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Sometimes we might have the wrong thing selected when importing an aniBlock. Let's use my previous example image of Michael 6. In this case, we would want to select "Genesis 2 Male" and then import the aniBlock.
Also in that example image, notice that his arms are slightly back, shoulders slightly shrugged and his arms are down by his sides? That would totally mess up an aniBlock Import, since those are "Morphforms". Any parameter dial that can change the pose has a possibility of messing with an imported aniBlock, because it won't reset those things. When Importing an aniBlock, be sure to always use a figure in the default pose (or go to "Animation > Zero > Zero Figure Pose) that is not already animated.
Thanks Dartanbeck, I'm going through all your suggestions and techniques! Batch queue sounds like a great idea!
Jonstark, I found SciFiFunk's video after your advise, will try that technique - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLbNkVnrV9g
I will also try loading Carrara dynamic hair to see how it works, haven't got to it yet!
Still no luck with getting any character animations into Carrara. I'm using the default aniblocks coming with carrara aniblock importer following the instructions video and they don't work on the Carrara genesis figures. I must be doing something wrong. Has anyone ever imported aniblocks into Carrara 8.5? (The aniblock importer installs in Carrara 8.0 folder by default and I have to manually point it to 8.5, is it 8.5 compatible?)
Mimic Pro seems to be working fine though.
I got an aniblock I exported from Daz working with Victoria 6 in Carrara! I think I'm on the right track!
I admit I had purchased Animate for Studio way way way back, but since I haven't been into animating til very recently had not yet purchased the Aniblock importer for Carrara, though since I've been into animating recently both with the dynamic hair and cloth (and even trees) I've had my eye on it for a little while because I knew I was going to need it in the near future. I snagged up a bunch of aniblock products in the recent 70% genesis sale but since I don't really ever use Studio and wasn't quite at the point of needing the aniblocks for Carrara, I hadn't jumped yet to purchase it, kind of was hoping it would go on sale but I don't think Gofigure ever seems to go on sale :)
Long story short, I was going to buy it tonight anyway, and seeing your post made me fear I had somehow led you astray and maybe some how some way the importer wouldn't work with Carrara 8.5. I bought it up about 20 minutes ago, installed it (and you were right to move it to the Carrara 8.5 folder instead of letting it try to install to the Carrara 8 folder).
I checked my extensions folders and all the 3 aniblock importer files were there in the right place, but when I navigated to my folders of aniblocks in the Studio section in my documents to try to import, at first Carrara didn't recognize the files.
then I realized my mistake, closed the Carrara I had running and restarted to give it a chance to see and use the new commands in the extensions folder. Now I can navigate to the aniblocks, and with my V4 selected I can import it right in and it's ready to go. I can save the aniblock animation as an NLA master clip, then save that clip into my clips tab, ready to be used again anytime :)
There is a video tutorial from Gofigure on how to use this, helped me out in the initial steps:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJDR1SsUOYs
Seems to work great for me so far (though I'm admittedly new to it).
Also I really like Mimic Pro, and not just for the obvious that it can do lip synching, but for the non obvious: that even with no dialogue it has automated way to add blinking, breathing, and other animations to add realism just by having it on and adding NLA clips to your scene.
All this stuff is so cool to me, btw :)
Yeah, I use the importer all the time (with great success) as well. Not sure where the problem is. I was going to snap some screen grabs real quick before I crash, but alas... although I've got Carrara and DIM and DS installed on this mini laptop, I still haven't installed my aniBlock collection. Hopefully you'll get it figured out before the next time I get a chance to hang out in the forum... could be a while.
In short, I think you need to select the line just above "Actor" in the hierarchy in the right side Instances tray. So, not the top line of the figure, and not Actor, but the one right in between. The key element to watch for to see if the right line is selelcted is to look at the top of the right side panel. If it has a tab named NLA, you likely have the right thing selected. If there's no NLA tab, it's not the right selection.
With the right thing selected, then go File > Import
navigate to where your aniBlocks are installed and double-click one.
Cheers, and Welcome to the wonderful world of Carranimating! :ahhh:
Thanks for the helpful suggestions! Yes Dartanbeck, I figured out the line above the Actor part, that was majorly important. Also, weirdly I think I figured out what was causing the problem -
If I load a Genesis figure and load the clothes, then I import aniblock, the aniblock gets assigned weirdly. Sometimes only one side of the body moves, and one side of the clothes! And other weird behaviours.
So I imported aniblock on a naked Genesis figure (just by fluke) and it worked! Then I loaded the clothes and conformed them, and it seems to be working fine for now!
