Animation Tool - Daz Studio

[Fengist]

So, a few months ago I took a tutorial on using Wings 3D to create parts for KSP. One thing Wings doesn't do is animation. Otherwise, it's simple and fast.

Every single time I've tried to watch a tutorial on Blender it's been an utter bombardment of Ctl-this. Alt-that... hit this hotkey, that hotkey... etc. To make things even more confusing, unless you change the defaults in Blender, you're using the RIGHT mouse button to select things. This has led to me starting up Blender. Punching buttons for a half an hour in utter frustration of not being able to do things intuitively... and closing it again with nothing resembling an animation.

Enter Daz Studio.

So I got to digging and discovered Daz, which isn't on the list of KSP recommended tools.

Allow me to recommend it. Within 30 minutes, I had my first animated part in KSP. It took some tweaking to get it right but I found Daz to be so intuitive, so user friendly and soooooo free.... Blender, you are not my friend. I likes Daz.

Oh, and here's a cool part. It exports to Collada .dae AND... has a Unity preset already defined.

The only thing even slightly confusing about Daz is changing the pivot point for parts. It's under Tools/Joint Editor.

Enjoy.

[lo-fi]

Looks like a great tool. I find Blender hard too - hat's off to those who manage with it! What are the UVmap / unwrapping tools like in Daz?

[Fengist]

It's just a 3d animator so it doesn't create the UV. They will sell you their modeling tool, Hexagon, though .

It will import UV's and wrap them around the object and you can kinda tinker with them but you can't create them. I make mine in Wings then just import them if I need to see the texture, otherwise, I just use a blank model. One thing I have found is that when it exports to Unity it has a habit of reversing? inverting? the normals. That may just be an 'undocumented feature' of the Wings .obj export and the way Daz reads it. The way I've found to fix this is to select your object, select 'Geometry Editor' tool then right click and choose Geometry Selection/Select All, right click again and select Geometry Selection/Invert selection. It still looks correct in Daz but it exports a proper normal to Unity. I could be entirely wrong but I read something about a double sided UV or some such... dunno. I just know this works and it was so easy to learn that I'm bout to put my first animated part into my mod pack.

The only other minor issue I've had is model size. It gives gobs of options to import and convert to various measurements. Normally, my 1 in Wings = 1 in Unity. Daz is designed for BIG scenes so when I import my .obj at 100% it looks tiny. If I import 1=1m then it's 10000% and when I export it into Unity it's freaking huge. I filled the entire SPH with one canard learning this.

Considering the pain of Blender and the ease of which I caught onto this, I can easily deal with those minor issues.

Edited June 25, 2015 by Fengist