Multiple poses in 1 scene, kind of like frames ?
PotatoHead
Posts: 38
Is it possible to have multiple poses of the same character, kind of like animation frames ?
It's hard to describe it, but it would be the same scene, same character, same lighting, except the character pose and translation changes. But not an animation per say, because it wouldn't be fluid, just a line up of scenes.
I'm looking for a way to do this so I can change my workflow from:
Setup Character, Scene, Lighting -> Pose -> Render/Save As... -> Pose -> Render/Save As... -> etc..
To something like
Setup, -> Pose -> Pose -> Pose -> Tweak Lighting (which retroactively affects the previous pose "frames") -> Add new prop to scene -> etc...
I'm new to Daz3D & Poser Pro, and I'm having a hard time to find the exact word for this feature, so I wasn't able to successfully google it.
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Don't leave frames between poses; pose 1 at frame 1, pose 2 at frame 2 and so on.
yes, that's how I tackle some stories I tell (not enough computing power for full animations, so I tell stories more with a comic strip frame approach).
I go to timeline, set the frame rate to 1 frame per second and the frame total to the number of frames I plan to create.
Then as has been mentioned, on each frame have different character poses and/or camera changes.
Anger Management: (well, sources of frustration I've run into)
Props: The "visible in render" property is key-frame'able -- so if props are needed in some frames and not in others, you can turn it on/off as required. (remember settings carry forward in the timeline until it changes -- so for sequence with 10 frames, if the prop is set visible in frame 0, then not-visible in frame 6, then the prop is visible in frames 0 to 5, and disappears in frames 6 to 9). "On" is the default ... so if it's off in frames 0-5 but on in frame 6, you may have to explicitly use the "add keyframe" to make sure that change to "on" value is in the timeline.
Lighting: if your lighting will not change during the sequence, make sure you're always on frame 0 before you adjust your lights. (similar for camera settings work). KeyMate has been helpful in reducing frustration in that regard since you can slide/copy/paste the key-frames around.
Positioning and spline interpolation: if you set a prop in one location in frame 0, and in frame 10 you have it in a different place, remember in frames 1 to 9 it will be moving as the animation generates the "tween" positions, and the motion follows the default spline interpolation used by Daz. If you don't want that prop (or body part for that matter) to move frames 1 to 9, you should paste the pose in frame 1 to frame 9 so it' remains stationary. even then, it might wobble a bit because of that spline behavior. So you either wind up pasting the pose to all frames 1 to 9 OR use a tool like KeyMate to set the keyframes to linear ... then the prop stays put in frames 1 to 9 and then snaps to the new position in frame 10. Similar goes for lighting actually if you change from frame to frame... some properties will keyframe so you may get unwanted changes on the tween frames.
Rendering:
Once I have my multiple frames set up, I then can render "image series" and let it chug away on the frames while I go for coffee (or sometimes a good night's sleep).
If you have multiple camera angles, I wrote a script I use where I can select what cameras I want for particular frames. (e.g. Camera 1 for frames 0 to 6, Camera 2 for frames 4 to 10, Camera 3 for frame 5, etc.) Do a search for mcasual's scripts ... he has one that does pretty much the same thing (camseq I think it was called? I used it for a while, but my needs were a bit different so wound up writing my own)
Thanks for the detailed answer, I managed to try out it and it seems to do what I want.
But I'm unable to actually use the keyframes (they're the blue blocks that show up in aniMate2 tab right ?), it looks as if I put my poses into the whole frames, so I can't move/delete them.
For what you're doing, I wouldn't use AniMate - it's more for managing/editing whole animated segments -- and it sounded to me like you're more after a series of still frames generating a comic book style set of renders.
I just use the timeline for this kind of work -- at 1fps, each frame is one image in set for a given scene or dialog exchange.
The only time I need another tool is when I'm dealing with tweening issues or want to re-arrange the keyframes -- and in those cases KeyMate (not AniMate) would be my preferred tool.
Ah I see, KeyMate.
Yea I'm looking for a comic book style series of renders, trying to work out how I can make multiple "scenes" with a shared environement but changing the poses/morphs/props.
Thanks for the tip, I'll check out KeyMate.
Also, do you happen to know where I could read up on keyframes, I googled it but it all brings me to this "Old Artwork" DAZ 3D wiki with dead or old images.
keyframes is simply the recording of values at a particular point in time. Set the playhead in the timeline to the frame you're working on and then set your poses for camera, model, lights ... whatever is changing in that frame ... then move to the next frame. Any time you make a change a keyframe is created to record those changes.
Youtube has some tutorial videos from GoFigure (the people who make AniMate, KeyMate, GraphMate)... they explain the basics - start there (search for the product names on there). Their website (not Daz's) has a few additional tutorial pages for AniMate, not sure about the others. There's also probably lots of tidbits scattered around the Daz forums, but you have to tease that info out of the search engine.
Puppeteer inside DAZ Studio would work for this.
Looks like Puppeteer only does posing, doesn't do other stuff.
As for KeyMate, it seems "Visibility" isn't a keyframe-specific value, only "Visible in Render". Is there a workaround or a solution to this ? It would be nice to be able to use "Visibility" value, and what ever else is non keyframe-specific.
There's actually a few scripts floating around somewhere that can add the "keyframe" ability to any property of a node (the "CanAnimate" property) Can't remember if one of them was one of mcasual's or not, I played with that for some of own scripts where I needed to keyframe some aspects of cameras that normally couldn't be keyframed -- that was back in DS3) ... use one of those to set a property to keyframe-enabled and it will show up in the list in KeyMate. Maybe you could do that with the "visible" property if you really need that
But "visible in render" is mainly what you want, since that's what's most important for your final frames. If you just want something out of your way while composing your scene, then you just use the regular "visible" button while you set up your posing, etc.
If you can't find a way to make "visible" property keyframed and you really want objects on preview screen to be invisible when you go from frame to frame ... another more convoluted way would be to use mcasual's MatAnim script ... it can set the "can animate" property of surfaces. Hopefully you have a simple prop in this case because what you could do is set the opacity strength to be animated. Then in frames where you don't want to see the prop, set opacity to 0. then in frames where it plays a part, set it to 100%.
Just tried it quickly now and it would work but for a complicated figure with lots of surface properties, you would mean animating a number of opacity properties. Kinda feels like more work that would be worth it.
I'll go check for the script and just use Visible In Render/simpler workarounds (scaling, moving under ground) if I can't find it.
If I could make something invisible but still render, I would just stick with Visible In Render, but having everything visible clutters the screen.
EDIT: Actually saw a sample of a script that uses setCanAnimate, I'll just code one myself since it's extremely simple.
I've encountered a problem with keyframes, it seems it also holds shader settings ? But keyMate doesn't show anything regarding that, I even cleared the values in TRSV mode but to no effect. I'm in a test scene with 1 light, so it can't be the lighting.