Why export from Daz, and use a Blender rigging system not designed for Daz figures?

jamesramirez6734

I'm just trying to understand a point of confusion for someone new to animation.

A figure in Daz is of course native to Daz, so all the bone tools and pose controls etc we have are designed for the figure.

But lots of people export to Blender for animation, opting for Rigify or some other rigging system. What's the big advantage of this? Surely using these posing systems is more awkward to operate given Daz excels at posing? (and much of animation is posing different keyframes)

I understand why people prefer the keyframe system for animation etc in Blender, but what are the advantages of the rigging systems over Daz?

Padone

The daz rig is FK and doesn't fit animation, see the IK discussion in my signature.

jamesramirez6734

This is a useful answer thank you.

I've just been looking through a few resources including yours to fully understand what you mean. From what I can see, the ActivePose tool in Daz does provide IK movement (I can grab the hand, and parent bones will follow) - is your point that, the locking of IK bones across a timeline doesn't work as expected in Daz?

Do you perhaps have an example of a movement which is easy in Blender, but not in Daz? Your signature pose mentioned crouching, but I think you showed this was achievable by making an IK chain in Daz? (or were you just trying to highlight the addition effort required)

wolf359

jamesramirez6734 said:

This is a useful answer thank you.

I've just been looking through a few resources including yours to fully understand what you mean. From what I can see, the ActivePose tool in Daz does provide IK movement (I can grab the hand, and parent bones will follow) - is your point that, the locking of IK bones across a timeline doesn't work as expected in Daz?

Do you perhaps have an example of a movement which is easy in Blender, but not in Daz? Your signature pose mentioned crouching, but I think you showed this was achievable by making an IK chain in Daz? (or were you just trying to highlight the addition effort required)

 

The biggest advantage is complex Character animation particularly interacting with both stationary and moving objects.
watch this entire video and try to replicate ANY of those IK/FK switching functions inside Daz studio. and your question will be completely answered.

If you only render still images Daz studio is the best  option for you.

 

Gordig

As I said (or at least hinted at) in the original thread that prompted you to post here, posing in DS can be incredibly laggy, so even if DS had IK and physics completely worked out, it's still easier to animate in other programs if only for the speed at which you can work.

Padone

Honestly I don't know if they fixed the IK chains, the last time I tried there were issues saving the scene. Even if they fixed IK you have to rig the figure yourself, there's no human IK rig provided by daz. And, as reported by Wolf and Gordig, the daz IK features are anyway inferior compared to blender or other professional animation apps.

As for Active Pose, as I explained in the IK discussion, that's for posing and doesn't work in animation, unless you keyframe every single frame.

jamesramirez6734

Thanks for the helpful comments all! Padone just on your last point real quick:

Padone said:

As for Active Pose, as I explained in the IK discussion, that's for posing and doesn't work in animation, unless you keyframe every single frame.

I think this is the main point missing from my understanding. You can create 2 keyframes using active pose and Daz will smooth the transition in between, so what is it you mean by every keyframe?

Padone

As you said yourself "daz will smooth the transition in between", that's the point. You have no control "in between", daz interpolates the keyframes, your keyframes defined with active pose will be fine, the interpolated frames in between will most likely not, depending on the poses. A proper ik system will keep the ik targets "in between", while active pose doesn't.

jamesramirez6734

Ah! I finally see what you mean... Thanks!

Fire Angel

There is another reason for wanting to use your DAZ figures in Blender.  I recently built a scene in Blender that had 768 million polygons, and it rendered without problems.  Not only that but I was able to manipulate objects in the scene without too much trouble, and without much lag.  Yes, there was some lag, but if you expect none at all with a scene that heavy you're dreaming.  Sadly the finished render was lackluster and I deleted the scene file as a waste of disk space.  I did post an image on my deviant art gallery that had more than fifty million polygons though.

If you're wondering what I'm doing that generates scenes with so many polygons that's fair enough; I've been adding 3D fractals to Blender scenes and mixing them with people.  There is more to come of that kind of thing, it's fun.

brainmuffin

For me, it is due to being on an old Mac for Studio and running Linux with Blender, though I've never been able to animate a DAZ character in Blender once copied over. I do still try though.

rilla

wolf359 said:

jamesramirez6734 said:

This is a useful answer thank you.

I've just been looking through a few resources including yours to fully understand what you mean. From what I can see, the ActivePose tool in Daz does provide IK movement (I can grab the hand, and parent bones will follow) - is your point that, the locking of IK bones across a timeline doesn't work as expected in Daz?

Do you perhaps have an example of a movement which is easy in Blender, but not in Daz? Your signature pose mentioned crouching, but I think you showed this was achievable by making an IK chain in Daz? (or were you just trying to highlight the addition effort required)

 

The biggest advantage is complex Character animation particularly interacting with both stationary and moving objects.
watch this entire video and try to replicate ANY of those IK/FK switching functions inside Daz studio. and your question will be completely answered.

If you only render still images Daz studio is the best  option for you.

 

 

The thing about that Spiderman animation is that it's animated on 2's like traditional anime/animation. And with Daz having the ability to turn off interpolations on keyframes, it wouldn't be incredibly difficult to do that same kind of animation in Daz. Now if you're using interpolation, it gets a lot more difficult (but then it would look like a video game and less cinematic). You can still do the ik/fk switching and squash and stretch through unhiding the XYZ scaling parameters. 

I'm not saying at all that this makes Daz equal to Blender when it comes to animating, I'm just saying that same animation is very possible in Daz Studio.