Seeing Set KeyFrame Attributes

Lord_Ashes

I am new to Daz Studio. Since my animation needs are very beginner at this point, before Daz, I used Anim8or. It is a 3D modeling and animation program that may not have all the bells and whistles of fancy products like Daz, Hexagon and Poser but it has most features that a beginner animator could want. It uses its own file format but imports and exports 3D Studio (3DS), Lightwave (LWO) and Wavefront (OBJ) files. Best of all it is free, no installs necessary (it is just one EXE), and takes up approx 2 MB (no models included). No that is not a typo it is not 2GB, 200MB or even 20MB. It is a little over 2MB (or about 3.6MB with the manual). It can be obtained at http://www.anim8or.com

In most cases I still use Anim8or over Hexagon for creating custom content.

In any case, I am still getting used to Daz Studio because in Animator if you wanted to animate an arm, for example, you needed to change the setting for each part (i.e. upper arm, lower arm, etc) whereas in Daz you can just move the lower arm and all other parts (as long as they are not pinned) will move accordingly.

Sorry, back to my question...

In Anim8or, the sequencing (somewhat similar to making aniBlock) and animation was also done using key frames (as is the case for most animation software). However, one feature that I found very useful was that in Anim8or you could get a list of all objects in the scene (like the Scene panel in Daz) but you could expand this to show all of the properties for that object that have been keyed somewhere in the timeline. This immediately allowed you to see if some property for an object was keyed somewhere when it should not have been. In addition you could then scroll across the timeline and see key frame indicators for that property so it was very easy to see on which key frames a property was changed. I found this invaluable. For example, consider a typo where somewhere in your scene you modified the orientation of an object which you did not mean to do. Just by looking at the objects and seeing that they have an orientation property, you know that somewhere the orientation was changed for that object. Then by scrolling along the timeline looking for a key frame for the orientation property for that object, it was very easy to locate the exact frame in which the orientation was changed.

I have not really found anything along the same lines in Daz. Is there something like that? I know when I click on a key frame in Daz, I can read all the frame's settings but I need to compare these to the previous frame and next frame to determine if that property was set.

I know that Animate has the graphs that you can look at which show a graphical representation of property changes but this too is not, in my opinion, complete. When I looked at key frames of my figure I get the figures properties (like hip rotation) but I don't see, for example, the figures's X, Y and Z position or rotation.

I think it would be very useful to have one place where one can look to see all of the "properties" that have been set/changed in a key frame. I was even so desperate as to try to open the aniBlock files to see if the saved properties are readable from the file but unlike Anim8or's files which are plain text, most Daz studio files are encoded and thus not easy to read.

Am I missing some easy way to determine what are all the properties that are set in a key frame?