New Poll at CAFE (attn: tutorial authors)

wetcircuit · April 2014

I'm using the Polls feature at CAFE to determine what the Carrara community wants to learn. Since "Animation" was the clear winner in the last round, my question this time is "Which animation methods do you want to learn?", and as usual you can pick any 3 answers.

If there are answers I have forgotten, please let me know and I will add.

Cheers! Thanks for the feedback!
holly

wetcircuit · April 2014

The current Poll (their order will randomize on the site):

DUDU · April 2014

I suppose that “Pyswarm” and “Pycarrara” are included in “Python” and that the walk cycles are in “Loops”...
Q. what' s "Cognito"?

wetcircuit · April 2014

DUDU_00001 said:

Q. what' s "Cognito"?

Cognito is a plugin at Digital Carver's Guild... It links certain mechanical actions together so that (for instance) gears turn the appropriate number of rotations, or pistons behave according to a drive shaft, etc.

DUDU · April 2014

Sparrowhawke do that too...

wetcircuit · April 2014

DUDU_00001 said:
Sparrowhawke do that too...

It's not a contest.... and it's not exactly the same thing. He has Wheels and the tank tread modifiers, but that's not the same as having one parameter manipulate another remotely, or setting up advanced relationships between different objects in the scene so they can control each other via puppeting or procedural programming.

Are you saying that's specifically the animation tutorial you want to see? Tutorials for Sparrowhake's plugins?

Or are you just trying to make me pile every possible example on to one very short line of text? ;-)

wetcircuit · April 2014

Ok, based on your comments I made a few changes (hope this is clearer) and added a couple more... Modifiers and shaders....

The goal is not to list everything that is possible, but to give tutorial authors an idea of where they might focus their efforts, and what skill levels users might be at...

Sometimes it's not just a tour of the buttons, but applied to a "real world" project that helps it "click".

Dartanbeck · April 2014

I just want to say this:
Holly Wetcircuit... You Freaking R O C K ! ! ! :ahhh:

DUDU · April 2014

OK, this Cognito plugin must be interesting, I will see the site DCG.
I know that the fields of animation are very broad and you could have a longer list.
It could be difficult for a beginner to understand what hides behind a word and these tutos are rather intended to them (I am beginner in certain fields also).
For example, I do not know what ERC wants to say, I often saw conversations which spoke about it but I still do not know what it acts…
Thank you for all that you do for the world of Carrara! ;-)

evilproducer · April 2014

DUDU_00001 said:
OK, this Cognito plugin must be interesting, I will see the site DCG.
I know that the fields of animation are very broad and you could have a longer list.
It could be difficult for a beginner to understand what hides behind a word and these tutos are rather intended to them (I am beginner in certain fields also).
For example, I do not know what ERC wants to say, I often saw conversations which spoke about it but I still do not know what it acts…
Thank you for all that you do for the world of Carrara! ;-)

I'm not super up on it either. It adds some powerful functionality to Carrara by letting the user link and automate tasks or actions I think. ERC is an acronym for Enhanced Remote Control I believe.

Dartanbeck · April 2014

Enhanced Remote Control for Carrara by Fenric
is a powerful plugin that allows us to control any joint or parameter using the value of any other joint, parameter, or more. fabaone's store at ShareCG is nearly dedicated to teaching it. Yet it has the power to do so much more.

Phil Wilkes shows us how to use it to control the flaps of the biplane we make in his Advanced Training course. Faba has some vimeo demos of it, I believe, of how she used it for controlling a hand and all of its fingers with a simple control panel that she gives away on he ShareCG account.

Clever fox, Fenric... this one is a masterpiece!

wetcircuit · April 2014

evilproducer said:
DUDU_00001 said:
I do not know what ERC wants to say, I often saw conversations which spoke about it but I still do not know what it acts…
Thank you for all that you do for the world of Carrara! ;-)

I'm not super up on it either. It adds some powerful functionality to Carrara by letting the user link and automate tasks or actions I think. ERC is an acronym for Enhanced Remote Control I believe.

Clearly we need more tutorials! :lol:

I did Faba's ERC Chain tutorial on a cat's tail (all I got around to so far), but it was an AH-HA moment.... Like Evilproducer I have a bit of a tentacle fetish :coolcheese: so it's not so much "When would I ever use this...?", as it is suddenly "OMG how did I ever live without this???" hahahaha. And that's just one of the ERC functions.... It wasn't hard to set up (Fenric designed it so it basically sets up itself with one of his scene commands) so it is a "chain" of modifiers on each bone of the tail, with a controller at the base of the tail, and you can start a wave motion down the tail just by keyframing the base.... And it sounds ok on paper, but the way it looks is eye-opening. It's "next-gen" animating. I thought it would be mechanical-looking the way those EZ-Pose™ dials looked, but because ERC can delay the next link in the chain it has a lifelike quality to it - one of those moments where you get excited about animation and 3D all over again, even though you don't know what you are doing, you're just messing around trying to figure it out....

There was a function in D|S that people liked, something that made hands clasp controlled by a dial, I think that was ERC (and why we didn't get it in Carrara). There are certain morphs in Poser that will never translate over to Carrara because they are ERC (one disconnected morph controlling several others)...

