aniMate 2 - by GoFigure
Motion Capture Acting
I don't really do motion capture myself. I purchase motion capture data - or rather, the license to use it for my work.
Browsing on YouTube, I found this fun adventure - YouTuber, Michelle Khare does a program called: Challenge Accepted, and for this one she delves into the incredibly difficult task of Acting for Motion Capture.
You think you're ready? Do you think you have what it takes?
This fun video might give you a bit more perspective on what this job entails! Very cool, indeed!!!
Let's get focused on mastering “aniMate 2” in DAZ Studio! AniMate 2 combines a user-friendly interface with sophisticated features, making it a valuable and core tool for animating your visual stories.
Dartanbeck uses AniMate 2 at the heart of his workflow and reveals in this tutorial set how to make the most of this and other hyper-useful tools such as LimbStick, Bone Minion and Mixamo for effective animation storytelling in DAZ Studio.
This tutorial set by Dartanbeck is for you if...
You're interested in uncovering the hidden and often overlooked powerful features of aniMate2, enhancing your animation capabilities in DAZ Studio.
You want to learn how to efficiently use aniBlocks, including advanced techniques like trimming, blending, and customizing motion paths for more dynamic animations.
You're keen on exploring the vast potential of aniBlock packs, cross-generation animation conversion, and integrating unique movements for characters and vehicles.
This is for you if you want to accomplish:
Making the most of aniMate2, ensuring a solid foundation for creating professional and intricate animations in DAZ Studio.
Expanding your creative horizons by learning how to modify and combine aniBlocks, achieving impressive new motions and animations.
Gaining expertise in leveraging specialized tools and resources like Motion Captured Animations, LimbStick, Bone Minion and more, to elevate your animation projects
What a Fantastic place to learn, share and absorb anything and everything Art!
Led by Paul Bussey, this fantastic place has a beautiful forum with an endless supply of topics - and we can join courses and training, or just hang out with the group and discuss and enjoy art!
Add the Magic of Non-Linear Animation to you Daz Studio Workflow!
Daz Studio does come with aniMate 2 built in, but that's mostly a really good demo.
We must purchase aniMate 2 in order to unlock the rest of the features.
It's not expensive and is a great investment if you like to animate!!!
Trust me - it's worth Every Penny!
What's Included and Features
Easily arrange aniBlocks(animations) that magically chain together to form a complete animation for your character.
Loop, split, and trim your aniBlocks for the perfect fluid motion.
Preview your aniBlocks directly on your character with the hover of your mouse.
See all your character tracks at once.
Keyframe directly inside an aniBlock using multiple levels for safe edits.
Graph Edit to visualize and adjust your aniBlock's keyframes.
Subtracks
Layer morph expression aniBlocks over your human motions to really bring your characters alive.
Override the bones you specify to combine aniBlocks in ways not before possible(such as wave and walk at the same time).
Change the entire poise of your character using pose aniBlocks.
Audio aniBlocks for extra fun and to help choreograph your character's movements and expressions.
Serious refinement based on feedback
Easy Cubic Interpolation. Never overshoots, always beautiful.
Previewer search to help find your aniBlocks.
Drag and drop your Daz Content(pz2, fc2, etc) directly to your character's tracks to easily make expression aniBlocks.
Pose Spline. Visually edit keyframes by using target points of the hands, feet and hip inside the 3d viewport.
Reorient based on a foot or a toe, for the elimination of character foot floating between transitions.
Line Guides to help align aniBlocks across tracks.
Start Circles in the 3d viewport to see that very important location that begins your animation. Have more that one start circle for cut scenes.
Parent Constraint. Now you can have your character pick an object up and drop it.
Retarget poses and animations.
See Feature Demonstration Videos Below
Check out all of GoFigure's aniBlock collections available at Daz 3D
Scroll Down to see a Lot More available animation products at Daz 3d
Join me in all of this in the forums:
I started this thread to help uncover many of the less-known but incredible things we can do with aniMate 2.
