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All of which is very true - if your aim is to make some great production, with all the bells and whistles, like Sintel.
The fact that we did do community projects, several times at Anim8or shows it can be done with the right approach.
When aiming to do even some of it in Octane immediately excludes probably 90% of the community who don't own these plugins. Unless the intention is to send off the scenes to those few who do for final render, in which case you run into TOS problems distributing propitiatory content.
Having Department Heads, with hierarchical structures and all the professional jealousy which goes with it smacks of huge ambition, which is not in the spirit of a community project. If you are proposing making a great movie, using whatever tools you need to do so, including an exclusive, private group, by all means do so, but don't go calling it a community project.
If the intention is to showcase Carrara, with community involvement, this calls for a very different approach - let anyone who feels they have something to contribute, do so.
What I see developing here is not so much showcasing Carrara and the community, but admitting that Carrara and it's community is not capable of producing something made entirely in Carrara.
Interesting thought Roy. Of course Carrara is capable of it. It's people who fail. And not without reason. And it's not a bad thing - that t hey fail :)
It wasnt dead, just slow moving, which looks practically the same. All of the results were positive, there has yet to be a single negative outcome from the project in any way. The splitting of the community was evidenced in the fact that we never managed to get the easy come and go concept completed which surprised me
Mike (MMoir) as one of the department heads (production I think but now I cannot recall exactly) was doing exactly what his title demanded by suggesting the Easy Come and Go project. It was a smart suggestion indeed. I take no issue with it, I am merely acknowledging that for those whose involvement was already marginal, a switch in theory after all the previous hype about the original concept might have been enough to push them away from the project all together.
There was something of a chosen group. There were departments and there were leaders assigned for each department. We did discuss some things in private emails, but the process was generally quite transparent for the obvious reasons of community involvement. Looking back I think we might have assumed that those leadership assignments from the full project would carry over to the Easy come easy go concept with the same level of dedication, but based on what you yourself observed, it seemed only the modeling team managed to fully adopt the Easy come concept. Lighting, rendering, those guys didnt seem as clear on the vision for it. It may even be at this point where Joe might have observed people experiencing some degree of unspoken tension. But I would blame that on my inept leadership more than anything else.
These projects needs to stay very small, a minute or so and maybe there is a chance of us pulling it off. I like bigger ideas, but I understand they are not often feasible.
For those who don't recall. We eventually decided on a storyline where a group of aliens suddenly arrive on a large mother ship orbiting Earth. The mother ship then dispenses a group of smaller ships (probes) which then start heading down to the planet. Each probe travels to a different part of the planet and observes different structures and life forms. The idea was to show off how many incredible looking environments you could create in Carrara, from Alps, to tropics to undersea. After each of the probes had collected their data the probes were to return to the mother ship before going back into some wormhole or something to continue collecting data on other livable planets. End scene
The space ship concept was ideal in that it allowed groups to tell any number of mini-stories they wanted. One person could do a story about one of the alien probes visiting the alps while someone else would do an alien visiting underwater. By treating it as several smaller movies later combined into a larger one, we had digestible pieces that when isolated are no more complicated than the Easy Come and Go. But what both projects big and small lacked was the hands on participation of the person in charge...me. That's why I am suggesting that if I get the whole thing started. maybe I'd render the space ship and the probes traveling to Earth, that it might get people warm again. or even the Easy come and Go. I could start rendering some of that. It''s more about getting something to show the rest of the team.
Glad how this conversation is unfolding, fantastic that we've been able to unpack some of the history behind a previous attempt at a community project and it's great that Rashad is still interested in making it happen, with the benefit of hind sight and all that. It's also great that Joe is putting up bullet points on all the pitfalls, it won't happen if we pretend those stumbling blocks don't exist. EP mentioned about the need to value peoples' time somehow, the need for some kind of motivation, I think Joe brought it to our attention as well. I couldn't agree more, I think part of what has made the monthly challenge endure is the lure of $100 in Daz content for the overall winner, with that in place, it becomes easier to enjoy the fun part of sharing your work and learning from others, etc, so even if you never win, you still say to yourself, "one day....." Aggregating all that's been shared here now, we probably need to start thinking about next steps, how to build consensus, renew interest and commitment and practical ways to side step all those issues Joe has raised. Maybe the first question to ask is if we want to revive the original challenge and have another go at it. Are we agreed to have Rashad lead it? What aspects of the old structure (department heads, etc) do we want to keep and what aspects do we tweak? How do people sign up and how do they participate? How do we handle TOS issues in terms of sharing content for rendering? Octane? Carrara native renderer? Do we do a spreadsheet (survey monkey?) on these questions and run a poll for a couple of weeks to build consensus? What about the motivation side of things? Do we ask PAs to weigh in and offer content as prizes to participants just like with the monthly challenge? Same with Daz? Do we ask forum members to contribute something by buying gift cards that Daz can put into a pool for the project? Kickstarter? Please don't worry if any of these suggestions are not practical, I'm throwing everything in but feel free to refine any which way.
