That begin said, if you ARE going to do an animation loop in Daz3d, the typical steps are as follows:
- Change the Render Type (Render Settings > General) to Image Series. (Ren'py can render directly to a movie, but if you start out by producing individual images, if something crashes halfway thru, you don't have to start over from scratch.)
- Decide how many frames you're going to render. Open the Timeline window, and set the total number of frames to one more than you intend to have in your animation.
- Make sure the yellow arrow on the time line is at the "zero" frame.
- Put your characters in the scene, and position them into their starting positions.
- For each of the characters that is going to be moving in the scene:
- Put the yellow arrow on the timeline on the "zero" frame
- Select Edit > Figure > Memorize > Memorize Figure Pose
- Select Edit > Figure > Restore > Restore Figure Pose
- Put the yellow arrow on the timeline on the very last frame
- Select Edit > Figure > Restore > Restore Figure Pose
What this just did was to create a keyframe for every bone in the figure's body on the very first frame and the very last frame, ensuring that the last frame is identical to the first frame, which is what you're going to want in order to make things loop properly. Also, having keyframes on everything prevents Daz's animation logic (which can be stupid at times) from deciding that it knows better where things should be.
Now, on intermediate frames, change the positions of the characters as you wish to. You generally get the smoothest results if you don't try to position things on every single frame. Instead, create a few intermediate poses and let Daz Studio interpolate between them for several frames. There are Daz plugins (GraphMate, KeyMate) that can help you edit keyframes better than what the raw Timeline window provides.
Then, render the image series, discard the very last image (which is a duplicate of the very first one) and then combine the image series into a movie file. There are different tools available to do that. I happen to be comfortable with command line tools on Windows, so I typically use ffmpeg to do that.
One trick you can use to speed things up while you're developing the animation is to change the Daz Studio render engine from iRay or 3Delight to Basic OpenGL. This render engine doesn't give you the beautiful images that iRay will, but it's FAST - it can render each frame in seconds. This gives you the opportunity to render out your image series, make a movie out of it and play it to see how things look, then go back and redo things that don't look right without waiting hours and hours for the rendering. Once you're happy with how the figures move,
then go back and do the "proper" iRay or 3Delight renders.
