Adding multiple Poses to a custom slider with Keyed Properties in DAZ Studio

let's talk about something equally exciting which is called keyed properties oh my that was just that was just so so beautiful when i found out what that was all about i think i've shared my findings on discord let me just go and briefly bring that up because it's just such a nice thing to see so key properties i was exploring controllers in dash studio and i'll explain more about controllers in my animated crap video controllers are magical properties as well they essentially allow you to use a single slider and make that one slider do multiple things at once in your project there we go so this is how this works i've been playing around with controllers and this is what came out so this is a single slider that can make multiple expressions as i move the slider and i've made this myself so i'll show you in a minute how to do that as well as i move the slider it goes through various properties on the figure so these are all expressions i believe in the from the fret rise to fame bundle they come with that and i've added them to a single slider so it's almost like i had a mini timeline in my slider there and it doesn't just work with expressions it also works with full body poses and when i discovered that i thought my goodness this just reminds me of what the uh what the post architect products and and the zevo growing up morphs what they look like because they make that happen they they essentially have one slider and you you morph the genesis figure from a little boy or little girl to an elderly lady and a grown-up in between so this is what 3d universe does with the tune generation figure as well you have one slider that that turns then turns the the whole genesis figure from a toddler into an adult and into an old man and it just goes through these stages and i was always wondering how do these people do it and i believe keyed properties is is how this works and it is fairly simple once you know what to click and where to go let me show you how it works yes key properties my goodness and it's just so refreshing when you find something that uh that you've not known before you think oh my god it's like magic i believe brian said you said it was a wizardry so let's go and uh let's do this with expressions let me show you this with expressions so i'll go and uh grab myself a genesis just a great genesis figure for now so i can recreate exactly what i've done there i'll use the genesis eight male i wish i've used the 8.1 male i'm sure we'll find expressions for him i'm sure he'll find expressions for him so here he is let's go and zoom into his face so we can see what what his expressions are gonna look like and i don't know if i have expressions uh i'll just i'll just dial some in i think i'll just dash them in so in the head we have expressions and let's i'll just go and pick a few like maybe afraid and angry i mean they're not they're not fantastic but you get the you'll get the point in order to mix and match between them i can either put them i can either dial these sliders up for any given situation but sometimes i like a combination of two things so maybe afraid and angry together makes me the the better morph combination rather than just using one of them and if you're using if you're making a lot of renders in the same scene like for comic or for a visual novel you need to have quick access to a multitude of expressions quickly and i've showed you recently how to do this with puppeteer so that's another very very cool way of doing it you just go and add these little dots around it i'll just show you again if you go and add an empty dot here and you go and crank up this expression put another dot here and then zero this one out and then add the angry expression and put that dot here and then the moment you switch this over to preview you can go and interpolate between these expressions and you can do that with as many expressions as you like i always recommend you have one neutral dot in your puppeteer preset so essentially what it's doing is as i move my little crosshair it'll interpolate between these values and that's kind of cool but and that's that's one way to do it and it takes some time to set up let me go and delete all these post presets here just right click and hit delete set these guys back to zero and we're not using puppeteer for that instead we're using these key properties now so if you go and open your regular timeline at the bottom what i've just shown you with the puppeteer is very similar to what the timeline does with interpolated values so if i have one keyframe i'll i have 30 frames on my timeline as it is i'll set one keyframe with a zero expression here and maybe i have another one say on frame five i'll crank this up to afraid so now i go and interpolate between these this is essentially what the puppeteer tool did as well and just in case you're not familiar with the timeline what it does is it'll interpolate values over time and so at this frame it'll have whatever's dialed in now at this frame it'll have whatever is dialed in now if i go to frame 10 i can go and set this back to 0 and maybe add angry to my expression timeline here and then i'll interpolate from here and then over to here that's how little that's how i'll do it i'm gonna go and add a few more expressions here so angry i'll set that to zero on frame 15 and maybe say i don't know confident is that good yeah that's subtle contempt maybe yeah yeah it's okay content and disgust at the same time that's that's a good expression goody and then on frame 20 i'll just use a couple more i'll set this to zero i'll set this to zero and maybe on frame 20 will go with excitement by the way if you're if you're interested in no this is a bit strong here isn't it i got to make sure that this here is also set to to zero because otherwise those expressions are a little bit overkill yeah sometimes it's a it's a bit of an issue when when expression values go go a little overbought we want to be on zero here and maybe 25 is probably enough for this demo so my timeline does this and it's almost like what i want my slider