For one, I'm in, I'm happy to give some time to a community project, I'm cool with Rashad driving the process and would love to assist in any way possible (admittedly I might not exactly have the Carrara skills the project will require but I can serve virtual coffee to everyone involved if given that rare privilege!) I also think the alien probe story line has prospects, especially since the core models can be made available for other forum members / Carrara users to go off on a tangent and try out their own twist to the tale. If well managed, there is a slight chance for it to go viral! :lol:
Personally, I wish there was no motivation for gains aside from being part of a truly remarkable final output.
Time
That was a huge thing!
The whole CCMP, to me, was too rushed from the start. By the time I found out that I was going to be volunteering to animate ducks in some adventure, I knew that I had very little interest at best, aside from helping those whom were interested as much as I could - if I could. Like I say, decisions would be made by just a few members far before some other's could even get a chance to come back and check the forum.
I really liked Mike Moir's input - getting a group together to model and animate Carrara-native objects. But, again... at that time "Carrara-Native-Only" was not a direction I would have taken. Now I might absolutely love that idea - thanks to some of these members giving me that nudge.
Kind of a side, learning project all on it's own, which to me really was the CCMP.
Instead of voting and talking without much else, this project had (has) a clear goal - one easily surmounted if one put a mind to it - less bureaucratic.
CCMP - Learning animation thread
Carrara Community Movie Project - Some assets ready to use
Carrara Community Movie Project needs Concept sketches.(Would Like)
Carrara Community Movie Project - Modeling start for assets
Carrara Community Movie Project - “Easy Come Easy Go” Look & Feel - Antara
Carrara Community Movie Project requires some “Rigging”
For me, the appeal of the challenges isn't the gift certificate. If the animation project were modeled more like the challenges, with a theme and an artist's interpretation of that theme, then I think I would be more interested. Would the final work be disjointed? Sure. But would it be a truer representation of what can be achieved with Carrara and the artists that use it? In my opinion, yes. It may be that whatever is produced wouldn't have a real narrative and would be better for a thematic demo reel.
There's also no need for an individual to work in a vacuum. Collaboration in the challenges is common in the form of people offering suggestions, tips and tutorials. There's no reason it couldn't work the same way for an animation. If somebody needs a specialized terrain for a background, then they could ask for help if they needed it. Need help rigging? I'm sure it would be possible to work something out.
pass the red ball is an easy one,
the ball comes in stage left,
you get max seven seconds to play with it in your animation,
then it leaves exit stage right,
the editor puts them together at the end
Hey guys,
I like the idea of an animation challenge and the idea of a very short 7-10second final animation. If you could somehow get two or more people working together to complete the animation that would be great.
Maybe have a list of models/Assets that need to be part of the final animation so the people that like to model could do the modeling for the animators.
For the "Pass the Red Ball" example that headwax gives the list of assets could include a table, chair, rug, potted plant, room etc. These assets would be modeled by people interested in modeling and uploaded to a site like ShareCg which could then be downloaded by the animators. Ideally the animators would have several different chair models to pick from and a bunch of tables to pick from to create their animations from.
This is just a thought to get interaction between community members to create a final animation together.
To me, the only asset I would want to be required in such an example scene would be the red ball. Anything else makes the scene to rigid and limits the interpretation in my opinion.
Perhaps it would be better if it were to require the animators to use a little used animation feature? Many times the regular monthly challenges require a little used modeling, lighting or shading function. For instance, instead of using physics to bounce the ball, what else could be used? A tweener? Motion Path?
I really loved how Mike offered up his modeled and rigged Carrara guy in the above "Easy Come, Easy Go" project for the rest of us to play with. Roygee and Andy and others offered up stuff, and Mike even offered the exterior sound stage. I still have all of that stuff and await the day when I can get into that scene and make it all work - and like Mike says, it would be really fun if I could do it with at least one other person!
pjotter gave up some invaluable information regarding weight-map editing... hmmm... when I get back to it, I'll have to revisit those threads myself and check out all that went back and forth within... perhaps even get them up and rolling again in the process.
