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To be honest, I think VWD is a much better solution than softbody physics. However, if you want to pursue the softbody physics further, look for a series of tests in that thread, especially by Marcus Severus and Stringtheory. The most important discovery was that the softbody physics calculations were fast and cool as long as a softbody physics object collided with another softbody physics object. However, things slowed down and went haywire if a softbody physics object had a lot of interaction with an object or objects that were moved with keyframes. The proposed solution was to create envelopes around keyframed objects and use "softbody attach" in the physics tab. That way, moving keyframed objects would be shielded from the softbody clothing or cloak or curtains or whatever. You will find a number of experiments and reports in the thread. One possible aid was the use of target helpers, but I stopped pursuing it when VWD came out.
Edited to credit stringtheory
do target helpers help at all with softbodies and moving figures?
I believe the target helpers were used to help adjust the movements of the undersuit shielding the moving figure, but it has been a while. I might be mixing it up.
the latter, just keyframe to follow
parenting seems to break it for some reason otherwise you could just add collider primitives to all the bones
is rather odd, the parenting thing.
was the undersuit like, grouped props?
There was a huge effort to get Carrara's Bullet soft body to work as cloth with animated figures - using proxies was helpful but it was still slow to calculate and often very unreliable. Then VWD came out which proved to be a reliable and flexible solution. If you are looking to use cloth simulation more than once, you'll save yourself a LOT of frustration by getting it.
Again, I agree. I would use VWD.
Ditto
Soft body physics was never intended to be a clothing simulator,. that's a more specific hybrid
although it can do some "cloth like" draping,. many of it's functions, like internal pressure, don't work as intended.
VWD is a specific cloth and hair sim.
can somehow save the audio with an nla clip or keyed clip?
or someway, so i can drag em in together to plop on the timeline together.?
example, the sound of a sigh with ab animated expression
i have the mimic, does that help
can somehow save the audio with an nla clip or keyed clip?
or someway, so i can drag em in together to plop on the timeline together.?
example, the sound of a sigh with ab animated expression
i have the mimic, does that help
can somehow save the audio with an nla clip or keyed clip?
or someway, so i can drag em in together to plop on the timeline together.?
example, the sound of a sigh with ab animated expression
does mimic help
I don't think you can save a sound with a clip - nice idea though! So you'd have to add them separately.
Mimic is OK but for best quality I would recommend hand-keying. Once you get into the swing of it, it can be reasonably fast to do. There is a section in my Animation tutorial about doing lip sync (Plug! Plug!).
Normally sound is one of the last thing's added and layered in post production.
for lip sync with mimic,. use a clear, simple vocal track,. (no background music or singing) to allow mimic to match the vocal sounds to your figures visemes.
Mimic is fast ( a few seconds),. but there will always be some "manual corrections" needed to adjust any automated process.
Bear in mind that if you're using a "customised" figure,. but using the default DMC files for that "base" figure,. then the facial animation may be different than expected, dependinhg on the differences between the facial shape of your custom head, and the shape of the default base figure.
again, some adjustment may be needed
Mimic for Carrara allows you to create your own facial/Vocal poses and link them to the sound phonemes. (to accomodate customised handmade figures).
you should ideally export your anmation as sequenced frames and add the vocal track,. fx track and background audio tracks in a video editor.
any audio brought into Carrara should be used as a guide for animation, rather than a final thing .
thanks.
i wouldn't put music on the soundtrack
but wouldve been nice to save ambient noises with nla clips. stuff like sigh, door closing, toilet flushes, flipper splashes, geese honks
some bits are easier as avi files. Aiko sighs a lot.
is gonna take a lot of practice to lineup sounds on the tracks.
an idea for the plug-in masters, imagine if carrara could render straight to mp4 ??
Ratty Mouse is at it again it this humorous tale of mouse vs cat. follow along as ratty does a nightly raid in a kitchen to only find its not a easy task. A Animated Short Created with Daz Studio 4.10
Another great one, Ivy. I posted my comments in your Art Studio thread.
Has anyone tried applying some of the GMIC filters to scenes destined for animation renders? Curious about the impact on render times and other potential issues. Hopefully, I will be rendering out an animation this weekend and just want to know what to expect.
