Why is the animator so difficult to work with. Are there any althernatives?

rjochinski

Hello, and apologize for my tone, I'm slightly frustrated.

I've been rendering series of still frames with daz for a long time because working with the animator has just been utter hell. Recently I picked it back up again as my still frame animation is starting to look really good, and it can be even better fully animated. My work flow for still frames is still freaken crazy... here is what I do:

30 frame image series, I save each frame or bundle of frames as a file, so at most I can have 30 daz saves for one image series. Why do you ask? well it seems like adjusting parameters through an animation can really srew up the previous, sometimes it's not that bad and easy to fix, sometime it's just a monterious amount of work and easier to just go back on a save. Not sure if this is just how it is, but I've saved a huge amount of time doing this.

The BIG problem with working with the animator: It just doesn't work sometimes.  I am on here posting hoping that maybe I'm just doing something wrong, as I recently lost a huge amound of work and I blew my top.

Here are the 3 most common and problematic things I deal with:

1) If I delete a frame, on accident or something, that character is GONE from that frame forward. like no recovery, I have to copy past the character from a previous a frame for each from after that one (if I'm doing 240 frames, and it dispears after frame 15, well.. yeah... no thanks.) It just happened to me during a complex 90 frames animation and after frame 30 I accidently removed a frame and poof. The same goes with just random missing spots in animation, I'll be working through the animation and on frames 45 - 89 out of 90 everything in the scene is missing. They aren't hidden, or anything. There's just litterally not there. But in the scene tool they are, in the animation they are, in the render, texture view etc they are not. Magic I say. 

2) Sometimes the viewport just dies working on the posting/animation, I'll get a little text in the top left corner of the view port that says "NO DC" and nothing apears in the viewport (prop, model ,anything) unless I turn on IRAY rendering (complex poses for large frames just went from a days worth of work to weeks). Looks like I'm just restarting.  

3) This is the final but worst one... parameters aren't copied over with frames. Oh my god, this crazy. If I start an animation, frame 1, then copy it and everything about it over to frame x (lets say 90), so the start and finish are the same, as I work inbetween one of the two one of them changes somehow. I go and I have click the first, and the last and slowly copy over every single pose/parameter setting manule (as they keep auto adjusting themselves) until they look as near identical as I can get them, then on top that work inbetween sometimes can change as well because of. <-- this I've spent more time doing then anything else in all of daz history. 

This is my first animation software, is this really how it is animating stuff is? I can't believe it's this complicated. Is there other software that I can work through to do it? I've seen puppeteer but i still doesn't seem to work that good. If we have such incredibly beautiful quality renders with iray any sort of awkward animation really because dauntly obvious. 

Richard Haseltine

rjochinski said:

Hello, and apologize for my tone, I'm slightly frustrated.

I've been rendering series of still frames with daz for a long time because working with the animator has just been utter hell. Recently I picked it back up again as my still frame animation is starting to look really good, and it can be even better fully animated. My work flow for still frames is still freaken crazy... here is what I do:

30 frame image series, I save each frame or bundle of frames as a file, so at most I can have 30 daz saves for one image series. Why do you ask? well it seems like adjusting parameters through an animation can really srew up the previous, sometimes it's not that bad and easy to fix, sometime it's just a monterious amount of work and easier to just go back on a save. Not sure if this is just how it is, but I've saved a huge amount of time doing this.

The BIG problem with working with the animator: It just doesn't work sometimes.  I am on here posting hoping that maybe I'm just doing something wrong, as I recently lost a huge amound of work and I blew my top.

Here are the 3 most common and problematic things I deal with:

1) If I delete a frame, on accident or something, that character is GONE from that frame forward. like no recovery, I have to copy past the character from a previous a frame for each from after that one (if I'm doing 240 frames, and it dispears after frame 15, well.. yeah... no thanks.) It just happened to me during a complex 90 frames animation and after frame 30 I accidently removed a frame and poof. The same goes with just random missing spots in animation, I'll be working through the animation and on frames 45 - 89 out of 90 everything in the scene is missing. They aren't hidden, or anything. There's just litterally not there. But in the scene tool they are, in the animation they are, in the render, texture view etc they are not. Magic I say.

The only thing I can think of is a transform pulling them way out of scene - translation or scale.

2) Sometimes the viewport just dies working on the posting/animation, I'll get a little text in the top left corner of the view port that says "NO DC" and nothing apears in the viewport (prop, model ,anything) unless I turn on IRAY rendering (complex poses for large frames just went from a days worth of work to weeks). Looks like I'm just restarting.  

That is not a DS issue but, at least as far as the No DC is concerned, an nVidia driver option - there was some discussion of this recently.

3) This is the final but worst one... parameters aren't copied over with frames. Oh my god, this crazy. If I start an animation, frame 1, then copy it and everything about it over to frame x (lets say 90), so the start and finish are the same, as I work inbetween one of the two one of them changes somehow. I go and I have click the first, and the last and slowly copy over every single pose/parameter setting manule (as they keep auto adjusting themselves) until they look as near identical as I can get them, then on top that work inbetween sometimes can change as well because of. <-- this I've spent more time doing then anything else in all of daz history.

That sounds as if the types are not correctly set to include all property types - Types, at the bottom of the Timeline, should probably be TRSOA. Also check Key Creation Scope in the Timeline pane's option menu (the lined/hamburger button in the top corner, or right-click the tab).

This is my first animation software, is this really how it is animating stuff is? I can't believe it's this complicated. Is there other software that I can work through to do it? I've seen puppeteer but i still doesn't seem to work that good. If we have such incredibly beautiful quality renders with iray any sort of awkward animation really because dauntly obvious.