Greetings Animation is a very important part of learning 3D design It allows your characters to come to life by moving around In this video we will see how to animate in Daz Studio What ways of posing there are, how to render animation and so on For this video I will be using this character - a Victoria 8.1 figure Let’s start with the interface At the bottom left of your default interface you should see an AniMate Lite and a Timeline buttons Clicking on them will open a corresponding tab interface Clicking on a tab again will hide it back If you don’t have such tabs open like me - worry not, it is easy to create them For this just go to the Window > Panes(Tabs) and find needed option here AniMate Lite is at the very top And Timeline is found near the bottom of the list First of all let’s learn the easiest way of animating in Daz Studio - presets All you need to do is with the character selected open an Animations section in Smart Content tab Here you can see all the available presets and hover over them to see a preview on your character For example, let’s use Clap animation preset Double click on it to apply it to a character You will see it appear in the AniMate Lite instantly And when you press Play - you will see figure performing it in real time Before moving forward, let’s look closer into AniMate Lite and its interface Here on the left you can see all your objects that you are animating And right of them is a timeline with aniBlocks that are your animations On top of the Timeline there is a Playhead It shows the current frame of your animation and you can drag it to change the frame Frame counter is on the top-right right here Also when you hover over some button for some time - you will see its name showing up So we can see that the Play Stop, Go to Start and End and Loop Playback are all found here AniBlocks that are situated on the timeline can be moved around This allows you to control when an animation starts and ends very easily Also on a Timeline here there is an End of Animation gizmo that can be moved So you can make animation longer or shorter if you need to Right click on it and select Auto Adjust to return it back where it was All the presets that are found in a Smart Content tab Can also be found here at the bottom left of aniMate Lite You can see all the Walks aniBlocks here right now You can open a list, where you can choose whatever animations you want out of your collection And hovering over aniBlocks here also starts a preview animation just as it did in Smart Content This is simply created for your convenience, so you would not need two windows open to work with aniMate The good thing is that we can combine these animation presets So one animation will go into another All you need to do is to take a needed animation and drag it before or after the one you already have Now there are two aniBlocks placed one after another And the End of Animation gizmo has been moved automatically When I press play, you can see that both animations play one after another And they change seamlessly Meaning that you it is not easy to see the point when one animation goes into another Some animations are created to be even more seamless than that To delete aniBlocks, simply select them and click on the delete aniBlock button Now I propose you a little exercise Change to the Walks presets And try using these aniBlocks to create a seamless animation That has both a start and a finish Just press a pause and see what you come up with, then resume Let’s see how exactly you could have done that Of course we need to begin with a start animation Then any of my choosing, for example a left corner turn A bit of forward movement Ending everything with a stop aniBlock Now I have animation consisting out of 4 aniBlocks Make sure that you don’t have gaps between them or they would not be seamless I can press play and see the whole walking animation Just need to zoom out a bit and change the view to see everything better Here is my walking animation made out of few animation presets It is very easy to do and I hope that you could handle it too For now we only worked with preset animations But usually that is not enough and you would want to do something more unique yourself I will delete all the aniBlocks that I have right now to work on another thing And we will use Timeline this time The interface is similar a bit to aniMate Lite, but let’s go through it anyway Here on the left we have the character that we animate And the timeline itself with a playhead on right Playhead can be moved to change the frame Everything about frames is at the bottom left Here we see a total amount of frames, their range The current frame and how Frames Per Second our animation is going in At the middle there are control buttons, similar to what we saw in aniMate Loop, skip to start and end, skip to previous and next keyframes and of course the play button And even more to the right are the delete and add keyframe buttons Instead of utilizing aniBlocks that are exclusive to aniMate, Timeline uses keys or keyframes They are very important and are used for animation in most other software Keyframe records the current state of your figure And by creating a keyframes in different state of an object, you can animate it going from one state to another Gladly, keys in Daz Studio usually are created automatically, so we have no need