Animation in Carrara - Let's Animate - Q&A - Come One & All

Dartanbeck

Yep. Here's the online documentation on those:

http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/carrara/8_5/userguide/animating/tutorials/animation_filters/start

Mistara

theres no youtube tutorials on how to render animations without the twinklies

Dartanbeck

Cool animation Mike Moir did years ago. Great job of giving a "Bouncing Ball" animation character!

Diomede

MMoir encouraged me (and others) to try our hands at animation.  The bouncing ball was one of the exercises.  Good stuff..

Dartanbeck

Diomede said:

MMoir encouraged me (and others) to try our hands at animation.  The bouncing ball was one of the exercises.  Good stuff..

and Fun! When I could participate, that is. Always busy on my Carrara machine. Hard to participate in these cool group events because the rendering must go on!

 

Here's one of my 10 second challenge entries, when he was running those:

...and here's another, but I should have made the binocular circles overlap each other. Oh well:

 

Mistara

thanks.  oh a render we will go a render we will go, hi ho the merry o  lol

working with keyframes

is there a way to quickly select a column of keyframes?  dragging the marquis down the whole list not that efficient

wondering if i'm missing some basics.  looked around the storyboard tab, doesnt seem to be a way to drag tiles to other spots.

the repeat, reverse, and mirror tool is brilliant!

struggling in ds.  working on baking the gfa animates to keyframes.  setting up for the next gfa file, doesn;t seem to be a delete all keyframes button.  clear animation doesn't do it

going to a lot of trouble to see g8m belly dance.

test rendering spinning primitives with pbr on em.  so far no twinklies.  .5 accuracies.  global illumination accuracy 1px

Dartanbeck

Mystiarra said:

working with keyframes

is there a way to quickly select a column of keyframes?  dragging the marquis down the whole list not that efficient

When doing this a lot, it can make it easier if you resize the sequencer to fill more screen, then drag it back down when you're done. I don't do that because I just got used to selecting by dragging all the way down.

 

It definitely helps that I always begin my animations at the 30 frame (1 sec) mark, so I can easily grab an entire animation if I want and delete it without wrecking the scene.

Mystiarra said:

the repeat, reverse, and mirror tool is brilliant!

Yes! Agreed! Also Crtl + Drag = stretch/compress keyframes and Alt + Drag = Copy/Paste selected keyframes. I use all of these things all the time, and except when using aniMate 2, these functions do not exist in Daz Studio - nor can we tweak tweeners, which really blows!

How could they be this far with Human Figure excellence and still have such a quirky-ass means of animation tools?

 

I just don't get why they don't just keep Carrara going and use that as their animation pipeline. It makes a lot of sense to do so!

 

 

Mystiarra said:

struggling in ds.  working on baking the gfa animates to keyframes.  setting up for the next gfa file, doesn;t seem to be a delete all keyframes button.  clear animation doesn't do it

It's really odd. Sometimes even the "Delete Selected Keyframes" tool in DS doesn't delete a key. Blows my mind! I mean... I think Daz Studio is brilliant! But whoever works on this thing doesn't care in the least that it absolutely Sucks for animating.

 

Anyway, after I bake to keyframe if I want to go back to aniMate instead of Timeline, I go down to the lower left tray, right-click > Collapse All. Now I can easily select all keyframes except the first, and use the delete keyframes tool.

Again, it helps immensely that I never begin animations on the first frame.

In aniMate 2, I right-click the leftmost edge of the timeline > Add Empty Block, and just go for the default. This keeps the aniBlock from altering the first keyframe. Otherwise, it doesn't matter where you place the aniBlock, it will change the pose at frame 0.

Next, after placing my first aniBlock on that main line, I click it to bring up options, and in the bottom left of the block there's a little slider with a green gradient. I drag that all the way to the left to make it so the aniBlock doesn't fade in, but is on 100% at frame 30.

 

To correct this in the Timeline, again > Collapse All, then carefully select frames 2 through 29 and delete them from the entire figure. 

This will make a smooth transition between frame 1 and 30. Note - if you delete frame 1, you may have to change to linear tweener mode. This can be avoided by just leaving frames 0 and 1 in place, and only delete frames 2 through 29.

 

Even selecting keys is an odd affair in Daz Studio. I'm doing it because I really feel a need to use Daz Studio for Rosie right now. But as a side effect, I'm also now able to load in things that I own that never worked in Carrara, and just render them to alpha in Studio, then add them to Carrara.

 

Mystiarra said:

wondering if I'm missing some basics.  looked around the storyboard tab, doesn't seem to be a way to drag tiles to other spots.

Since those frames actually represent frames in time along our timeline, the way Storyboard room is now, that would break our animation.

I get where they were going with this, back when they put it in. This would probably be a really handy tool when animating things like the Bouncing Ball exercise. It gives us a one-page view of many frames. This was meant to be a handy way to notice quirks or the perfect place to change a tweener, etc.,

 

 

Would be kinda cool if we could actually use the storyboard room to select which exact frame is displayed in each window and then be able to render out a storyboard sheet.

I suppose we could do that now using the discrete tweener, but using it like that might just crash Carrara upon entering SB room.

 

Mistara

woww what a fate.  the digivault star thing is in the 1.99 sale