keyframe advice please
davpet77_53e573d360
Posts: 10
Hi I'm animating a scene with Daz 4.21 vanilla and the timeline/keyframe is literally driving me nuts. The simplest tasks seem to be ridiculously complex. I want to be able to delete keyframes with a simple click and move them around to speed up or slow down parts of an animation. If I make even a tiny mistake I'm screwed because undo doesn't undo keyframes for some reason. I have to start again from scratch which is impossible once I'm 7 hours into it. In old versions I vaguely remember using something called Keymate that made things easier but that was a long time ago and my memory is hazy. That doesn't seem to exist anymore. I'm just starting a project after not using Daz Studio for about two years so struggling a bit.
My question is can I buy some software or something to make keyframe editing more simple? Is there some easier way I don't know about? I understand I can micro manage the keyframe in advanced mode opening up every single node but I work on a laptop exclusively with limited screen space and I'm mostly animating fish so don't need to that degree of complexity. I only do animation not stills so I pretty much live on the timeline all day long. Any advice greatly appreciated.
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Comments
I'm not certain from your cropped screenshot but I think you have the Timeline in Intermediate mode - setting it to Advanced will enable some additonal features, though I am not sure how much they will help. That is in the option menu - the lined/hamburger button in the top corner or right-click the tab.
As for deleting keys, I just tried a simple test moving a primitive around and deleting a keyframe seemed to undo correctly
wow you're still here helping people... I remember you since the very first version of Daz Studio... much respect. Yes I have it in intermediate mode and as I said in my post I know I can go into the rabbit hole that is advanced mode and I appreciate that you need that for animating just parts of an object but it is overly complex for what I need to do and incredibly time consuming. I would rather just stay in intermediate mode and work with the reference points it shows, delete, drag, copy etc but clicking on those reference points simply moves the cursor to them rather than selecting so I guess I must be expecting too much from the software. I used to do a lot of animation in Daz Studio once with much more complex stuff and I thought it was easier than this but I admit my memory is hazy. My workflow was so much faster with the older versions of the program. It's got so bloated and complicated, nothing is where it used to be, hardly anything works the way it used to, the logic of some of the interface does my head in but it's a free program so I shouldn't be complaining. I just want to animate and everytime I use Daz Studio I spend 70% of my time just trying to find stuff and work out the new ways of doing things instead of animating. I'm trying though... I'm trying.
Ah, I must admit I never use the Intermediate mode - but yes, clicking on one of the markers is actually clicking in the timeline and setting that point to be the current frame. If you go into Advanced mode you will see the Property hierarchy under that, which has the actual key markers (per property) which can be selected and deleted (which is what I was doing). I'm not sure why Intermediate doesn't seem to have a ready way to delete keys, however, unless I upset it by going into Advanced - how are you currently deleting in Intermediate?
I'm not that was my point. Up until now it was faster to just start again from my last saved file before I needed to delete something. That was actually faster than opening advanced mode and then finding all the keys and deleting them. I've redone the entire animation from scratch (1000 frames) at least four times now and that was still much faster than trying to mess with the keyframes in advanced mode on a tiny laptop screen. 90% of the animation is just move fish and apply a pose, move again and apply a pose... problems come when I run it and okay wasn't fast enough I need to drag some keyframes or delete and make new ones closer together... stuff like that. It's getting more and more complex though so starting again all the time is no longer feasible because I'm animating seaweed and bubbles and other fish as well now.
To be honest everytime it starts getting too complex I used to throw up my hands in despair and go to Lightwave and import the Daz figure and then rig it myself from scratch. That's way too much work for this project though. I'm not complaining and I appreciate your advice and taking the time to answer. You helped me a lot many years ago when I was first starting out with Daz Studio and you probably know more about the program than anybody. I'll just grit my teeth and dive into advanced mode on the timeline. Thankyou for your help. The video is no big deal just an intro for my youtube fishing videos.
I found the issue... my Timeline wasn't showing up properly in advanced mode and that is why I was confused. Buggy graphics. I restarted Daz Studio and now it is fine. It looks familiar now.
Ah, yeah - laptops with integrated GPUs can be iffy. My father has had a couple of variants (on Intel, the other may have been Intel or AMD) and even Word and Thunderbird have had graphic glitches.