Time, or the lack of it, to be more precise, is the biggest reason that I have been doing my own stuff by myself - as if I'm locked in a shell.
Admittedly, I am one whom is going for a lot of purchased content in my production. By that is very different from a community effort - as I'm doing most everything aside from asset creation by myself. I do recall that "I" was mostly interested in that sort of production when I've first began following the CCMP idea - mainly because that is really most of what my Carrara skill set was made of then. I have grown a lot as a Carrara user since the CCMP quieted to non-continuation.
Those WIPs have been very interesting and fun, but also a great learning environment with gobs of sharing. Mike was doing a great job of directing that stuff with Easy Come, but there just wasn't enough time or something to get it to keep going. Maybe, with my new job, I'll find enough time to help him keep the thing flowing forward to a final fruition. I'm certain we could get others to join in. But if not, I'm also certain that we could finish it, too.
Ironically, the first animation I ever completed was for the Carrators bouncing ball challenge, and I actually used the 'bounce' modifier (under behaviors in the modifier tab for the object).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCoL0NclPE8
Awesome! ;)
How about the animator asks the modellers to model what he needs for his animation to work in a "model needed" section of the challenge thread.. He could post an image of the object he wants modeled as a reference for all the modellers to work from and anyone who wants to model it would model it and post a link to the finished model.(in a finished model thread) This way the guy creating the animation is free to create exactly what he/she wants .
The modeler would get credit in the credits of the final animation alongside the creator of the animation. You could have another help thread that covers Textures, lighting and sound too.
I guess my focus is to try and get people to work together in a very simple way and then work up to a more organized project.
On a side note I did try to start a animation challenge like you mentioned but very few participated in it. Here is the link to the challenge.
Maybe I should have posted a new challenge as only one challenge wasn't enough to peek the community's interest.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/49592/
Mike
That one caught me at a really bad time. I had a lot of other commitments at that point. I actually started a walk, but had to abandon it due to time constraints. My idea was to build the walk and then create an NLA clip and then give it away for others to play around with. I'll have to see if I can find the scene file... I seem to recall I wanted to create a run cycle.
I like where Mike's suggestion here is leading, I think this sort of 'open source' project pipeline if better refined could work, it would be weird, it would be quirky, but it can work, keeping in mind the concerns over having a 'private group' being (s)elected to work on the project, with this 'help if you can' kind of pipeline, anyone can drop in and layer a quick contribution to the process and can drop out at anytime if other time pressures kick in, without holding up the project because someone else can easily drop in and layer on top of what was done last. Google drive or Drop box or whatever team work enhancing cloud solution could be used to host the project files, etc. and everything is done under creative commons terms. While by all means different community animation project should flourish, I'm still desirous for one kinda ambitious one that pushes Carrara to its limits and succeeds at doing something awesome.
Dada Universe,
I think we should start small and after completing 3 or 4 animations work up to the bigger projects. Just my opinion.
As far as the online file management systemI think it was drop box I was using last time, it was okay but it would be nice when uploading 3d models you could have an image part of the download link. (ShareCg allows this.) If anyone knows of a good free online solution for the project management of animation projects like this please let us know.
I know that time constraints affect everyone at different times.
The idea behind this was a "Speed animation challenge", sort of give yourself half an hour to create the animation and post the results. When you do things this way it forces you to finish the task, to me finishing the task is more important then the quality of the result when starting out.
Anyways I started another challenge thread and we will see how that goes.
In my experience, "speed animation" is self-contradictory! Animation (at least for anything of any complexity) takes time to set up, fine tune, and of course to render. Carrara is certainly capable of a good standard of animation, as I hope the animation that I am working on at the moment will demonstrate. It is a 5 minute animation in cartoonish style and is taking around 5 months to do and it is all hand keyed, no preset animations are being used. I am using DAZ characters (although you may not recognise them!), and a mixture of commercially available and self-made clothes and sets. I aim to produce 5-6 secs of animation per day, it is being rendered at 1920x1080 and 24 fps. I try to keep rendering at around 5 mins per frame (and it is being rendered in Carrara and not Octane for various reasons) which means that I have not been able to use any global illumination, but I think the end results look good. I think with animation, it is the quality of the animation itself which carries the final result more than the lighting - and with using cartoonish characters, I can get away with a less realistic look. The fact that it is set at night means that there would be less ambient light around anyway.
