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Hey guys,
A bit of an update to the animation. I started working on this again but it has been a little frustrating getting a workflow to the character animating. Anyways , here is all the scenes so far but in a very low resolution and sometimes with no shadows to speed up rendering. I am trying to get the timing right and the sounds synced to the animation during this process and will do a higher resolution render later.
Looking good Mike
Fantastic! Looking Great!
Apologies Mmoir - and belated thanks for answering my question on how the storm clouds were done!
Is anyone still working on this, or did everyone abandon ship?
Just wondering . . .
Pun intended, of course! ;)
Naturally. (and it's the last line of dialogue in the current version!)
did my boat sink! gasp!
Mike... are you still out there working on it? Hope you are well.
There doesn't seem to be much interest in learning animation around here. maybe try finding him at Carrarators.
Thanks Dart. BTW I am interested but there might be more animators there... I don't know.
Yeah... it's a bummer. I think Mike was hoping for more community interest in helping to animate, but it started to turn out that he was doing most of the animating himself. I had a lot of fun in the one I was involved in, but to go through all of that and then have another immediately after, and then another, and then another... it would be just too much for me. I'd never get anything else done.
He has the great idea of doing this... just not enough animators contributing, I think. I could be wrong and he just might be busy right now doing other stuff?
It would be great if he dropped in once a month or so to spur us on. Often folks need a little nudge now and then to get them kick started... I sure did.
...while I am off animating behind the scenes, most of which have not yet been seen by anyone but my little dog, who says I'm doing great! ;)
I know, I miss Mike when he's gone and really appreciate him when he's here. If you've even downloaded any of his scenes that he's set up for us to use, they're really well put-together creations. I love how he builds scenes from scratch - a true Carrara master is he! Every one of the scenes I've downloaded of his from this animation club series reminds me a lot of his awesome products - though they have that extra polish on them.
A lot can be learned from his scenes. He has very solid techniques.
wdgjohn, I am fine but I am not working on the animation for a variety of reasons. Like Dart said I was hoping for more interaction from animators , one of my goals of the movie projects was getting people to start animating in carrara. Finding people to model stuff seems to work out fine but finding animators is more difficult . It didn't help when I didn't have the 3 characters for our story uploaded for people to use or animate with but the file with the 3 characters in it was close to 300mb (crazy big) which is why I didn't upload them.
My initial idea was to do very simple animations as a group but the story always seems to get "bigger" which is understandable and then the animation part becomes more daunting so people don't want to participate. This is why I started the bouncing ball exercise as it wouldn't be too intimidating but there wasn't a great response to that either. Somehow there has to be a way to do animations as a group but so far I haven't found it yet.
I should say there is an online website called "Artella" which facilitates creating animations or other projects online as a group. You have storage space to upload files into appropriate categories etc already pre set up for you which takes care of a lot of the orginization for you. It is an interesting site with interesting projects. Maybe I will post another animation exercise and see how it goes.
You are a true Hero, Mike. Your inspiration and drive to help others succeed is nothing short of fantasticredulous!
I, for one, totally love you, my friend! You freaking ROCK!!!
Would love to learn to animate Mike, but there aren't many tutorials available to learn from.
I'm currently working my way through PhilW's tutorials on animating and creating walk cycles for toon characters (they render much faster).
I wouldn't be confident enough, at the moment, to say I could contribute to a group project.
Mike, Glad you are well. Please do post another exercise... I'll understand if you don't. I was disappointed as well about the turn out and regretted posting my animation... thinking others or someone else would have had I not. Guess that is their loss as well as mine... since I kept waiting to see how someone else animated the balls. I keep thinking of your other thread that you had exercises in. I'm planning on doing the exercise of the brick falling off a shelf/bookcase and the ones in which you animated a flour sack. I've even recently started character design in preparation for that one, mine is a Ginger Bread man. Ohh... I'll check out "Artella", thanks.
BTW: There has been a lot who are now just starting to learn Carrara and are eager to learn it... I've no idea which ones are interested in animating.
Hmm... perhaps someone should start a thread... "Animators Wanted - Dead or Alive"... or something like that. Please let me know what I can do to help. It's been an honor working with the great mmoir. Thanks for everything you've done for the Carrara community.