Jonstark it is very cool for me as well, I last played with animation software 10 years back and now I got back to it for an urgent project and hey presto, everything's ready made, and easy like unbelievable!! Renders beautifully, and unbelievably fast in Carrara!
(Now I've loaded the song file in wav format and it shows a Soundtrack 'Channel 1', but no sound on playback. Hopefully it will, by clicking various buttons randomly)
Neole
Sound is incorporated very well in Carrara! Multi track support (which is handy for me as I'm a sound guy, no pun intended). Insert sound goes to sound tab, then drag and drop in any track in Soundtrack Channels. Got this from the manual, there werent any sound related threads I could find!
Spoke to soon! Playback is stuttering when fps drops. Doesnt happen in Daz3d, frame rate drops but audio plays smoothly.
Tried changing viewport to wireframe, still stuttering.
Neole
Hello,
I am putting up some test renders from an image sequence render I did of 40% of the video. Crowd is missing and much of the clothes.
Any advise would be appreciated on what else I could do to improve the look. Skin texture, lighting, set, whatever. I would like the skin to be more realistic. (Maybe I will put it up as a separate thread as well so more people can review. This thread title is misleading!)
Couple of problems I'm having (I can work around them by editing them in post production and replacing them with crowd scenes or screen video footage) -
- Some movements like the arm joints are weird sometimes, not originally in Daz studio, as you can see in some of the renders.
- Area around the lip is showing weird white discoloration, not originally in Daz studio, as you can see in face closeup renders.
- Some of the animation (I animated in Daz and saved the whole as one aniblock and imported in Carrara) is very weird with the legs lifting off the ground.
I'm unable to load the model in Carrara directly as I used some Victoria and other morphs in Daz that I can't find in Carrara. In Daz I loaded Genesis 2, applied some V6 and other morphs to my liking, then exported as scene subset, imported in Carrara, then put on the hair and bikini. The lips and nipples came out a little off, everything else looked fine. If I load the same model in Carrara the lips are fine, but I'm unable to apply V6 morphs to my liking and the model turns out too thin. I can load the V6 model directly, but that's not the look I want.
Neole
Some more renders I hope I can post, trouble posting these pics. Keep getting Unable to receive your submission message
And some more here, I think I have to type longer lines for the post to go through, thats why Im rambling
And here are the last of the batch I think, selected from a total of around 1650 frames, this info posted to make this post long enough to post
These took around a minute each to render with a large part being the depth of field applied after each image rendered. Will Octane render do a better job? What would be the render time difference?
I don't have a version of Carrara that supports Genesis, so I can't help with those issues. I do think that maybe I can help with the white around the mouth and other UV issues. It may be something else, but Carrara 8 and later default to Fast Mipmap for image maps by default. I have read numerous posts where this can cause a visible line at the edges of the shading domains.
The fix is easy enough, select the model (or actor), look at the top of the screen for the Shading tab. Select it, and you should see a list of all the shading domains. Double click a domain and it will open the shader used in that domain. Look for any area in that shader that uses an image map, such as Color, Bump, etc. and change the pulldown menu near the image map thumbnail from Fast Mipmap to Sampling. You will want to do this for every shader.
A quick tip to simplify the process: Before you begin editing the shaders, go to Edit--> Remove Unused Master--> Consolidate Duplicate Shader. This will consolidate any shaders which use the exact same settings and image maps. For instance, using V4 as an example, instead of a separate shader for torso, neck and nipples, which all have the same settings and use the same image maps, each of those domains will use one shader.
A minute per frame seems very long for these sizes and settings (unless you have some crazy settings in your render room or are using GI or something, which doesn't seem necessary for an animation like this). I suspect it's the depth of field that's slowing you down so dramatically, you could disable depth of field effect from the camera, do a multipass with the depth information, and then do depth of field in compositing much faster easier, I think, so that's one option of where to do.
Realistic skin... lots of different approaches, just remember that Studio and Carrara read textures differently than each other, and the shaders you set up in Studio are not going to look the same in Carrara. I always make my own Carrara textures for any character, doesn't take long to do once you know how but will require you to dive into the texture room (which really isn't that bad, and is pretty easy to use, but still).
I would recommend exactly what Evil mentioned above, consolidating all your duplicate shaders and then you'll have a lot less shaders to work on as it will combine the shoulder/forearm/hand/feet/leg textures all into one texture, and the head/neck/nipples/torso into another texture, as an example.
