions like blinking or breathing? I can't find anything at all about animating in the manual for 4.9, and although I know it pretty well already, there are a few things here and there that I'm not yet familiar with.
Also, we used to have an Inhale morph for earlier Genesis figures, but no longer. Any suggestions for how to remake a similar animation from scratch would be useful (maybe tiny adjustments to shrug, chest/stomach out, a sternum morph, etc)? Thanks in advance.
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For inhaling, I don't know how you would make that work, I've pondered this before myself. But for a timing suggestion of blinking, I make it a five frame action. Start the keyframe with the eyes fully open on 1 and 5, then on 3 I have the eyes fully closed. I don't think I've ever veered away from this and the eyes animation always looks good and isn't jittery. I also tend to do a two frame falloff for lights as well. So if a light is turned off, I have it on on keyframe whatever, count two and then turn it off and it's not as abrupt and it mimics turning a light off in my apartment.
I'm sorry also, what is TCB falloff? I might know exactly what you're talking about, but the term is eluding me right now though on what aspect it encompasses.
You know what, though I don't know how to keyframe for breathing, I just remembered I have an aniblock for breathing. I bought a number of aniblocks a couple of years ago and stopped using them as I got fed up trying to make it work combining things, but this pack here does have breathing. And if you're using keymate, you can bake the keyframes to the studio timeline and then in keymate delete everything you don't need keyed so you can move the person around however you want.
https://www.daz3d.com/genesis-8-alive
Thanks for replying. OK, five frames is what I was using for blinking, but it's good to hear it confirmed. :) Thanks for the link, I don't really want to mess with aniblocks either, but the video gives me ideas on what to try. I've got enough body morphs to give it a shot.
I did some experimenting and figured out what TCB falloff is; you basically enter values in the three boxes in the bottom right corner of the timeline depending on what you want and it affects the ease-in/ease/out between keyframes. It's a nice way to adjust motion without having to do a lot of additional work.
...and then last night, I read a tiny bit about Blender's animation tools and almost wept. sooooo much better...I really need to learn that one day. ;)
If you want to learn about the basics of motion rather than the software, this would be a good start:
https://www.amazon.com/Animators-Survival-Kit-Richard-Williams/dp/0571202284
(Used by 2D and 3D character animators throughout the animation buisiness)
I've been using Blender now for the past couple of months and I'm in love with it and Daz assets are surprisingly super easy to transfer over and use, and they look amazing. I've been animating in Daz for the past like three years now and it took me at most two hours or so to figure out Blender once I got a character in with the diffeomorphic tool. I started an animated film in the beginning of April and I've already got about eight minutes animated and rendered out thanks to Eevee being near real-time rendering. I'd be done but I did a time-lapse shot that spanned like six three centuries and had to render out about 50 characters walking across a bridge and then layer them over and over in After Effects, there was something like 260 layers lol, it took a week to do but totally worth it. I'm putting some screen grabs here so you can see how Daz characters and environments look in Blender. You can also use Mixamo files with the diffeomorphic BVH Importer.
The animation itself looks so smooth. You can put rigify on the character through the importer and with that, you can move the torso around and the hands and feet don't move, so you can really have control of the limbs. There's no more feet sliding if you hand keyframe things. I used a Mixamo file for one walk up a stairway and there's sliding from that and I might go back and just keyframe it by hand. Plus with rigify, if a part of the body is moving unnatural, the bone bends backwards so you have to then adjust the hip or torso so that it would be correct and you have realistic looking poses. I love it.
I also got the cloth sim to work, so you can basically do DForce with whatever they're wearing and you can set it up to do that with hair.
And you can bring environments into Blender via the diffeomorphic tool as well.
If you take the time to try and learn it and have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask! The parts of importing the assets into Blender will probably be the part that holds you up the most if you already understand the basics of animation, the importing is what took me about a week to truly get the hanng of, so just let me know and I'll be happy to try and help and make the process quicker for you!
The TCB falloff sounds like a wonderful tool that I never about! I'm going to have to look at that when I open up Daz next.
Thanks Sempie, I will take a look at that.
Bennie, thank you very much for the infomation and for offering to answer questions! I'm sure I will have a few, lol. I tried Diffeomorphic a while back but gave up mostly because it wasn't transferring Iray materials all that well. However, I've changed my style a bit and don't have to rely on the exact material settings any longer, so I have more flexibility now. I reinstalled it today and will test it out as soon as I get some free time tonight.