As this is being done for a commercial client, I can't share any of it at the moment. I wish everyone well with any community project that gets going.
I've been actually shocked by how quickly folks have been coming up with 10 second animations in the other thread for the challenge that Mike opened, some of whom have never animated before.
When I first saw the challenge my gut reaction was 'a week? what could I possibly do in a week? Well, I'll try...' but literally within a couple of hours some fun little animations started popping up! Guess that proves the point that we don't need a long time to put together a real quick concept animation (it obviously helps it's only 10 seconds!) :)
Got my own idea for a clip, need to start working on it... :)
Hey PhiilW,
I am not an animator but I think when you do something fast(speed animation) it forces you to find out what is important for the animation to work and then you focus on that only to complete it quickly . In other words it teaches you not to get sidetracked on trivial things which I find is a problem when doing animations, modeling etc.
I agree to do a finished quality animation takes time , doing a finished high quality animation really isn't the purpose of the speed animation challenge. This is more of a learning tool for people starting out at animating or want to get better at it.
Mike
Fair enough!
For those wanting to take animation at all seriously, you should know the 12 basic principles of animation. Although they were devised by Disney animators for 2D hand drawn animation, they apply just as much to 3d computer animation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12_basic_principles_of_animation
I would also recommend The Animators Survival Kit by Richard Williams, which is available in a variety of forms from a physical book to an iPad app.
http://www.theanimatorssurvivalkit.com/
I second that, "The Animator's survival kit" is one of the best book's there is on animation, the only downside with the paper version is that is very heavy ;o)
I totally agree with knowing the 12 basic principles of animation, I started working through a Modo version that I should get back to as it was very good .
On another note entirely, regarding "Future of Carrara"
I would love to see the Carrara Discussion community come together and ensure a longer life for Carrara through the power of supporting product availability. Let's take a look at where Carrara is right now, as of the time of my writing this post:
Carrara is owned and sold by DAZ 3D, a company whose roots were formed by making high quality support products for Poser. Back when I've first found DAZ 3D I had Poser 5 and Victoria 3 was not yet available - but she came out shortly thereafter. That was back before there was a DAZ|Studio. Just content. The sheer amount of Poser content available has really done something towards driving Poser into being one of the most popular 3D rendering suites for the casual artist in the world. DAZ 3D created Studio in order to ensure that their products had a home no matter the life of Poser which, at the time, was looking unstable.
So let's do some quick and simple math:
+ I have seen some incredible works of art here in the Carrara Discussion forum. Excellent stuff from passionate Carrara users.
+ DAZ 3D is always looking for exciting, high-quality content and the artists that make it, and offer a fine publishing package (returns and services)
+ Many Carrara users are always looking for new content to add to their browsers
+ Content Availability makes software more attractive
============================================
= If we continue to add fine content products to the store - specific to Carrara or at least that offer Carrara support files - we'll continue to make Carrara more and more attractive to new users. Knowing that we can grab something and make it work out-of-the-box brings comfort and confidence and, in our case, shows off the power of (what I feel to be) the finest 3D animation/render suite on the planet!
Our community is currently in a beautiful state of growth. I'm seeing new members coming on board, friends from the past coming back, and this all makes me very happy!
I have things in motion now to begin converting my main living from my outdoor manual labor job to making DAZ 3D content products. So I am confident that Carrara can grow, an that DAZ 3D has so much love for the software that, with or help, they will continue to grow this wonderful suite of tools toward the future of the Carrara user's needs. What really is that? To me - the biggest selling point that got me to invest so heavily into Carrara, when I did, was its compatibility standards. So when DAZ 3D asked us if we wanted support for their new figure system, I voted "Yes" even before I had the slightest clue of what that was, and I'm glad that I did!
evilproducer is good friend of mine. The last thing that he was in a hurry for was the Genesis system. No need... no hurry. Another good friend of ours bought Carrara 8.5 Pro for him. I think the biggest reason, too, was that she wanted him to see for himself the wonders of Genesis and Genesis 2... now he's hooked and doing amazing things with it!
