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Thanks for the comment, Bunyip. And thanks for joining the scanty warrior party.
You got some interesting NPR Briana Cullaith going on there!
Today's Render
Getting Blown Away by Everyone's Images
Very kind of you to say so - thank you!
Stezza - that looks amazing!
Some more bits of the animation coming together. I picked up Noggin's Crow in the PA sale fairly inexpensively, wanted to add a flying bird and used this as an excuse to learn a bit more about using the NLA track in Carrara for animations.
Watched a few youtube videos of slow-motion birds in flight and I was surprised how the body of the bird really doesn't move much at all, it's the solely the wings, and seemed to be a fairly simple motion, at least for birds flying in a straight line. There's only 4 different keyframes here (can't just do the top and bottom poses of the wing stroke, but have to do a keyframe in between going up and going down or the wings don't know how to move from one position to the next). Then after creating the basic poses, had to experiment a bit to figure out how quickly the wings should flap: the answer is very very quickly lol. Still not sure the wings are flapping fast enough.
Some surprises I didn't expect: When you creat a master pose by default it erases the keyframes you created (whoops), this is true for master clips too, so I accidentally lost my keyframe work the first time I pressed the button (I did notice there's a checkbox you can click that will allow you to keep the keyframes too).
I figured I would make 1 master clip of a full upstroke/downstroke cycle (lasts less than half a second) and then repeat that over and over again, then use the collection of clips to make one larger master clip of several wingbeats all together. However I couldn't figure out any way to make a new master clip comprised of several other clips put together.
Adding the next scene element was an opportunity for me to - finally after all this time - learn the Virtual World Dynamics plugin for dynamic cloth. I buckled down, read through the manual, and wow this plugin is really terrific! I think it was Diomede who told me back when I first started fiddling with it that I would LOVE it and he was right :)
So here's a few thoughts about the VWD plugin:
First, it calculates at 30 frames per second, and this is important because I didn't know that at first, and when I would re-import the animation back into my Carrara scene, which was set at 24 fps, the clothified object would seem to randomly jump around the scene or fall through the character it was supposed to be colldiing with. At first I was befuddled how the animation could look so good in VWD and yet have so many problems in the Carrara scene, but the answer came down to the fact the Carrara scene was only 24 fps instead of 30. So in transforming a 30 fps motion into 24 fps, Carrara does a lot of 'guessing' about what the between frames should look like, and gets it very wrong. VWD basically assigns a new morph for your clothing object every frame, but if Carrara has to guess or split the difference, it doesn't just take 50% of the morph before and 50% of the morph after to make the new 'in between' morph (which is what it should do, and how you can correct this problem by hand) but instead assigns random amounts of both morphs that often account for more than 100% change, which is why the cloth suddenly appears to 'jump' into the wrong position. Once I figured out 30 fps was the standard, I just simply changed my Carrara scene to 30 fps to match and it was all good. Much easier. I didn't see any way to change the default 30 fps that VWD operates at, by the way, so I don't know if there's a way to do that.
Secondly, I love that you can mess with the wind forces in realtime as VWD is calculating. Found I could simply grab the wind force arrow and turn/pivot it silghtly to make the wind whip the clothing a bit more, and I could also change the force of the wind in real time the same way, making the animation for the clothing much more interesting and dynamic. HOWEVER on drawback is that I could not find anyway to 'store' or memorize the wind forces I used in a simulation, so that I could then use the exact same wind forces on another simulation, and as I had to decided to try out VWD for both the skirt and the hair in the same scene, I wanted to get the exact same wind forces on both, couldn't find a way to do that.
Speaking of using VWD on hair to make conforming hair more dynamic I see it as 'meh... just ok'. I'm sure the poor souls out there who aren't using Carrara would love this function, but for those of us who use Carrara dynamic hair, it's just not nearly as good. There are some hairstlyes that are hard to make with Carrara dynamic strand hair that VWD would be good for, so it's nice to have it as an alternate standby method, also in many cases if you're not super picky and don't want to spend the time to make a Carrara hairstlye this would be an easy way to simply grab a conforming hair you like the look of, pop it in the scene, run VWD, and off you go. Also, I remember tinkering with trying to make a Carrara dynamic ponytail a while back and had a lot of trouble, not in crafting it but in getting the ponytail not to escape it's 'rubber band' holder, certainly there are instances like that where it's probably better to save yourself the stress and simply grab a conforming ponytail instead and use it with VWD.
Also reading through the VWD manual there are many uses that I never even thought of before, such as simply using it for soft body interactions, like the example given in the manual about having a character sit down on a coiuch and having the cushions yield/bend exactly to show the pressing of the characters bottom and legs and back to the couch (that's freaking awesome!). Also there's an example of using VWD to model a pillow out of 2 flat planes, simply using the forces to draw the edges of the planes together, then weld them.