Feeling very much out of my comfort zone.
love it especially the sound effects maketh it all the more funnier
I think Wendy did when it first came out.
Not quite the same here's a Digital Carvers Toon! Pro job
Rendered out as a tiff sequence then superimposed over a sequence of text pages in the shader room
@Headwax, wow, most excellent. For my current project, I want to minimize the need for editing the raw animation because I don't have time to learn too much stuff at the same time. I am filing away the tiff/shader room tip. Lots of possibilities. Very cool.
Thank you ! For this I just appled a series of dance poses at intervals at let carrara do the work ;) (lazy me)
Disappointing - today is the deadline and I did not get my animation done on time. I hope to complete it anyway, and I will post some progress updates along the way. It was a little too ambitious for a first project.
i lost track of that model of the milkyway spiral arms again. foh
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/28775/vrml-wrl-nasa-milkyway-model/p1
thank you. backing it up this time lol
Mindsond and I are DEEP into fine tuning our animation processes - it's really fun, and my whole reason for getting into all of this in the first place.
Lip Sync is a big one. For me it's never been the biggest - but then again, the biggest thing I've been working on over the years was experimenting and testing other animation tools in Carrara, like the Ocean, fog, lighting tricks, animated textures, vehicle motions, animated background characters and as much of that stuff as I could - all while having fun with different variations of the tips I mention in AniMating in Carrara
Later I started getting more into particles and then VWD, which I agree is an Amazing simulation tool. I love it!
Rosie 5 came along and I finally got Carrara dynamic hair working better in that long, big and curly style, but it's still quite glitchy and unpredictable at that size. I'm still trying more and more variations with that - Physical forces against parented collision objects vs hair shaders. It's the shaders that cause my biggest source of unpredictability and glitchiness because the curls push the shape away from the guide hairs which then is simulated - so after thinking it through, it's easier to understnad that these shader morphings are following a string, not really minding if it rotates around and makes things look funny. So I think if it was straight (it can't) it might have much smoother results.
Part of my thinking now:
I've been playing with Linday's Classic Long and Curly Hair with dForce for Genesis 8 Females, which looks fantastic, I think. The actual simulations from dForce, which wasn't intended to be used this way for hair, often gives a much more 'boring' simulation than that of Carrara's dynamic hair.
So I've created Rosie 5.5 from the ground up in Daz Studio so that she works with all of the tools that Studio has to offer, and she just opens right up in Carrara.
With the two great softwares, I'm going to be trying a bit of experimentatation - currently getting accustomed to a consistent way of running Linday's hair in VWD, which is not an easy task - it has a Lot of vertices and is a (beautifully) tangled collection of mesh tubes. I haven't been successful yet, but my inexperience with 'actual control' of VWD is disappearing with Mindsong's assistance, which is geting me closer and closer - now the biggest obstacle being time to spend at the computer.
Another experiment on my mind is to try and liven up dForce results using Carrara's dynamic hair.
Without actually testing my theory, I saved a dForce animation in Daz Studio and loaded it into Carrara. It took a l o n g time to load, but in the end, I had the camera and Rosie 5.5 in motion. The VWD in DS and dForce elements just get deleted (in practice, I'll save a version in DS without these elements - perhaps it'll load easier).
Now I'd need to load in my Carrara-optimized Rosie 5.5 and either NLA the animation to her, or transfer the collision objects and hair to the one imported from Daz Studio. Either is simple. I feel so 'at home' in Carrara!
So now I'd simulate the Carrara hair and render that. Since Rosie is the same in both apps, I'm thinking that rotoscoping the results together will be fairly simple. If not, I'd likely try turning one of the Rosies green and using green screen to blend the hair results together.
Now this may sound like a lot of work - because it is. But it's amazing how much of a workflow like this, and even much more encompassing goes on in movie productions CG houses. Besides, one of the jobs in a VFX house that most peole dread doing - rotoscoping - happens to be something I really don't mind doing.
3dage's advice on Mimic above is spot on. It's a fantastic lip sync automation tool, but like animating any character with a real story, real personality, artist intervention is required throughout every line spoken - for the most part.
