3D Animation

[MovieMike]

As I learn more about working inside of Daz3D I naturally begin thinking about doing more than just stills. I know there are a lot of programs out there for creating animations and I know they're not easy. I'm just wondering what people here are using, any pros or cons to specific programs, or any tips that people may have. The animation capabilities of Daz aren't as robust as some others so I'm seeing what else is out there.

Some of the programs I've been exploring are Maya, 3ds Max, Cinema 4d, Blender, and iClone7. I imagine all would get me to creating animations and would take some learning. Wondering if anyone has recommendations of what to dig into. I've thought of Maya, because I actually get access to it along with 3ds Max, and Blender is free, but obviously the learning curve of these programs is pretty steep. I'd also love to use my Daz assets so I wouldn't have to create figures from scratch. From what I've read, the whole export/import of Daz figures is a process in of it's own.

I imagine Maya and 3ds Max would do anything I could imagine but have the steepest learning curves. I've also seen some good things from the new iClone7 with Character Creator 3 making it easier to import Daz models. Anyone tried it? Anyone know how importing genitals would work since most are 3rd party and not part of the original figures?

Thanks!

 

[Rich]

The animation capabilities of Daz aren't as robust as some others so I'm seeing what else is out there.

That's an awfully polite way of putting it... LOL

I'd also love to use my Daz assets so I wouldn't have to create figures from scratch. From what I've read, the whole export/import of Daz figures is a process in of it's own.

On approach is to export to another package, do your animation there, then import the animation back into Daz. This way, you're doing both your stills and animation renders using the same package (Daz) so you don't get inconsistencies in the renders.

I've seen two approaches described for this:

1. iClone can directly import Daz figures if you have the correct add-ons for iClone. You can then do the animation in iClone, export the result as a BVH file, and import the BVH into Daz. Of course, the whole setup to do this runs around $700. (They do have a 30-day free trial, however.)
2. Blender and other packages can work with FBX's, so you can export your figure from Daz as an FBX, animate, and then re-import as an FBX. This "round-trip" tends to screw up your character's materials, but, as a final step, you can transfer the animation from the "imported as an FBX" character over to a "never left Daz" character. Here, the main problem is that the Daz rig doesn't support IK. I have yet to see anyone with a good solution for adding IK support to the Daz figure after it's been transferred to another package. iClone doesn't have this problem, because it converts the Daz figure to its own format (which has IK support) as part of the transfer.[/QUOTE]

The main issue is that the Daz figures have an unusual (in the animation space) bone structure, in that they have separate "bend" and "twist" bones. So BVH files, for example, typically won't work unless you started with a Daz figure, since the "vanilla" BVH files "out there" can't easily be mapped to the Daz bone arrangement.

Take all of that with a grain of salt, since I haven't (yet) personally done this - it's on my list for "soon." I've been told by people on the iClone forums that #1 works (now that Daz has fixed it's BVH import bug in 4.10), and I've seen a number of posts on the Daz forums describing #2. So, it should work, but your mileage may vary.

 

[MovieMike]

I'm hearing decent things about the new iClone7 and CC3 pipeline, but from what I remember a while back you couldn't import genitals or anything like that which for most people isn't a big deal, but obviously for most people on this site that would sort of defeat the purpose.

 

[Virge]

If you can use Maya then do so. The process I would take is:

1. Export your model from DAZ in FBX format. Tinkering with the settings will take you a bit, but nothing too hard.

2. Import the FBX in Maya, make sure nothing is screwed up. You can try and rotate some bones to see test the rig.

3. Set up HumanIK. This might be a bit hard the first time, but really, it's not. The second time it'll take you no time. Make sure to save the bone structure template for other models, as they use the same skeleton. Save the scene and that'll be your character scene - Don't overwrite it with animations.

4. Animate in Maya. Using HumanIK might be tricky at first, you'll fuck up often. Don't worry. You'll also need to re-make many of your first animations as some fuck-ups usually take more time to fix than starting from scratch all over again. Again, don't worry, save your animation scenes often, even in multiple files if you aren't sure about what you're about to do.

5. Once you're done animating, bake the animation to skeleton. This has given me some trouble before, so I sometimes skip it and let the FBX export handle it instead.

6. Export the animation as FBX. The final size shouldn't be too big (~10MB? or less) if the animation is simple. Make sure to select bake to skeleton at the export settings if you hadn't baked before.

7. Import animation into DAZ. This is something I haven't done so far, but I reckon the process should be simple enough.

 

[dick bullcock]

Hi!
You can try a plugin called

You must be registered to see the links

for Daz3D. I think it is the best approach to a time line. You can slide, copy, paste or delete keyframes more easy, and also to make interpolations. It is still far away from what a usual 3D timeline uses to be, but it is the best solution I have find.