Two questions regarding Daz3d animation

[jojozz]

I just had a couple quick questions regarding Daz3d animations if anyone could give me some feedback on.

1. n terms of quality and ease of use implementing in renpy, is there a preference over a video file or image series for Daz3d animations?
2. What is the best way or guide to pin limbs so they don't move while other body parts move? I.E hips moving while legs stay static..

 

[zger]

From my exp daz is terrible with that. Im just using pose tool and pinning with space key. If u pin feet and lets say pose arms then its gonna be fine but if u pin feet and gonna try to pose hips or pelvis for sample then feet gonna still move like some nodles.... HATE IT.

 

[arnii]

There are two different types of pins in DAZ. I use the active pose tool (bone with small arrow). Select the body part, then go to the tool settings and select ‘toggle pins’. Once you have pinned all the parts you want to fix, use the same tool to select part of the body (say the pelvis) and move it - you should see much better results than the regular pins.

To help you move the body part, In the tool settings you can activate the manipulator gizmo.

 

[jojozz]

Awesome thanks! Will try it

 

[jojozz]

There are two different types of pins in DAZ. I use the active pose tool (bone with small arrow). Select the body part, then go to the tool settings and select ‘toggle pins’. Once you have pinned all the parts you want to fix, use the same tool to select part of the body (say the pelvis) and move it - you should see much better results than the regular pins.

To help you move the body part, In the tool settings you can activate the manipulator gizmo.

Also for the other question, when you export an animation, what format do you do? Image series or a movie file?

 

[mickydoo]

I'm the opposite to the active pose tools, I use the regular pins and the regular dragging, I find the active pose tools, although seems to do its job, hands have a habit of not staying still.

Also for the other question, when you export an animation, what format do you do? Image series or a movie file?

Image series

 

[arnii]

I'm the opposite to the active pose tools, I use the regular pins and the regular dragging, I find the active pose tools, although seems to do its job, hands have a habit of not staying still.

Interesting, I had the reverse experience - when I pinned with the regular pins, even the smallest movement cause hands to move etc. When I moved to the Active Pose, suddenly I had the movement I wanted. As with much of DAZ probably depends on what bones are selected and on the tool settings. Worth playing around with both, although neither is anything close to perfect.

 

[Rich]

I just had a couple quick questions regarding Daz3d animations if anyone could give me some feedback on.

1. n terms of quality and ease of use implementing in renpy, is there a preference over a video file or image series for Daz3d animations?

The issue with an image series in Ren'py is that Ren'py essentially has to load all the images in the series into memory at once. Depending on what's going on, that can strain Ren'py's cache, or cause the amount of memory the game takes to get large. I've seen some games that will crash with an out-of-memory error on a machine that has only 8Gb of RAM when they do that, or which are teetering right on the edge. Even if it doesn't, your players may notice a non-trivial hesitation as Ren'py loads up all the images. Still if you're only using 2-3 frames in your animation (which some people do), then an image series is pretty simple. It's also easy to create several animations that run at different frame rates this way if you need to.

image my_animation:
    "first_image"
    pause 0.2
    "second_image"
    pause 0.2
    repeat

....

scene my_animation

Ren'py's pretty good at playing video files. For longer animations, a video file is going to occupy a smaller amount of disk space (usually) than the image series, because of the inter-frame compression in video. You will, however, want to include a static first frame, just so that Ren'py has something to display while it's getting the video started (usually just a couple of frame delay - fraction of a second, but you don't want to be showing nothing while that's going on.)

But the code is easy-peasy.

define my_movie = Movie(play="path_to_my_movie.webm", start_image="first_frame")

...

scene my_movie

That being said, when you're rendering the animation you almost always want to do it as an image series, because if something goes wrong half-way (Daz crash or whatever) you can restart the rendering where it left off. Just then convert the image series into a video file. VP8 encoder in a WEBM file is a good implementation, as it's supported in all Ren'py environments (including mobile). There are a variety of tools that will do the conversion.