If you are part of a group project there is always someone in the group that will lend a hand and there are many ways to help, storyline, modeling, animating or rendering.... surely I've left something out. You are doing better than I am... I have PhilW's animating tutorial but have been too busy with his others, I've wathched all except for one chapter, and modeling at the moment.
Actually there are. I began with an interest in animating only after getting Poser only to make pictures for D&D games. Just having the tools to animate gave me the drive.
Trying to find animation for poser tutorials wasn't very hard via internet searches - but the best experiences I've had in learning to animate came from removing the software type from the search: Animation Techniques or Animation Tutorials.
3D animation is very similar from one tool to the next, except that some apps have different tools for simplicity and/or automated simulations and such. So even if a tutorial or set of tutorials keeps using something which is not readily available under the same name, or at all, in Carrara, we should still be able to get the gist from the lessons.
► AniMating in Carrara is an article which REALLY gets the action happening FAST with a very small investment of aniBlocks and the aniBlock Importer for Carrara, using various aniBlocks and keeping certain parts, deleting and discarding the rest - even tweaking some of those we keep. This method has become so darned fun for me I decided to write this article about it. Afterwards it just kept getting more and more fun - and fun makes it more and more powerful and effective.
But what about more traditional animation techniques?
My overly simplified Carranimation Part 1 – Rotation of the Hip article is very brief and ends with an incredibly simple, unfinished result. This was purposeful because the rest would have been simply explaining that we now have to tweak this and that until it's right - processes which differ for every single animation we make. This is very much traditional 3D animation although techniques very from on artist to another. I am completely uneducated in this field, aside from my own research. Someone schooled in animation might have more and/or better advice... but digging into it is what teaches us how it works.
Getting back to aniMate, this technique is incredibly similar to what pro animation studios use when we see them working with actors with litte dots all over them to digitally record real-world motions to transfer to the digital actors - except that Posermocap, GoFigure, SKAmotion, etc., take the middle, difficult, step out of the equation - mapping the data to the rig, in our case, Daz3d/Poser figures.
Beyond that, we can also use these MoCap animation data packs to teach out=rselves a lot about the traditional methods, simply by loading them up and investigating distance over time, rotations between two frames comapred to rotation across many frames, etc., helping us to get a real feeling for how muuch rotation to apply for our second pose and allowing the tweeners to do their thing in between - and then tweaking where needed.
However, Mike's Animation Exercises to do. Exercise #5 "Bounce." and other animation excercise threads are another great way to learn other forms of animation.
If it seems really "Basic", well... that's because it really kind of is. This is where 3D animation began in the Amiga. But learning these principles is paramount to understanding animation.
Cause and reaction
For human and other living creatures, we also add observation, anticipation, pre-action, main action, and follow-through. Then all the extra little things that happen everywhere else.
The excercises in this very thread and the other that preceded it are amazing! This is where we dig right in and do animation! We send each other files and critique each other's work... it's a great way to learn and improve. We've also been using physics and particles simulations, Carrara's tree wind and rustles... even more ways to animate.
Alas my story broke the animation club
Kinda ironic really, given the effects vs story threads elsewhere.
Your story didn't break the animation club. It was my sad attempt at the bounce animation that killed the energy for animation. Thus, Darth Villainous.
I am busy until April working on my own project for a convention. But after that I might be able to help with some character animation. It will give me a chance to learn Carrara a little as I am not that familliar with it.
Back in December while visiting my Mom for the holidays I had some ideas for creating the flooding water effects using geometry cheats instead of particles. My initial R&D looked pretty awful, and I just looked at it again and, it's...pretty awful. I never chimed in because I didn't want to disappoint the group.
Glad you escaped the clutches of that villainous Darth. :) I rather liked your bounce animation... you achieved a much better squish when the ball hit the floor than I did. I was waitning for others to join in also.
I haven't gotten into the animation side of Carrara, not really interested in it but do enjoy watching others do it... [that sounds weird]
but I have enjoyed making up simple models for the animators to include in the movie and loved the end product of Gone to Australia the last animation club challenge.
Was good while it lasted but understand the constraints that are on a very few to get it up and going.
I to am slowly going through both your tutorials Mike as well as Phil's so that I can work on some animations I have in mind.
I have not got to the exercises yet but hope I will soon,