Where to find Advanced Animation Features in DAZ Studio

[Music] hello everyone in this video i'd like to show you where to find and how to access the advanced timeline features in das studio those are kind of hidden and they're not obvious to discover but they're very powerful if you know where they are and what they are and how to use them i'm not going to show you how to use them but i'll show you where to find them and a little example so that we get into the groove of things this video was inspired actually by a comment i've received by one of my viewers mark borok hello mark he was he left a comment on one of my older videos about walk animations and dash studio and he said hey look this is all fair and square but can't i do more advanced stuff with that studio how would i do that and i was describing how to do this for him and i've noticed hey this is actually not that obvious to find at all so i thought i'd make a little video so this one's for you mark i'm in death studio 4.12.1 in fact this is the version i'm using it currently has a little bit of an issue with the latest windows update so when you're in the ira viewport the scene doesn't really rotate that well anymore it kind of it's not as fluent as it used to be i have a version that is ahead of this and i have a version that is behind this and they work pretty well but this one i've confirmed this with other users doesn't work particularly well but the timeline features are there so that's what we're really focusing on so right now in the bottom part of my window i find my regular timeline there's in fact to this just to go really all out here there's two tabs here there's the animate timeline and there's the regular timeline we're talking about this one here that's the regular keyframe timeline just in case this window isn't open for you if you've closed it which you can do with right clicking and choosing close pane if ever you've done anything i've lost my timeline where is it not to worry it's over here under window panes and then there is timeline at the bottom so if you click that it'll come up in my case it'll probably oh no i was thinking maybe it's gonna go down but it's not so that's how you get it back and then you can left click and drag and dock it around so my timeline here is super simple right now it shows me 30 frames i can move the playhead i can go i can play the animation if there was one there i can say do i want it to loop or not go to the back and to the beginning and that is really that is really all so if i were to bring in an object like a cube here there's my cube i don't seem to be able to actually set any keyframes with it and that's kind of a good thing this is called the basic view if ever you see this and you think haven't i had adjustments at one point that's that's just the basic view and it has its merits namely if you bring in a scene there's really no way that you can delete keyframes with this either you can't set new ones you can't accidentally move them this is kind of what the basic view is for it's just you know but nothing happens because i don't have an animation and even if i wanted to make one i can't actually do that for that we need the what's called the intermediate view so there's these three views a basic intermediate and advanced view this is the basic view and you can access them with this little hamburger icon at the right hand side of your timeline if you click over there at the very top of this very scary menu here you've got this thing called view mode and i'm currently in the basic view but if i switch over to the next one down the intermediate then my timeline looks a little bit different it's got lots of numbers and things and more sliders and stuff dotted all over the place and that actually lets me set keyframes now and because we're talking about animations let's just quickly make one so i'm gonna i don't have any keyframes here so i'm gonna be on frame 0 of my animation i'm going to go and select my cube here that's very important if nothing selected then you can't set keyframes but if you select the object that you want to set a keyframe on then this little icon comes up which is create keys and that's what i'd like to do so i'm going to go and create one that gives me a little icon at the front here which is the keyframe i'm going to go to the back of my animation at frame 30 i'm going to set another keyframe that means whatever i do from here to there is being interpolated right now we're interpolating the exact same thing so we're not going to see anything but at frame 15 no actually that's not what i'm going to do forget about it i'm going to go and go to the very back of my thing here and i'm going to go and rotate my cube around the y axis y is up so i'm going to go and rotate him once fully maybe not to 360 but to 359 numeric value here as soon as i do that that's two will actually select the key create a keyframe for me so now if i do this i can see that my cube rotates which is awesome so that's a very basic animation here it keeps spinning it keeps rotating i'm going to go and open this up a little bit there is also the option to make this longer so if i'm thinking actually that spins a little bit too fast let me go and make this a total duration of maybe 61 frames or 60 frames in total and i'd like for my last for my keyframe that used to be the last frame i'd like to move that over to the last frame um because currently if i if i play it then nothing happens for the last second but i like for this keyframe to move over to the other side i can't do that but what needs to happen is that i need to be able to select that keyframe here and then go and left click and drag it and no matter how hard i try i can't really do that and the intermediate timeline doesn't really let us do that so it it lets us work with animations that lets us set keyframes like basic keyframes but we have no way of seeing where they are what they do and what what next to do with them for that we need to use the advanced view of that let me go over to that little hamburger icon again under view mode and then select advanced view and watch what happens to the timeline as i do that it opens up a little menu at the front here which now shows me the same object i've already selected in my scene view here but with that i can now go and open the object up and see its properties here and if i open up properties i can see that i've got transforms translation and transforms rotation and if i open up transforms translation i can see that there's not really much in there even though yeah these are the the keyframes that i had selected earlier so i don't really need them anymore because my object is in the same space but these are now the actual keyframes that i can i can select so under rotation there's one that we definitely know we've we've used and which is the the y rotation here so really i don't need to use i don't need any of these keyframes so i can now go in and delete them here careful not to press backspace or delete when you do that very careful if you do that the object that's selected in the scene outliner gets selected you don't want that if you want to just delete the keyframes you have to right click on the keyframes and then go and say delete keys i can do that nothing happens because we haven't really changed the position of the cube likewise i can go and select this keyframe and the bottom one so the x and the z they can be selected with control either you can border select all of them you can select off it to deselect them or you can select one hold ctrl and then select another one and then go again not backspace not delete you have to right click and say delete selected keys and this is the last keyframe that remains standing here so if i go and play this this is what happens and i can now go and left click and drag this over to another position such as frame 60 and then i can see that my cube keeps rotating but it does that much slower you can also set the interpolation type that's another