Genesis and Animate
murph101
Posts: 68
Does Genesis support the use of the Animate Aniblocks? I am just now getting into animation and watched some tutorials on using animation clips imported from Poser. That was a few years ago. Genesis seems like a huge leap forward. Do Animate Aniblocks still work?
Comments
(My first answer was eaten by the forum :) )
Yes, partly. (I can only talk about the aniblocks in Studio, but that doesn't should be different from Carrara.)
Because the Genesis zero position differs from the V4/M4 position, for which the aniblocks where made, you run into some problems with the feet. (Mostly only the feet.) With Animate 2 you could add some overlay animation on frame one to fix the whole following animation. The Aniblock importer in Carrara lacks this feature, but maybe there's some possibility with overlaying NLA tracks. But this is more the field of someone like Andy; I'm still to stupid to understand all the NLA features in Carrara.
The bone structure in Genesis has changed, too, but that doesn't seem to affect the V4/M4 aniblocks so much. And: if not using the straight V4/M4 morph you have to adjust the animations a little bit; but that's the same with a morphed Gen4-figure as it is with Genesis.
Sure, aniblocks work with Genesis. You might have to adjust the feet and the arms once in a while (the feet rotations are off and the hands sometimes go through the body, but that's because aniblocks were made for V4/M4)
But that's no big deal to correct with animate 2.
Hey argus 1000! Good to see you again!
Also, you can find a good write-up in the 'stickied' Carrara Information thread in these forums.
Look at the Genesis and aniBlocks post and you'll find great tips for using aniBlocks in Carrara in general in my aniMating in Carrara post in the same thread. There are navigation links throughout the pages to help you get more information as you explore as well.
Hope it helps - and feel free you reply more questions in there, if you'd like. Just try not to quote those really long posts! lol
Also, as Frank mentions above (this is also talked bout in the above linked article), the feet come out off. Just scroll down the timeline and select the feet keys and delete them. Another tip would be to load the aniBlocks away from the zero position so it's easier to delete all keys except the first. Never delete the first key of a figure part.
That also makes it easier to reposition the foot correctly, because you have the default pose at zero.
For this, I usually set the yellow triangle at the top of the timeline to 1.0 seconds - which sets that as start when you hit the rewind button on the sequencer playback. If you do this, you can still make NLA clips, just have to set the specific time range up on the timeline, and tell the NLA Clip popup to use scene time instead of All Keyframes. ;)
Dartanbeck,
Thanks for the welcome back. For the last 2 or 3 months, I've been in a daze of indecision, what with Daz hinting to a Carrara 8.5 production version "soon" but now that I finally know that version will be coming out at the end of the summer, and not before, I decided belatedly to start my next project using M4/V4, and not Genesis.