Hi everyone!
I'll bet that every 3D artist has been here sometimes: you finished a render, maybe you even shared it with us on Renderotica (thanks!!). A few days later you load in your project and think... "I could use this as a basis for another render!". So using the same scenery, the same figures and props, just another pose / setting while optionally also using different angles for your new render. However, you obviously don't want to ruin your current pose either. So... maybe save your project with a new name and then start messing? But what if you want to build up a comic or something, that's going to end up in dozens of different projects which will make it very hard to keep a good overview.
Maybe we should look for a plugin to buy which might sort this out for us?
Fortunately we don't have to!
Timeline
Let's take this screenshot of mine as an example for my guide:
Here you see the same scene but now from within my Daz Studio setup. So my idea is to have the werewolf bend forward and point to someone (or something?) in front of this scene. However, I also don't want to risk ruining this scene because I quite like it.
The solution is called: Timeline pane.
Open your Windows menu, go to "Panes (tabs)" and in there find "Timeline". If you have a second monitor then I'd suggest to place the pane over there because that way it won't eat away precious space from your viewport. The above scene would look something like this in the Timeline pane:
If you open this pane then make sure that your "View Mode" is set to the 'Advanced View', you can check or change this by right clicking on the pane name itself. I also suggest that you collapse the bottom half because we won't be needing it.
By default this frame will use a setting of 30FPS. But because we'll be using it to store different poses and because we want easy access to those "pose properties" I suggest that you lower this number to 20 or 15. This will show less steps on the timeline thus making it easier to access key frames.
Now, as you can probably imagine this pane was originally meant to help us set up animations. But it can also be perfectly used to store several "stages" of our pose. Or, in other words, to store several poses using the same scenery within the same project.
But first things first... we'll begin by making it easier for ourselves to use this pane. Press F3 to customize your workspace, find the 'Animation' section and expand it. Then assign keystrokes for the "Step to next/previous frame" and "Skip to next/previous key" actions by right clicking on the options:
I marked the relevant section for you. This will allow us to quickly step through our poses by pressing the assigned keystroke(s), as you can see I picked alt-left and right (cursor keys) to skip through the frames.
SO... now that I have everything set in place I press alt-right which moves the timeline to a new (empty) frame. Then I start working on my changed pose:
As you can see my werewolf has taken on a different stance. He's pointing to something over my shoulder, his ears are bend backwards a little and he's even breathing down my neck. The nerve of some people, errrr, wolves! 😁
In addition I've set up my character to narrow her eyes a bit and look towards the direction of the wolf's hand. This is how things look on the timeline:
See what I mean?
Every one of those black markers indicates the presence of a keyframe. This also means that if I want to delete this new pose (or parts of it!) then all I have to do is delete the relevant keyframe(s) after which my pose (or the affected part(s)) will change back to the original state.
(edit): And of course... if I want to go back to my previous pose all I have to do is press alt-left and my pose will switch from pointing back to howling.
It takes getting used to (and your project files will also end up a bit bigger, make sure that your PC and its memory can handle all this!) but it will also make it a lot easier to work on multiple poses which are based on the same scenery.
(edit2): Daz Studio 4.20 even improved on the experience and enhanced support for the Genesis figure. In my screenshots above you'll notice that there's no black keyframe marker behind 'Genesis' despite me changing some properties. That's because my selection of property types didn't include "Other". With DS 4.20 you no longer have to worry about this, because it has been improved.
Thanks for reading, I hope this was useful for some of you!
Edited by user Friday, February 25, 2022 10:12:19 PM(UTC)
| Reason: My guide is now fully 4.20 compliant! :-)