PhilW's Animation in Carrara course, as he says above, has an excellent class on lip syncing by hand. After practicing animation for all these years (though it wasn't all on animation, and my computer time has Always been very limited) I feel pretty comfortable animating. Yes, I like using motion capture data. My favorite vehicle for that has been aniBlocks with the power of aniMate 2 for blending motions, layering them, etc., and then bringing results into Carrara and fine-tuning or changing them entirely - depending on what I'm doing.
But I've never been afraid to dig in and animate by hand either - like my previously available Animation Kits. Those were all animated by hand.
Many animation houses will use filmed actors to drive their animations - sometimes being used as a backdrop for key frame purposes. That's sort of how I look at using aniBlocks. The motion data is how I hand-animated over an actor doing a motion. I just saved a lot of time and work by importing data instead of animating by hand. I am a single-person studio with little time, after all!
The imported data is only the beginning, as we get a small glimpse of in my workflow video. In the video I do a very quick reposturing of the actoor using nothing more than Morphform-style parameter dials. But when I'm really getting down and dirty, I'll use the graph editor to alter the entire path of certaing axis of joint, and then perhaps delete a bunch of keys that I don't like, let that interpolate through a tweener, then edit further by hand - and I'll do this for several - often many joints on the figure for perhaps even all three axis.
If that sounds like a lot of work to you, you might be right. But when I have a specific motion in mind, keeping Rosie's 'attitude' in mind as I work the animation, it doesn't feel like "A Lot of Work", but rather art that must be performed - or just don't work on this at all.
My Just a Bit of Fun video from ten years ago was compiled of test renders of just these sorts of things. I worked very differently back then, and it was then when I wrote that AniMating in Carrara article, but refined it somewhat by the time I brought it to the new forum software - because by then 8.5 was out and I was already doing things a bit more advanced.
Nowadays, most animation projects I work on just feel like making art - and that's how I feel about it too.
Made back in 2012 to test a 30 day trial of (then) Sony Vegas Movie HD Platinum, this is Just a Bit of Fun
This is an example of one of the better version of Rosie's Carrara dynamic hair I have - though there are several test versions made since this - none have improved upon the dynamics, but have improved the overall look in a still image.
is there a quicker way to save face rigged animations?
mimic came out long before the face rigged figures.
a breathing track should prolly always be running. cant decide where to put it in the layers of sequence tab?
blinking. i mean, a character should never look still or frozen, even if they are in cryogenic suspension. need some defaults to be running at all times. when River Tam was in the box, smoke was moving
I used to use NLA clips, but I prefer to just do it all by hand for each animation now - since each of my characters requires their own, individual treatment anyways.
I even animate the strenomastoids in the neck, so yeah... I agree with what you just said and more.
After observing folks, I also notice that people rarely 'stare' people down as they talk. The eyes come back and lock for at least a portion of a second, but then the eyes either roll to the side, up or down, depending on the individual.
My sister always rolls her eyes to the side and up every single time she makes conversation.
I tried performing eye-lock on someone while I was talking to them, just to prove to myself how much I never do that. It made the recipient feel a bit uncomforatble too - I could tell.
I like to move Rosie's nostrils, sink that lower center oart of the throat (whatever the hell that's called) and accentuate one of the sternomastoids that run up and down the throat on either side of that part.
For breathing, I made my own Torso Scrunch controller morph that I use in conjunction with the Inhale morph from V4 Morphs ++ (now called Shapes ++? Not sure it's still the same). So I added Chest Bend, Abdomen Bend, Abdomen 2 Bend, Neck Bend and Arms Twist and made a freebie: Genesis 1 MorphForms +
It works great!
I do find that it's more difficult (less simple?) for me to animate the fingers on Genesis than what I've grown so accusomed to with generation 4. Probably because Rosie 5 is so vastly different in shape and size from the base, unlike Rosie 4. So I'm already planning some additions to that product.
Blinks I do by hand as well. With Rosie 4, I simply used the Blink and Blink Twice aniBlocks from Victoria Alive. I have just picked up Genesis Alive, but keep forgetting to try it. I actually enjoy just doing these things by hand.
All I've been doing these days is animating and then running simulations on cloth and hair. What a freaking Blast!!!