to work with them a lot Now for the animation itself Let’s animate our character using poses Make them go from one pose into another I will choose the "Walking B" pose as the original one It is very important now to move your playhead Or instead you will override the keyframe that was created on frame zero As the whole animation is 30 frames, I will move the playhead right in the middle, on frame 15 Apply another pose, I will use "Walking A" You can see a black triangle appearing on the timeline beneath playhead This is a keyframe that contains information about "Walking B" pose and was created automatically Frame 0 also has a keyframe that has "Walking A" pose in it When I move a playhead, character moves too And pressing play creates an animation of character changing one pose into another Remember that you can add and delete keyframes if you need to do it manually To create a loop animation, you can go to the last frame and apply the same pose as you had on a frame zero Now animation is a seamless loop, where character changes between two poses constantly That is it about basics of animating poses Until this point we had still used some already made assets such as animation presets or poses It is time to learn how to create something from scratch For this we will need to learn what posing tools there are in Daz Studio First is an ActivePose Tool that can be found on the toolbar up top With it active you can select any of your figures bones And move them around by dragging You can see that this not only moves the bone that I have selected, but also influences all others It looks realistic, because when you move a real bone, usually other bones are influenced too This have created a keyframes for my bones at frame 0 If I change a frame and move same bones again - this will create another keyframe And two keyframes together create an animation Even though ActivePose Tool sounds good and look realistic, reality is that it is not the best It is not precise at all and it is difficult to control exactly how you want to position the character That is why we will look into another method of posing When you select any of your characters bones by clicking on it with ActivePose Tool At the top left of the viewport you will see a new gizmo appear Here you can control different rotations of the selected bone By clicking and dragging on these circles, the bone will rotate accordingly along this axis On this gizmo you can also see which axis you can rotate along and which you can’t Also the range that is available to you is seen It is very easy to use and far more precise than just dragging parts of the body Also using this gizmo you can even Restore Figure Pose to a default one Basically all same options are found in the Parameters tab With the bone selected, you can control here how it should be moved It is the same thing as Rotation Gizmo and even when I change values in one, they also change in another one By the way, we don’t really need a Timeline for now, so we can hide it For the next tool - PowerPose Pane I have it opened right here If you don’t - just find it in the Window > Panes as always Here in the PowerPose interface, you can see your characters template On this template there are a bunch of blue dots You can click and drag this dots to also move the figure One of the best things about PowerPose is the sun-like dots They allow you to move the whole part of the body at the same time For example, this "sun" will let me to move the whole hand, which includes three bones Moving three bones at the same time is extremely useful Like this you can also move the head and neck, each leg and both legs simultaneously PowerPose is probably the best tool out of all for creating poses and animations Knowing all these posing methods, you now can manually create poses and thus animation In combination with the body moving, character’s faces also should move while animating So it would not look like it is just a lifeless doll moving You can find Face Expression option if you select a figure and proceed to the Posing window And find Pose Controls Here are a lot of options to control the face expression of your character You can move every inch of their face such as brows, cheeks, jaws and more Also here you can even find the face expression presets They can make your character look angry or afraid just by changing the value These face expressions are very detailed and you can even combine them to create some animations Also while using PowerPose you can change the Template that you want to work with The default one is Body and you can change it to the Head This should also give you a possibility to change face expressions easily But Genesis 8.1 figures don’t have a proper template yet for some reason There is also a Face template This one is extremely flexible You can control everything about your characters face But this also requires some training and knowledge to utilize correctly Here I have a Genesis 8 figure You can see that it has a Genesis 8 Female Template Set And when I select a Head Template There are a lot more options here I can make character frown Close their eyes Control brows and the whole face I am not sure whether Genesis 8.1 will ever have this Template fixed, but I hope so Let’s talk about the Additional Tools that you can use to help with the task First of all it it is a Puppeteer tool If your