Dynamics in Carrara
Restif
Posts: 61
Hi All,
I am a Carrara user for a long time now, still have much to learn. One thing I do find frustrating and want to have some guidance is in dynamics. Smoke seems pretty difficult to do. Lightwave (which I have used) does have a Fracture tool that allows a solid object to fracture when struck, which I would need for a couple shots on an animation I am doing.
Any suggestions on using Carrara dynamics to , in this case, explode out from the ground upward?
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Comments
I think it's safe to say that you can do pretty much anything in Carrara. The only question is how much effort you're willing to expend, and what kind of results are you expecting. :)
You mentioned smoke...yeah, you can do smoke in Carrara, or any other 3D program for that matter. But the quality of the results, and the effort required, can vary IMMENSELY between applications.
If you want a very high quality smoke or fire, using some free software and relatively little effort, then I'd suggest something like Blender. You can do great animations of smoke and fire in Blender, then composite them later into whatever still or animation you're doing.
Or, if you're doing stills, you might even consider using a Photoshop-type program and drawing the smoke by hand. You can get some great results, especially if you use reference fotos.
But if you want to stick to Carrara, and don't want very high quality results (IMO), then I believe some folks use Metaballs, though I'm super rusty on the application in that regard.
As far as dynamics of something exploding up out of the ground (if I'm understanding you correctly), then I believe with Carrara you first need to break apart your ground object into pieces, then make sure your rigid body dynamics settings are correct so the objects remain at rest at the start of the simulation, and have whatever object collide with them. That will give you a very basic result, and then of course you need to add particles and stray pieces of debris, etc.
Maybe if you gave some more detail on exactly what effect you're going for we could give more information. A reference foto or video would help.
There is the particle generator, although I would use the Point at Camera particle which is essentially a billboard. Using that and the particle shader can create some nice looks.
People have also used volumetric clouds and the fog primitive as particles. A lot of the look you can achieve is dependent on experimenting with the system. Particle size, quantity, speed and gravity will all play major factors.
As to an expolosion, it will really be a combination of things that are needed to sell the effect, especially if it is animated. You may need the object blowing apart, if it's a fiery explosion there will need to be light effects, maybe additional particle effects, etc. As Joe suggests, some of these effects may be easier and/or quicker to do with specialized systems, either 3D or 2D.
For the physical aspect of the object blowing apart, as opposed to a fiery effect, Age of Armor did a neat little video tutorial where he blew apart a car using Carrara's standard physics engine (rigid body). Even though we're on C8.5, the rigid body physics is still the same.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XGRj4VjPqk
Maybe a cheap and easy way to do an explode from the bottom type effect, was just playing around with a vertex cube in the assembly room for a few minutes to see.
After selecting the item to be exploded, select the modify tab and one of the old style carrara effects you can select from the pull down is explode. You can mess around with the sliders and see how much gravity effects it and how big the pieces will be, etc. There's no selection to explode from the bottom but once the explode effect is set on the object, it's a simple matter of checking the 'explode from top' and flipping the object upside down. you an manually translate the object along the timeline to have the building 'drop' as the explosion at the top makes it's way upward, sort of giving the effect the building is falling as it's exploding. There's also a 'shatter' effect under basic deformations that can be added (you can stack as many physics effects as you want on top of each other to affect the object) and also under complex deformations check out dissolve and atomize and mixing these into the effect may also help. Pairing this with some smoke and a few particle effects inside the object, might be able to get a cheap and easy explode from the bottom looking animation of whatever object you need destroyed.
Just a thought, probably not exactly what you're looking for since this is all very old tech, but maybe it will help :)
You do some of the best realistic human renders I've ever seen in Carrara Restif, so I know you are already quite expert with the software and know your stuff, so probably you are looking for some of the ways people use the more advanced bullet physics to achieve these types of effects, hopefully some of those guys that are able to do that stuff will chime in with some more salient and advanced methods to help out more than I can.
Just to say I've played around with old style Carrara effects Jonstark mentions here in the past and I was pleasantly surprised to find how much could be done with those sliders. I recommend them as well, and yes Restif, I'm also a fan of your clips on vimeo, sometimes I visit them again and again and wonder how you achieve those realistic animations and neat renders to boot.
Thanks Everyone for some great ideas. I will definitely work on giving some of these a try. I am so use to Carrara for so many things that my first choice is to stay with it for my animation productions. I appreciate everyones input!
As for an example/still of the effect, This is a concept still I did :
Ah! That one I might use a smoke particle emitter and maybe another one or two emitters for the dirt clods and rocks that are launched into the air.
The preset smoke emitter that came with Carrara's Native Content works well if you modify it for your scene, such as particle size, velocity, particles per second, dispersion angle, etc... For some reason after C8 it was "broken" when trying to load it. The fix was easy, you just needed to open it in a previous version of Carrara and save it as a new scene file, then someone with C8 or later could open it. I did this to help folks out that needed it. You can get it here if you wish. I didn't modify it at all.
http://www.sharecg.com/v/64199/view/5/3D-Model/Carrara-Particle-Smoke
Thanks so much, I've missed using this.
To be honest, as a still render at least, that already looks pretty great Restif. The motion blur you've got going really sells the movement of the explosion (as does the way V4 is posed falling away and even the expression, I can nearly hear the worm-beast's roar). I don't know if this is for an animation or how well it works in the animation if so, but as a still image this looks pretty convincing already!
I agree with Evil too, love to see what a few particle emitters could add to the scene. Looking good! :)
I'm kind of tempted to make an attempt at it myself, but I'm in the middle of setting up another scene at the moment. If I remember, I may be able to try something in a few days.
Ok, gave some ideas a shot and here is the result.
https://vimeo.com/114510799
Used some hard body dynamics with the rocks, for the dust, just used a couple carrara clouds with the textures tweeked. Did a bit of post for fun.
Not perfect ofcourse but a lot of fun to do.
Very cool work!
That's awesome! Made me grin :) The little bit of camera shake also helped sell the 'splosion.