Happy to share my current preferred settings for skin if it's of use at all, but no guarantee that they will look exactly right on whatever character texture your using (textures maps vary, some have very dark and grainy spec maps for example while other spec maps are very bright and smooth, so you kind of have to 'eyeball' it and try to change setting so they'll look the best on your particular texture).
Here's a quick animation I was doing for the dynamic cloth thread for proof of concept, and also because I'm just barely learning how to use aniblocks in Carrara. Render settings are very low, just one direct light and the ambient light in the scene just from the presets, and I am using subsurface scattering, which you may or may not want to use (for any scene where indirect lighting is enabled, SSS calculations will slow down your render time appreciably enough that I wouldn't recommend them in animation, but if you're not using indirect lighting the SSS calcs are 'blink and you missed it' for each frame).
I was rendering with V4, so I can't really comment to help on how to adjust Genesis2 with the aniblocks so there's no feet movement, but one thing the Gofigure tutorial video stressed is that your tweeners (at least for the aniblock part) should be set to linear, that might help if that's off. Hopefully some of the guys who use aniblocks a lot can come and comment to help, Dart or ScifiFunk.
You already asked about Octane in another thread, so I think you've got an idea of what it can do (Octane can be very very fast indeed, depending on how much gpu your rig is running, and it's unbiased so it does very realistic light calculations, however I don't think you can do volumetric lighting effects - at least not easily - in Octane. But again, you could do a multipass in Carrara and take the Volumetric pass and then composite it with your Octane rendering together to achieve the same effect, I think).
By the way, the stills from your animation look pretty good, things seem to be coming along nicely :)
Thanks for the advise evilproducer. However it still didn't fix the lips texture. I will post a screenshot of the viewport later once Carrara stops rendering, maybe that will help diagnose the problem!
Neole
Since it is a G2 figure, it could be how the UVs are maybe not right for the texture set maybe? I know they can be different for different characters, but that's about it. As I mentioned earlier, I don't have a version of Carrara that supports Genesis.
If it is a shading issue, such as highlight, shininess, etc. then I can offer some advice.
I will have to get into multipass renderings as it looks something that should be in my toolkit!
By the way, the stills from your animation look pretty good, things seem to be coming along nicely :)
Thanks, I know this must look basic, but amidst the dance sync, lip sync, expressions, sets, crowd and the learning curve and troubleshooting I am not getting too much time for refining. Once I get a 30 second teaser out by tomorrow I'll have a couple of weeks to complete the full animation so I can figure out more details.
Surprised to hear the expressions aniblocks are not working, as expressions are simply poses, shouldn't work any differently than other anibblocks or anything else that can be keyframed. I don't think I've got any expression ones to test though.
Mimic pro has breathing and blinking built into it, I'm trying to remember exactly where you find those controls, I'm remembering a parameter tab somewhere, I only tried it once to test it was working so I'm not an expert but it should be able to do that sort of thing (though it isn't really expressions per say, it does give some nice variance and movement to the face even if it's lip synching absolutely nothing).
Skin settings: here's mine (sorry I was away from computer for quite a while tonight, would have responded earlier if I could have, and I didn't realize you were on such a tight deadline)
So for most skin areas (torso areas, face limbs) I use pretty much identical setup.
In the top channel I put the bump amplitude to 5%
Color channel is the color texture map of the character (may want to switch the dropdown from fast mip map to sampling for Gaussian filtering, to avoid strange seams in distance shots).
Alpha channel is left at default 100%
Highlight channel is set between 4% and 8% as per what suits my eye (I once used Spec maps here, but eh I'm not as sure I need them anymore and prefer using a straight percentage). Highlight controls the brightness of the specular effect. Higher percentages = brighter specular glinting.
Shininess channel is set between 3% and 5%, again according to taste. Shininess controls the spread or how wide the specular effect is. The lower the percentage, the large the spread of the glinting over the skin. That might seem counterintuitive, but lower % = larger area of effect. Think of it as micro roughness of the texture.
Bump channel is the bump map texture.
Reflection channel can be set to none, or if you're feeling daring, you could add a tiny bit of reflection (like 1% or less), but bear in mind any reflection is going to slow the render time a little bit, probably not worth mentioning or noticing in slowdown time, *unless* you decided to use blurry reflections, in which case it will slow you down quite a bit. I don't recommend using blurry reflections for animation at all, it's more the kind of thing you would use for a still render closeup that has to be very precise, and if you use it make sure the max depth is set to 1.
Transparency, Refraction, Glow, and Translucency I would leave at none (though there is a cool way to use a slight bit of glow to fake subsurface scattering).
