Animation - aniMate - Going Crazy - Is This A Bug?

Lord_Ashes

I have been trying to do a simple animation sequence for days not and DAZ it driving me crazy.

The sequence is basically made up of:

Walk, Corner Left, Baby Step (custom sequence for talking a very small step), and Step Up (custom sequence for walking up a stair).

I have tested by Baby Step and Step Up and both seem to work well when tested outside my scene.

The sequence is basically Walk, Step Up, Baby Step, Step Up, Baby Step, Corner Left, Walk, Corner Left, Step Up, Bay Step, Step Up, Corner Left. This basically generates a sequence where the figure goes up to a mid floor "landing" and then up to the next floor.

Here are the problems that I am having:

1. When a reloaded my scene the aniBlocks on the timeline had gaps between them (definitely did not save them that way) and I think they may have either been out of order or some missing.

2. Corner Right and Corner Left have stopped working correctly in the scene. Even if I delete the entire animation sequence and just put a Corner Left then the figure starts walking but then does more of a strafe (side step) to the side but never changes direction. However, these worked before in the scene. When I try using them outside of my scene Corner Left seems to work perfectly fine. I even tried it using a figure at a non-zero position and with a non-zero rotation.

3. When I still had the sequence, at one point, the last frame of the first Corner Left aniBlock was causing my figure to jump to an odd location.

4. When I still had the sequence, at one point, the Corner Left aniBlock was causing a continuity problem with the next walk forward aniBlock (i.e. position of the figure at the end of the Corner Left and the beginning of the Walk was not the same).

5. I noticed, in some cases, that when I added an aniBlock like Walk Forward (1 Cycle) after a aniBlock like Corner Left the initial playback (when advancing the scrubber manually) of the added Walk Forward (1 Cycle) was in the wrong direction. When I scrubbed back to a point before the Walk Forward (1 Cycle) and the scrubbed forward, the sequence corrected itself. I don't know if it has anything to do with the frame I was on when I added the aniBlock...maybe I was on a frame partially through the Corner Left aniBlock and it use that orientation to add the new aniBlock. I don't know. When I tried to intentionally re-produce it, I was not able to.

Are these all bugs or am I doing something wrong which is causing these bug-like situations but are actually "as designed"? If I was having problems with only the custom aniBlock (or interface points between these blocks and other blocks) then I would suspect that my aniBlocks are faulty but in this case I am having issues with the DAZ provided aniBlocks (i.e Walks).

I have scrapped the animation sequence a number of times and re-started but something always comes up that prevents me from completing the sequence.

I would love to use DAZ for all its benefits but if I had use another software for this animation, I would have been long done by now. Unfortunately I like DAZ's Genesis form fitting clothing, realistic figures and, to some degree, the ability to move parts and automatically influence other parts (instead of having to move each affected part) which I don't have in the software that I previously used.