Confused about LOD

Pjotter

Dartanbeck said:

Pjotter said:

Dartanbeck said:

LOL!!! Well of course! Sometimes we need to be patient and let the files get written.

Faster hard drives on faster computers can speed up saves and loads

I am pretty patient, but if I know saving takes several minutes, I am posponing the saving. I regret that if Carrara crashes. It does not happen often, but sometimes it does.

I have not the latest pc, but my Core I7 and 12 Gb memory will have to do the job.

I suppose I was sounding cynical - I didn't mean to. Yes, saving does take time. I always use compression as well, so it takes me even longer. But if I want to work on a difficult scene with a LOT of info in it to save, I'll do a save without compression nor a thumbnail, so I can keep saving it as I go without waiting nearly as long. Then when I want to do a more permanent save (at a time when I want to go eat or some other form of walking away) I'll add thimbnail and compression to the save, and walk away while it saves.

Yeah... IMHO, that's a great Carrara machine, what you've got. There are many i7 chips to choose from, but I bet all of them are excellent. 

There have been times when I bring this laptop up by my Carrara Beast for multitasking purposes. Carrara Beast multitasks very well... but When I'm working on animations, I like to work only in Carrara. Then switch to the laptop if I'm waiting for a save or whatever.

I have one of the early i7, so not the fastest one.

I could not do animation on a laptop. Screen is too small for me. I keep scrolling left, right, in out, sequencer up and down. I have two large screens. Main one in front of me, the main screen. On the right sequencer only. For still images you do not need a sequencer screen. But for animation it is perfect. Will never change it. I am getting off topic? That's new.

In case you missed it (you do that once in a while :)), I also posted while you responded.

Dartanbeck

Yes, I do miss them often! LOL

But this time, when I said "That might do it", I was referring to the heel morph you mentioned.

Yeah I don't really like character animating on a laptop... but I'll still do it even though it won't be used for anything other than a test. I do all of my main animation renders on my Beast. Does you i7 have the four cores hyperthreaded to 8 logical cores (eight boxes in the render room)?

Either way though... i7 cpu are all 'good', I think. Some might argue that, but i7 is above the i5 and there are some i5 that can render Carrara just fine. 

Oh... and another thing I love about Predatron's original figures (besides being built on Generation 4 technology) is that they are absolutely LOADED with posing morphs - knoown to V4 and M4 as Morphforms. Troglodyte, Loretta, Lorenzo, Masked Hero... well all of his LoRez... now here's what I love about that:

I've been mentioning the graph editor. 3DAGE and Richard Chaos really got me into using that. I never used to use it at all - instead using the method where I'd delete rows of keyframes I want to change, except leaving those few in between as guides to work from.

Well I may still have to do some of that with Predatron figures, but quite often I can make the necessary correction just using those. Keep in mind that those get saved under a single channel in NLA if at all. So if they don't get saved in the NLA I could, if I wanted to, use Fenric's PZ2/BVH exporter to export an animated PZ2 (Poser pose file) instead, and load the animations that way. Fenric's PZ2/BVH exporter was reported (by Fenric) to NOT work on Genesis figures. But it works fabulously on Generation 4 figures (including ever Predatron figure I own, which is quite a few) and includes the option to export with translation (moving forward, etc.,) or without for creating stand-in-place cycled animations.

 

Pjotter

That is important info for me. So you are saying Predatron figures can use BVH? That is my only doubt for buying Lorenzo and Loretta. They are not based on Victoria or Micheal. But if the skeleton is the same it should work. I want to use BVH a lot and Genesis does work, but it is messy and needs too much editing. That is why I went back to V4. With Genesis, extra bones are added, which are not recognized by BVH.

Dartanbeck

Pjotter said:

So you are saying Predatron figures can use BVH? 

? Not at all. They probably can, but I wouldn't know - I don't use BVH format

What I was trying to say is that, when I import, say, an M4 aniBlock onto one of Predatron's figures, and there's that foot angle issue, I can often fix that with the morphforms included in the figure. This also works well for adding alterations for multiples using the same animation, like one can have the arms up more - or even just one of the arms, etc.,

Dartanbeck

Here is a quick look at one of my LoRez Masked Hero characters - the Base Figure

With the figure selected, in the Parameters Tab, here is a look at the morph filter. A lot of morph categories! M4 and V4 Morphs++ introduced Morphforms to them, which are very handy to have. Predatron has these built into his Troglodytes, Demoneconuto, Angor, etc., and all of these LoRez folks.