favorite that i like to do i think you have to do that on the first keyframe here and just select it and then there's this little option menu down here at the bottom with the half cut off symbol here i don't really know what it means it's got the interpolation type on it and if you click that the one that's selected by default is tcb god knows what that means i have no idea linear is the one that i'm going to show you that's kind of a linear interpolation tcb is like curves i really don't know what it means and constant is the one that changes the value immediately without any interpolation so there's only zero and one as a value so in linear fashion if i now go and have my cube spin it'll continuously spin without there being an acceleration or deceleration on that and you can also see that reflected in the little keyframe so it's no longer saying t is now saying l t i guess stands for tcp i would imagine but let me go a little bit more advanced here because we're not quite done with the advanced timeline we haven't talked about the dope sheet and the graph editor yet let me go into the middle of my animation at frame 30 here and i'll go at that point i'm gonna go and lift my cube up somewhat so i don't know maybe just to about here and i'll leave that on tcb interpolation and now i can see that my cube goes up and down no it doesn't actually it just stays up so what i'd like to do is copy the first position of my cube and make sure i paste it onto frame 60. so i'll do that by going over to selecting this thing right clicking it to say copy selected keys and then i'll go move my playhead to the end and then i'll go and say paste keys and that will now drop my cube down so now i've copied and pasted some keyframes here and that's how i can i can effectively animate there's something crucially missing in this whole setup and that is what professional animators really like it's called a dope sheet or i believe that studio knows it as the graph editor and that is something that's almost not obvious to find in an animation and that's the all the scary curves that we may have to deal with from time to time there's this little icon at the bottom here and that almost looks like something that collapses my timeline altogether or collapses any of the windows in that studio altogether it could be mistaken for that but it is something vitally important and it actually brings up the graph editor so if you click that and this doesn't come up by default when you select the advanced view here so i'm still in the advanced view but the advanced view is now even more advanced so technically this is like four modes of advancement here when i open that i get this this other different scary window here and i'll go and expand that a little bit so that we can see both the timeline and the graph editor side by side here because they do rely on one another this thing down here which is currently empty will only display something if you select the track over here in the regular timeline that has keyframes on it so right now it's not showing anything because the cube object is selected but if i go to the x object here also doesn't show anything because now no keyframes are happening here under translate however we do have keyframes and i can see that there is a curve it's a little bit too big right now so i can do i can zoom in and out and i can move this thing around either with the mouse wheel so you can scroll the mouse wheel to zoom in and out you can also hold down this little icon here which then hold down left click and drag on the icon that moves this thing up and down zoom is kind of the same thing you left click and drag move this up and down if you hover it'll actually show you that there's shortcut keys available for that as well so this one is left mouse button and drag well not here is it no so you have to be on the icon now crazy and then the bottom one is my favorite that centers everything into the view so any keyframes that are out of view right now with this thing you can bring them into view so same thing if i go and select my y rotation down here if i click this this is now a linear graph and it kind of shoots off here so i can either go and bring this back or go click this little square icon and that'll show me the whole graph as it goes off into the distance here so that is how i can use the graph editor and same thing here i have the same keyframes down here that i have up here that i can now go and manipulate and move into other places to create the animation that i like so if i go back to this thing here and expand this interview there's one other thing i wanted to show you that is really handy for animators to have that is that the very bottom here the one that i'm highlighting right now that is the play range slider so this is equivalent to hacking numbers into these boxes here so they are in the traditional studio before we got all these little fancy add-ons with that studio 4.12 we had to really hack in numbers to be able to see a range of our animation in kind of a zoomed in fashion but now i can go and either click this little handle at the back here and zoom into my animation or at the front here and do that or i can go and click on the whole slider and then move the slider along and see where my keyframes are that way and that is really how you do that and that's how you can find these advanced timeline features and how you can edit the keyframe so keyframes same thing down here in the graph editor they react to the same contextual menus with the right click but yes it's vitally important to know that this is where it is and this is how to open it so to recap then the hamburger icon on the timeline is super important if it's set to basic view we can do literally nothing other than just navigate our timeline we can also not delete any keyframes because we can't select any keyframes we can't set any keyframes then there is the intermediate view so again hamburger icon view mode intermediate view and that now gives us the play range slider in which we can peek into shorter snippets of our animation we can set keyframes there's actually if you wanted to set an additional keyframe with it notice that this is now grayed out this is because i've switched views so in order to make this appear again if i wanted to set a keyframe you have to click off the object and on the object again and then this thing comes back and so i could set another additional keyframe here i can also i believe delete keyframes if i go to this thing now i can't seem to delete keyframes in the intermediate view but hey one of those things for that we have the advanced view which is again hamburger icon view mode advanced view and that now lets us open up properties of our object and that lets us select keyframes of our object as i've shown you and if i were to find them here some oh yeah this is a keyframe here there's also this one here that's a keyframe so these are the actual keyframes that i can now go and manipulate and move and delete and copy and whatnot and i can set interpolation types but the real power kind of comes with the fourth view which is the advanced advanced view which is that tiny little almost didn't notice it was that kind of icon that opens the graph editor with its powerful options that is it i hope mark that clears it up and yes that is a little introduction of where to find all these scary little timeline modes i hope this was at least partially helpful if you always wanted to know where do i find these scary features didn't somebody demonstrate this didn't i see a screenshot every once in a while this is where they are this is how you access them i hope you enjoyed it if it helps please share it with friends family and total strangers and other than that i will see you in the next episode take care bye [Music] you

Channel: The WP Guru

Views: 22,597

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Id: vUywa9xU2Yg

Length: 16min 5sec (965 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 30 2020