Should i animate in daz, blender or in something else?

[zZONED]

i always loved animation and before i start writing a story for my own project i am learning daz. I spent 5 hours yesterday learning the basic and downloading assets, and it came to me doing a 2 second, 24 frames a second loop. I did not render it since i have a "not so good pc" and only did it for fun. What i am curious about is if Daz is good for animation. I've seen some people talking how it is a pain to use daz for animations and that you should opt to animate in other softwares.
I already saw guides on how to export from daz to blender but won't that degrade the quality of the render? Is it worth the bother of exporting models?
Is daz really not that great for animations?

 

[polywog]

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real-time is critical for animation. being able to see the outcome of each little move you apply to the character frame by frame..
you're blind working in daz stusio waiting 20 minutes to see a frame. the character is flopping all over the place, legs bent unrealistically, clipping everywhere and you don't get to see what went wrong until the frames finish rendering next week. jerky stuttering animation takes forever.

in real-time you can flip back and forth frame by frame what you see is what you get, no lines and no waiting. spot a problem immediately, fix it and move on.

 

[Saki_Sliz]

I already saw guides on how to export from daz to blender but won't that degrade the quality of the render?

"but won't that degrade the quality of the render?"

blender ... degrade ... quality

EXCUSE ME!?!? I SEE YOU ARE A NEW USER, BUT ARE YOU ALSO NEW TO THE NSFW COMMUNITY?!?!!?

I'm just having fun, but in all seriousness, you are only as good as your skills with a tool... with higher-end tools allowing you to do the same/more with less skill needed. This is true of hand tools (I solder circuit boards together) to software (you don't need to be a 3D artist to use Daz for example). Sometimes constraints and limited tools inspire some of the most creative solutions, and some times it is a bunch of bs not even worth a second thought ( aka obsolete technology).

I think I am one of the more active vocal Blender user in the game dev sub section of these forums. I use daz for blocking out character ideas, but I port characters into blender to continue my work, sculpting, animating, rendering. I could write you an essay on how blender is better than iray, down to a technical level. Although I haven't looked much into Octane (another render engine option for daz that most people upgrade to), even if octane was able to match blender's cycles engine spec for spec, my analysist would then evolve into discussing how you can better calibrate blender in a variety of ways, but then my argument would be dependant on the user's skills to use blender, and that's blenders main downfall.

Sure, with the recent upgrade to blender 2.8, blender is now more user-friendly than it has ever been, offering a range of features that have the attention of multi-million dollar companies and donators, but it still isn't an "open it for the first time, do nothing but hit the render button and expect to be amazed" experience for those with short or fearful attention spans due to being new to the hobby, and having grown up in a society that teaches its young to fear learning new things and instead train them to seek easy and immediate satisfaction.

I find that most who give blender a chance stick with it, from research professors to modders. blender is a jack of all trade, a tool box with many uses. It's not like daz, a power tool good for only a particular use, instead blender is like hand tools, able to do the same work, but it may take a few more steps. It is something worth adding to your collection.

Blender can do render quality, here are stuff I have made

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(I am more of a technical artist, so I mostly experiment rather than truly create, so I don't have much)

and as far as I know, the majority of all nsfw renders are done using blender (especially those that look good) with Source Film maker also being one of the dominant animation programs (albeit old video game like graphics).

I am most certainly biased, but I would say blender's animation tools are pretty good, you can use EEVEE to do quick renders or to view the animation in real time, and this works with lower end hardware so it may work well for you compaired to something like iClone 7. but idk polywog is a more pro 3D user than most on these forums.

 

[Synx]

Blender can do render quality, here are stuff I have made

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(I am more of a technical artist, so I mostly experiment rather than truly create, so I don't have much)

Ow that skin looks pretty good. Do you mind sharing your node set-up ? I have seen you mentioning it here and there, but I never actually found out if you shared it somewhere. I'm trying to create my own skin with painting it, but it's quit a time intensive job. Switched to substance painter which is a lot better for texture drawing then blender, but still costs a lot of time.