to do so that's you know that's that's number one that's kind of number one part of the puzzle so number two is how do we turn my timeline into a slider uh like that like what i've shown you so you know looks like he's going to swear absolutely pugwash welcome good to see you that is exactly what it looks like so i'll go and you can put this anywhere you like you can put it under post controls i might just go and put it in the in in the top somewhere in the top maybe pulse control is that a good idea there's so much in here already i might just go put it in my pose controls at the very bottom here so just that is inside post controls so first thing i need to do is put the whole parameters tab into edit mode i think that's how i think that's how it works somehow edit mode there we go so right click anywhere here and turn this whole thing into edit mode once it's in edit mode right click on here and select create a new property and that'll create ourselves that new slider that we want to make so let's go and make that happen create new property it'll come up with another dialog that'll first of all ask us what property type is it floats good what name would you like to use it's name and label so there if you ever distribute these things there's fairly strict um ways of you you should so the label is whatever is displayed here like angry hd or whatever and i'll just call that uh magic slider for now if you type that into name and then hit tab it will populate both the name and the label so the name is what dastudio is using underneath the under the hood so that should be something very unique i'm not sure how we deal with this and key properties but in the joint corrective modes and morph control mods you usually preface this with ncm and then the vendor and then the product and then the actual name so you make that very unique so in our case i don't really know what to what to call it maybe i'll call it kc for keat or kp for k keep properties and then maybe i'll call it j and then i'll say magic slider and i'll avoid spaces here just so that you know what that is if you're testing around it's not not a problem but if you ever were to release this make sure the name is something very unique so that it can't conflict with something that another vendor might have released so we have the same thing with wordpress plugins if you have a function that's called the same as something that another person may have created then two functions that are called something that are the same that might just confuse the program underneath it so make sure it's kind of unique if you distribute it if you're playing around no problem everything else we can just go leave as it is there's one property at the bottom here that says the minimum value is set to minus one i'll set that to zero because that's um you know i don't want this to go into the negative area there's also the path here that is also important this is where this thing is actually going to show up so i want to put this under my post controls but in the very top directories on the top pause controls if i wanted to and i'd like for this to be in my own folder i can just go and put a forward slash in here say pose controls forward slash j that might that might do that that let's go and create a new folder here into which the slider then goes that's really that so i'm gonna go and also tick this box at the bottom here that's called create as empty morph and then i'll go and create it it looks like everything is gone but of course it isn't really it's um impulse controls under j there's my magic slider i have to because i'm still in edit mode i have to double click into it so that the slider does something but currently it doesn't do anything so i need to give it some functionality so i think the way this works is if i in edit mode i crank this up to a hundred percent i think this how it works do forgive me if it doesn't this is just this very very new to to me yes it is such a handy tap biscuits absolutely and now comes kind of the the crazy part so with it in edit mode with it dialed up to 100 go and right click on that slider and find this magic property here which is called erc freeze i think brian was saying earlier on by on my patreon polls where i made that where i told you all about that discovery he says it seems that whenever the cool stuff is happening erc freeze is involved and it does just so much good stuff so erc freeze is a function if i understand it correctly that will a bit like the timeline magically calculate interpolations and interpolated values of things so you use erc freeze if you have a custom character and the skeleton isn't quite in the same position as the as the custom character that's when you'd use erc freeze with the skeleton in the correct place so it will say something to that studio along the lines of hey when this slider is dialed up to 100 then all these positions are correct so if ever the slider gets dialed down to something else please make sure that the values are interpolated correctly all the values that are associated with this erc freeze that are kind of back calculated to whatever the slider position is so if you have if you have something that makes something big and small it would have to calculate between the big and small according to that slider but it also works with multiple other properties so you had like 20 properties that have changed to make this one slider happen erc freeze would tell das studio hey calculate all 20 as the user modifies the slider so it's super super powerful so i'll go and cr i'll click it and another scary window comes up that says you know my property that's the crazy name that i've given it and i looks like i don't really see anything in here it would show there would be multiple values here if you if you had other values controlling things we don't have that but what we have is this here keyed extract from play range and as soon as i click that i get all these deltas that are being moved on the timeline and keyed means that this erc freeze is now going to look at my timeline and say hey whatever happens in the play range which is in my case 30 frames it could