Aniblocks, pivot points, parenting, the joys of animating in DAZ studio
WendyLuvsCatz
Posts: 38,294
Aniblocks, pivot points, parenting, the joys of animating in DAZ studio
aaahhhgh
I did buy kreymate and graphmate but still to figure them out
honestly it is easier to use carrara aniblock importer and use Fenric's plugin to export a bvh
because
you can IMPORT AN ANIBLOCK WITHOUT TRANSLATIONS
so you do not get your root node wildly flying all over the place making parenting an animated figure to something like a dragon's neck or a horse saddle impossible.
please tell me there is an easier way?
baking to timeline and deleting keyframes in figure and hip does not work or using bone editor to align the bone points
and parenting often distorts the figure too DAZ is very weird IMO guess I am just used to Carrara
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Comments
I import animations into Poser then zero the body translations. Then I can move the object to any location in Poser and the animations work perfectly for me. Haven't learned how to do that in Daz, yet. I'm sure you can but, I like the Firefly renders and speed I get with Poser, so no incentive for me to really try.
Hope this helps.
well same as me in carrara :lol:
AniMate2 has parenting constraint. Sometimes it even works :) - it is very sensitive to scale, it MUST be 100% or weird things will happen.
Aniblock importer for Carrara is not 100% correct too, I've reported the problems to DAZ but they are still there. Currently the most adequate way to port motion from AniMate to Carrara is bake to DS timeline first, then save as animated pose preset (.duf), then import it into Carrara.
did you try creating a null
actually moving this
and then parenting everything to the null
you know theres a rotation issue with aniblocks creating weird behaviour ?
so I do not use them for rotation movement
yes a null sometimes works and have used it, in the end said blah and I imported some iClone bvh motions using 3DX5pipeline, they work very well
sometimes i can fix pivot point issue Wendy with the joint editor tool by moving the pivot e point of character to to off set the ani block
or other wise like you said you have to bake the aniblock and them fix the issues and rebake it, which takes for ever..lol and not always work with some aniblock like the mystic shards dragon ani blocks were very difficult to to get the pivot points to be where i needed them to be. so after playing around with the Dragon moving it around I found (by Accident) that moving the character pivot points with the joint editor help relieve some of that issue .
the trouble is Ivy I can actually see the pivot point moving away from the character on the timeline!!!
even after baking it to the timeline? I don't think I have encounter that issue yet
yes indeed
This is just a thought Wendy ,
was the ani block your using in the 0 potions when it was created.
I ask because i have made ani blocks before where my character was not in the 0 position on the stage but over in the corner somewhere in the scene and then when i saved the ani block the position of where it was located was saved as well
so every time reload the saved ani block, it wants to load my character in the same position where i created the ani block the first time. , this will create pivot point issues sometimes ,
After trying to do certain things in DS animation, I decided a few months ago to move to Maya. I will finish out most of my project in DS but will create a few scenes in Maya for the practice. It's been a learning curve for me but it's okay. The biggest turning point for me was trying to animate a couple just dancing a side step back and forth for about 10 seconds. There was no way I could get her hand to stay on his shoulder and his hand on her waist. I wasted weeks and weeks trying to make it work one frame at a time but couldn't do it! I even tried using casual's script but it still would work. I have love the concept of aniblocks and hate to leave them but there is just too much limitation in DS's animation module, even with GraphMate and KeyMate.
I have years (nearly 15) of Daz and Poser collection and using Genesis as my model, I can easily work in Maya. I will still do stills in Daz because that love affair has not ended but my animated music videos will going elsewhere. :(
it was a premade aniblock
I have found as I said using in Carrara with the do not import transforms option I do not have these issues
is just a shame in studio you cannot load them without transforms
they link together fine etc, the issue only arises with parenting to another figure
I can as I said reimport from carrara or use an iClone motion imported as I did
graphmate and keymate probably could fix it when I learn how.
DAZ does have some very strange quirks though especially with rotations I have not encountered in other software
"DAZ does have some very strange quirks though especially with rotations I have not encountered in other software"
thank you for saying that
and do not forget the camera behaviour when going from + to - or back
I love using Maya, I love that they have a floor zero lock. which keeps your character at the set perimeter you use as the floor level. I wish Daz had that Option, & with the Vray in Maya it has real time render preview.. That is something i really I wish daz had for a Options it would make catching the errors n your animation cycle much easier.
Do yout have the full licensed version of Maya,, I have Maya 2012 it came with my Autodesk student editions. the problem is being the student version is leaves a very clear Autodesk water mark in the final render until I pay for the full version. which is why i never used it for anything other than class.
I can't wait until I see what you create :)
I do have the full version...2014. I am on a monthly pmt plan with Autodesk so I got the extended version. Has some very cool extras like instancing any object so I can use plants and flowers from my Daz collection to build scenery along with the painted ones that come with Maya. Glad I got in before the 2015 version because some of the wonderful plugins I found still don't work with 2015. Just got Faceshift and a Windows kinect and I'm excited about using the Faceshift Maya plugin.
I was initially having trouble getting the human models in. V4/M4 won't go in at all. Genesis will but had trouble with an extra joint that FBX throws in. I got some bad advice from someone who looked at the model and said it was unuseable. I stripped it of its skeleton to start over. I have never rigged before so I was having problems there. Then a guy on Youtube posted a video on how to bring in Genesis and get rid of the extra joint. Took me 2 minutes after watching the video. Also had to deal with the transparancies. Maya tends to not reconize them but now I have some beautiful eyelashes. I am presently using the Face Machine to rig the face. Chose not to use blendshapes. Prefer joint based rigging on the face. After I'm done with the face, I will be trying to bring in Daz clothing to create nCloth and Daz hair to convert to dynamic using an inexpensive little plugin called GMH2, a polygon to Maya hair script (http://www.thundercloud-studio.com/?page=shop/1.script/0.GMH2) Very excited about that one!
I am excited about using Maya! The possibilities are totally endless! I subscribed to Lynda.com and Digital Tutors and with the help of YouTube, they are my teachers!! I am still buying Daz content and even plugins and utilities because love Daz and won't give it up!
It really sound exciting jaebea. learning something new is always a challenge it sounds like you got your bases covered though,
I have a subscription to Lynda.com , I used them almost daily for Adobe creative suite, they really are a great resource site.
with the full version of Maya don;t they still grant you access to Autodesk university online help courses and tutorials for Maya and 3d max it came part of the student version free, so I am assuming the full version was too.
like i said i look forward to see what you come up with :)
There are some really good tuts for Maya in Lynda.com too!