The Three Carrarateers raid Mad Town!
Dartanbeck
Posts: 21,323
T'was a magical gift.
Just a bit of goofing around on e-mails, Garstor mentions that he's gonna be in Madison for a convention - he's on the board. In my overly babbly sense of typing, I suggested that EP and I head down from our northern Wisconsin environs; Him to the west, and I live along the eastern shoreline right on Lake Michigan where the Ahnapee river meets it - pretty sweet here!
Whoa... what a blast we had!
Left - Garstor
Right - Dartanbeck
Front Center - evilproducer
The Gars-Man was busy the whole weekend with his work stuff... but we managed to kidnap him a few times and storm Mad Town and get in some excellent Carraratastic conversations about the world of CG!
Had a blast guys! A real honor to meet you!
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Had a lot of fun- and we weren't even arrested! ;-)
In case anybody was wondering, Dart talks less than he writes! :lol: :lol:
Inspirational environs while inspirational, wonderful, free-form, "Hello, Great to meet you face-to-face" fun! That superb enthusiasm of young Gars-Man, intermingled with the obscure insanity of Dartan, held together, directed, and whipped into shape by evilproducer! Garstor is now heavily loaded with the enormity of learning both LightWave and Carrara, side-by-side. Such endeavors get EP and I to kind of have to look at LightWave, at least a little. It looks like another "Vastly Superior Value to Cost Ratio" sort of software. I look into many of the features and abilities within the powerful, high reputation animation/modeling master. Very cool stuff. Heavily engrossed into what Carrara has to offer, I often wish that the lessons that direct him to cough out the cash for LW would have sent him into Carrrara instead... but that's likely the Carrara enthusiast in me talking... You go, Garstor! One day, bud... we'll interconnect our workflows and get all of this great software working together. Right now, a great link-up intermediary formatting tool is Daz Studio Pro, as it can export or save to files that deliver what you make for DS in LightWave into a native Carrara format, duf. Pretty neat how this whole circle of software that DAZ offers is allowing us to inter-connect all of our favorite computer habits into Carrara! I'm loving it!
2nd from Bottom: Yum! Shrimp tacos with DosExis... I'm lovin it! My tummy was round all weekend! Evilproducer's twin brother is a master on his King Griller Akorn grill! Whopper Jr. provided the Brisket... and Pork Shoulder was another huge slab of grilled perfection! Makes it hard to move!
(but easy to sleep!!! ;)
Sounds like you guys had a blast. Gods of Carrara, assembled together... :)
I think it would be really fun to set up a whole expo of computers loaded with Carrara Pro. All you need to do is hook up your external drives and show of your Carrara stuff without having to lug around your dandy motherboard with all of the cooling weight on the cpu! Those things are just best not being hauled around. So I could just organize the Newegg order, have them ship enough stuff for me to build a plethora of workstations a few days early - Bam! Instant Carrara Fest!
Spend a year or so planning - so that we could get as many Carraraists as we can in the same place at the same time... I'd love to meet our whole crew!
As much fun as I've had seeing how incredibly talented evilproducer and his whole family are with acting, directing, art, you name it - and very active in it,
still one of my favorite times was when we were all in Garstor's hotel room messing around with the modelers in Carrara on Garstors mobile workstation. Where I prefer the vertex modeler, evilproducer zips into the spline modeler and blows us away with commands we didn't really have a good handle on - inspires new realms of investigation. Meeting up live like this was magic - and I'm eager to do something like this again. It has convinced me to pursue building my render nodes as soon as I can afford to - so that I can host a multi-eight core experience studio for just such occasions. Having one, especially if someone like Garstor shows up with a nice portable solution, is actually really nice. But I think having at least three or for eight core or more workstations (since they render so much faster) would make it more feasible for anyone to say: "Well here... let me show you" and hop in the command chair and jam away in Carrrara before peers!
It's amazing how many different ways the individual user can get around within and use Carrara - it has so many different ways to accomplish the same things, plus it is incredibly capable of doing so many different sorts of CG art. I'll be buzzing from our weekend in the Mad City for along time to come!
Daaaaadddddddddd!!!! :-)
Ladies and gentlemen: the three Musketeers of Carrara.
:lol: :lol:
The Three Carrarateers of Mad Town 2013:
Garstor is a big, fit dude! Really cool, high intelligence, fun, inspired, and motivated. He wants to build everything he sees in Carrrara and/or LightWave and render it out! Garstor is one of those fellows who is highly trained and experinced in computers and how they're written to work - or however you word that. Of course I have to us as many words as possible, anyone else might just say: Garstor is a computer programmer! We don't see him that much right now 'cause him gone and falled in Love! I Love that! You go Gars-Man! If there's one major thing that I wish for, is just for everybody - and I mean Everybody - to find happiness in life. Love is one of those things that can take to happiness' highest peaks!
Oh... but one of his Windows Server towers has 24 cores! Um... yeah. What a node, eh? Like me, the Gars-Man builds his own. At least I think he does... Oh... and Garstor works out.