 

[Saki_Sliz]

oh kool
Yeah I have an

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one that needs to be seriously updated (it focused on automatically adapting to skin color of whatever texture you through in, I think it still kinda works but it has some neat features and tools)

My current stuff is still experimental and is not nice to work with(not clean, supper ugly, missing features, only testing basic coloring) but I can upload something

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.

I have been working on making something more final quality, where instead of one master node (the sliders can be confusing), I break it up into 3 group (procedural texture generator, effects injector, and the actual shader). When I do finalize my node design, I was also going to throw in my fabric shader, which have effects such as wetness and transparency for lewd renders.

But I work mainly with cycles, there is another user around here somewhere who makes their own game, and their skin shader is optimized for EEVEE which is probably what you want to look into. The lighting was a bit too dark for me, I would want to bake some light probes but the artist is keeping theirs private for the time being.

note: the texture being used is from the daz character Tess, a toony character but I found she has my favorite texture and eyebrows. The Eyelashes I believe are another character (alexandra 8, I don't really find use for much else), but yeah, tess has great clean textures, not this too hyper-realistic rough and dirty stuff I see with a lot of other models. Again in the future if I clean up the file a lot of the tweaking will be automated so that you can use simple sliders, right now everything as a mess with the nodes. But the eyes and other shaders are useable. the lense shader is probably the only thing I will always have to fight myself with, until I buy a better glass shader plugin.

 

[Rich]

What i am curious about is if Daz is good for animation. I've seen some people talking how it is a pain to use daz for animations and that you should opt to animate in other softwares.

The current version of Daz Studio was not really designed with animation as a "first-class operation." Its origin was more or less purely for rendering, and animation support has kind of been "tacked on." The new Daz 4.12 makes some definite improvements, but some critical features that animators find useful are still lacking. The most obvious if these is "inverse kinematics." DS has only recently added rudimentary support for it, and it's still buggy.

I already saw guides on how to export from daz to blender but won't that degrade the quality of the render? Is it worth the bother of exporting models?

It all depends what you choose to do. If you basically leave DS completely for both animation and rendering your animations, but do your stills in DS, then you will see differences between scenes rendered in Blender and scenes rendered in Daz Studio. That's pretty much unavoidable.

Note - I said "differences," not "poorer quality." Blender is capable of extremely awesome render quality - just look at some of the sample movies made with it. However, whenever you switch to a different renderer, there are almost always going to be differences, since it's VERY difficult to get material settings from one renderer completely transferred to another renderer. Different renderers, well, "render differently."

Another option is to export your characters to Blender, animate them there, then transfer the animations back to Daz Studio and render the animations there. This would get around the issue of rendering differences.

The main issue, in my own opinion, in "animate in Blender, render in DS" is that even if you transfer your character over to Blender, you're still dealing with the Daz skeleton and its lack of IK support. Many of the common "rigs" for Blender (example, Rigify) have support for both forward and inverse kinematics. There are ways to move your character over to Blender and switch to a "better" rig (

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for example) but then you don't have an easy path to get the animation back into DS. It's probably possible to graft IK support (in Blender) on top of the Daz skeleton, but that's something I've never personally tried.

There are commercial solutions to animating Daz characters. iClone and it's 3DXchange pipeline will let you import a DS character, preserving its skeleton, animate the character, then export the animation back out. Even this is not without its quirks, however - I did some recent experimentation on this, and there is a flaw in the way they export BVH's back out that means that they don't work perfectly in DS without some post-export alteration. I'm still working on getting that "right." But iClone isn't free, so if you are shoestringing it, then iClone is probably not a viable solution for you.

Finally, mCasual has produced some free scripts that do help with some of the challenges of animating in DS. One of my favorites is

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, which does a pretty decent job of "locking" hands and feet into place so that you can frequently accomplish what inverse kinematics would do for you.

