3D Archives

My notes on 3D apps I use: ZBrush, Hexagon, DAZ Studio, Poser, Carrara and many others.

How to export Keyframe Animations from Unreal Engine

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I’ve just figured out how to setup keyframe animations in Unreal Engine, and thought I’d make a note of it before I forget. I made the animation above a little while ago by “poking around”, but it wasn’t as smooth as I liked it to be. I think I’ve found the missing bits now, so here’s how it works. From what I gather, Unreal Engine calls Keyframe Animations “Cinematics”. They’re a little tricky to setup, because the whole engine is built for so much more, but in principle we need to:

  • create a new Level Sequence
  • create a Cinematic Camera
  • add the camera as a Track to the Sequencer
  • create keyframes for/with the camera
  • add a Camera Cut Track
  • export your animation as a video or image series

I’m going to create a camera animation like in the demo above, but any regular mesh object and Actor can be animated, including lights and their properties, so this process is not limited to cameras. However you need at least one camera to render out the sequence, at least that’s my goal here. The process will be different if you’d like to trigger the sequence from within a game, which is not in the scope of this article.

Let’s see how to do this step by step.

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How to use Event Dispatchers in Unreal Engine

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Following on from my earlier article about referencing a Blueprint from another Blueprint, Unreal Engine has another interesting way for inter-object communication. Sometimes we need to reference more than one object, say when press a button and want several objects to react, all in their own different way. Imagine pressing a button and a light goes off, a particle effect gets triggered and several enemies get spawned. Event Dispatchers can do that, and here’s how we can use them.

In this example I’ll have a Switch object, and a Lamp object. When we press the switch, it’ll send out a message to which the Lamp (and other objects) can react. Each object can implement the function and execute different code. I’ll only show the abstracted Lamp code here for brevity, from which I’m sure you’ll understand the gist.

Sadly the terminology “dispatcher” is a little confusing. At least to me, it suggests that an event is dispatched (i.e. sent), whereas in reality the dispatcher is actually the listener rather than the sender. Hence the dispatcher needs to be setup on the event that needs to react. A real-world dispatch worker doesn’t work that way (thanks code people for confusing us non-coders).

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How to make an object invisible in Unreal Engine

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I’ve recently had to use a helper object in Unreal Engine (a plane), but I didn’t want this object to be seen when the game was running. In a regular 3D application I would have just clicked that little eyeball icon to hide it, but that would temporarily remove the object from my scene in …

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Creating a Moving Platform in Unreal Engine

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I’ve made a simple moving platform in Unreal Engine today. This is used in platform games all the time, be it as a triggered mechanism or an automatically moving always-looping/moving thing. Remember all those gaps you need to cross over a deep ravine, while stone platforms are moving left and right, and you’ll have to …

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Building a Sliding Door in Unreal Engine

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I’ve been following Katie’s videos to get my feet wet with Unreal Engine, and thought I’d take a note on how to build her sliding door so I don’t forget. Here’s how I’ve built mine in principle:

  • create a new Blueprint Actor
  • bring in a cube and build an “InnerDoor” piece (that’s the one that will slide up and down)
  • build a frame for the door (will remain static)
  • add a Box Collision and extend it (it will trigger our animation)
  • use a Timeline node to raise the door
  • reverse the process so the door closes

I’m doing it slightly different to how Katie suggests it, but there’s really no right or wrong way. I’ve described how to do something similar with a Level Sequence in another article. Let’s see how to do it with a Sequence Node here.

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Changing Morph Targets programmatically in Unreal Engine

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I’ve just found out how to change values for Morph Targets on objects in Unreal Engine via code. This will come in handy when any attribute needs to be updated either as a result of user input, or via automation. Here’s the basic workflow:

  • know the exact name of the Morph Target
  • add a Set Morph Target node in Blueprints
  • populate it with the name of the morph
  • give it a value (between 0 and 1, equivalent to 0% to 100%)

Here’s a small example that continuously changes my Genesis 8 character from Basic Female into Olympia. While not particularly useful in itself, it illustrates how a parameter change can trigger a morph.

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How to get rid of the white ball in Unreal Blueprints

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When you start a new Blueprint Class in Unreal Engine, there’s this weird white ball that shows up in the centre of the viewport. I believe it represents the Default Root object. Trouble is, there’s no obvious way to get rid of it, even when you add a mesh object to your Blueprint. For a troubled and easily confused beginner like myself, I don’t even know what question to type into Google to get an approximate answer.

In this article I’ll show you the simple solution to the problem. Here’s the ball I’m referring to:

Even with a Static Mesh in my scene, that ball persist. I can’t even select it.