The "hard" part is that ERC is invisible. You have to understand what you are doing before you understand what you are doing... Fenric made an Inspector for ERC so we can see all the parameters that ERC can read/write, but... I didn't understand it. lol

I don't know how to say this, I'm not being melodramatic and don't want to be negative.... People are moving on from Carrara. There's no devs on staff (afaict). We don't even have a bugtracker. Our base of semi-pros has been decimated... again.... And lest we forget the ongoing manual controversy.... No offense intended to our lovely DAZ staff but collectively DAZ 3D is a lizard-minded entity. They acquire, they broker, they market like crazy. But DAZ will never-ever-ever care if you are successful with your projects or not. At the end of the day that is not their business. They are not a college or an art community, or even your friend. DAZ is a store. They need us to keep buying Vicky, and all the upgrades that work with her. Vicky is Barbie 3.0.... Complete with Ken and the Dreamhouse™.... It's not a "bad" thing but if we don't advance we're just playing with other people's presets. I'm pretty sure everyone who is here using Carrara has their own dreamproject™, the idea that got us into 3D in the first place. SOME of my vision overlaps with DAZ's store, SOME of it.... The rest is up to me.

Carrara is for "casual users" - which in my honest opinion is not a bad thing, it's a niche actually. I have a life, and a really demanding job - and a bright stepdaughter who just finished college early with no job, and a mother-in-law who is 87 and living alone - and a husband who just tracked tar all over the house and is more upset about his sneaker than mess he's making.....I don't have TIME to become a professional 3D student. I fantasized for 20min that I would go into debt and pay $20,000 for that ridiculous animation online course and runaway to live at Skywalker Ranch.... It ain't gonna happen. If I want to do this, it's up to me, in my spare time.

And you know, it's not even about the money.... If I really wanted to I could jump up to C4D, buy it on sale, slowly get the modules over years (ugh!), but hanging out at DAZ has taught me one lesson: there is always someone willing to encourage you when you just want to throw money at a problem.... C4D has no feature that makes learning 3D easier - or gives me more time to be a "student" with no other cares but beer.... C4D may have a larger professional base, so if I knew what question to ask *maybe* someone could answer faster.... and yeah there is a sense of the future. I will be able to BUY another version someday - whoopie. With Carrara? Who knows? Guess what - this is SO NOT THE FIRST TIME Carrara has been this way. There are some hardluck orphan characters from Charles Dickens novels that could learn a thing or two from Carrara. Hahaha. Carrara 1.0 was ABANDONED and full of bugs. MetaCreations? Eovia? DAZ 3D...? and I think I am forgetting a company there.

Carrara will endure. Or not. It's getting better at import/export, and imho that is the ONLY "professional" feature that really matters these days. Octane? WHOOOO MAMMY did I spend two weeks trying to figure out how to get CUDA running on the most expensive Mac Pro I couldn't afford - U BET I DID!!! :snake: WOWEEE Octane would make my life so much better, then I all I need to do is learn 3D-Coat for the sculpting and iClone for the realtime character rigging and Marvelous Designer for the clothes and -- oh SH*T, I still have to learn how to animate in Carrara. Hahahahahaha!

So instead of buying C4D on "the layaway plan" I spent $99 to remove the plugin shaming on Cafe for our forum software. LMAO! At the end of the day, if we really want to learn to animate we have each other: this lil' community. That's it. You can't BUY skill and knowledge....

But if you hang out with the right people you just might pick it up by osmosis. :P

evilproducer · April 2014

Someone has been taking posting lessons from Dart. :lol:

Great post Holly. Thanks for the information about the ERC as well.

I feel a bit like I've let down people here by not doing an in-depth tutorial. Like you and everybody else, I have a day job and ambitions of my own, which I try and balance with helping here. I salute you Holly for the work you've done at the Cafe! I promise to try and do better and get some kind of tutorial done for the Cafe.

Dartanbeck · April 2014

evilproducer said:
Someone has been taking posting lessons from Dart. :lol:
Great post Holly. Thanks for the information about the ERC as well.

I feel a bit like I've let down people here by not doing an in-depth tutorial. Like you and everybody else, I have a day job and ambitions of my own, which I try and balance with helping here. I salute you Holly for the work you've done at the Cafe! I promise to try and do better and get some kind of tutorial done for the Cafe.

Dude... you tutorial us all the time just by how you answer our queries!
No need to feel all bummin' like that. You Rock!
Now get writing that tutorial! ;)

Dartanbeck · April 2014

Rock on Holly! Wow...

wetcircuit · April 2014

evilproducer said:
Someone has been taking posting lessons from Dart. :lol:
Great post Holly. Thanks for the information about the ERC as well.

I feel a bit like I've let down people here by not doing an in-depth tutorial. Like you and everybody else, I have a day job and ambitions of my own, which I try and balance with helping here. I salute you Holly for the work you've done at the Cafe! I promise to try and do better and get some kind of tutorial done for the Cafe.

Yeah. TL;DR lol

Don't feel guilty. I think you have to make a tutorial for yourself.... It's like that old saying about not really learning something until you teach it to someone else.... There may not be much movement at DAZ, but that doesn't mean Carrara is "dead". Far from it - we have barely scratched the potential. A few ongoing projects prove it, and we really don't hear about people who are using Carrara in studio or professional situations, but they are out there.

As always, a strong community is the best longterm value - and community is what you put into it because we all stand on the shoulders of those who came before. With Cafe my goal has always been to create a longer-lasting knowledge base.... I just tried to search the DAZ forum archive to find an old hair thread and I got a "not found" error.... :grrr: That's a lot of Carrara knowledge that is eventually going to be lost for good, assuming the error was just a temporary glitch....

Dartanbeck · April 2014

Absolutely. And just because we can't hear them, doesn't mean their keyboards aren't crunching. My gut has been feeling as if they never stopped working on it. Just quit reporting about it. We'll see. But I have a strong sense that Carrara is here to stay.