Subsurface scattering I do use, but will slow render time with calculations too much in an animation with any kind of indirect lighting calculation (so if you're using skylight or full GI then subsurface scattering might be too much of a render slower to be worthwhile, on the other hand if you're using direct lighting and the ambient light in the scene tab to fake indirect lighting you may still want to use SSS). Finding good SSS settings is very very tough, lots of people I respect very much for their Carrara skills use lots of different methods. Looking at mine, I realized I'm using the same ones PhilW recommends in his Realism Rendering tutorial series, so I can't in good conscience give them out in a public forum or else I'd feel like I was giving away part of his product. Let me jump back to a prior SSS setting I used to use, that I still think it's pretty decent and give that instead.
diffuse: 99
translucency: 10
Intensity: 10
Refraction: 30
Fresnel: 10
pair it with a light pink color to simulate blood beneath the skin (if I'm remembering right; I didn't write down my color settings at the time, so play with it and see what pops for your eyes).
Now lips are similar to skin with a few differences, I try to make lips for girls a bit more shiny to simulate lipstick, can do this by raising the highlight intensity and the shininess percentage to make it a bit more glossy, and the lips look a bit better with a slight amount of reflection (imo).
Eyes are very important (imo)
Eyesurface: Can be very useful as an all over the eye cover to give reflections, but my current setup I don't use it and have it set to transparency 100% with the top channel 'no light interactions when fully transparent' checked.
Lacrimal: This is the skin in the corners of the eye, and I use skin settings with higher highlight and shininess settings to make it look a little more 'wet'.
Sclera: The whites of the eyes, I use the eye texture for the character here, again like the lacrimals I add some highlight and shininess amped up a bit to give a wetter look.
Pupil: The dark hole in the center of the eye. Can leave it fully black in the color channel and nothing else, or can also just throw the eye texture from the character here (it will map to the black part at the center of the eye texture anyway). No reflections here, which may seem counterintuitive, but seriously can look weird if you put reflections in.
Iris: this is the colored center of the eye. It might seem counterintuitive but currently this is nothing more than the color channel with the texture map of the eye, no other reflections, highlights nothing (well it doesn't hurt at all to throw a little bumpmap in if you have it).
Cornea: This is the eye lens that sits over the iris, and this is where all the magic happens to make the eye 'pop'. Even though it's transparent, this is possibly the most important part of the eye texture. Refraction here is very important, I actually have my refraction set to the 'ethyl alchohol' dropdown, my highlight is way up at 400%, my shininess is at 21%, my transparency is set to 100% and my alpha is set to 49% and the color is set to black. I don't have reflections set here, but for closeups I would use reflections in this channel (for longer shots the highlight should work just fine, especially if you have a low intensity light pointed at your character's face, that gives good highlights to make the eyes pop but no real cost in rendertime). You also may very well want to change the eye shape in the assembly room parameters to make it so the cornea is nicely convex while the iris is actually flat below it (it only should appear the iris is convex because of the refraction from the cornea).
I'm actually looking back at my settings and thinking this may be an older texture setup, not my most current, as I play with refining skin textures all the freakin time (it's one of my long term hobbies with Carrara actually).
There is a lot more that can go into trying to get super realistic skin, and many other methods, but I thought that might be a quick and easy way to get you used to the various shader components and comfortable playing around in the texture room.
Thanks, I know this must look basic, but amidst the dance sync, lip sync, expressions, sets, crowd and the learning curve and troubleshooting I am not getting too much time for refining. Once I get a 30 second teaser out by tomorrow I'll have a couple of weeks to complete the full animation so I can figure out more details.
Not at all basic, looking very good so far. Seems like you are flying through the learning curve and well on your way. I do wish you weren't under such a time crunch, but judging from the stills I think you will be just fine for the teaser, and at this rate I bet you will blow them away with the full animation :)
Very grateful for the detailed notes on your skin shader techniques! I'll try them out now.
My renders for the extreme closeups are taking too long, especially the floor behind, now that I've switched on 6 point color light gels. Maybe I will have to switch them off for now.
Jonstark, the Highlight parameter in the master shader does not show any percentage. First I have to choose something (texture etc).. what do I choode?
Bump map was set to none in all textures, probably that's why everything looked plasticky. I've turned it to 5% and added the color texture map to it.. don't know where to find the bump texture map yet!
Also, turning off the depth of field and also the shadows of the 6 point gel lights reduced the rendering time per frame to 23 seconds. That's a huge relief!
