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Funny Story: My new Blue Yeti Microphone (which is blue)

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I had some audio issues with my 5 year old Blue Yeti recently. It started as occasional small crackles when listening via the headphone output, some of which ended up on recordings as well. It was so occasional that I could edit it out, so I never thought much of it. For the last couple of weeks though, the crackles are now audible during my daily Stardew streams. Again they’re subtle, but I thought perhaps replacing the USB cable might do the trick.

Sadly it did not. Something else must be amiss, so much so that I lost audio completely during the stream today. I replaced the cable again, and it held up for the remainder of the stream, but it looks like I’m in the market for a new Blue Yeti microphone.

And this is where the story begins.

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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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Using Synty Characters with Mixamo and Blender

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I’ve just worked out how to import Synty characters into Blender via Mixamo. It’s a somewhat complex process with a few pitfalls, and while it’s all fresh in my mind, I thought I’d best write it down somewhere. The workflow is similar for both the SimplePeople and the Polygon City characters, and I would imagine other Synty characters will probably work with these instructions just as well.

Note that I’m only using Blender and Mixamo, no other plugins or game engines. I’ll also explain how to add textures while we’re in the process, because that’s not exactly intuitive. Here’s the step-by-step outline:

  • import Synty character into Blender (as FBX)
  • correct pose and apply texture
  • export as FBX (see settings below)
  • import into Mixamo
  • apply desired animation and export (as FBX)
  • import into Blender and see the animation

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Octane for DAZ Studio – render tests

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In a recent stream I got accustomed with some of the options of the Octane Plugin for DAZ Studio. It’s easy to get brain overload with so many sliders! After some fiddling though, I discovered how to render the final image. However, there appear to be four different types of options on how to achieve that. These are:

  • Direct Lighting
  • Path Tracing
  • PMC
  • Info Channel

Rather than read the manual, which I’m sure would explain what the difference between each option, I did a few test renders of the scene we built. Let’s see if we can visually detect any differences.

The renders below were done at 2000×1500 with the built-in denoiser, which kicks in at the end of the image. Until that point, minor grain is visible. These were saved as 16 bit PNG files (click to enlarge).

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Adding an old GPU increased my render speed by 24%

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I’ve made an interesting discovery the other day about one of my render nodes: with identical GPUs, one appears to render faster than the other. I didn’t get it at first. But with a possible explanation in my head, I got the thinking and applied the same principle to my other node, and was able to increase its render speed by 24%!

How exciting is that?

It’s all about retro hardware, and how to make the most out of what you already have. Let me tell you what I discovered, and how I made use of an old AMD/ATI GPU in my setup that I never thought would work.

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Can a 1080p Timeline export 4K UHD in Premiere Pro?

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I was asking myself this very same question. The obvious answer is YES of course, it really depends on the export settings. I had assumed of course that Premiere is clever enough to take the original resolution from whatever media is available, and do its rendering from that. Big mistake. Because it doesn’t do that!

While it is possible to pick a 4K or 4K UHD export preset, or even create your own, Premiere will up-scale your footage from 1080 to the desired resolution.

I’ve done some tests on this recently and can confirm that’s how Premiere works under the hood. If you want to get crisp 4K output from your edit, the timeline needs to be set to 4K or 4K UHD (depending on what aspect resolution you’re editing in).

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How to D-NOISE an image sequence in Blender

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I had an image sequence rendered on one of my nodes, and sadly my D-NOISE add-on did not kick in as expected. This was entirely my fault, and I thought I could perhaps just denoise the sequence rather than re-render it. Turns out it works, even though it does not match the results of a regular denoised render.

Be that as it may, let me show you how to use Blender’s mysterious Compositor to denoise a sequence of images automatically.

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DAZ Studio 117 – Global Illumination, Environment Lighting, IBL and HDRI explained

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In this episode I’ll tell you much of what I know about the Environment Lighting in DAZ Studio. This technique is also known as Global Illumination. I’ll explain the meanings of such cryptic abbreviations as IBL and HDRI, and how all these pieces fall together to make your scenes look handsome. This is a continuation …

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How to make wheels turn in Blender 2.8

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I’ve recently built a little animation during a live stream, and Rod’s suggestion was to add NASA’s Curiosity Rover into the scene. It’s a freely available blend file, and I thought it was a great idea. It added a lovely character to the otherwise deserted alien landscape, and I quickly animated it into position.

Trouble was, the little guy was essentially an afterthought, and when I was watching the animation back, it became obvious that its wheels needed to be turning as it was driving around. While I was keen to do this, I had no idea what mechanism I should use for such an Endeavor (har har), or what Blender had to offer in this regard.

My first thought was to simply animate the wheels with keyframes, but this would be a lot of work, and if the rover’s speed were to change I’d have to probably animate those wheels again. There being six and all, I discovered a better way to make the wheels turn, using something called a Driver.

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How to replace an object with another mesh in Blender

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I’ve been wondering if there was a way to replace dummy objects I’ve placed in Blender with other meshes. Say we do a particle simulation, and during rehearsal it’s all about speed – but for the real render, we need higher resolution meshes that might take a while to render in the viewport. Thankfully it’s …

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Building JAY PLAYS – a Title Sequence Animation in Blender

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In this series I’m building an animated title sequence using a set made for DAZ Studio in Blender. This requires lighting and material tweaks, and messing with textures. It’s not a tutorial, just some dude trying his best at Blender (without knowing much about it, but learning a lot in the process).

The end result is an intro for my my game streams, as well as these new seasons of 3D Shenanigans. Once the set is built, I’ll replace a couple of key textures so that the cinema and screen show something different. It’s a lot of work!

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How to orbit around selections in Blender

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While I was deep engrossed looking for a feature in the Blender Settings, I found something else I didn’t know about. It’s a way to always orbit around a selected object, rather than do that awkward thing where the viewport just goes off into oblivion when you least expected it. I frequently use the NUMPAD …

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How to enable thicker outlines in Blender

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With any software demo (or with failing eyesight as we get older), it’s important to have some visual aides so that your audience knows what you’re talking about. I’ve been streaming some Blender sessions recently, and I usually have my excellent little cursor highlighter tool called PointerFocus active. That’s good for viewers to follow the …

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