Keyframe copy and paste is broken
I've been using Daz3D for about a year now. There has been one persistent bug in 4.10, 4.11 and 4.12 across all five (very different) computers that I use with Daz installed on it. Copy and pasting keyframes is utterly broken. I need to know if other people have this problem. I can start with a simple animation of a Genesis 8 Female character waving her hand (that I have created). I will get a perfect 60 frames animation of this handwave. I will begin to copy and paste keyframes as I need the animation to last a few seconds, but I want the same hand wave all the way through. No new movement of anything else has occurred. The first few keyframes I copy and paste work flawlessly. Then out of the blue I will copy and paste another (known good) keyframe that works earlier in the animation and suddenly the genesis 8 figure will go bonkers. It will turn upside down or flip at a 90 degree angle or the complete top half of the figure will disappear or the genesis 8 figure's face will become an out of proportion nightmare. I can recreate this exact behavior on all five of my systems on any animation that I work on. Without fail. I have encountered this behavior literally hundreds of times. I truly need to understand if I am insane, or copy and pasting keyframes is absurdly broken in the software. If anyone can help me understand what is going on, you would become my new personal hero. Thank you for your time.
Comments
When you copy, are you copying only keyframes specific to the hand/arm, or are you copying keyframes that have keyframed all parts of your character?
I noticed this the one time I tried it and figured it was normal DAZ studio behaviour
it loves flipping things 360° around the nearest axis even using cameras in viewport along timeline
only way I can animate a camera is strictly using sliders and keyframing every parameter or it will tween all the others from some point way back.
Figures often do crazy spins at the best of times tweening between poses.
Someone wrote a script that actually helped there in another thread.
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/5582166/#Comment_5582166
F7eer
You can "fix" it by selecting all the keyframes in the timeline (only the ones of the object you want to fix) changing the tweener from TBC to Linear and back to TBC.
Yep, I'm having similar issues with copy & pasting keyframes (including entire frames going blank, parts of the characters disappearing, etc). Unfortunately, Daz hasn't, afaik, been able to reproduce the issue on their end. I can reliably cause glitches by doing the following:
1. Load G8F.
2. Copy first keyframe (with keying scope set to "Object") to a later frame... say, frame 5.
3. Drag-select frames 1 and 5 and copy & paste them to frame 10.
And already I start getting blank frames, and sometimes missing geometry. The more complex scene, and the more times I copy and paste keyframes, the more serious the glitches become. It makes Daz unusable for me for animation, which really sucks
This worked for me. Thank you. I appreciate all of the comments. I believe at the end of the day that it was a combination of strange behavior in Daz3D that probably needs to be looked into and using the inital key as part of my copy and pasting. In other words, it is keyframing the whole figure instead of just the part I want to work with. Things that seem to help are 1. Don't ever use the inital keyframe without carefully selecting only the body parts you are working with 2. Find the part that is acting weird and manually input the correct values into each frame where it starts messing up (this sucks, but it does work) 3. Do the "fix" mentioned by Imago
I actually made it through an entire mildly complex animation and I am very happy. I am now going to put in some animation into my current project, because of this. Thanks for stopping and helping out the village idiot.
Hmm, this seems to work for my issues as well. There's definitely something screwy going on with the TCB interpolation (maybe it's time to scrap TCB altogether in favor of the bezier curves that most animators are used to).
TCB I thought that was Elvis's favourite saying?
Bachman Turner Overdrive sung about it too
or The Care Bears
Tension, continually and Bias apparently
Elvis just didn't know about bezier curves
in Carrara as well as linear and bezier we have oscillate tweeners which I use a lot
wonder if adding that to DAZ studio is on the cards?
My, this was hilarious (not in a good way)! I followed these instructions in 4.12.2.6 Public Beta. After the copying and pasting, I too had blank frames and missing geometry. If I step through the animation frame by frame, and frame the camera on G8f in each frame, when I get to frame 5, G8F was only eyeballs, eyelashes, one fingernail and some toenails. How can Daz not reproduce this? Did you send them a video showing them how to make it happen? That is what they usually ask me for.
Deleted - post got duplicated.
Yeah, they requested a video, which I sent a few days ago. Haven't heard back yet though. It would be greatly appreciated if you (and anyone else who encounters this issue) could do a quick bug report. The more noise we make, the more motivated they'll be to fix it (that's my theory, anyway;-)).
I submitted Request #333211. I mentioned that you first reported this and that maybe additional information from another user's perspective might help. I could not record a video today (recorder would not launch), but I included some screenshots. I hope it helps.
Awesome, thanks!
So, I wanted to personally thank you for your recommendation Imago. I have successfully created a half dozen animations since you gave me this great info. I appreciate you taking the time to help.
@hookflash, Daz customer service has responded to my help request and said that they have been able to follow my instructions (basically your instructions) and reproduce the problem. The developers will look into it.
Nice! I guess going through the hassle of reporting bugs actually pays off (sometimes)!
Well, I hope so. We'll know when we get a product update with a fix. Did they reply to your video?
Yep. They were able to reproduce it on my side as well. Not sure why they weren't the first time around.
I guess it depends on how explicitly we write step by step instructions and how carefully they follow them.
As someone who spent years interfacing with vendor support groups - after you write it all out let it sit overnight and then repeat the process from your writeup. You'd be amazed at the places you left something out.
Hi,
Keyframe copy and paste is still broken. It's not just broken, it's horrifically broken. I mean there's broken and there's broken isn't there. Well, this is broken. And reading this thread it seems its been broken for a while. I expect it'll still be broken next time I check.
Thanks for listening.
So here's how I "fixed" the issue, at least for my loop.
0) Most important, save your file (always)
1) Increase length of timeline to fit n copies of the loop
2) Select all keyframes
3) Change interpolation type from TCB to Constant
4) Copy the keyframes
5) Move the time pointer to the last frame of the loop
6) Paste
7) Select all keyframes
8) Change interpolation type from Constant back to TCB
I'm going to guess there's an uninitialised variable somewhere on paste related to TCB (or stack corruption) that isn't present with Constant keys. So the paste works. Bit of a hoop to jump through but it seems to work OK.
Let me jump in this loop, I was facing the same problem, can not success copy and paste a keyframe. Now I found how to fix it.
I'm still using 4.16 pro, in Timeline, if I have frame 0 as original pose, frame 15 for new pose, when I tried to copy frame 0 and paste it to say frame 25, it shows the black triangle pasted, but, when playing, from frame 15 to frame 30, they all frame 15 pose, not changing to original frame 0 pose.
Finally, I accidentally found the key:
1. In case of my problem above, go to the Types at the bottom of Timeline, change it to anything else, i.e. from TRS to TRSO, then back to TRS, the Timeline UI will immediately have a tiny shock, but nothing changed, now the problem solved, I can successful copy frame 0 to anywhere.
2. during playing, if you found any tiny weird deformation in any part of the figure, choose that figure, Select Item Keys by right click mouse, then change its TCB to Constant, and back to TCB, deformation should be solved.
Wish these can help someone.
THANK you! so so much. Man I have searched for this so many times and must've jumped past this answer x)
Thank you so much this saved me!