I freely admit that I'm very happy I spent the time to get familiar with VWD, and this may be one of the most important Carrara plugins of all time. Along with LightX. And Fenric's Unlock Figure. And Shader Doctor. And Baker. And Architools... (Actually that would make a fun thread: what are your top 5 most used/favorite Carrara plugins?)
Anyway here's my test for the next character I'm adding to the scene. I'm probably going to get rid of the hair and add my own using Carrara strand hair, but I really love the skirt.
Jon, I am enjoying your experiments. Very cool effects!
My end goal in Carrara has always been to learn animation. Haven't started yet, even though I planned to start in May.
Still working through Phil's basic course. There is so much to learn.
Wow. How you dood that? The character has really clean muscle tone. Is that Genesis?
Stezza, that's awesome! I'm pretty sure I'm seeing particles, but I have no idea how this was done.
Thanks Phil, jonstark & UB
that is Genesis2F with some muscle morphs applied.. postwork was done in PSE using layers, layer masks and a variety of Ron's brushes.. a fun project I tried which took around an hour to complete.. nice and quick.
For comparison to the prior one, threw in a Carrara hair instead and used a directional force for a quick comparison, the directional force needs more variations up and down, but otherwise I'm pretty sure I'm going to use Carrara hair for the final render.
bunyip, loving this one too
well this one blows me away Stezza
Here I used Cripeman's method of creation rust shader. The shaders for Alien Shrooms and for spaceship are created using this method. Alien Shrooms are completely created in Carrara. Carrara's native render.
https://youtu.be/QL1nP-sBCY0
VWD can do other frame rates, uncheck use discreet tweener when opening
Starting to put the scene elements all together. Realized after rendering I hadn't put in the particles lol, which was the whole idea to begin with. But this is where i"m at so far. I'm sure it's not very good scene composition, but sometimes I imagine things will look and the way they turn out are vastly different (sadly).
Good to know! Thanks, Wendy, I'll make use of this in the future, and pay better attention to those pop ups in future :)
Lovin' it!
Nice rust and shrooms! Vertex on the shrooms, or spline?
Thank you, UnifiedBrain! It was Carrara's Vertex modeler.
Loving all of these projects.
- Stezza, today's render (above) should be the banner for this month's challenge. I am indeed blown away.
- Jonstark, I like the Carrara dynamic hair, but the VWD does work on mesh hair. Might be a function of the particular mesh hair model, rather than VWD itself, if you are willing to try some different models. Either way, coming together excellently. And dynamic hair is a great function that Carrara has that a certain other Daz assembling and rendering program does not.
- Bunyip, we have great variety in our warrior women! Almost feel like should have made warrior women the theme. Intriguing style in that filter.
- Vyusur, fun alien plants. The mesh is simple, but effecive, which is always best. Cripeman would approve of the application of rust this way, but maybe we needed a better pilot for the scifi spaceship?
Wonderful variety of approaches already. Makes me very happy. Hope some more folks get some time to put a project together. Plenty of time.
I'm hoping to have time to get started on something this weekend. I just have to finish my entry for the rendo Halloween contest first and then decide which Cripeman video to use as my inspiration (I did go through them all and bookmark a couple possibilities already).
I can't upload mine.... it never has worked for me
I have that problem wwith every one of their contests. They list the size they require for the image and thumbnail, but it always rejects that size and I end up having to try five or six different resolutions until I find one that it accepts. Then after all that work you never know if anyone even looked at your image, much less voted for it.
Anyway, on a happier note, I spent a little time while watching TV last night sketching out my entry for this challenge and blocked a little bit of it out in Carrara so I should have at least a beginning to post this weekend. :)
Happy Python Day - Cow Chucking Device - after Cripmen'a blue print tutorial - used also filter forge old photo and topaz impression :)
I've been playing around a bit lately with low poly modeling and have been wanting to try it in a Carrara challenge. Here's my entry so far. I'm not sure how much more I am going to do, but I may play with the light cone effect to make it a bit clearer and I'm not 100% sold all of on my color choices at the moment. I may redo the painting on the headstone too; I painted that in Carrara and I like the hand-painted look of it in this scene, but I got a bit messy with my lines.
I used/referenced these Cripeman videos:
Scene Setup:
Render:
Final with post-work:
Wow, everyone has some great entries!
MDO2010 - nice work! So strange, I had just been looking into creating low poly assets for an "Autumn" landscape entry...now I feel lame, lol. Well, I might go through with it. Here is a replicated 'Aspen' tree I was creating today as a start.
Please do it! Both of you guys are creating interesting and wonderful worlds.