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(Mis-)using Puppeteer for Scene Storage?

homerbrainhomerbrain Posts: 8
in New Users

This is my scenario. I'm creating a scene for a cartoon strip. Each window in the cartoon strip uses the same scene but the people in the scene will be posed in different places and the camera will be in a different position. Often the lights will be in different places and have slightly different settings. The place I use to store this information is Puppeteer - which is excellent at saving all the settings for each object - individually. But I'm not interested in animation and dont intend to interpolate between the dots in the layer tab. If Puppeteer didnt exist it seems I'd have to create a sub-scene saved DUF containing all non-static objects. With Puppeteer I can at least click on the dots (in edit mode) to quickly browse through the different poses of each selected object. 

This must be such a common scenario I feel I must be missing a trick or a feature here in DS. The problem is that if there are a lot of changing objects and a lot of dots you have to be very careful to position the dots in a similar place across all objects. I often forget to 'save' a position when moving, say a camera. Also dots have no properties or meta-information. What I'd like is a button that 'saves' the pose/parameters information for a group of objects in one go - and a dot on a board or grid, or list that restores all that info. If there are too many dots on a Puppeteer layer I can feel things slowing down as if the computer was grinding out the impossible animation moves between the dots.

How do other people tackle this type of workflow?

Comments

  • WendyLuvsCatzWendyLuvsCatz Posts: 38,614

    You could save as a pose preset I guess

     

  • homerbrainhomerbrain Posts: 8
    fool said:

    You could save as a pose preset I guess

     

    Wouldn't that again be on an individual object basis?

  • Richard HaseltineRichard Haseltine Posts: 102,864

    If you parent everything to a single figure you can use a hierarchical pose preset for the pose (and a hierarchical materials preset for the materials). A light or camera preset will store all lights/cameras by default.

  • homerbrainhomerbrain Posts: 8
    edited March 2016

    Hi Richard, thank you for drawing my attention to hierarchical pose, yes that does the job, partly, Tested on a dummy scene with a primitive, a figure. a light and a camera. All work. Hierarchical pose will save the position of a light but none of its values.  So I see its best to use the "light presets" and keep lights out of the group being saved by hierarchical pose.  So thats two load/save operations per scene cut. Materials, for me wont change, but nice to know about hierarchical mats.

    Down side is that I can't tell which of the potentially many pose preset saves is the currently loaded preset - danger of overwriting the wrong one when saving again. Save is always a process of pick/name the file - daz doesnt remember the last file saved. I might resort to adding an object into the scene to tell me. 

    I would like make a custom toolbar to put "Save as Hierarchical Pose" on a button, but F3 "Customise Daz Studio" does not contain the sub-menu items in File->Save As menu. Sigh. Might have to research a script.

    Post edited by homerbrain on
  • Richard HaseltineRichard Haseltine Posts: 102,864

    Look at the Save Filters group on the left to find the command for adding to a toolbar.

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