Animate2, does it still worth it?

Hi, I'm hesitating to purchase animate 2, as I've begun working hard on animations for my visual novels. I'm aware it's an old plug in which hasn't been updated since gen 2. I've been using the timeline, and I can do anything, but perhaps not as fast as it would be with animate2. Would I get something extra than the aniblocks? I can create "aniblocks" by saving animations frame to frame and part of the figure if necessary. I only use gen 9. What would you recommend?

Thanks!

Comments

  • Catherine3678abCatherine3678ab Posts: 8,335
    edited September 19

    When one first installs Daz Studio there's AniMate2 working for about a month. Then the extra features will stop working until a serial key is purchased.

    Yes it is still worth it but please, it does go on sale! There is a major PA sale this month and then next month it's the member's sale. Animate2 is sold by itself AND also in a bundle. So watch for either one of them to go on sale. [possibly under $5, we don't know 'til the day]

    With AniMate2 you can work with sublayers, save out aniblocks and generally just not get frustrated seeing a feature you can't use ;-)

    Sublayers are handy for models like horses for eg. where you might work on the animation for the gait on one layer, the swishing of the tail on another layer and so forth.

    https://www.daz3d.com/animate2-leisure-time-bundle-for-m4

    https://www.daz3d.com/animate2

    All one really needs is that serial key which will appear on your Serial Key page in your Account, so it doesn't matter which product is purchased [unless you're really still using M/V4].

     

    Post edited by Catherine3678ab on
  • Just a side note: It is worth it since it provides a lot of nice features for animation, HOWEVER; save very often, it is known to quitely remove your work from your timeline if you don't know what you're doing! There is no undo button neither. Don't go crazy like me :)

  • The animate line is worked separately from the timeline. As you arrange the blocks and/or edit them, you stay on the animate line. When a portion is 'done' -- then that can be baked into the timeline and one goes over to the timeline to continue work and render.

  • Catherine3678ab said:

    When one first installs Daz Studio there's AniMate2 working for about a month. Then the extra features will stop working until a serial key is purchased.

    Yes it is still worth it but please, it does go on sale! There is a major PA sale this month and then next month it's the member's sale. Animate2 is sold by itself AND also in a bundle. So watch for either one of them to go on sale. [possibly under $5, we don't know 'til the day]

    With AniMate2 you can work with sublayers, save out aniblocks and generally just not get frustrated seeing a feature you can't use ;-)

    Sublayers are handy for models like horses for eg. where you might work on the animation for the gait on one layer, the swishing of the tail on another layer and so forth.

    https://www.daz3d.com/animate2-leisure-time-bundle-for-m4

    https://www.daz3d.com/animate2

    All one really needs is that serial key which will appear on your Serial Key page in your Account, so it doesn't matter which product is purchased [unless you're really still using M/V4].

     

    Thanks a lot! Will wait for the promo..

  • For animation I would strongly recommend learning how to use Diffeomorphic's free Daz exporter and learning to animate in Blender.  The path to gain some level of competence if you're new to it may be painful but the payoff in time and effort will be huge. 

    Daz is great for derping about only and even then you need a pile of scripts from mCasual to get anything vaguely useful.

  • Both are on sale this day.

  • Be aware of two annoying bugs in AniMate2.

    1) If you have animation like walking and the figure rotates, it works correctly only with rotation 0° or 90 °. If you have rotation like 30 ° or 45 °, the aniblocks are not connected correctly.

    2) In some cases the aniblocks are not loaded in the same order as they were saved. I recomend to load the scene in next DAZ Studio instance before closing the scene and verify it. If this hapens you need to make gaps between the aniblocks before saving. Very annoying.

    I wonder where the money is going from the product sold when no one repairs the bugs? I sent official request to fix the bugs but it was useless.

    AniMate2 can handle only TCB keys in timeline. If you use Linear or constant you have big problem.

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