Is daz really not that great for animations?

Bottom line is that you can definitely make animations using only Daz Studio. But its far from the ideal environment if you're trying to make complex animations.

 

[Saki_Sliz]

The main issue, in my own opinion, in "animate in Blender, render in DS" is that even if you transfer your character over to Blender, you're still dealing with the Daz skeleton and its lack of IK support. Many of the common "rigs" for Blender (example, Rigify) have support for both forward and inverse kinematics. There are ways to move your character over to Blender and switch to a "better" rig (

You must be registered to see the links

for example) but then you don't have an easy path to get the animation back into DS. It's probably possible to graft IK support (in Blender) on top of the Daz skeleton, but that's something I've never personally tried.

I agree and disagree, depending on what kind of users use blender.

If most users are say, daz users, and they expect blender to be nice and do everything for them, then you are right, blender fails in regards to IK. This mimics my statement that blender is not a "open it for the first time, do nothing but hit the render button and expect to be amazed" experience.

However, if you learn a bit about blender... actually, that is not the right phrase. Blender doesn't do anything. you don't learn blender (well maybe its user interface and features). But rather, blender is like a tool, so you learn how to do things using blender. For example if you want to make your own character from scratch, every step of the way, character creation is broken down into different stages. one stage is called rigging. Step 1 is make the skeleton (daz does this), step 2 is connect to the mesh and attach weight paint, (daz does this already), and step three, and the reason I disagree with your comment of lack for IK support is, always step three, ADD IK.

So if you have even tried to rig a character in blender, turning on IK on a new rig is one of the most fundamental steps, so much so it is impossible to skip over, you can't learn to run without first learning to walk, making the rig is learning to crawl, making the ik is learning to walk, and doing math automation and physics simulation is learning to run.

basically I am just saying, IK is supported in daz, you just have to activate it. Any and all modifications you need can be done on a second skeleton, and you can just tell daz to use the other skeleton as a refernce. after you animate everything, you just bake the animation, and clean up the keyframes (using a

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).

Now I think I know why you may bring up the lack of IK... for some reason everyone is freaking terrified of messing or learning about blender armatures. I can not for the life of me understand why everyone is so terrified. Sure they can get complex, but everything gets complex if you keep stacking on more details. I find rigging to be my favorite part, so for me it is trivial to import a daz character and add in automated effects for weight distribution via posture, physics, other animation assistance. I don't use riggify because I don't want to have to learn how to use someone elses rig, it is like using someone elses code, making your own means you fully understand it. the rig that comes with daz is so basic that there is nothing there to intimidate anyone, it is exactly the base skeleton you need before you start adding on extra neat details.

 

[Rich]

I agree and disagree, depending on what kind of users use blender.
...
Now I think I know why you may bring up the lack of IK...

Not disagreeing with you at all in terms of what Blender is capable of - it's a hell of a program if you're willing to take the time to learn it. (As with any tool, you have to learn it to use it to its best advantage.) I confess I haven't gone into it deeply - not because I don't think it's great, it's just a question of where I've decided to budget my time.

My point about Daz/Blender/IK is that "just import the character into Blender" isn't a panacea, as you've correctly stated. IK support has to be designed into the character's rig via some means. So, the Daz skeletons, imported as-is into Blender, don't provide you any additional posing features that they don't have in Daz. That being said, if you don't take the time and energy to learn Blender rigging, and if you're willing to limit yourself to FK, Blender is still substantially than Daz in one respect - it's much, much better at being able to play the animation sequences at full speed. Daz is usually able to play animations for a bare G/G2/G3/G8 character at full speed, but if you are attempting to animate any of the non-default characters, it starts to skip frames badly. I suspect this is because of the fact that the non-default characters have lots of JCM's, and that Daz has real trouble processing all of them in real time.

