The Daz 3D ecosystem
his.royal.duckness
Posts: 32
I'm trying to understand the typical "workflow" for rendering either a series of unanimated stills or an animated clip and where each component is generally handled. So far I've been learning Daz Studio and trying to edit figure textures in Photoshop, which is painful, and animation in Daz using Keyframes is buggy as all heck. I picked up Carrara to help with that, but I don't know the limitations of its animation and rendering capabilities, so I'm wondering what folks typically do in which app and where/how it all gets assembed? Is it better to use Poser for animations? What is Bryce used for and how is it different from Carrara? Sorry if these questions are already answered somewhere, but most of the posts I've found for answering these questions are about a decade old and full of broken links.
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Comments
Animation tool is a matter of choice, Daz Studio does hav several tools to help though without knowing what is being "buggy" it is hard to offer suggestions. Some people like Poser for animation, some hate it even more than DS.
Bryce is a landscape tool only, it has no support for rigged figures of any kind.
What may seem "buggy" are often actually "features" for those who are familiar with the powerful functions of Daz Studio. One of the major problems is the lack of documentation from the free software provider, which justifies the often redundant activity of users on the forums. That said, editing textures in Photoshop or any other image editing software is pretty fun, as long as you know how to use the tools you need.
Sorry, I'll add a bit more context on this one. I started with a few tutorial videos on Daz Keyframes and from the get go they illustrated a couple fixes for Daz's more "creative" interpolations from one transform or scale to another. The worst part was actually the Render, after 18 hours of letting it run, it couldn't save the movie file. After reading up on this issue here on the forums, it seems the consensus is "don't render to movies". Wish I'd known that beforehand.
I think my general confusion comes in with all the different options for doing things. I tried animation with Keyframes in Daz, and did ok there. Then I saw a post saying aniMate was much easier and more powerful, but other folks recommended Poser. Then I downloaded Carrara specifically for model editing and texture painting and discovered that Carrara can actually do animation and rendering as well, but without anyone really going into specifics, I've gathered that Daz is way better than Carrara for animation and rendering, so it's left me a bit confused as to which tasks are best handled by what software. I get that a large part of that is project specific and an even bigger part is personal preference, I'm just looking for some general guidance for common high level tasks. I spent hours trying to get a brush to be pixel-perfect across seams on a leg and foot in Photoshop, only to find out I could do the same thing with a model painting program in a couple minutes. Trying also not to waste another day rendering a movie only to find out it can't be written to disk and I should have rendered it as a series of stills instead.
I remember this kind of problem when my uncompressed AVI file did exceed 4 Gb. Sorry for tonight, I really need to sleep.
see: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/53658/uncompressed-avi-file-size-limit
I realize I've asked a pretty broad and open-ended question here. I'll try narrowing the scope a bit for brevity. I downloaded Carrara Pro because it was on sale in the Daz store. I've been going through every beginners tutorial video I can find to learn all I can about it, but I just saw some recent-looking threads that say Carrara can still only natively support Genesis 1 characters? I've been debating on whether I should be working with Gen 8, 8.1, or 9. Seems like there's still way more content available for Gen 8, but I'd like to start my learning journey with the latest and greatest. I'd like to eventually be able to create entirely new Figures, complete with props, textures, etc, but for starters I'd like to simply be able to do some basic frame deformations to model things like vicious sword cuts, zombie bites, and I have a cool looking Yeti model that looks like he should be able to rend someone limb from limb (I like monster-related projects). So before I go too far down the rabbit hole with learning Carrara, is it even possible to do things like deformations and texture painting with Genesis 8+? Is there another application that would work better?
If you are having trouble getting the keys to do what you want in Daz Studio it sounds as if you need to look at adjusting the interpolation type and settings - by default the keys are treated as fixed points and Daz Studio draws the smoothest curve that it can through those points, so it is quite possible to have a value overshoot between two keys when you wanted it to be static. Adjusting he interpokation values or even using a different type (in the previous example, using Constant would probably make sense for the stretch between keys) helps a lot - and that is what you will be doing in any animation package, though the UI will vary.
Ah, didn't know that was possible, thanks! On a similar note, are there Undo "modes" that you can switch between? I noticed that once I started operating on a keyframe, the Undo feature would only track keyframe operations and ignore any posing or other actions I'd do afternoon and I couldn't figure out how to get it to undo after that. I ended up just reloading the scene when I'd make a mistake