Truly though,
We have immense talent and creativity around here. We also have subjects that are easy for some of us that seem like the darkest place in the universe for others. We're all so different. Together, we pull together and, in a friendly, sharing manner, solve each other's issues. It seems like we have to. It's in our souls. A question pops up and our constant visiting members do everything that they can to help solve the conundrum... it's beautifully perfect! Mike and Phil make these tutorials that help us go from knowing absolutely nothing to actually being able to make masterful work come to life. Tim's and Ringo's skies give us instant atmospheres for our scenes while giving us the ability to open the settings and learn how to use the system. GKDantas, Dimension Theory, 3D Lust, 3D Celebrity, Phillip Drawbridge, Magaremoto, and more plus the already mentioned PhilW, mmoir, Tim Payne, Ringo Monfort... I know I'm missing people... there's a growing list and even Carrara supportive content by other DAZ 3D PAs (published artists) that I didn't know about until recently... all of these greats and more, creating really cool products that add to our content browsers - makes our lives easier and easier, thetruly help me to more help we eventually seek out and purchase. Carrara is so vast that we need to settle into it over time. Fenric, Sparrowhawke, Digital Carvers Guild, SENO Soft (p3dO Explore GoFigure, and others, making excellent plugins that make our vast abilities soar to levels that change the Carrara we know forever - giving us immense new ways to control our sessions in our 3D worlds!
I only have six products in my store so far. My manual labor job keeps me away from Carrara for days and days at a time - only giving me glimpses of the interface from time to time. So when I go in, I get pretty serious. I've come in here and asked my questions and, since 2010 when I've first bought Carrara Pro and joined this community, I've grown a LOT since my early days. I look back at some of my old saves, tests I've done on shaders, animations, modeling, effects... some of it makes me chuckle - trying to keep to my tiny Poser scope before I realized the vastness of a Carrara scene - while others make my light bulb go off and get me inspired to continue in my research. Carrara is something that I needed to grow into, and buying Howie Farkes and mmoir scenes, Tim's skies, Ringo's and Magaremoto's shaders... etc., truly help me to further my skills. All of you folks, here in this forum community helping me to learn keyboard shortcuts, using ambient occlusion, learning about better imagery, making dynamic hair, using postwork, animating particles and physics... frequenting this forum helps me to grow, even when I cannot actually enter my wonderful interface that is Carrara!
We need more content in the store. You all make some incredible stuff. Now just take those ideas to a level where you're imagining how you'd like it to work if you bought it and needed to use it without knowing how to. Something that the user just loads into the scene in some way, with clear and concise instructions... no confusion...
What we already have in the store is awesome. It's just the tip of the ice burg, however, in the grand scheme of things.
Phil's Advanced Techniques series shows ideas about modeling and texturing for products to be sold. Mike shows us some more modeling skills as well as shader building skills... my EnvironKits actually come with presets meant to be used for creating spherical, surrounding background images. Since the example scenes are already rendered and included in the kit, so you cannot just render the defaults and sell those, but those were just simple examples anyways! Take those scenes, spend some time and make some really nice spherical background maps... make a nice set of them, even include, perhaps, some extra scene settings, modifiers, illumination settings, render settings... etc., and you can sell that scene preset collection at DAZ 3D! Just that simple idea might sound silly to hear. But see something like that in the store and what do you think? Not silly - convenience, helpful, just what I was looking for, etc., - that is what we think when we see that in the store. Those kits were set up to be a wonderful stepping stone to outdoor scene creation. Obliterate my included lighting and set it up for Global Illumination with Gamma Correction set to 2.2 to introduce a set of useful "Linear workflow" empty base scenes. Many of us would love to buy that. It is always helpful to have as many base setups as possible when it comes to Carrara scene setups. Perhaps you make a whole new collection of plants, not trees, from the Carrara plant modeler. How many shrub or smaller plants do you see for Carrara in the store? None? Me too. Perhaps you've modeled them instead of using the plant editor. Perhaps it's actually a box, and the further we scroll down the timeline, the less time we have before the whole scene blows to smithereens! Perhaps you've used 3D Paint in Carrara to paint new textures onto Genesis. You now have the opportunity to sell a new character set which works in Carrara, Poser and DS!!!
Good fortune to you, Dartanbeck. I love your environment products and am confident that the quality of your work will continue to be excellent. Cheers.
Well said, Dart! Also during that recent sale I finally was able to complete my envirokit collection (well, so far, until more are released at least :) )
Even a nice illustrated pdf of you explaining the steps you take to build your most wonderful characters would be an item I would buy in a heartbeat - even though I already have my own workflow for that, That's the thing, we all like to discover techniques used by others. It makes us stronger... more powerful!