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it is actually a conformer that fits to the facial bones on G8.1
Yes. Wendy's right. It's taking leaps into higher-end technology, like that used in Alita Battle Angel.
While 8.1 is Not made using all of the advanced tech of Alita, it Is leveraging a lot of the philosophies used. Daz 3D has always been on the forefront of delivering some (some) of the utmost latest tech in their CG Characters.
That said, we Carrara users also have a huge boon of this same nature that was gifted to us by a high-end amazing animator collaborating with one of our brilliant plugin designers. Her Carrara call sign then was "Faba" and she worked with Fenric to help him produce a plugin that's so powerful that few of us truly understand how to put it to full use - besides Faba, that is.
But she tried to teach us all with amazing details that are still available today.
In Carrara, we could use Fenric's Carrara Enhanced Remote Control to create an interface almost exactly like the 8.1 FACS interface, or we could customize it however we want. With a free ShareCG account, we can download some really cool tutorials and addons for this amazing (and now free) plugin via Faba's gallery: fabaone, and in particular regarding this, her Carrara Custom Helpers, which she made when I was asking her how she made them in the older Daz forums of the time. I'm glad that she moved it all to ShareCG when Daz shifted to a new forum software!
In the examples she did for the Carrara ERC, she demonstrated using helpers like these to control hand gestures. But with Carrara ERC, we can connect any morph or joint to any control, so we could use this to make our own facial control rig just like what we see on 8.1, but we can also have it as a simple controls sytem that stays with our view rather that sticking in to the head of the figure, so as we rotate the character around, our controls remain in the same place in our working view - if we wanted.
If we use Carrara ERC on Genesis 2 and earlier figures, we can use it to control the many facial morphs in ways that it would 'feel' like we're controlling facial bones in a way. If we used it on Misty's Genesis 3, 8 or 8.1 presets in Carrara, we could actually control the movements of those facial bones and/or use it to control morph dials. Quite powerful!
That's what Faba thought that Carrara was missing all along - being the incredible animator that she is. So I was very grateful to her and Fenric for making this a possibility - even though it was waaay over my newbie head.
I was just saying in another thread that, for a "Legacy Software" Carrara sure is ahead of its time in a Lot of ways! It was fun to see that some of the new features in LightWave a couple years back were things that Carrara's had for quite some time! No... I'm not saing that Carrara's better than LW! Please don't misinterpret! LOL
It's the people using Carrara that make it so advanced. The Daz 3D devs that were working on it were pumped about it. Spooky had a great team and they had a lot on their plate. It was truly inspiring and amazing to see what all they got done in the time they did it in - especially when they rewrote it to bring it to 64 bit!!!
Our plugin makers never cease to amaze me - the things they create. have a look for yourself in my Carrara Plugins section!
@Dartanbeck - It's also interesting to see everyone sets up thier runtime differently and we are all correct because the art choices are peculiar to us.
re: your work - a man's gotta do whata man's gotta do. Of course your contributions to these boards down the years have been immense - and I mean that - top contributor to helping others.
re: updating my video links - that's very kind of you. I've uploaded some but not all, when I can get the time I will continue. The lbry.tv app has been playing up, but all the content is still visable via odysee.com which is the same website under a different name.
I am looking forward to seeing your new artwork and what you've written. The storyline drives the art as far as I'm concerned.
I shall continue to funk on. ha ha. Cheers bro.
you ever take the time to break down the howie sets into props, trees and rocks?
i want to do it, dunno if i has the patience to finish such a project >.<
harpsburg looks like a goldmine of buildings.
theres a lot of building sets, they dont bother putting any features on the back of the buildings, like a window or door.
I have saved out all the trees and plants from his sets.
i started a prject to backup all my carrara installers and plug in dlls to a new external drive.
thinkin i should unzip em all. never know when d/l a zip ends up corrupted. i still have the old exe installers. lol
Oh well done!
Did it take long? This is what I am going to have to do with the howie sets when the time comes. (I'm a bit nervous).
just drag and drop to the browser under trees
is some drilling down to get the origin tree under the replicated trees.
dereplicated desolate secret lake
Ok thanks.