Evilproducer is an incredibly talented film director whom is an excellent actor! He's shown me stuff that he's done in RayDream 5, some older version of Bryce (5, I think), Carrara 5, and now he's running 7.2 Pro
I've seen him get eaten by a T-Rex that didn't come rigged- so he made the rig and animated the thing composited over a series of live-action footage. When the thing gets him and swallows him down... it's just darned cool. He and his twin brother are heavily critical of their own work and the others, making the competitiveness between them immense! No wonder they're both do darned good! At least three other brothers also act - and love doing so. Lots of talent there - their wives and their Dad, too!
EP is teaching me all sorts of new tricks in Carrara. Always fun to find new ways to pedal a bike. In this case, that couldn't be more true! Stuff I've always done 'the long and hard way' (and loved every minute of it), he's teaching me all sorts of nice little helpers and workflows. Mixing it with how I've always worked before is very cool and welcome.
Dartanbeck is just Dartanbeck, I think. Slightly (at least) off his rocker, because he's always off in his mind on some fantastical thought of imagination. Carrara 8.5 Pro, Dogwaffle Pro: Howler 9, PaintShop Pro X5 are his main tools and is clearly now work Daz Studio heavily into the workflow after discovering some amazing, built-in features on the Pro version.
I've just acquired a plethora of great plugins for Carrara and am looking for some time to learn them better. Most of which are Shader enhancements. So now, my node settings have expanded vastly beyond what I'm accustomed to - and I look forward to taking further and further steps toward using them to enhance my production.
Whoa... babbling again?
Haven't seen you for a few. I sure hope you finishing all of your chores before you go gallivanting off like that. Your mother will have both our hides, you know!
How go your adventures in the wonderful world of Carrara?
Gee, if I told my wife I was going down town to meet a few blokes I met on the internet - she would start to get suspicious :)
Heh,
great to see that you lot had such a great time! Hope you had a beer for me :)
...and while I'm babbling and showing off pictures, here's my latest quickie desktop image I made. Rosie and I are truly blessed. Our Granddaughter is amazing - full of character, doesn't fuss... she's quite as far as crying is concerned - but her beautiful coos have me convinced to have her sing with me all the time - and teach her piano, guitar, bass and drums along the way too... wherever her interests lie. Maybe she'll let me teach her Carrara or DS?
EDIT:
Man, she is such a good baby!
It's all right, dad and I'm learning, but the road is uphill. I often find myself dreaming spectacular live footage between mixtures and post productions. The last, chronologically, Sunday afternoon in Piazza Navona and the Fontana di Trevi in Rome.
I am very happy to see you together in your "mad" city. Three people who share their skills with great passion to Carrara.
Embraces MOM ....:lol:
Great photos of the little granddaughter Dart! She's a little sweetie!
I figured I would try and recreate a scene from this past weekend in Carrara. I like the lighting, but I think I need to really work on the morphs for the M4s as they all look a little too goofy.
I'm still rendering, so here's a screen shot! ;-)
Incredible lightning, funtastic hair shading and the m4's with their cloth look so natural! WOW!! :lol:
Nice to see the real guys behind their avatars!
Almost spewed a glass of wine I'd downed all over the keyboard...and then did when I saw the Hooters shot! ROFL
Nice looking lads and families !
xx :) SileneUK
I am happy that it has the human one there behind these images!
I know " KevinProducer " because I am fan of his achievements on Internet but the others…
I find that it is unhappy that the members hide behind an image and such as they are not shown are really, they would be much more sympathetic!
Naturally, I am of the older generation where one was proud to be what one is!
Thank you for your devotion to all the three!
(you have a nice family Dart !)
DUDU
Congratulations Darten I most can say: Its your best work until now :-) the litle girl
What, no one's going to critique this render? It's so obviously a digital composition, I hope you weren't going for any kind of realism, the specularity is just way off for real skin tones and that hair? Obviously poser prop hair, and there is some pokethru on the clothes... the ambient occlusion is way off everywhere, certainly you can tell those are highly digital lights and the SSS effect is just nonexistent. That V4 needs some NGM because otherwise her form just doesn't look natural, and the smile is obviously a preset dial-in... I'm just sayin' you can spot it's a digital render from a mile away... :D
:)
That really cracked me up, Evil, I quite literally found myself cackling like a loon, very funny stuff! It really looks like you guys had a great time, wish I'd been there too honestly, must have been some great conversations and a lot of fun had. :)
I grabbed the pics from them too via Gmail am considering Facegen versions hehehe
maybe good for the Twilight Zone comp :blank:
I had the joy of camping over at his twin brothers house for the three days and nights, leaving on the fourth day. It was really cool... like these are the kinds of people I would certainly have befriended had I known them previously. Then three more (but that's not all of them!) brothers show up to have a taste of Whopper Jr.'s Brisket! I kept pestering Garstor via text messages offering to break him out of his engagements. I'm glad he puts up with me! He's like, 6'1" and works out regularly with a physical trainer! He's incredibly ambitious about his 3D stuff, too. Major ideas constantly flowing around in his workshop - his endeavors in LightWave certainly makes one admire that software's potential.
evilproducer came armed with DVD productions of many facets of his work;
Plays that he was in at his local theater, which he professionally masters to DVD for each of the cast members as a keepsake. Titles with animated characters and physics goings on and such, all done in Carrara. Really neat stuff!