I guess for the slowness of the renders, it would help to know what render settings you are using.
As to the textures, for a Gen4 figure (or earlier) such as a V4, you need to select Model in the figure's hierarchy in the instances palette. With Genesis I believe it is called Actor. With Model or Actor selected, you should see a shading tab at the top of the screen. Select it, and the tab should reveal a multi-colored ball (more on that later) with a list of shading domains beneath it.
Each shading domain has a different shader. You need to edit each of those domains if you wish to apply your own settings (or use Jons suggestions). To edit them, double click them and they will open in the Texture room. This can be fairly tedious, which is where my suggestion to consolidate duplicate shaders comes in. Fenric also has a plugin called Shader Doctor or something. This can automate the process.
Once the shaders are edited to your liking, you can easily save them to your shader browser for later use. To do this, select the Shader Tab in your Browser, select a folder (or add one) and then click and drag the multi-colored ball at the top of the Shader Domain list and drop it onto the shader browser. You will then have the option to name it or use the default name. This process saves all the shader domains in one place.
To use the shader again, just select your model (must have the same UVs), then the Shader tab, and then click and drag the icon for your shader from the Shader browser and drop it right on top of the multi-colored ball at the top of the model's shading domain list.
Going back to the slow renders for a moment, some settings in the render room that can cause slow renders are using the Global Illumination settings, such as Skylight and Indirect light. Caustics will also slow render times. Some other culprits are having the Anti-Alias settings set to high. For most animations, you may be able to get away with a fast setting with a 1 or 2 accuracy setting for objects and a 2 or greater for shadows. If you notice sparkly artifacts, you may wish to use the same settings under "Good." I found also, that for terrain shaders I had better results if the shadow and object accuracy were set to the same value.
Other things that can slow a render down are raytraced soft shadows on the lights, A light cone, DOF for the camera and special effects in shaders or on objects. For instance, SSS will slow a render down.
Having a glow on the object will not inherently slow down a render, but using the Aura which generates the effect at render time by generating an aura around a glowing shader applied to an object can significantly slow a render (depending on quality settings).
A light can can be fast, even if you use shadows, but if you turn on the ability to shine through transparencies, it will slow a render to a crawl.
Light gels should not slow down a render. More lights will add time to a render, but Carrara handles lots of light pretty well, unless you start using GI or have all the lights use soft shadows. Lots of lights shining down on an object with lots of trans-maps, such as hair figures or props will also slow down a render, especially if you use raytraced soft shadows.
Carrara has light linking, which is extremely useful. You can restrict lights to certain objects or exclude them. So a light with soft shadows can be set to ignore a hair prop for instance.
Having read Jon's skin settings, I will have to very respectfully disagree with using a reflection for the skin. Since this is an animation and the reflection level is so low, it is not worth the render time hit, and there will be a render time hit as Carrara still has to raytrace the reflections. The effect will be very subtle- perhaps to subtle to see with flashing lights, moving cameras and animated video displays.
If it were a still image, it could be very well worth the effect.
I do agree about the highlight and no reflections for the corneas. For the iris, skip the bump, especially for a video.
evilproducer, I figured out how to edit the settings and applied Jon's settings except for the highlight and I couldnt find the bump map for Genesis 2 so I used the texture map instead. I already consolidated duplicate textures as per your advise!
The save shaders sounds like a good idea for the future, I'll do that! The shader doctor plugin looks good too, I'll puchase this and the no clothes poke 2 plugin once I'm off the deadline tomorow1
I've skipped the reflection, as I didn't want further slowdowns.
My render settings are save to png 1920x1080 image sequence. Most of the other values are set to default. I took a look at a realistic settings video and tried them but it slowed down things (setting map to smaller than 16, skylight on, indirectional lighting etc). I've switched off depth of field off for now as well.
Of the things you mentioned I only have 2 light cones. The others like light through transparency, ray traced shadows, caustics, glow etc are off.
But I have many lights I think 14. Once I switched off shadows on the gel colored lights render sped up considerably.
That sounds like a good idea too, unlinking lights from objects with trans maps. I will have to check though, I cannot unlink the lights from Genesis 2 as that's where i want the light effects. Maybe the bottles have transmaps.
Oh the floor in my scene was the one that caused maximum slowdown when the lights had shadows enabled. I'm not sure how I created that floor, it was pure click everything till it turned out the way I liked.
The problem with some (maybe all) of the post render effects like DOF and Aura is that they are not multi-threaded so they can't take advantage of multi-processor computers. That is why they are slow.