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I am looking to create a long 8 minute animated story I am using Daz but having issues when trying to go from pose to pose with animations throwing arms and legs all over the place, I would be nice to know what others are using for their animation workflows around here, Kinda new to the animation side of things as I have just made stills up to this point.
that was exactly what I wanted to know, thank you. Didn't want to get stuck in the "fiddle till it works" rut and waste a lot of time when there is better software out there to make it work the first time around. appreciate you taking the time to type out the long explanation.
I've had a lot of success in Unity and Unreal as well. Unity has a learning curve associated with the HDR scriptable render pipeline that's essential, but the amount of info and resources available online is second only to Blender. Unreal's animation and cinematography tools are stunning and the out-of-the-box visuals are better than Unity's although Unity will do anything UE4 can. Tutorials are harder to come by for UE4 but they are out there.
The soon-to-be-released Unreal 5 with its astonishing Digital Humans (Meta Humans) is where it's going to be from here on in I think. The DAZ to UE4 bridge is not staggeringly good but it's relatively simple to make any adjustments to materials once the assets are across. I'm not sure a DAZ to UE5 one will be needed...
If you haven't seen this before, remember it is real-time rendering and prepare to be blown away. You will, of course, need appropriate hardware to do this!
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/digital-humans
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9owTAISsvwk
For scripting Unity uses C# (fairly straightforward) whilst UE4 and UE5 use C++ (ugh). All have visual scripting tools if you need them but 99% of animation and camera work will not. The main learning curve is in the interface.
Blender is very good but if you have any aspirations towards pro quality work you couldn't go too wrong with grabbing UE4 now and having a play, primarily as a primer for the UE5 general release next year.
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Meta Humans.
Thanks for the informaton, I'll keep a close eye on this.If you want to see an early-access demo, as well as getting the info on how to sign up, have a look at this vid:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXuVqfasT90
I've found UE5 and the Creator Tools a little unstable at the moment but it is essentially in Beta. First full stable release is expected in Q1 or Q2 next year.
You'll need some properly good hardware to build animations/short movies without any pain but it runs very well on my main PC (AMD 5950x CPU, 3080 GPU) and half decently on my old PC (i7 4770 CPU, 1660 Super GPU).
All of your DAZ assets will work pretty well in Unreal with some tweaks to the materials. Prepare to learn how to use node-graphs (which DAZ also has but no one seems to use!)...
I like DS, and it's a much deeper and cleverer bit of software than a lot of people give it credit for, but the rendering is creaky at best (despite producing good results) and the animation tools are beyond laughable. Personally, I'm gearing up for UE5, Meta Human and the Nanite graphics engine which is a game-changer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wh06vT0NTD0&t=336s
Costs you nothing to have a go and you don't need to be a programmer to use it for art. C++ is a double-edged sword as it's not that difficult to learn but it's so easy to make garbage code with it. From an artists's perspective, though, you shouldn't have to touch it at all.
I never thought of using a game engine for animations but especially with UE4 that makes sense. I just learned about node graphs in DAZ and am really liking it. Yes UE5 looks absolutely amazing and will be a game changer, pun definitely intended.
I completely agree with that, LP. Unreal is probably the right choice for the average amateur/semi-pro animation artist as it essentially just works out of the box. From a developer's point of view it's not as suitable for solo projects as Unity is, but if you're only doing animation then the rest of it doesn't come into play. You are effectively creating a series of cut-scenes which require absolutely zero knowledge of coding.
The problem with Unity is the visuals don't stack up unless you have an unfeasibly large amount of time and knowledge. The HDR pipeline in Unity is a stonking great mess and not something I would bother with. The Universal pipeline is marginally better but 99/100 people are going to be stuck with the built-in renderer. It's OK, but not a patch on Iray or UE although it is, obviously, real-time.
If your materials and shader game isn't that great, assets are reasonably priced. One tree shader and hey presto, wind-blown swaying forest with no further input required. In real time. In AAA quality. Generate a landscape, auto-generate materials appropriate to elevation and surface. The list goes on...
What DAZ has in its favour is ease-of-use. You can go from zero to hero(ine) in a couple of months and the UI is straightforward, if a little messy in places. To get better you're really going to be looking at something like Cinema 4D and that is not a cheap solution!
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