My entire workflow flourishes because of aniMate 2 - and how it so easily passes motion data between itself and Daz Studio's Timeline and back again in any order and for any reason.
After Getting through that, there has been no stopping me pushing forward with more explanations of how I use this wonderful setup to work out the animations I create.
Of course that all leads me down more paths, techniques, and useful tools to help along the way.
So this thread has turned into a wonderful means to Get Animating in Daz Studio with very little cost and easy to follow guidelines and techniques.
Having the article in the forum gives You the opportunity to ask questions, comment, make suggestions, share your own workflows... it's a big win for us all.
A living, breathing workflow experience that can evolve however we need it to :)
If you have any questions or comments,
Reply to the thread - I monitor it often so answers come quickly!
►►► Handy Helpful Links
Dartanbeck's workflow tips:
Don't Have Bone Minion Yet?
Using zaz777's amazing animated pose conversion script (FREE) along with the necessary rsg's "Updated: Daz Studio Posing Scripts (now for G3F)" available on sharecg.com (FREE) has brought great results for me over the couple years I've been working in Daz Studio for animation.
If using Mixamo animation FBX
3D Universe's Daz Studio Animation Tools Set 1 includes a tool called Body2Hip
Run this on the FBX result Before saving the animated pose, and you'll enjoy Massive Improvements!!!
Use is simple: Select figure (I just select the imported FBX figure) then run Body2Hip
I had converted a lot of my Mixamo FBX downloads to Victoria 7 using Zaz777's conversion script, and they work great. But they're for Victoria 7, so to use them on Rosie 8, I'd either use the G3F to G8F World's Greatest Pose Convertor pose dials or run a Bone Minion. (there's also G3M to G8M World's Greatest Pose Convertor for our male figures)
Rather than using the Victoria 7 conversions I already made I decided to just use my new Genesis 2 Pose Bone Minion to start from scratch with the original Mixamo FBX downloads. (I purchased the Genesis 2 Pose bone Minion Bundle so that I can easily translate my Mixamo FBX downloads to Any of my Daz 3d Figure generations from M4 and V4 through Genesis 8.1)
Wanna Really Dig Into It?
A Digital Art Live Experience
Now Available at Daz 3d - a Special new educational course that I've been anxious to share with everyone.
Paul Bussey, from Digital Art Live, offered an amazing opportunity for me to tell my story of how I've unlocked the key to a super-easy approach to animating in Daz Studio - something that a majority of animators consider to be nearly impossible, and for good reason. Daz Studio is set up differently than traditional animating software, making it feeling clunky, even unfriendly to folks who are used to animating.
Such a thing is difficult to tell in a few words or even a single article here on the site. It's something that needs to be seen, worked through, demonstrated.
Animation Vendors at Daz 3d
If you have any questions or comments,
Reply to the thread - I monitor it often so answers come quickly!
If you have any questions or comments,
Reply to the thread - I monitor it often so answers come quickly!
If you have any questions or comments,
Reply to the thread - I monitor it often so answers come quickly!
As of this writing, this incredible product is 12 years old, yet it's a real Gem!
Check out the images below for how cool this thing is.
Working with the materials to bring them to become Iray shaders was a simple and fun process and the figure itself holds up with everything today - with a wonderfully imaginative twist!
Having aniBlocks included with it is Really Amazing! Walk Start/Stop/Cycle along with some that open and close the rear end - and they all look Fantastic! See the aniBlock preview video below!
And as if that's not enough - Elele also has a Free Gatling Gun addon for it at ShareCG.com:
Example Video of the Included aniBlocks - which are Great!
If you have any questions or comments,
Reply to the thread - I monitor it often so answers come quickly!
Need some of the Industry's Best VFX Elements for your movies at exceptionally great deals?
Look No Further!
I don't do subscription plans, but AVFX+ is much different - if you cancel, you keep what you got! But they also offer non-subscription sales as well - which is Brilliant! Check them out!