Oh, I do have a couple of quick questions that I had the last time I tried bringing DAZ stuff into Blender, if you have some free time. :)
- In Studio, you know we can save a complete character with all its clothing and hair as a scene subset and then drop it into any other scene, like a pre-made asset. How would you do this in Blender? I've only read about having to link complete scene files and select the specific assets you want, but there are problems with them being updated as you work, etc. Is that still the only way?
- Is there any tool like Powerpose that's compatible with Blender and could work with DAZ figures? Even if it's a paid plugin, it's fine.
Much appreciated!
It's super easy to drop characters, environments, whatever you want into another scene! What'd you do is create the character in a new Blender scene. Do everything you want to it and then save it as a blender file. Then whenever you need to insert it somewhere else, just go to file, append, click on the blender file and then you would click on collection and that's where you'd bring in the file.
As for Powerpose, I found one thing called Auto Rig that's like 40 bucks and it looks really great that I'm looking for to work with facial features better, but honestly the rigify thing I was talking about is basically power pose because you can grab the hand, hit G and move the entire arm around, same with the torso, chest, hips, and feet and those control the whole body. You'll see what I mean when you play around with it, it's awesome. But make sure when you do diffeomorphic, to do everything to the morph before adding rigify, so make sure you click on morphs and add expressions, facial units as you can't add them once rigify is added. You can always delete and bring it back in, it takes all of two or three minutes, but figured I'd point this out now.
If you have an old file for diffeomorphic, I'd recommend redownloading it as there's been some updates to it that I think make it work better with iray from my understanding. What you can also do if you have the Gen 8 to Maya plugin is export the maps through that script and you can add them to the characters in Blender in the node maps and they look wonderful. I'm happy with what the diffeomorphic transfer does, but if you need a little more and you have that script, give it a try as it was working for me when I experimented!
The one problem though that I'm finding, and it's a super easy fix, is if I save a scene and reopen it, the people's faces look all distorted and I don't know why. But to fix it, I just click on convert to rigify (even if it's already on there), it converts the rig and their faces are back to normal, and then I just go to edit undo and all is fine. Don't know what the bug is and I don't know who or how to report it, but if you come across this, don't panic it's two steps to fix.
Let me know if there's anything else!
@SnowSultan - I also gave up on using the Diffeomorphic plugin because I couldn't get the materials to transfer nicely. I've been through the time-consuming process of adapting materials for another render engine when I used Reality/Luxrender before I switched to IRay. But that didn't have nodes and the Blender node system is something I have been resisting so far. I was not convinced that the time I saved using Blender to render was enough to offset the time spent setting up materials but I guess that with animations, that's a different story.
@benniewoodell - the details of your workflow would be so helpful even though we would still need to dive into tutorials on materials and rigging and animation in Blender.
Unreal fakes breathing in the idle animation by moving the chest and arms, it does it on retargetted DAZ figures too in third person player, so maybe one could try something similar in DAZ studio.
@marble Let me try and figure out how to record my screen and I'll do a tutorial in the next day or two. There's no rigging you'd have to learn, I could point you in the direction of some great youtube videos though if you wanted to learn, this one guy teaches you how to do it in like two minutes and it's super easy and works, but everything can be done in diffeomorphic. I don't touch materials on anything unless I'm creating something from scratch, otherwise everything you see in the photos above is directly from Daz's materials transported in. And animation itself is basically the same as in Daz, I'll run through the whole process in the tutorial. I'll post it here when I get it completed!
Superb. I'll look forward to that. Thanks.
On the materials thing - did you compare the results to IRay renders? I wonder how they compare because that's where my previous tests came short (although I was attempting Cycles rather than Eevee).
I got a figure exported through Diffeomorphic, but it has no body morphs and I actually can't figure out how to get into Pose mode, it never appears in the dropdown box. I'll also be looking forward to any tutorials you have time to make, thank you very much for offering!
Wendy, yeah I think some slight adjustments to any sternum and stomach morphs along with shoulder shrug should do a fair enough job.
Yeah, those concerns occurred to me too. Do the morphs transfer? If so, can they be adjusted (I'm guessing that they become Blender Shape Keys so they should have an adjustment range). Do JCMs work? Also, what about clothing - does it transfer on the figure and can the Blender cloth sim be applied to mimic dForce in DAZ Studio?