Here is the Tip Toes morph for both feet at the same time, which is what I'd use in this situation - though we also have the same controls individually for each foot, if needed. This image has two parts. The left image is showing the maximum foot bend given by this morph - same angle as the individual FootBend morphs. At this point, the toes' angle has not changed at all. On the right, further dialing the morph the feet remain fully angled and the morph is now bending the toes up. I love how the morph dial is specially set up to control both feet and toes separately, depending upon the values being set by the dial!

But also note how many repositioning morphs we have just for the legs and feet. The bottom one, not shown, is Sit, which can pull the legs and feet up into a sitting position with the simple dial of a morph. I never really use that one yet, but it's amazing how well these morphs work toward tweaking animations and poses!

Dartanbeck

Also, all of my skin and clothing maps and such that came with Lorenzo also work on my Masked Hero and my MU14 Worker, Monk, and Arab. 

They certainly are not meant for Cose-up shots - like the mouth expression morphs are nowhere near the mesh detail of any of the Daz figures - but they look fantastic at a distance.

To me, the most important start to the collection - or the most importatnt to get if only getting one, is Lorenzo and Loretta. They contain all of the extra color tones for ethnicity, orcs and zombies, etc., as well as the base clothing options.

Once I got MU14 Worker, and saw how it was a tweaked out Lorenzo, I was thrilled how they interchange nicely. The Masked Hero takes this even further - a very satisfied, happy and overwhelmed customer = me!

Dartanbeck

Pjotter said:

That is important info for me. So you are saying Predatron figures can use BVH? That is my only doubt for buying Lorenzo and Loretta. They are not based on Victoria or Micheal. But if the skeleton is the same it should work. I want to use BVH a lot and Genesis does work, but it is messy and needs too much editing. That is why I went back to V4. With Genesis, extra bones are added, which are not recognized by BVH.

One thing I like about Genesis' extra bones is that the aniBlocks don't have them included, leaving free for individual tweaks. Like I can use Abdomen 2 to arch the character back a bit more in the upper torso or the Pelvis to rock the legs forward or backward. 

The LoRez figures are not based on M4 or V4, but they are made to the same scale and, aside from the feet thing being different, they use M4 and V4 aniBlocks well - but that's coming from me, whom really doesn't mind tweaking things to work when it comes to animation. 

I also like Posermocap's animated poser pose files for M4 and V4, like Spy Moves and the like. I haven't tried his for Genesis yet. SKAmotion's are also quite excellent. But the GoFigure aniBlock sets come with so many different motions that I find myself using my collection of those the most - but often not using all of the bones at the same time, as I explain in this

► AniMating in Carrara

You've likely seen that article before, but it truly is my preferred method of animating as a home director kind of workflow. I do quite often create my own custom animations too - for very specific needs. I love doing that. But more times than not, I'm using the Mocap data from those mentioned above.

It's been a long time since I've imported a BVH file. Here's a thread I've stored on that topic:

* importing bvh files into Carrara 8

I have the complete Carnegie collection of M4/V4 converted BVH files, and I remember them to be excellent. I may get back into trying them some day.

Dartanbeck

Oh, I also wanted to add that I've had decent success using my V4 aniBlocks on my Genesis 2 Female Rosie figure. There are always tweaks to be made - in this case especially those darned feet! LOL 

But it still saves a lot of time.

I'm really not sure how you're getting the foot slide unless you might have accidentally moved the figure besides importing the aniBlock, or are using blocks I've never tried. GoFigure's walks work amazingly well for me. There was one thing I've learned though... when I needed to make Rosie smaller (6' is just way to huge for her) I use to use the overall scale of the figure to reduce her down. That messed up animation data somewhat - especially when matching NLA clips together - it just wasn't working. So I bought Stephanie 4 Petite which has morphs to better adjust her dimensions - and that made a big difference.

But I think we could still change overall scale and still get decent results by using a different approach, though I've never tried it - animating first, then scaling down by reducing the overall scale of a Group instead of the figure itself. (?) That's the methos I'd try if I had to try it again.

Some of my animations I've made of Rosie took a lot of time, even though I was importing aniBlocks. Tweaking them to my needs. So in those situations, I actually save Rosie with the animation applied as a separate file in my browser under her base folder > Animated folder. Then I can drag that animated version of her into any scene. The problem with that is that the Rosie character has been ever-evolving over time.

Pjotter

Thanks for all the replies. A lot of new stuff to figure out.