On the other hand, I'm sure it's perfectly possible for someone with your expertise to overlay IK support onto the Daz skeleton. But that's not something that is available "out of the box."

 

[Saki_Sliz]

agreed, not an out of the box type product. despite my love for blender, it does take time to learn. It took 2 months to learn what I thought would have been a fair 3 weeks. But everyone's mind may work differently.

 

[polywog]

 

[Saki_Sliz]

XD
I can't tell if the fur looks better or worst with blender.
I don't think I have heard of the other two renders, are they newer engines?

 

[polywog]

are they newer engines?

 

[Saki_Sliz]

strange, I have read comparison reports with other engines, but those two names just don't seem to ring any bells. Tho many of the reports I read were supposed to be cutting edge tech demos for 2012, and by this time those reports and webpages are long since out of commission.

 

[polywog]

forget rendering. let the player's computer do the rendering

 

[Saki_Sliz]

damn, that pipeline is witchcraft!
though I am still hesitant to commit to a 3D game just because the technical issue I inevitably have. last year I was looking at Godot, at the time it had 3 key features missing in unity, but that was about the 3.1 update for godot where all the api changed and there was not a single page of functional documentation. Over the course of 2019 unity I think got at least 2 of not 3 of the major features in they wanted, the only features godot use to claim it had over unity now being rivaled, so I am starting to consider using unity again (I noticed object isolation is now working in the video, so that gives me hope).

 

[polywog]

 

[Saki_Sliz]

XD love the lazy tutorial series!
The glass shader of the luxrender looks nice, probably my only critique with current cycles, I'll have to see if there's been any update on this subject in recent years or month to see if it is a competitive option nowadays. Thanks for sharing!

 

[recreation]

XD
I can't tell if the fur looks better or worst with blender.
I don't think I have heard of the other two renders, are they newer engines?

LuxRender used to have a plugin for Daz, but it's dead since a few years, the render engine itself has become a lot of competition and nowadays it's not really competitive anymore.
Don't know much about Maxwell render, but both of them aren't really new.

I can't recommend Godot at the moment, it's a really nice concept, and I wish them all the best, but it lacks a lot of basic stuff when it comes to 3D game creation, it's 3D engine is also poorly optimized atm. They will surely fix it in the future, but right now, it's not really recommendable.

As for animating in Daz: The functionality in 4.12 has improved a lot, but they're still not there. It's usable, and you can make good animations, but it's still a pain in the... other programs, even sfm, do a better job in this regard.

 

[polywog]

XD love the lazy tutorial series!

When I was young, living on the street, pre-teen years, I did odd jobs. Lots of tourists came to the islands, lots of artists painting tourists, I picked it up quick. Lots of construction, hotels, restaurants, bars. If you've seen a bar fight in movies where someone was thrown through a window, you know that they used to paint signs on the windows. I painted a lot of glass (later pinball machines) painting on the back of glass, you paint layers in reverse order... face details shading body background, where regular painting ends with the details. this was long before plotters and vinyl cutters. Lazy is good. stencils, silkscreens, reference photos, projectors is not cheating. Get the job done. back to layered images, led to me animating cartoons, but that reverse deconstruction on glass brought me into 3D, and compositing.

Those lazy tutorials are good examples of cheating. The objective is to trick the viewer into seeing something in your image. Some joker the other day said, "I wouldn't use a 2d editor like photoshop on a 3D render" how dumb can you be??? renders are not 3D, rendierng makes a 2d snapshot of a 3D environment. and some other idiot agreed with him. sad, many such cases.

If you're making a 3D game, you can still cheat, the environment doesn't have to be 100% 3D, the game only renders the player path. turn off collision fly through a wall and you see there's no building, it's just a wall prop, on a movies set giving the illusion of a building. clouds, birds, airplanes, the moon aren't real they are projected on domes in the 3D environment... bat as for 2D renders you can composite a pic of a real sky.

 

[polywog]