Me too, but I don't own all of them yet. I've always done that with many of Stonemason's products too.
@Dartanbeck Stonemasons stuff is so good I take bits of his props for use with other inferior props to up the quality of them. :)
Yes! And it's also fun to just take an otherwise ordinary set and make it come alive with some Stonemason!
For me it all started back when I first bought Enchanted Forest. I needed to make scenes specific for animating, so I saved every element separately - Carrara optimized (or what I considered optimized by then! LOL) and then brought in elements as I needed them.
At around 2:15 is where we enter the forest in this clip, and we remain inside different scenes I built with it until just past 3:15.
It's really funny how newb I was back then, and I still feel like I'm just learning some things. Amazing how vast this whole world of 3D CG is as far as tech to learn, and then how to manipulate the results to how we need them to be. Man, in this I was (2012) not very good at animating, not very good at lighting and not very good at rendering - and this was my first attempt with Sony Vegas.
I look back at it now and laugh, but then I also like to watch it through and pat myself on the back because I like it, even though it's just a pile of failed tests that I was going to delete, but used them to test Vegas during a 30 day trial. After making this, I bought Vegas (the lesser expensive Movie HD Platinum) within the first week of the trial - after making this. I still have that same version of Vegas installed, but mostly just use DaVinci Resolve now.
@Dartanbeck
Your animation may be from 2012 but there are still some commendable pieces of animation. I watched the forest clip and some of the facial expressions particularly on Rosie are very realistic.
I had forgotten you are a fellow Vegas user. I just upgraded to 18, after my machine crash all I had left was the serial number - it was enough to upgrade with. *phew*.
New Rosie 5.5 speaking. She emotes really well!
@Dartanbeck looks good. Have you got an animation example?
It's on it's way, yes. Maybe this weekend?
That's a single frame from an interview animation
Rosie 5.5 Support Article
Be sure to stick around until after the credits to see a major hair simulation blooper! :)
@Dartanbeck Fantastic! That hair movement - so real. Very well done sir. edit - I should add the whole production was very good as well. Lighting, animation movement, backdrops. Great.
Thanks man!
These were only preliminary tests, but I like to show that - and then I like to watch it, learn from it - push ever forward.
The sofy-body dynamics are very new to me. I always felt it to be a bit distracting - so I wasn't going to do them at all. But several CG folks that know better convinced me otherwise, so that's what's going on with that - first stage tests. I'm using VWD Cloth and Hair for that, and have since refined her limits to be much more subtle as we move forward now. Of course, I'll be refining it and getting better.
The hair in this is simulated by dForce, which is being problematic toward heavier animations that I need her to do - fast movement action. The hair, as it is in dForce acts more like conforming hair in those situations, so we're working hard at getting it (over 300,000 vertices!!!) to work in VWD as well. I have good help with that - new tests for me to perform tonight.
That said, I'm really hoping for good VWD results with the hair so I can get her back into Carrara on a more full-time basis. I just feel more 'at home' here and have a lot more possibilities with my animation endeavors.
Also, I rushed to get that video out before I slept last night because otherwise it would have had to have been put off for another week - and I really need to push forward with new tests instead, so hence the lack of polish.
But watching it now after work again - I'm happy with it. I only wanted it to be a grounding point for the early days of the project with her as an actress - and it does that just fine. It was supposed to continue on and there are several points in the middle that got edited out, but I like how short/sweet it turned out - including the new exit music, which was really fun to make!!! :)
@Dartanbeck You did well. I mean as a demo of sofy-body dynamics, dforce etc it has got me interested - certainly takes character movement to the next level.
So now (slightly off topic but important info), the best (fastest and best results) path to final render seems to be (please correct me if I'm wrong on the dforce bit because I know nothing of dforce other than what it does)..
1. Organise a run-time per project (both DAZ format for DAZ only scenes, and Poser format for Carrara scenes). Export those DAZ scenes to Carrara if you intent to integrate them.