be much longer than that it could be much shorter than that just grab all these properties and populate them all along the space of the slider so to say that is all i need to do if i hit accept then my keyframes on the timeline have disappeared my slider is still at 100 that's cool i can take this out of edit mode now with right click and then i think as i move my slider all these expressions are essentially locked in on the slider in each and every percentage is that cool or what that is just absolutely magical so if i had like my 20 favorite expressions even something that i've made with puppeteer that i've cobbled together with puppeteer like my perfect 20 expressions that i like my characters to have at all times rather than having to find those exact spots on puppeteer i can just go and create keyframes on the timeline from that put them all on one slider and save this slider with the figure because this is now just a regular morph so once you've made all that hard work and this is actually super handy on every of my forthcoming characters of this generation you can just go and sync this out with file save as support asset morph asset so this is something it's just like a regular morph that you that you save out now so honest this gives this gives you another massive long list of things so in it it was in genesis 8 paul's controls in my case it was under j and in my case it was just the magic slider so i just go and tick this and save that out and uh give it the correct library where i want to save this probably not your main library you probably want to split this out into a separate library especially if you want to distribute this fill out your vendor name and your product name this is this denotes where in the data folder of this asset directory this is going to go very very cool isn't that amazing i find that absolutely amazing because it just makes it's just another trick that if you use that it just it just makes your life so much so much easier if you cranking out a lot of renders for comic book and visual novel production good stuff isn't it chris and of course it means you can you can morph your figure in any in any which way like if you had something let me show you another variation of the same theme here if i have if i have an any block that is essentially an animation of the guy getting up or down or about to be sitting in a chair it's kind of difficult to extract those from animations so let me see if i can if i can find something like that probably just in the regular adi blocks no that's not it is it maybe in animate is that is that what that is no that's also not what that is walk construction kit oh there we go ups and downs is that something that'll work oh no that's not for the right figure is it there we go that's that's a good option here jump for really for the genesis eight female but that's okay i mean if you want to portray a figure in mid jump so you go and drag this addy block onto the any timeline here and it'll do its thing what we need is to put this onto the regular timeline so there's a there's an option here under just right click and choose bake to studio keyframes that'll turn all these the anything that's contained in any of your anti-blocks that'll bake that onto the regular timeline just say yes and then we have a ton of keyframes and now we have a play range of 65 and say you wanted to portray a figure in mid-jump over the course of three or four still images it would be really handy to extract those poses from here while you can do that you can just use the erc freeze in the exact same way so now that we have the keyframes i'll put this whole area back into edit mode and i'll go and right click create myself a new property and i'll just call that jump baby and i can make the name unique i'm going to leave it as it is for now just to show you the principle again i'll go and put the minimum to zero just so that the slider doesn't go into the negative because that's just gonna be screwy as hell i'll go and create a create this as a new empty morph create my property there we go double click crank it up to 100 and at that point at 100 i'd like for this to erc free so not at zero percent not at fifty percent not at some other value has to be at one hundred percent right click the slider and hit for erc freeze and uh it has already done uh it has a lot of values in here already i'm going to click the key to extract from play range because that's what i want and the values will change hit accept all the keyframes will disappear and this will now make my guy jump but now you can use the timeline for something else so you can now position your guy at some point in the whole sequence then go and use defaults because that's not going to change this value but it might play with the timeline you can do something else with the timeline so you use the use it to rotate your camera around this guy in mid jump like they did in the matrix with how many cameras were that like 120 cameras or something around a center and that's how they could literally on 35 millimeter film mind you freeze the guy in the jump and then move the camera around it was literally doing that rolling 120 cameras or however many cameras it was at the same time playing one scene in real life footage in the middle and then going freezing it and just going changing from one camera to another at the same frame so you can do all that and yes that is that's the magic of key properties i was when i discovered that i was thinking my goodness the possibilities and also it doesn't seem to care how many frames were on your timeline so the first one had 30 and that is still whoops i need to take this out of edit mode here so that they are functioning that works perfectly fine with 30 but this slider has been interpolated over 65 and it also worked well it's a very very cool isn't it joseph absolutely that is a very very cool trick i thought so too i thought i shared with you because i was really excited when i found [Music] it [Music] you

Channel: The WP Guru

Views: 4,174

Keywords:

Id: uVasZa2EKDU

Length: 20min 34sec (1234 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 29 2021