MatAnim

for DS 1, 2, 3, 4

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Introduction

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This script contains all you need to animate the color and intensity (strength) properties of any

material in your daz scene.

if you want to animate the material's textures (images) you can use my other script named TexAnim

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History

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Version 8 Mar 27, 2020, 12:48 PM : now works for DS4.1x materials with DzFloatColorProperty

Version 7 Apr 5, 2013, 10:54 AM

Version 5 Oct 8, 2009, 2:07 AM

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Installing

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The dowbloadable script is found at the bottom of this page

the zip file contains the script and companion icon/image

it also contains the manual which is ( this web page )

typically you should place the files

matanim.dsa and matanim.dsa.png

somewhere in

program files/daz/studio/content/scripts

which will make them appear in your daz studio's content tab

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Use

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Making a material-property animatable

here's MatAnim's interface in action

figure 1.

You can see i selected the "Diffuse Color" property

of the material named "Default",

which is owned by the object named Torus

you can also see that presently this property cannot be animated

i click on the "Make Property Animatable" button to change this!

i close MatAnim

i move the DazStudio's Timeline cursor to frame 0

i go in the "surfaces" tab and set the torus's "Diffuse Color" to red

i move the DazStudio's Timeline cursor to frame 9

and set the torus's "Diffuse Color" to blue

if i render frames 0 to 9 i get a torus that changes from red to blue

figure 2. click on this image to see the animation

Tween the keys, Tweening

The material properties marked as "Type Float" ( see figure 1 ) have an extra animation feature, you can control their "tweening".

Example, the property named "Ambient strength"

Say we create 2 keys for "Ambient strength", the first one at frame 0 with a value of 0% and the other at frame 100 with a value of 100%

For frames 1 to 99, Daz Studio is in charge of computing the value of "Ambient strength", a value somewhere in-between 0% and 100%.

The act of computing in-between values is called "interpolation" or "tweening".

By default Daz Studio uses "Hermite" or "Splined" tweening to compute the in-between values. What this means is, the value of "Ambient strength" will slowly start increasing from frame 1 to 50, speeding up, then from frame 50 to 99 it slows down until it reaches 100%

often, you will want your values to ramp up from one key to the other at a steady rate in our example, at frame 40 we would like to have "Ambient Strength" at 40%, and we want it to be 90% at frame 90. This behaviour is called "Linear " tweening

if we want the value of "Ambient Strength" to remain at 0% from frames 0 to 99, then jump to 100% at frame 100, what we want is called "Constant interpolation", sometimes called a staircase.

in figure 3 you can see the cone's "Ambient Strength" animated with "Constant" tweening"and the sphere's "Ambient Strength" animated with "Linear" tweening"

figure 3. click on this image to see the animation

MatAnim has a button to set the tweening for the key at the current frame (if any ) and one to set the tweening for all existing keys. This works in conjunction with the Linear/Constant/Splined checkboxes

if you modify or create new keys, it's possible the tweening for those keys will revert to "Splined" since that's the default behavior set by Daz Studio. So setting the tweening may preferably be performed once all the keys are laid out.

Deleting Material-Property keys

you cannot use DazStudio's Timeline buttons to delete material property keys,

so i added two delete buttons for this purpose in MatAnim

Animating the UVs

So how did i make the animation at the top of this page?

i made the "Vertical Offset" property of each material animatable

then i set the "Vertical Offset " of each surface to 1.00 at frame 30 and i set the "Vertical Offset " of each surface to 0.00 at frame 0.

This is called UV animation i guess, if you ever visited SecondLife, i'm pretty sure that's how they do water falls :)

So you could do this to make, Snow ! and Smoke and water !

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License

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( MIT License )

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person

obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation

files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without

restriction, including without limitation the rights to use,

copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell

copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the

Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following

conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be

included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,

EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES

OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND

NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT

HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY,

WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING

FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR

OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.