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Carrara's "Clips" Are Great - Does DAZ Studio Have Something Similar?

Steve KSteve K Posts: 3,234
in Carrara Discussion

Working on a new short animation, I'm reminded how convenient Carrara's "clips" are.  I'm still having trouble adapting to DAZ Studio, but I'm wondering if it has something similar?  I do have a LOT of "aniMate" products, which I have converted to Carrara clips for convenience.

Comments

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,568

    Yes. aniBlocks are NLA Clips and aniMate 2 (paid version) enables us to open and edit them directly in aniMate 2  - or we can bake to timeline, make edits, make new aniBlocks.

     

    I have quite a lot about it here: The Power of aniMate 2

    Also, if we edit within aniMate 2, we can make overall edits to the whole thing, animate changes throughout, and/or even blend into and/or out of our edits at any point in the animation..

    Even more, we can make edits using many different 'layers' of edits. So we can do "this" on one layer, "that" on another layer... it's really handy.

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,568
    edited August 15

    When I started on this path - and really started to leverage aniMate 2 more, I started to think that GoFigure had designed aniMate to bring a Carrara NLA sequencer into Daz Studio. 

    While working in aniMate 2, we're using the best tweener that Daz Studio has - but that tweener is not user-facing, so we can't leverage it in the timeline. Weird. They just never added it as an option - but I've been told that it would be doable via script or plugin - which is what aniMate 2 did.

     

    It's a bezier clamped tweener. Bezier Clamped is like a standard bezier with the exception that it will never exceed the highest value* nor will it go lower that the lowest value* - meaning that it doesn't do the wonky behavior that often occurs when using bezier for things like facial animations (eyes start going buggy, mouth goes more than closed, etc.,) 

    * Highest and Lowest values used by us in our animation - not to be confused with limits. This will work as expected whether limits are enabled or not. Handy!

     

    "Baking to the Timeline" - As the name implies, "Baking" is the process of mapping where everything is on each frame and making a key frame of everything. So Baking will result in a key for every frame of animation. That's what baking is in any animation software.

     

    This can be handy when we need to utilize other sorts of interpolation - like Constant, Linear, or Daz Studio's TCB - which is a bezier interpolation with fields for T - tension, C - continuity, and B - bias.

    I'm not handy with adjusting the TCB tweener yet - but it's done by selecting the keys to be edited and typing values into the fields on the lower left of the application.

     

    Daz Studio is capable! I'm shocked! I dug into Content Creation Tools to make it so... but after doing that (and it's easy to do) animating in Daz Studio just plain ROCKS!!!

     

    I'm looking forward to doing more stuff between both Carrara and Studio. 

    Post edited by Dartanbeck on
  • Steve KSteve K Posts: 3,234

    OK, thanks, good to know.  Still some inertia to a new learning curve.  surprise

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