I'll need to read the Diffeomorphic tutorial on his web site again - it is quite a while since I looked and my memory is poor these days.
When you say morphs transfering, are you talking about like if I create my own character with the dials? If so, absolutely, the girl character in the photos above is a combination of Yoyo, Girl 8, and someone else, I forget who. But if morphs are something different, just let me know what exactly you're talking about. You can transfer poses and animation in Daz itself over as well. Expressions are the one thing that doesn't seem to want to transfer over right now from what I'm finding, but the way to control the face is pretty easy and intuitive so it's not the end of the world.
With clothes, that's one of the things I'll show in my video, but you merge it all together and you can use the cloth sim. Here's a link to the opening of the animated film I'm working on, I'm posting here specifically because you bring up cloth sim. All of the cloth movement was done in Blender with the diffeomorphic tool.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzPB0zVhfYs&t=1s
Just fast forward to like 19 seconds in and you can see the cloth movement.
As for comparing it to iray, once I saw the animation itself as smooth as Blender makes, the need for iray subsided and I never did a side by side test. But, since Yuzuru has been released, he's my go to guy character just becuase he's the closest to an anime guy and there's no Guy 8 to dial into, so I dial him into any guy that I'm using that's not him, and I think he looks pretty darn close to the renders I've made in Daz with him.
To get into pose mode, you have to have the rig selected and then you can get into pose mode, otherwise it's not an option.
I've been thinking the past few hours of everything I can put in this tutorial, there's a lot to talk about. So I'll try to do it tomorrow afternoon!
By morphs I mean those we buy in the store from Zev0 and the like. Or the muscularity morphs which add muscular realism to an otherwise Barbie & Ken look. I'm only talking about morphs that can be adjusted via parameter sliders or JCMs which come into play automatically when limbs are moved, etc. I have had another look at Thomas' web site and yes, JCMs are included - he just calls them "correctives".
Back to clothers - when you say "merge it all together" do you mean the clothing becomes one item or the clothing and the figure become a single item? Again I'm thinking of the morphs that many clothing products come with - for opening/closing or wind-blown or shortening hems, etc. Those morphs, combined with dForce helps to get a realistic look that was never possible with conforming clothing alone. Hopefully, those capabilities would be available in Blender after transfer.
The video is very impressive, by the way. Kudos.
Oh, I don't have anything morphwise like what you're describing, but I'm glad to hear that they are included and that those are the correctives.
When I say merge together, that's like the first step in the process, you click merge all with everything selected and then the clothes will move with the armature of the character, but everything is still seperated and controllable. I'll try tomorrow to see if those kinds of morphs work, the short I'm working on I didn't need to worry about any of that as long as I got it all weight painted properly to simulate, but I'll see if things transfer over as I know what you're talking about there.
Hey, I'm sorry it's taken me a few days, I got slammed with work. So now I have another problem. I've been working on this tutorial for the past like two hours, I figured out how to record my screen and all and just as I was about to show how to import poses (and how you can't use rigify if you're going to) my mouse broke. So I have a tutorial recorded that goes through the basics, it's like 20 minutes long, but I recorded in OBS not realizing that it didn't record in an editable format, it recorded in mkv, which I don't even know how to get that into final cut to edit and sync up my audio. I look up converting mkv to mp4 and it's showing me I have to get other programs to do so. So here's what I'll do, I'm going to put the tutorial with the audio file on my dropbox and if you can watch an mkv file, I'll add you to the folder and you can pull the files and then just play the audio with the video, just direct message me an email to share it to. Otherwise if that's not going to work, let me try and get my mouse situation fixed tomorrow and I'll record it again, maybe I'll set up my DSLR on a tripod in front of the screen or something. I've been making films for 20 years but spent most of it shooting on 16mm film, so I've fallen so far behind the times in terms of digital formats and streaming, and all this stuff, I'm amazed I grasp all the 3D stuff lol. So yeah, let me know if you want the files and if that's not going to work, just let me know and I'll redo it this weekend if Frys is open and I can get a new mouse or something.
Oh please don't worry at all and thank you very much for putting so much time into making a tutorial so far! Hope you can get a mouse for your own work of course.
About converting video, best one I found is called handbreak, it's open source which I am a big fan of. https://handbrake.fr/
Okay, I posted the video just now in this thread that was created today that I came across. I really hope this helps!
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/407006/daz3d-to-blender-workflow#latest