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How to create animated dust particles in Blender

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In this episode I’ll show you the complex process of setting up animated particles in Blender. I’m doing this for an Eevee render, but the principle will work in Cycles just as well. They can be used to give atmosphere and depth to your renders, or to create other exciting effects like bokeh. There’s a lot going on in this video, so I thought I’d provide some written instructions in this article too. Here’s what’s coming up:

For this whole project I’ve used Blender 2.83.1. You can see an example of the effect in action on my Sad Robot animation. My wonderful Patreon Supporters have access to the scene file I’m building for dissection, study, amendment and commercial use.

Enjoy!

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How to rotate a HDRI in Blender

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I always forget how to rotate HDRIs in Blender. It’s really not that difficult, but somehow this information doesn’t seem to save in my brain. I’ve given up trying understand why, so I thought I’d write it down for a future visit. At least I know where to look now 🙂 In the Shading Tab, …

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How to use TeleBlender 4 by mCasual / Jaques

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Getting characters and scenes from DAZ Studio into Blender is one of the toughest things to get right. It’s an endlessly time consuming, confusion and generally un-fun process. Several scripts exist to make this happen, yet many of them fail to make it a one-click solution. Jacques aka mCasual has been working for years on something called TeleBlender. Steve aka Backdoor 3D recently did a live stream on the process, and I finally had a chance to try it out myself.

In this article I’ll show you the workflow that I found worked best for me. You may know a better way, and perhaps it’s not the intended way of working, but it thought it might come in handy (since usage instructions on the download page of TeleBlender are literally non-existent).

I’m using the following versions, which will probably no longer exist by the time you read this article:

  • Blender 2.83.1 LTS
  • DAZ Studio 4.12.1
  • TeleBlender 4 (Beta 06252020)

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Importing Genesis into Blender via Mixamo

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I’ve just been experimenting with uploading a Genesis 1 figure to Mixamo, and importing the animated figure into Blender. There are several trillion options what with the combinations of tick-boxes and values. Thankfully, nothing is documented, just the way I like it. I thought I’d quickly post a screenshot of what actually works – for …

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Why do DAZ Characters take so long to load?

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I’ve had this question twice recently, and it’s another interesting nugget of information I thought I’d share with you: why do DAZ figures take so long to load? Especially the no-frills base figures? And why does this only happen for some users, and not for others? The two guys who contacted me about this (Richard …

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How to completely reset DAZ Studio and Install Manager

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I was talking to a viewer recently about how he had made some changes in his DAZ Studio installation by manually moving folders, and as a result, nothing appeared to be working anymore: Install Manager didn’t show any content, DAZ Studio didn’t either, and a complete reset was in order. I mentioned briefly how this could all be reset during a Stardew Valley stream, and the information was so helpful that I thought I’d share it as a stand-alone clip.

When I was done editing, I thought perhaps some written instructions on this process might be a good idea, so here they are. This is all I know about how to completely reset your DAZ Studio Installation. Use it as a last resort if nothing seems to be working anymore and you’d like to start with a clean slate.

Note that these steps will remove ALL traces of ALL versions of DAZ Studio and Install Manager from your system!

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My Animation Workflow in DAZ Studio – The Basics

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I often get questions in regards to Animations in DAZ Studio. It’s a complex topic, because it combines “animating in general”, and “using the animation tools in DAZ Studio”. I recently described my animation workflow to a reader/viewer (Nkem) and thought this information might be useful to others too, so here’s what I said.

Most new users have an issue with the time it takes to both build the animation itself, but also the enormous time it takes to render an animation out. Something relatively short and simple like this is a good example:

Aside from the setup, rendering an animation frame should be treated differently to a still image. We need to live with compromises, because we’re rendering quite a few images (30 frames per second, on a 10 second animation, that’s 300 images). If each of them would take 6 hours to render, the whole thing would take about 75 days, or nearly 3 months. And that’s a very short animation.

Let’ see how we can trim that down to a few hours or less instead.

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Using non-native 3D content in DAZ Studio

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I get a question every now and then that goes something like this:

I bought content from (non-DAZ store), but I don’t know how to use it in DAZ Studio. Can you help?

It’s a complex situation, so perhaps I can shed some light on it. Let me explain the basics of what’s happening here, then we’ll move on to the process of making a compromise work.

First of all, transferring content between multiple 3D applications is a pain. You’d think for an advanced society like us there would be a “universal format” of all things 3D, but sadly that’s not the case. Every 3D professional is struggling with this fact. If you’ve ever tried formats like FBX, Collada, OBJ or Alembic, and have been disappointed with how they transfer content, then you’re not alone. They all work to a certain extent, but usually not perfectly.

Most 3D applications (DAZ Studio included) can import 3D objects from other applications and display them somewhat. The trouble lies not in the 3D shape of an object, but mostly in the material descriptions. These are very much dependent on the render engine for which the source object was intended. Hence, while the diffuse texture map is usually imported correctly, none of the other parameters are (such as bump, transparency, normal, etc). Furthermore, the material properties (like shiny, rough, translucent, emissive etc) are not working, because each render engine has different ways of describing such properties.

