Frequently Asked Questions


Current product & price list

• January 2023 (Excel)

I need a custom animation. Do you guys offer those?

Over the years we've been asked if we would create custom animations upon request.
The short answer is; Yes, but they aren't cheap.

Let me explain; today, almost all 3D animations for game characters are based on motion capture data that is applied to a character.

When it comes to adult animations however, this is currently not really an option, and for several reasons. Since this type of content usually involves two or more characters interacting in close proximity, getting a precise capture of their motion is very difficult to say the least. Even the most sophisticated MoCap systems would have a hard time with that. And let's not even talk about the costs involved going that route. Multiple actors, using multiple capture systems would cost a fortune.

So, the only real alternative is to create those animations from scratch by hand keying them, which is how we create most of our various sets. We have used MoCap data in the past, but not very often since it is almost impossible to find for an adult subject matter.
The drawback with this technique is that it is very time consuming, requires a lot of skills, and the use of pricey software.

To get to the point, we could certainly create a custom animation for you, but it would not be cheap. It can take many hours, days or even weeks to create a complex, high quality animation sequence by hand.
Just how long it would take depends on many factors; the length of the animation, how many characters are in the scene, how much skin contact needs to be maintained between characters (character A's hand staying on character B's arm during the animation), etc.
To give you a baseline of the possible costs for a custom animation sequence; our current rate is $400 US for a full 8 hour day worth of work (subject to change).


Why are the prices here lower than on Renderhub?

Renderhub does keep a substantial amount of the proceedings. By selling directly via our site we can offer our animation packages at a lower price.

I didn't get the download link after I bought an item. What do I do now?

You should have been taken to the download page after you have purchased one of our animation packages through PayPal.
If that didn't happen for whatever reason, just send us an email via our contact page and we will reply to you within 24 hours or less and send you either the download link or we'll attach the package to that email.
If you don't see an email from us after 24 hours, then please check your spam folder.

Why is there strange figure movement during the animation?

This can be caused by old keyframes that are still applied to the figure when you load a new animation. Make sure to clear the timeline for that figure first by selecting it, and then right click on the [Parameters Tab] label and select Clear Animation > Clear Figure Pose. That deletes all preexisting keyframes from the figure. Do that for G8M, G8F and the Dicktator figure. You can also multi-select Dicktator and NGV8 and select "Clear Figure Shape" for them.
This ensures a clean timeline for the figures without any errand keyframes already on it.

Why is the guys hand not fully touching her leg?

Make sure that you have unlocked the Genesis 8 figures bone rotations before applying an animation. Use our BoneUnlocker script on their hip bone for that.
And always select [Turn limits off] when asked.

Can I string sequences together?

Yes. Go to the last frame of the current animation, select one of the three figures and set a key on that frame. Make sure to select "Object" when setting the key. This will ensure that everything is keyed on that figure and consecutive keys from the next sequence won't affect it. Do this for all three figures. Then load the next sequence on the next available keyframe, or give it more space on the timeline to create a transition.

Why these bland expressions?

It is much easier to apply an expression to a character that's in it's default state, rather then trying to wipe a grin of the guys face and make him frown instead.
Just go to the first frame of the animation and apply new expressions the characters. Make sure to set keys on the last frame if you're adding animations to the timeline after this.

How can I adjust body parts, like a head position for example?

There are several ways to do that without having the animation "pop". If there is little movement on that body part, you can just select it and then right click on the [Parameters] pane and select Clear Animation > Clear Selected Item Pose. This will wipe all animation keys from that part of the body and you can then make adjustments to it on the first frame of the animation without having that body part "pop".

The other way to go about it is to select a body part and then adjust it's keys in the timelines graph editor (DAZ 4.12.x and up).
Select the heads "Bend" parameter in the Parameters pane for example and then drag select all of the keys in the graph editor and move them up or down.
This way there won't be any "popping" in the animation.

How can I speed up rendering times?

Good question! But you already knew that.. :)

There are several ways to get more frames rendered in an hour (or a day, or a week).
All involve compositing the final animation in a program such as Adobe Premiere for example. Rendering your character’s motion in the full environment takes a super powerful rig. So instead, you lock off the main camera and render the environment without your characters to create a background for your composition.

Next, you make your characters visible again and use Iray section planes around them to exclude anything getting rendered from the environment except your animated characters and any objects (like a desk for example) that receives shadows from their activity. Make sure to turn on “Clip lights” in the Iray planes parameters, or the lighting of your characters will change too much and your shortcut becomes very obvious.
This will speed up rendering times considerably, because DAZ doesn’t have to render the stuff on the side of the Iray planes that is facing away from them. Once the frames have been rendered, you just composite them with the background layer in Premiere.
And done!

