Word of warning from the few times I've fooled around with animation in Daz. The interpretation between keyframes was flaky at best. It calculates, stores, and uses information beyond the keyframes. I never dug deep enough to figure out exactly the why of it. The end result though is that the animation you spend ages perfecting doesn't necessarily match what you get after you save the file and later load said file. (Hopefully there have been improvements. I haven't touched animation in the most recent daz version. But be forewarned.)
To add on... if I were to guess it probably boils down to "limits" and/or nested morph/movement. Like if one does a "raise arm" morph which causes multiple joints to move and rotate as part of a single morph you get one look, but then instead move and rotate the shoulder and elbow manually to the numbers they were assigned by the combined morph and the finished look isn't quite the same. And daz may interpret off the master morph when actively creating, but then interprets off the components when loading (just a possible guess). Like if one saves a camera pose, I've done that and used it later to find that the camera is pointing at the same place but the camera is upside down or X and Y rotations were translated into a Z rotation (basically the look is similar but the numbers don't match what I originally set).
As an example I have a horizontal line along the X-axis. I rotate it 90 degrees along the ground so that it aligns with the Z-axis, then rotate it 90 degrees up so that is finally sits on the Y-axis. (Both rotations were added at the same timeline point) Now if you interpolate from the original position to the 2nd position you will see the line kind of sweep backwards and up in a curving arc.
But say daz then translates my rotations on save (as it only saves the keyframes) and says well, all that matters is that it is in this exact position. How it gets there doesn't matter. So when you load it now has the same start position and end position, and the interpretation causes it to loose that away-from-the-camera curve. Now it simply rotates in a flat plane.
I've been getting much better at moving characters and posing. I don't use any premade poses, all my renders use my own poses. I use the ActivePose tool
, then click on the body parts I don't want to move and press SPACE. I do this A LOT for parts all over the body before say, moving an arm with it (left click and drag mouse to move using this) and it has been really handy for posing. I imagine you have to be careful that way in an animation. Not sure, I'll definitely experiment with it and figure it out. Not sure of the animator respects limits imposed by the ActivePose tool or not, guess time will tell.
Is there an option to choose the type of interpolation it does? I know in Blender you have linear and other curved options etc which will make a big difference.
Also, I don't know about animations, but I know with poses and facial expressions, you have to disable certain information from being saved. Whenever I save a premade pose, I uncheck "GENERAL" as it will also save translations, rotations and scaling which will move and rotate your character away from it's location. This way ONLY the pose gets saved. With facial expressions you have to first uncheck EVERYTHING, then make certain ONLY the head elements are checked and GENERAL (under HEAD) is also unchecked so it doesn't move, rotate or scale your character, but only applies the expression to their face where they are currently located.