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Removing x-translation wobble when converting keyframes to aniBlocks

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When you convert keyframes to an aniBlock, there’s a phenomenon that can happen in that the figure seems to sway left/right. It’s not something that is present in the keyframe animation, and I’m not entirely sure why this happens on conversion. The above shows how Darius 7 does his keyframe funny walk, while the bottom shows what happens after conversion to an aniBlock. In a word: terrible!

aniMate is a powerful tool, and in this article I’ll take a look on how to fix such shenanigans.

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How to apply Mixamo Animations to Genesis 3 and Genesis 8

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If you’ve ever tried to upload a G3 or G8 character to Mixamo, you’ll have noticed that it’s a complete and utter nightmare. Seemingly nothing will work in the plethora of export options, and a ton of time has been wasted globally, leading to anger, depression and frustration. In short: the stuff us creatives can’t …

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Using Non-Linear Animation (NLA Features) in Blender 2.8

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Many animation apps have an exciting feature that lets us re-use a group of keyframes in a more convenient way to build larger and more complex animations. They’re commonly referred to as non-linear editing. A popular example includes setting up an action as keyframes once, and then looping it using an NLA bock of sorts (like a walk cycle). Better yet, animations can be combined and transitioned without interruptions or ugly pops. We can even overlay several actions, such as a walk cycle, an eye blink and a waving hand gesture.

Blender has these features, and while difficult to grasp at first, they’re surprisingly simple to use once you grasp the concept:

  • setup an animation using regular keyframes, or import it from a service like Mixamo
  • turn this group into an Action Strip (that’s what Blender calls an NLA block)
  • add this Action Strip onto an NLA track, repeat it or combine it with other strips
  • add transitions in between blocks to seamless motion
  • add tracks to combine animations

Here’s how it works for me. This might not be 100% accurate, but it’s good enough to build seriously cool animations with ease. I’m using Blender 2.82 for this example, and I’m expanding on principles I’ve briefly touched on in my previous article about looping walk animations.

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Switching between Cameras in Animations with Blender 2.8

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If you have multiple cameras in your scene, chances are that you may want to cut to another one during the course of an animation. I’ve often wondered how to do that, but only finding outdated material on the internet, I decided to poke around myself. Half an hour later I had it sussed out …

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How to render with the current Viewport Shading in Blender

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Although I like Eevee, sometimes I’d like something even faster for animatic previews. Eevee still requires lights to be setup, whereas with the regular “material preview” setting in the viewport, we can see things just fine before we bring in our lights. It would be nice if there is a way to use the same …

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Rendering with Transparency in Blender

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I’ve encountered a small puzzle recently in regards to rendering the alpha channel of PNG images with transparency. I didn’t quite understand the complex setups I’ve read about, nor could I reproduce the results. Thanks to some hive-mind thinking, we could figure it out on my Discord Server.

Here’s how to do it, both for Eevee and Cycles.

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Animating Synty Characters in Unreal Engine

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I’ve been intrigued by how easy it is to render a scene from Synty Studios in Unreal Engine. It’s as easy as opening the project and selecting the demo map. This allows us to explore the scene with the default Unreal Mannequin. I wanted to find out how to use a Synty character in its …

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How to loop Walk Animations with Blender’s NLA Editor

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In my previous article I’ve explained how to import Synty characters into Blender, and how to apply animations from Mixamo. Now that we have an animation in there, we may want to play it more than once. In a walk cycle, we’d have to play the walk loop multiple times to create the illusion of walking. I’ll cover how to do that in this article before I forget again.

PS: These are just notes, not exactly a tutorial. I’ve only just discovered the basics of the NLA Editor, so if I’m mis-describing anything and you know better, or something isn’t working, please leave a comment so I can correct this article.

Here’s what we’ll do:

  • if necessary, remove the forward motion from the current animation
  • turn the keyframe animation into an Action Strip (that’s an NLA Block)
  • add the Action Strip to an NLA Track (that’s a special timeline)
  • modify the Action Strip to repeat
  • apply forward motion with two keyframes

The concept of the NLA Editor is similar to aniBlocks in DAZ Studio, or the NLA blocks in Carrara. We start with regular keyframes, turn them into a block (or Action Strip as Blender calls them), and then we mix and match them on a special timeline called the NLA Editor. If you’re curious, NLA stands for Non Linear Animation. Action strips can be mixed and matched to blend in, so there’s no popping when one animation ends and one begins.

The NLA Editor can be used in conjunction with regular keyframes. For walk cycles, it is common to exclude the forward motion from the Action Strip and instead replace it with a linear motion. If the forward motion is included in the Action Strip, the character would reset to the beginning rather than continuously move forward. Hence I’ll use a combination of the two.

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