Carrara Crawling Christmas Greetings - my latest animation

daz3d_9ff14f0c17

In response to a post from Dartanbeck, I was inspired to finish a complex animation I made in Carrara. It is out of season, but I want to post it now and not wait until December.
There was a lot of work on this, I am not very much friends with the Carrara timeline, but finally I got it acceptable. When looking at all those files and prerenders I made.. oh boy.. and all the time I spent on this project.. Take the "spiders", they are for Daz Studio. They are not for Carrara. But somehow I managed to export the animation blocks from Studio, and use them in Carrara. What an effort.. And the background is real, from my living room. I used Syntheyes (a GREAT piece of software) and exported it to the Carrara format.
I LOVE mixing real world with CGI animations.

What was most time consuming, was tweaking and adjusting stuff, using the time line. Carrara could definitely benefit from markers, to make it easy to jump back and forth between certain places in the animation. I also spent a hell of a lot of time making the cartoon character jump out of the cockpit, because her fingers invariably would stick themselves into the metal. Had I got the left hand correct, you can bet when I started to fiddle with the right hand, the left hand came out of position. All in all it was fun. And Carrara's render engine never let me down. Lights and shadows - excellent. Shaders - super. Improve the time line, and Carrara rocks.

Ok - signed, sealed and delivered:

Carrara Crawling Christmas Greetings

I hope you will like it!

-Ingvar

evilproducer

Great job!

For the unwanted had movements you mentioned in the first post, did you try adding a Target Helper or locking the constraints? They can be keyframed as well...

daz3d_9ff14f0c17

evilproducer said:

Great job!
For the unwanted had movements you mentioned in the first post, did you try adding a Target Helper or locking the constraints? They can be keyframed as well...

Thanks! Yes, I finally found out that I could use some constraints. Still I had the feeling that that character lived its own life..

-Ingvar

SimonJM

Very impressive indeed!

Dartanbeck

Very cool!
One thing that I find helpful, when things tend to go out of wack:
If the scene begins somewhere other than the "0" frame, and there is a bezier tweener on either side of the starting point key frame, there's the culprit. Try sliding the "0" key to the starting film position (first drag the real one slightly to the right - to save it), and change it to nearly where you want it to be. If that isn't helpful, try using either a tweener other than bezier, or add more keys to correct the oppositions caused by the bezier. I have yet to get into the graph mode... in there, you could mess with the bezier angles to make it all work better. 3dage knows all about that stuff-and I think professor Richard Chaos also.

Dude... I really like you crawly card! Very nice
Dartan

daz3d_9ff14f0c17

Thanks for the positive feedback, all of you!
Dartanbeck, so you don't use the graphs? When making this, I found the curves invaluable. Maybe you don't want to change anything, but you get a good idea about what goes on in your animation.

-Ingvar

Dartanbeck

ingvarai said:

Thanks for the positive feedback, all of you!
Dartanbeck, so you don't use the graphs? When making this, I found the curves invaluable. Maybe you don't want to change anything, but you get a good idea about what goes on in your animation.

-Ingvar

Yeah... I'll definitely get there... so far I've been happy with most things. Professor Chaos has instructed me that I must learn this - so I shall. Dogwaffle has totally introduced graph editing to me - as it starts in graph mode from the start. It was Poser's graph that made me less than keen on using it - but back then I was a total noob. A lot has changed since then and I think I'll open that realm today - or this weekend at the latest. I know I'll love it.

I love Elele's arachnid, too! I remember when he was first planning to submit that to Daz3d for acceptance. The thing is a very complete package... Thanks to Elele!!!

Ingvar... I'd love to see more! Do you have animation convenience experiences since you've picked up C4D?
Carrara totally won my heart.

Oh... just a small thing, but:
Daz3d devs just added a new right-click feature! :)
Not what you really wanted, but you can now right-click copy and paste in the 8.5beta!!! I'm still not used to it! lol
Have you ever gone into the ability to add KB shortcuts in preferences? Hate to open old wounds....

daz3d_9ff14f0c17

Hi Dartanbeck :)

> Ingvar… I’d love to see more!
I wonder of that is appropriate, since I now use C4D. I could send u a pm though.

> Do you have animation convenience experiences since you’ve picked up C4D?
Yes, now. In the beginning, it seemed that C4D is not a good animation tool. As a matter of fact, that is what I heard from the Norwegian Maxon dealer too. And everywhere in the newsgroups. In the C4D Cafe, I was told to make my own characters, because importing was so difficult. Nothing could be more wrong. But I had to teach myself how to do all this. Thanks to Daz Studio, I can use much of the Daz Store content, by exporting it from Studio, and importing it into C4D.
Yes, I used Carrara almost 5 years and learnt how to do 3D. But C4D is another world, a very logic world. It has, like Carrara, animation layers, motion clips and all that. And it works just great.

There is one thing in Carrara that really made me frustrated. If you can forward that to the dev dept, it would be nice, maybe they are aware of it. It goes like this:
If you jump back and forth between keyframes, this works UNTIL you put an animation clip into your project bin. It does not have to be used at all this clip, on the time line, it is enought that the project "owns" it. Then Carrara will stop on each and every keyframe in that clip. If you understand.
My favourite solution would be to have Carrara only stop on each keyframe only belonging to the current selected object. That's the logic way for it to work.
These two issues slowed my so much down last year. And they accellerated my initiative looking for another tool.

It is good to see that improvements are on the way for Carrara!

-Ingvar