Slide Shows of his stills, which I've admired as long as I've been involved in these forums. His sense of lighting, shadows, composition, action, and creativity has always inspired me - sometimes leaving me in awe.
In the Carrara 8 Promo Reel 2010, Age of Armour spills sparks of a cutting torch creating a Carrara logo cutout, then some physics cubes erupt in your face. Now, from the 15 second mark through 16 is part of an evilproducer animation. I've always loved that two second shot an want to (maybe some day?) see the whole movie! We were watching all of his stuff and his Black Hole stuff comes in with new shot that I hadn't seen yet. It was really cool watching through it first, and then the next time he paused in places explaining his many technique for using target helpers, motion paths, various tweeners, etc., the man's an inspirational genius! His Twin does other types of video production, and I have a feeling that he might just land a career as a director. His passion and natural abilities remind me, in ways, of Peter Jackson during some of the Bonus footage I've seen from the LOTR Extended series DVDs.
Garstor was the only one of us to bring Carrara loaded onto a machine. When we showed up to his hotel room after one of his many meetings, I immediately got the impression that he Carrara Jammed whenever he had some free time in his room. He was already working on testing some various methods that he might try to use for modeling Madison's amazing Capitol building! So EP gets on and demonstrates some Spline modeler techniques and I demonstrated a few tricks for Vertex modeling - but nothing they didn't already know! lol
Like I said earlier... I'd love to have a well planned meeting of as many Carrara enthusiasts as possible. For example, if somebody simply cannot travel, that would make for a great start for a meeting place. I've always wanted to visit Antarctica anyways! ;)
I had a great time as well Dart! It was a pleasure meeting in person. I'm glad I didn't bore you too badly. ;-)
There was some stuff that you showed me in the VM that I wasn't aware of, so I learned a bunch as well! It just reaffirms in my mind, that there are umpteen different ways to achieve one's goals in Carrara, and not one is wrong.
A Carrara convention would be awesome! It's a great way to meet people and pick their brains about techniques and such.
Forgot to post a link to the Cirrus City video you mentioned:
http://youtu.be/9Po9ktxc6NA
What, no one's going to critique this render? It's so obviously a digital composition, I hope you weren't going for any kind of realism, the specularity is just way off for real skin tones and that hair? Obviously poser prop hair, and there is some pokethru on the clothes... the ambient occlusion is way off everywhere, certainly you can tell those are highly digital lights and the SSS effect is just nonexistent. That V4 needs some NGM because otherwise her form just doesn't look natural, and the smile is obviously a preset dial-in... I'm just sayin' you can spot it's a digital render from a mile away... :D
:)
That really cracked me up, Evil, I quite literally found myself cackling like a loon, very funny stuff! It really looks like you guys had a great time, wish I'd been there too honestly, must have been some great conversations and a lot of fun had. :)
It was the prop hair instead of the Dynamic hair that gave it away, wasn't it? ;-)
Love it!
Early registration including lodgings could:
* Give us a whole block of the area - be it cabins or a hotel, etc., so that naps can occur at any time they're needed.
* Provide a good idea of how many attendees to expect so that we could be sure to reserve enough space and workstation considerations.
* Create an opportunity to gather queries that may need to be addressed. Given an appropriate amount of time, workshops could be organized and conducted by those of us whom do the answer in different ways - so that we can see, first hand, how the different techniques look as they're being performed live - like You, Gars-Man, and me in the hotel room Sunday.
Beyond that, we could also have fun times doing other things Carrara related. I would love to do some demonstrations of some of the things I've been doing lately. It would be really cool to get some of the great tutorial experts - like Mark Bremmer, Jack Whitney, Ringo Monfort, Phil Wilkes, Cripeman, Age of Armour, Dimension Theory - whom ever is willing, to perform via projection display with pro audio - a theater of Carrara learning!
Man... that would even be more awesome if DAZ would be present. Have a whole wing set up specially designed for new Carrara users to quickly learn their way around the interface. Veteran users mingling amongst them offering answers and advice.
Okay... I better go to bed.
"Gods of Carrara" is pretty funny considering that I was in town for an atheist convention (FFRF 36th Annual Convention). :lol:
The Wisconsin State Capitol building and surrounding grounds is an inspiration to 3D artists! I highly recommend checking it out if you can.
Definitely a really good time, I'll dig into the pictures I have to see if there are any worthy of posting. I'm coming back to Madison in the future and this time, Dart, EP and I will try harder to get arrested! :-P
Actually, the poor young waitress at Hooters...I seriously doubt that she bought our "we're 3D artists" story for more than a second! :lol: We compensated our tormenting her with a generous tip.
That was a good beer. Better than the Texan effluent around here!
I totally wanted to adjust the waitress' chest morphs but EP stopped me! :cheese:
Oh yes! Please!