character has a pose, you can open a Puppeteer tool As always, use Window > Panes to find the window and open it Here you can see a huge grid By clicking anywhere on the grid - you can create a dot This dot saves current pose of your character If you would then go back to Smart Content and change the pose to something different Then return back to Puppeteer and place another dot You will have two dots, each of them saving information about the pose that you character had at that moment Clicking on a dot instantly brings the character to that pose This is convenient for situations when you want to save a pose for later Though Puppeteer proposes more than just that If you change to the Preview mode You can click and drag anywhere on a grid This makes your character make a pose according to grid Closer your crosshair to a dot - closer the pose to what was saved there You can even go further than dots to exaggerate a pose, but usually it looks silly You may wonder why would you need this? I will show you, open a Timeline and go to the frame 0 Now change the Puppeteer to Record mode And start moving crosshair around Pay attention to a Timeline As soon as I start moving crosshair - Timeline starts recording everything that happens In the end we can witness in Timeline that there are a bunch of keys created automatically And even that a total amount of frames were increased to match created animation too When I press play - it will recreate animation exactly as I did it when recorded You can even see crosshair moving in Puppeteer exactly as when I moved it myself Zoom in to have a better look Puppeteer can be extremely helpful and there are many uses for it Another thing that can be extremely helpful is aniMate 2 In this video we have worked with aniMate Lite It is a free built-in cropped version of aniMate 2 AniMate 2 is basically a must-have if you plan to work with animations in Daz Studio It has a lot more functions than aniMate Lite and a Timeline too And the main thing is that it was designed to be as easy to use as it can Meaning that it will be an ideal choice for any beginner out there Another tool that I want to recommend you is Anilip 2 This tool provides you with ability to make your character speak You just give a sound file to this add-on And it will create a talking animation for you Additionally it has a lot of settings to control the animation and change how it will look in the end Links for this products in Daz3D.com/Shop you can find in the description Returning to Daz Studio, let’s talk about the last step of any animation - Rendering What do you need to know about rendering animations Firstly of course we will need to open a Render Settings window Starting from the top, General settings are the most important Here you set up your Aspect Ratio and Resolution(Pixel Size) You can do it manually or use Dimension Presets up top Here you can find all kinds of presets for your Aspect Ratio and Resolution I recommend sticking to 16:9 aspect ratio Mainly with either HD 720p or Full HD 1080p These are the most popular resolution in world and will work with most screens The higher your resolution is - better, more detailed and sharper the image will look But will take much longer, that is why I don’t recommend to render animations higher than 1080p Other options may have black bars because aspect ratio does not match screen But these are just recommendations and does not mean that you can’t use any other option Everything is only up to you Other important thing is Render Type By default it is set to Still Image, which means that it will render a single frame only For animations we will need to change that Movie option seems like the best choice But in reality an Image Series considered to be better Mostly because it is a lot more safe and flexible to render like this A quick example: you render a very complex and long animation And your Daz Studio crashes for some reason in the middle of it If you were rendering a Movie - you will be left with nothing and will need to start again But if you had Render Type as Image Series - you will have half of the images safe and sound And will need to only render the other half Nothing more in the General Tab Progressive Rendering can’t be missed too Here you set up your samples amount Usually you can afford to render for a few more minutes and have more samples But when you render animation, a minute on each image can cost you hours in the end So I recommend sticking with lower sample numbers It is harder to notice all the details while figure is moving anyway Same goes for Denoising Sometimes people skip it and increase samples instead to preserve all details But when working with animations - I highly recommend to turn denoising on and lower samples amount This is it for rendering animations But there are a lot more to rendering overall, we even have a video on our youtube channel that you can check out This video is based on our article from renderguide.com There you can find even more information about animation in Daz Studio More recommendations, tips and tricks for you to use If you are interested in learning more about 3D design - I advice you to visit our website Here you can find a lot articles and tutorials to help you on your journey Choose a Category and find something for you Don't forget to subscribe to our channel to get more insipartion
