Carrara and Blender animation

andras2

Hello,

I would like to ask you for some help whether is that possible to animate plants in carrara then export them into blender. I very liked the animated trees in different youtube videos but unfortunatelly I did not find any tutorial for this. Is someone to explain how to animate trees properly in Carrara 6 or 8 ? I found the Shape Tree function but nothing happened the tree remained still. Should I set frames for animation ?

EDIT:

all right it is easy as I explained to myself by frames :D but it does not work with Blender. any idea how to export animation ?

WendyLuvsCatz

I only get errors if I try exporting wind and rustling trees in any animated format, likewise the ocean primitive or particles.
so never tried it in other software.
not so many Blender animation import options as that only uses collada dae, DirectX (maybe but not for me) or mdd via fenrics plugin (kinda hit and miss for me) and most things give errors but I have gotten rigged animated figures with Carrara rigging like 3dage's Kreature with nla animation.
fbx is definately the better export function but Blender does not import it.
if the trees used rigging, keyframed or nla clip morphs etc it would work I think but it is a an inbuilt Carrara function from what I can determine like the ocean primitive and particles.
I post this as I have tried the same thing many times without success.

evilproducer

Trees from Carrara's plant generator will not really export that well (if at all) for a number of reasons. Many of them have to do with the fact that they use Carrara specific functions, such as a replicator for the leaves, etc. There may be ways to generate real instances of the leaves and export a model that way, but I don't know how to do it. I'm certain the wind in the trees will not translate either due to it being a Carrara function. Why not render your scene in Carrara if you have it?

Perhaps the best way to get animated Carrara trees into Blender or any other app. is probably to render the animated trees in Carrara with an alpha channel and use that for billboards in your program of choice. Yes they'll be 2D, but depending on the camera movement, you might be able to work around it.

Joe Cotter

evilproducer said:

...Perhaps the best way to get animated Carrara trees into Blender or any other app. is probably to render the animated trees in Carrara with an alpha channel and use that for billboards in your program of choice. Yes they'll be 2D, but depending on the camera movement, you might be able to work around it.

Game and VR software deal with billboards by maintaining planar surface of the billboards pointed towards the camera. One could achieve this in software by doing a 'point at' on the billboards. Often though, pointing at the camera isn't enough but rather one may need to create a null attached but displaced from the camera to maintain the proper orientation. Finally, one can even swap 'point at' targets in the timeline. I haven't tried this in Carrara but it might be worth trying. Finally, there is the issue of shadows, those would need to be dealt with separately if the trees are close enough to have shadows that would be noticeable. For them, the direction wouldn't change with camera movement but the size might. Also, one might need to do something like pwCatch to handle planar shadows over surfaces.