Does Daz's Puppeteer feature basically do what the AniMate(2) plug-in does?

24_Seven

I'm pretty new to all this, but I was ultimately interested in doing some 3D character animation. And I've been fumbling around trying to get a handle on all the things involved and available.

So, please give me your thoughts on AniMate2 vs Puppeteer and anything else I haven't the awareness to ask but will be likely encountering soon. I would like to know ahead of time before I spend a lot of time learning one that I will have lesser use for. I've been stockpiling poses. That much I figure is a good starting point.

I started looking at models and messing around with the big picture like setting up scenes and all that. In looking over the features that come with Daz4.7, I didn't look at AniMate2 soon enough to compare it with Puppeteer. They could be similar or wildly different for all I know. I like the idea of building a catalog of ani-block movements. Seems very practical. But I also like what I see with Puppeteer (which actually sold me on going with Daz). It looks fluid and spontaneous and a heck of a lot of quick fun, though I have to figure it all out. (I can't wait to get past this learning curve!)

Thanks!

DUDU

I don't know if you speak about the puppeteer in DAZ Studio or that of DAZ Carrara, but in Carrara, they are transitions between the various poses which you record with your mouse.
The aniblocks are animations modules , like the NLA clips of Carrara…
You can edit them if you want.

24_Seven

Right, I didn't know it could be a Carrara question -- which I've also bought but haven't had a chance to crack yet. I've got some tutorials for it on the tarmac. (after a brief pause) I just jumped to YouTube to see what NLA was and looked at an introduction video. Looks like a great feature! I must say seeing it in action really clarifies things.

Now I believe I'm going to have to look at Carrara pretty much right away. Very cool feature. I didn't realize that going from pose to pose was so fluid -- and that you can isolate "children" (?) or isolate parts and assign them completely different actions simultaneously. NLA looks even more versatile by far than ani-blocks practically speaking if one is trying to tell a story with different stuff going on in it, if I read the potential of each right.

And I also just now remember being told of some of the weaknesses of cataloging walk cycles and so forth and trying to shoe horn them into several different scenes. Saturday morning TV animation had a ton of repeated animation cycles in the USA. Often times they had issues with tracking with a moving background vs the movement of the feet making them look like they were walking on ice.

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So in essence my question originally was whether or not I needed AniMate2 if I had Puppeteer both of which in Daz4.7. I guess the question was to get a more complete read on what AniMate2 can do, and whether there's a reason to get it. Perhaps not yet.

Thanks for dropping the clue about Carrara. It certainly anticipated where I was going to be not too far down the road which I was hoping someone would extend the question as you did. Now it's pretty much time to open it up and see what's inside.

Richard Haseltine

AniMate2 is for assigning pre-made animations, usually from Motion Capture data, in a way that allows flexible mixing. Puppeteer is a way of recording two or more states of the figure and transitioning between them by dragging on a grid in real time. They aren't really overlapping at all.

24_Seven

Still zeroing in on what works best for what, but I have looked at some mo-cap dance stuff and all I can say is "Wow" to that as well. You're right. It does have its uses no doubt.

NLA question here then, I went and bought up a set or two of general figure poses. Can I assume that one can assign more or less any pose to any character or is that too good to be true? So if I have a set of poses that were designed for V4, will they apply to a G2 figure? Is there a converter for that kind of thing, or is one even needed?

I'm still kind of sketchy on whether these NLA movements are based on bones that would probably be similar in proportion, or if there's a mathematical calculation that looks at the proportionate length of an arm between the pose and the new figure it's been assigned to and does the math for ya. I've still been loading in a figure and clicking on a pose that I can't recall whether it was done for it in the first place or not. It seems to work, though I'm not doing anything complex like movement yet. Just still images.

Thanks.

skydat

Hi,

I'm no expert but may be able to help.

You can apply V4 aniblocks to Genesis figures, though they will look odd. Specifically with Genesis you get the "John Wayne" walk - it looks ridiculous.

There is a fix, you need to apply a sub aniblock below the V4 aniblock, you can get it here.

http://www.sharecg.com/v/60135/related/21/DAZ-Studio/Genesis-V4-pose-adjust-script

This will apply a "patch" as it were to the animation so that it looks pretty good. If you could help me, I'm looking for a way to save body part animations to an aniblock, I have a thread about it here,

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/51930/

I have a great crouching animation for the legs, but the upper body part is terrible. I can't seem to save just the legs part. Somehow DaveGB in his aniblock above included just the necessary parts of the animation to fix the Victora4 walk for Genesis, using the same principle (whatever it is), I'd like to save just part of animations for futre aniblocks.

Another issue I've come across is annoying translations of figures when I save a pose. In the end I had to save my crouch animation as a pose and deselect everything above the hip. This worked kindoff, but now the character translates accross the screen! If I deselect transaltions in save, the character moves legs up to the torso instead of translating the body down to the ground! It's so frustrating these petty issues that crop up, and they are sometimes takes a long time to fix.

I'm thinking of opening up these pose files in a text editor - there must be some way just to delete some of the more annoying translations via search and replace, anyone had any luck with this?