What we do to render our promos takes a bit more up-front work, but drops per-frame rendering times very nicely.
We set up the complete environment, including the active characters, to evaluate the overall lighting of the shot.
When everything looks good, we remove the characters and position a camera at eye level with a spherical lens (parameters/lens) right in the center of the scene to generate an HDRI image of that scene. This HDRI will later be used to render only the character’s animation frames without any environment, but with the appropriate environmental lighting.
Take a look here on how to create an HDRI from a scene in DAZ.

Once you have the HDRI, you can delete the entire environment out of your scene and light it with the HDRI instead. But use “Dome & Scene” because you will have to balance the lighting with at least one or two spotlights. Load the pre-rendered background as an environment map background [Environment tap], the HDRI as the environment lighting map [Render settings] and light your characters with a spotlight. Adjust environment intensity setting and spotlight brightness until the scene looks believable, and not composited.

Use a DAZ batch render program to knock those animations out and start compositing!


How can I make an animation sequence more dynamic?

We always like to add speed changes to our promo animation renders in order to mix it up a bit. This can easily be done in the video editing software by adding speed ramps to some of the loops in a sequence.

In order to do so you’ll have to render the animation loop at a higher frame rate, or it will sputter when you slow it down a lot. But it’s well worth the extra time it takes to render.

Can I use these animations in other programs, like Unity for example?

Yes, you can. DAZ Studio (a free application) let's you export animations as FBX files, which you then can import into Unity. There is even a free DAZ to Unity bridge available that does the conversion for you.
The problem that you might run into is that the figure meshes don't match close enough. We take great care of making sure that our animations work flawlessly with the standard DAZ Genesis 8 figure meshes.
Hands stay on the skin and don't sink into the body or float inches above it, and so on. This is just a real buzzkill for us.
So you will run into these issues when applying our animations to different figure meshes in other software packages. The DAZ to Unity bridge might be able to alleviate some of those problems, but we haven't tested that.
We offer free samples from some of our animation packages, so just get one and give it a shot!

How about putting some heels on the girl?

Yes - absolutely crucial!!!
If it was up to us... well, never mind.

Putting heels on the girl will in most cases change her foot pose, and you will have to compensate for that or the animation will pop.
There are basically two ways to go about that:

A. The easy way:
Select one or both foot bones of the girl and then right click on the foot and click "Select / Select children".

This selects the foot and all of its bones below it. With all the bones selected, right click on the Parameters tab and select "Clear animation/Clear selected item(s) pose". This removes all animation keys from the foot and toes.

Now you can add heels to the girl on the first frame of your animation, without having the foot pose pop. If the feet now penetrate the surface below because of the changed foot angle, just select the girls shins and move their Bend keys until both feet now clear the surface.

 

B. Retaining the foot animation:
In order to retain the swaying of the girl’s feet you'll have to fix the feet’s Bend, Twist and Side-Side keys after adding some heels to her.
Apply the heels at the first frame of your animation.

Then look at the Bend/Twist/Side-Side keys in the timeline and you'll see how the first frame animation keys have changed after applying the heels compared to the rest of the keys.
But don't worry!
Select all but the first key in the timeline and move them up or down to smooth the curve. Look at the first and the very last key and try to match its position or value to the first key.
Do this for the Bend, Twist and Side-Side curves on both feet and if needed move the shins Bend keys to clear any surface intersection.


The animator's cookbook

In this section we'll be collecting some useful tips for animators.

* How can I avoid creating mid-timeline keyframes in DAZ?

Has this ever happened to you?
You render an animation for x amount of hours, just to find out that when you finally play it back that there's a subtle change in lighting from first to last frame?
Which means that you've waisted all this time rendering and have to re-render after you fixed the bad keys.

Here's how we've learned to avoid this (the hard way):

When you set up your scene after loading the animation, set the playback range in the timeline to 0 - 0. This will ensure that anything you do to the scene will happen on frame 0 only. No popping arms in the middle of the scene, or lighting change when playing it back.
Once your setup looks good, you set the last frame back to where it was before.
Following this easy procedure is guaranteed to safe you a lot of time on re-rendering animations.


How can I buy more than one animation package at a time?

Not a problem! Please, just send us an email via our Contact Page and ask. We're happy to help you with that.
We’ll bundle them up for you to make it a single purchase, and give you a discount as well.

We know that our store isn’t the most sophisticated one, but we’re primarily animators and VFX artists.
Implementing a full shopping card system would take way too much time away from us making new animations.

If you would like to purchase 5 animation packages or more, you can send us an email and we’ll make a custom bundle for you.
We’ll also give you a 10% discount on top of that.
If you like to buy 10 packages or more, you’ll get a 20% discount.

That will hopefully make buying from our site a bit easier.

Thank you for supporting us and Happy Rendering!
- AnimArts Team


How to adjust animations to fit different meshes?

In this video tutorial, we will show you how you can adjust our anmimations to better fit your custom characters.

© 2023 AnimArts