2. Kit bash / set up / model in Carrara to get your scene file together (excluding DAZ characters).
3. Export scene file back to DAZ (no characters).
4. Export (latest FBX) to Twinmotion. It will go in like a dream (so far in my testing anyway).
5. When set up with foliage, twinmotion shaders/materials export to Unreal Engine 4.
6. dforce your characters in DAZ ready for export to Unreal 4.
7. Animate and use the cameras in Unreal Engine 4.
8. Render your scene somewhere around 50x Faster than either Carrara's render engine or the Octane plug in.
9. Sit back exhausted BUT with having spent virtually no time waiting around, and most of the time creating with a bit of time spend exporting.
This is the path I am on right now, Carrara is my go to modeller/kit-bash program and scene creation. DAZ is my exporter. Twinmotion my fast gateway to Unreal and Unreal my camera set up and render engine.
Just testing each stage and thanks for the heads up on dforce I will look into it.
i love those stonemason greebles sets
Wow Steve, that's one cool workflow!
Digital Art Live is currently running a DFORCE Class. My Daughter and I are attending, We have just finished the cloths and now onto hair and other things.
I is a total of 8 Weeks and we are just done week 5
It is really interesting what DForce can do.
Digital art Live also has some Video's from previous classes on Dforce. Such as https://www.daz3d.com/dforce-complete--tutorial-bundle
I am going to also look at what the carrara physics can do again as it might be able to do most of what Dforce is doing. We ust need to figure it out.
I believe Diomede is also taking the course.
I absolutely Love VWD! It's really fast, flexible and works well.
I tip my hat to your ambition! I hope you figure out how to make it (Bullet Soft-Body) work!
Yes, I am also in the DForce course. It has been very informative. Not limited to clothing, as Chickenman points out.
I've also done a few Carrara native 8.5 physics tests since I got my new machine (although not really new anymore). I do think that Daz was close with its soft-body physics in Carrara. It seems to me that there were two significant issues preventing more widespread use of the native soft-body physics before Philemo and Gerald added VWD functions to Carrara.
1) Calculation times
2) Interaction between rigged meshes and soft-body meshes.
For the first, upgrading my computer helps a lot with render times. For the second, Stringtheory and MarcusSeverus showed how a soft-body envelope around a rigged figure could address a lot of issues.
IMHO, if Daz3D had devoted the resources for making its PA-only strand hair in Studio to
(a) fixing the typo that causes G3/8 to crash Carrara
(b) create a geoshell for rigged meshes that acts like a soft-body envelope for soft-body physics
Carrara would be super-stellar for 1/10 the cost that they have put in Daz Studio to try to re-invent Carrara.
But, woulda, coulda, shoulda...
Well, much how I treat my dynamic hair on Rosie 5, I bet it would be feasible to animate primitives (or other mesh objects) to act as the collision - like Wendy describes.
In many cinematic productions they limit the scenes that require cloth simulations, and then work on those in earnest. It's time-consuming.
That said, if they (the Pros) find it time-consuming, it wouldn't bother me much to slave away perfecting motions of geometric shapes to get cloth to simulate according to the motions of my actor.
VWD is amazing, but it still requires a lot of though and practice. Sometimes one might want to go soft, when in reality more stiffness makes for the better result. If one doesn't try going outside the box in thinking through these sims, they might just give up in frustration without ever finding an easy solution staring them in the face - just backwards from conventional thought.
I say this, but I'm still brand new at conducting cloth and hair simulations.
In my newest (at the time of this writing) video, Rosie 5.5 I'm using dForce for the hair and VWD for the soft-tissue on Rosie and her clothing. I purpoesly left in the overly distracting jiggle scene as a reminder that I found a simple method to get that under more control, simply by putting much more constraining limits on the simulated motion. The I also wanted to include the failed VWD sim of the hair in the end after the credit roll, just as a reminder of where things were - even though that time os currently now - well... Mindsong pretty much fixed the hair issue for me - for the most part!
Thanks Mindsong!
and if you want to copy your ca library to another machine, need to copy the text file with the folders info.
i have a hexacore and a octocore. i terrified of flicker if i use node rendering. i'd rather copy everything and render animation frames in batches on the separate machines.