Carrara 3D Animation. How to keep your scene files small and quick to load.
Sci Fi Funk
Posts: 1,198
How to reduce 3D Scene files. How to speed up load and save times.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTDckG40qe8
A strategy to reduce your 3d scene files, using reconciliation of shaders, textures, objects and replication.
Taking careful note not to waste (include) any of these elements in your scene file will reduce the file dramatically. (Replication being the exception. That should be used often - however - even then there are limits and consequences which I explain).
Although this tutorial is aimed at Carrara users the basic principles hold for ANY 3d software package. Remember - small is beautiful here.
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Comments
SciFiFunk,
This is good information. Thanks
Pleasure. I've spent a whole day doing this kind of stuff now to get that scene file small enough to animate with.
Agreed!
In my several years of building up stages and assets for my movies project, I have spent quite a lot of time studying other movies, TV shows, cartoons, and tutorial advice, and then experimenting with many methods as renders in Carrara (but, like you've said, it also applies to any movie project) and have shifted and advanced my practices dramatically - and the timeline, itself, is no different!
In a college-level CGI animation text book I read from in the library a few years ago, the author mentioned some excellent information regarding "Time". He asked that the reading watch some TV and/or movies, and pay close attention to when the camera changes - which is constantly, and quite often. Try timing how long a camera remains before switching. Quite often, it can be very difficult to start a stop watch before the view switches to a different angle.
Although it can be said that, with film, it is also common that the same angle is actually recorded for much longer periods, perhaps even a whole scene, but then gets trimmed in the final cutting process. But with CGI animation, we can store the scene without the animations applied. Furthermore, in Carrara, we can even save the actual animations using non-linear animation clips, in very small files that take very little time to load.
So I have taken on a workflow of building my stages as stages. No characters or animations saved in the file. I build my characters and backdrop people individually, save them as such (in the super-awesome Carrara browser system - fully optimized with their own kick lighting rigs) and then also save their animations separately as NLA clips.
For my main characters, I save various versions of them for different situations. For example, there is a time when Rosie comes to life from stone form. That character is saved with the texture changing needs in place, but no keyframes are saved - just the appropriate shader that allows me to animate the change. Another example is when Dartan's muscles get fatigued and the viewer can see his veins bulge out before their eyes, wearing different costumes, riding on a horse, dragon or vehicle, etc.,
I save all of these things within my browser. Even though I need a large HDD for saving all of these variations, it makes for some very efficient work when I actually build my animations. Here's an example:
I have many stages saved with effects and full scene lighting. So let's say that I need to shoot a scene with Rosie and Dartan walking through a busy street as they discuss the difficulty of their new assignment or mission. Load up the dark street scene for some mood. Bring in some background folks, which are often each a customization of Predatron's LoRes figures, and place them within the confines of the scene - even some that we'll only catch a glimpse of their elbow during the last few portions of a second at the end of the shot - or the beginning, then load an appropriate animation onto each of them. The thing is with this, is that I save my NLA clips from the hip down, and from the abdomen up, so that I can mix upper-body motions with sitting poses as well as standing or walking, etc., poses.
When I get this to where I think I want it, I group everything into categories that make sense (a trick I've learned from mmoir's Mystic Gorge, back when I've first purchased Carrara), and make them invisible to my working view, but keep them in the render.
With that done, I bring in my heroes wearing the costumes that I need for the scene, and apply or build their animations. With select groups hidden from my working view, I have plenty of speed and fluent manipulation for building/tweaking these main animations.
Each of my characters load in with at lest one camera. My heroes each have four, and bystanders each have one.
So for this example, I set the animations for both of the viewing angles for Dartan FilmCams 1 and 2, and then repeat the process for Rosie two filming cameras. This alone gives me four angles to shoot. Right here will be about the third or fourth time that I have saved this particular scene - and I save it to the same browser location as the stage, but in a new folder, named for the time signature of the scene.
At this point, the scene takes a bit of time to save, and to load, because of all of the figures and textures and such. I should also mention that, throughout this whole thing (and just about everything I do in Carrara) I have been Edit > Remove Unused Masters > (All three options) before each save, and even more often than that - constantly keeping my resources in check. When I add a second LoRes, for example, I know that they often share some of their shaders, so I always "Consolidate Duplicate Shaders" after loading in each subsequent LoRes person. (Many of his figures can share textures from other products in the LoRes line)
Once I have my lighting, effects, props, and people animated, I save as Beta, and render each filming camera using the Batch Queue Render with fairly low(fast) settings, but still at 1280 x 720, which is my final size currently. It still looks great on my wide screen 42" TV at that resolution, so that's what I use for now.
So on and so forth... hopefully you can see how, by saving in chunks, I'm saving myself in the long run.
Oh... and back to my original point: "Timing"!
By having so many cameras at my disposal, simply by loading in my individual elements that I need (each stage has at least four camera angles saved with it... and remember what I've said about my characters) I save the scene at only about three seconds of animation, and I still get a lot of mileage before saving for the next three or so seconds. In the final cut, I'll often use less than the whole clip that I'm editing. So in the above example, I haven't yet made the part of the scene with the mimic animations. So I have Rosie and Dartan walking down the street with full ambiance around them. Each hero has a closeup of their face, and a more full-body shot by default. These work beautifully, not just for times when they're not talking, but also using the facial closeups of the opposite hero in the midst of when the other is talking. I've picked up on this from the experiment of the author of the CGI animation text book. One of the huge things that I've noticed, is that the show would be boring if we were always focused on whomever was doing the talking. Instead, there is often (and frequently) a split second or longer where the camera switches to someone whom is not talking, and so forth.
Yes indeed. I frequently go back to older episodes to get similar animation data, models, lighting rigs (although I've started again now with Octane on that one).
Good post sir.
:)
Not as good as yours, but just some helpful notes, I guess ;)
Absolutely, very helpful.
Sci Fi Funk and Dartanbeck -
Great thread! I find myself running into all sorts of time vaporizing problems when building complex animations, so practical, workflow tips like these are greatly appreciated. Please keep them coming. And the detailed explanations are great, because there's a big difference between knowing how to do all of the steps so it works, and knowing how to do almost all of the steps, which can just lead to frustration.
Thanks again.
Pleasure. I'm very much on the same theme atm - saving time. I just posted an upscaling (to save render time) video as a new thread here which will help you. http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/49812/