I tried one last animation in Daz... [Cut Content] (Patreon)

The Journey of a Fearless Tiny - A failed foot/sandal animation. Also contains a weird glasses/face thing I tried.

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So, as you may or may not be aware, I've been trying to convert my animation workflow into Blender for a while now. It has been...challenging.

Challenging enough that I considered abandoning the whole process and sticking with Daz.  Back in December, I tried an experiment to do something that should have been quick and easy, and Daz once again showed me how abusively difficult it is to even maintain control of the camera. It came out...okay, but additional issues with rendering (notice how extremely grainy and unprocessed large chunks of the video are) kept me from continuing and making this a full animation. No sound effects on there, just the animation itself and some music.

[Technical Jargon and complaining begins here! Skip to the last paragraph if you don't care about the technical details!]

The biggest issue with animating in Daz is the way it handles interpolation. In modern animation, artists will set a keyframe (or an important frame within an animated figure's motion] move to a different place in the timeline, and set a new keyframe, and let the software figure out the best way to get the figure from the first keyframe to the second keyframe. The process that Daz (or really any modern animation software) uses to figure out the movement between those keyframes is called keyframe interpolation. It's great, when handled correctly.

Unfortunately, Daz does not handle this well. There is a bug (or maybe just a really badly written line of code somewhere?) that tells Daz that, on after the second or third keyframe,  the node (or animatable bone, camera, prop, etc.) needs an unnecessarily long wind-up between the previous keyframe and the next. Think of it like a Baseball pitcher pulling back their arm before throwing the ball).

A little of this is necessary and good, but Daz makes it way more than necessary, to the point that it is far more than noticeably distracting. If this bug happens while a character is taking a step, imagine that their foot sinks below the floor for 3 seconds before lifting back out of the floor to be in position to move again. Obviously this looks terrible.

Now, wrapping up our little explanation, there are ways to fix this, but none of them are preferable. You can *change* the interpolation from what Daz calls 'TCB', which is the default, and the type that is causing the issue, to 'Linear', which means that Daz does not require any kind of wind-up to prepare for motion. Unfortunately, linear interpolation means that natural motion has to be animated on every frame, not just keyframes.

You see, humans are not robots. Humans will slowly move bones and muscles into action from the largest movement to the smallest, making our smooth movements very clean and flowing and gentle. Linear interpolation does not make those adjustments for us, and therefore, for every single frame must be adjusted to allow for this motion. Yes, every frame...not every keyframe.

In the video I linked here, there are approximately 6000 frames. With linear interpolation, (and yes, for those of you who understand this, I am watering this down a LOT!) I would need to go to every frame and adjust the motion to be more natural. There are other ways to do this (such as the graph editor) but they don't change much about how grueling that process would be. It would take literal months of work to get even 30 second animations rendered.

So, the animation linked above is using a combination of TCB (normal/automated) interpolation, and linear (manual) interpolation. Anywhere you see the camera, or a person, or just part of a person, suddenly go from moving smoothly, to a rigid, awkward movement (especially the camera) is when I had to switch from TCB to linear to get the camera to be where I needed it to be. It means that I am not controlling the camera, I'm asking the camera to go somewhere, then adjusting the animation based on where the camera *actually* ends up. Needless to say, this is not what should be happening.

[Technical explanation and jargon ends here!]

Anyway, I'm working on a few different ways to get character models from Daz to Blender, and that's been my biggest hang up. I've got some images I can share sometime soon of the process, but I wanted to keep you all updated! The animation linked here was the final nail in the coffin...I should not have to adjust my 'vision' for the animation based on limitations of the software. 

Thanks for your support everyone, I hope you enjoy this last animation project in Daz! I hope it won't be too long before the next one, this time in Blender.

-UE