If you have any questions or comments,
Reply to the thread - I monitor it often so answers come quickly!
GoFigure aniMate Demo Videos and Tutorials
If you have any questions or comments,
Reply to the thread - I monitor it often so answers come quickly!
aniBlock Importer for Carrara Tutorial by Jonny Bravo!
If you have any questions or comments,
Reply to the thread - I monitor it often so answers come quickly!
A fun little behind-the-scenes look at GoFigure recording the motion capture for Martial Arts packs
aniMate 2 User Guide
aniMate2 User Guide.pdfIf you have any questions or comments,
Reply to the thread - I monitor it often so answers come quickly!
Need to get Poser Formats out of Daz Studio?
Use DAZ Studio, Carrara and/or Poser in your creative process? Need to get poses and/or animations to Carrara or Poser, but the data is in DAZ Studio?
DUF files can take forever to load in Carrara and, sometimes they might not work at all, depending on what it is.
Solution?
This script provides the ability to generate Poser format Pose (.pz2), Face/Expression (.fc2) and Hand (.hd2) files from directly within DAZ Studio. Use DAZ Studio to pose or animate your figures, then use this script to transfer that information to Carrara or Poser.
NOTE: PFE supports both DAZ Studio 3 and 4
Check out How to use the Poser Format Exporter by Mattymanx
What's Included and Features
Features
Create Poser format Pose(.pz2), Face(.fc2) and Hand(.hd2) files
Include the root node or selected nodes
Limit inclusion to only selected nodes or recursively include their children
Create poses of the Current Frame or of an Animated Range
Choose the starting and ending frame of an Animated Range
Include/Exclude Transforms (rotation, translation scale); per axis
Include/Exclude Morph Targets (targetGeom)
Include/Exclude Numeric Properties (valueParm)
Include/Exclude Node Visability state
Include/Exclude Node Bending state
Paul and I are at it again! We thought it would be a Great idea to demonstrate ways to Really perform some Cool Magic with your Daz Studio work, whether it's animated or still.
This is one session you won't want to miss!
There are many ways to build, save and render our Daz 3D scenes.
In Movie Magic we’ll explore workflows for creating specific, separate renders that are purposely made to be melded together into a single, final image.
Whether for you’re making still images OR animations, these practices add Magic by allowing us total freedom over the look of Every element within the scene.
You’ll see how much Faster we can work – how much more we can get done with an efficient workflow.
The additional tools and elements demonstrated are not essential to the course, but shown to inspire creativity in using them. The main things that we will take away from all of this can be achieved with your own library of content assets.
Have a Question? Just Ask!
I love to help others as best I can. This is a rather broad topic: CG Filmmaking, so my articles on any particular topic may not answer your specific question.
Most of the questions directed to me are regarding Carrara or How did I do this?
For these sorts of things, post your question at the Carrara Discussion Forum (or another appropriate category) at Daz 3D.com forums, and if I don't see it right away, someone else might. They are such a friendly and helpful bunch! I've learned so much from that forum over the years!
For a more immediate question directed to me, log into those forums and Send me a PM!
and support this site at the same time!!! :) Thanks!!! :)
Appreciation for Your Support!
In honor of the Wonderful People who enjoy what I do enough to offer support, This Appreciation Page is For You!
For those who have asked to remain anonymous, I have not included you in there. If you'd like to be included, I'd Love to!
Anonymous or otherwise, I really appreciate your Support - and All of it goes Directly into what I'm working on at that time, so it's a Huge benefit. Thank You So Much!!!
Every opportunity I get to make improvements is a delightful boon and helps push everything forward!
Special Thanks to All of You who donate a Gift Card Code!
I really appreciate it.
It's one of the only ways I can get this stuff and report back about it
- it Truly helps this site flourish!
Simply buy a Daz 3D Gift Card and Just Send me a PM with the Gift Card Code
