I need an animation solution for my DAZ Studio characters.

[hakarlman]

Animating in DAZ is the dumbest thing I've ever tried to do. Is there a better solution without import/export complexities and cleanup?

I was hoping Virtamate would be using Genesis 8 by now, so I could just port my characters to Virtamate to animate, but Virtamate is taking FOREVER with getting Genesis 8 to work.

I was even considering using TK17 to animate and just not show the face, but the renderer is no where close to Iray, so it would look off.

Honey Select animations are the dumbest and stupidest thing I've ever seen, just rocking back and forth like complete retards.

Can anyone think of any other animation solution for DAZ characters? I tried to find DAZ animation tutorials, but they're all complete shit, created by people who have never animated anything in their entire lives. The DAZ animation tutorials are so bad, they feature some idiot setting a pose at keyframe 0, and setting another pose at keyframe 10, then just sliding between them, which looks fucking stupid as hell, and they think that is an animation tutorial, omfg.

edit....... TK17 seems to have come a long way. It's crazy what people are producing. I never in a million years thought about switching from DAZ to TK17, it seems to have improved so much in rendering quality.

 

[Domiek]

You can look up animation tutorials for any 3D software, it doesn't need to be Daz specific as the fundamentals are the same. There are a lot of Maya tutorials that go over the same basics of keying and timing.

There's a workflow of Daz to Blender as well as a reallusion/Daz pipeline.

Of course going these routes adds an extra level of complexion and headache. If you're just doing simple sex loops, Daz can still handle this even though their animation tools leave much to be desired. You can also buy some of those premade sex loops for Daz which can help in understanding timing.

 

[MissFortune]

There's some paid stuff out there for Animations in Daz, but a lot of animating well in Daz comes from simply just doing it until you get it. As Domiek mentioned, there's always Daz to Blender, but Blender itself has a steep learning curve which'll naturally take time to pick up and comfortably use for animations.

You're probably just better off just sticking with Daz if you're only doing sex animations, while also learning Blender or something of the sort on the side and then start transferring your Daz stuff to your program of choice when you feel comfortable enough to animate with it.

 

[linkinn]

Since this thread is already in this topic, i never tried myself, but is there a way or rather a easy way to bring animations from Blender to Daz?

Daz(export)>Blender(animate)>Daz(animated)

 

[Rich]

Since this thread is already in this topic, i never tried myself, but is there a way or rather a easy way to bring animations from Blender to Daz?

Daz(export)>Blender(animate)>Daz(animated)

At the moment, no, not to my knowledge. But I'm working on one...

 

[KiaAzad]

I've seen a program that people use to specifically animate and render their daz models, it was few years ago and I can't remember the name for the life of me. Look into slightly older daz videos on YouTube, you might stumble upon it. it had a name like keyshot, but it's possible it was some other software with a generic name like that.

 

[maiku123]

Since this thread is already in this topic, i never tried myself, but is there a way or rather a easy way to bring animations from Blender to Daz?

Daz(export)>Blender(animate)>Daz(animated)

Im curious about this, is there any specific reason why you want to bring it back to daz? Is cycles giving you trouble?

 

[holmes992]

You've definitely got options, which is more than we had for Daz even just a few years ago. Just off the top of my head:

Option 1: Staying in Daz. I know it's possible to make passable animations in Daz because I've seen users and PA's do it. There's certain tricks and optimizations you can do. Personally, I make a duplicate of my genesis figure with all the morphs and other data stripped out for smoother performance and have some handy freebie scripts I found around the internet that make animating a little easier. Daz Studio isn't really designed for animating but, sometimes, having limitations can be creatively stimulating.

Option 2: Blender. There's a really good daz to blender bridge which you can probably find in the asset releases section. I was raised on Autodesk software and Blender has always been vaguely mystifying to me. That said, even I found this workflow to be really easy and there's good tutorials out there on how get set up and animating. Only takes a few minutes. I think most people go for this route, and the results they produce speak for themselves.

Option 3: IClone. Don't know much about it. I know it's pretty popular with Daz users. You can transfer Genesis figures through the companion character creator app. I tried it once a couple of years back. No strong feeling about it, one way or another.

Option 4: Maya. There's a Daz to Maya bridge available. That's all I know about it. Maya's been the industry standard for animating for years, though I've noticed a lot of people use Blender nowadays.

Option 5: Unreal. Dave Vodhanel's Daz to Unreal plugin makes the process of transferring Genesis characters into the Unreal Engine virtually frictionless. He also provides control rigs for the G3 and G8 figures, so you can actually animate them right in the editor. It's not as feature rich as Blender or Maya, but it's MUCH more comfortable than animating in Daz Studio. Besides that, Unreal has a built-in retargeting utility, so you can easily convert any animations you might have lying around to the Genesis figures. imo, the Daz to Unreal plugin almost makes Unreal Engine feel like an extension of Daz Studio in a way.