DAZ/POSER Characters interacting with landscapes in Carrara
revenger681
Posts: 156
I'm still find it incredibly hard to use Carrara for anything landscape related. For example: I tried positioning a new scene using the landscape wizard to pull up one with 2 plains. I wanted to use a sniper rifle set, and V4 in military gear to be on the edge of the plain, tripod on the edge with her aiming down at some soldiers down below.
This to me seemed impossible. I just couldn't get Victoria to be on the plain. I spent literally in upwards of 5 hours trying to get her there. Using top, left and right views. Finally, I got her around 100ft from the rock. I figured that'd be close enough, using a blur effect on the camera to focus on her and angle it right. Next task was to get the actual camera to be in position instead of one of the views. That turned out to be impossible for me... Every time I tried to move in close to her the entire screen would disappear. Finally I looked at the camera itself: it looks like it's the size of the moon or something, it's larger than the plain.. I finally gave up after 1 day of doing this. Loaded up the figure in DAZ with the rifle, clothes and hair. "export to bryce".
I then used Bryce to make the same flat plains and mountains. In around 40 minutes everything was set up perfect. I wish there were more tutorials on positioning people/objects into large landscape views in Carrara. Most of the time my renders lack any "environment" because it's just too hard to do in anything else, Except Bryce. In Carrara's sky I also tend to have an annoying "ground" color in my renders which is more fake than any cartoon I've seen. Turning the ground off makes a flat white (or whatever color) right smack in the middle of my render. So again I tend to once more pop up bryce, get the same effect but turn off the annoying horizon line. I'm sure all this can be done in carrara, but it just seems so hard to get anything done there.
There are good basic lighting techniques on youtube, modeling, importing "properly" skinned models and etc. But none for having a model in a large-scale landscape (girl standing on the edge of a large mountain, overlooking the canyon walls, for example). I'm not sure if my troubles are simply because of the sheer scale of C8's imported landscapes or what....
Then again I'm sure I'm so completely new to this as opposed to many of you guys on here. I've never had any classes in any of this. Most of what I know is from wiki pages and what Youtube videos I can find. lol. Still I do have a lot of fun making in-door scenes in Carrara, mid-range housing scenes in Carrara, and landscapes in Bryce, I just wish I could find more on Carrara. My manual seems to be for Carrara 6 as well whenever I open up my "help" manual from within C8. Seems odd to me considering the program is over $100.00 for a none-upgrade purchase. I would think they'd have the money to make an updated manual.
I'd really like to learn to unlock the power of Carrara, but I tend to revert back to Bryce for all my landscaping mostly because of the posing options in DAZ's "send to bryce". But I spent over $350.00 on Carrara 6 pro, and upgraded to C8 Standard.... Someday I hope to get better at it. On a side note: Smaller scenes are easy for me. I love using the Tin Pan Ally scene, for example in Carrara. Or using indoor scenes, subways and etc. In that respect I find Carrara a breeze, and delight to use... Just wish I could get the hang of importing a full mountainscape into Carrara more easily.
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Comments
Lots of questions there...
Anyway, for positioning on a landscape I think you need to use a few different tools. First, note whether your scene is small, medium or large. For landscapes it probably should be large. I think your views will work better that way. Also note that the landscape object has an origin point with XYZ coordinates. If you can move your object to that point, you've won half the battle. Use the Align tool, one of the most useful tools in Carrara. Select the terrain, then Shift select the object, select Align from the menu, and choose all three axes. Once you've moved to the center of the terrain you should have an easier time of locating the surface.
Also there's a feature called collision detection for moving objects around, and it stops the object before it passes thru another object. The icon for this is in the top right corner of the 3D View, 3rd icon from the left. Once you're located to the origin you can use collision detection to make your object touch the surface of the terrain.
Also, keep in mind the #1 most important feature of Carrara...select an object, then hit the zero key and your view will zoom to that object.
On the other hand, I almost never work with landscapes in Carrara, I generally composite stuff onto other landscapes, so I'm sure there's a better way.
BTW, I wonder if you can drop a sphere or something from above the terrain at the point where you want your object. Have Bullet physics calculate the drop, and the instant it hits the surface, note the XYZ coordinates of the sphere and align your character with that point. Might be the quickest if it works.
EDIT: HEY, IT WORKS !!! And you can get some cool effects like a guy walking on the moon. Anyway, since it's a large scene you might have to set the initial velocity downward in the -Z direction to some big number (like -3000 ft/sec), but just select Physics as the motion method for the sphere, place it over where you want your character, run the sim, and the sphere will drop on the point and then roll over the terrain. Pretty cool.
And here's a sphere I dropped using Bullet, then at the frame where it hit I did an Align to bring another object to that location. The whole process took maybe two minutes max.
Hold on, I think I see one of the problems you're talking about....
With the monster huge scene, and tiny character, the camera view and motion are all jacked up. Seems like the near clipping plane can't be set low enough, and the character gets cut off as you get close. And I think you do have to set it up as a Small scene, not Large. And you also have to set the camera motion to something much lower than 100% or it's too sensitive. But I have no clue about the clipping problem.
I had that issue on my laptop, it was related to my woefull graphics chip (no card :roll:)
changing the settings in interactive render and preferences helped (cannot recall what to) and working in wireframe.
surprised JM you are getting it though, I still do annoyingly on some things like top view looking at a textured plane trying to do closeups with a tiny image map size.
Wierd. Got rid of that scene, set up a new one, and it seems to work much better. There is still a problem with the 3D View not matching the rendered image in terms of placement...character looks like its feet are touching the ground in the 3D View, and when you render it's 2 feet below the surface. Easy tweak, but a pain.
Anyway, make sure the sphere you use is only about 6 feet in diameter. And I did get it to work okay using a large scene. Cut down the nudge size, but I'm really not sure what fixed it.
Anyway, here's the result.
ATM I have an invidia 8800 with 640mb ram, my cpu is a 2.40 duel core. Could be my graphics card effecting my performance in C8 as well. My viewport is often out of synch with what is really going on (This does not happen in C6 Pro). I notice that if I simply click anywhere in my scene the viewport updates.
Ok, I'm going to try and duplicate your image, and I'll come back here and edit this post if I can get it right.
**Edit**
Here's a photo I found on google, to give you an idea this is the type of scene I wanted to do, but my sniper would be closer to the edge of the cliff (enough to see downward)
You guys have hit on exactly the things that make Carrara difficult to use with figures in a landscape. Firstly, the lack of a drop to floor - clever use of physics there, Joe.
Secondly, the terrain isn't where it seems to be - it is a render effect and where it will be in relation to a figure placed on it depends on the resolution you render at - very annoying to carefully place a figure and have it float or sink in the render.
As you've noticed, using a figure in a large terrain makes things very difficult - BTW, that pic you showed could be done in a medium terrain, which is better suited for figures. You can make the terrain as large as you like in the terrain editor, or make multiples for the medium and far distance.
If you really must use a large scene, change the scene magnitude and adjust camera movement under the interface tab with scene selected. It doesn't do anything to the scene dimensions, but makes the camera movement more manageable.
Getting rid of the ugly horizon pollution is done in the sky editor using fog, haze, changing the atmosphere proportions.
You could save a lot of hassle and use a Bryce render in the backdrop for the medium and far distance.
Okay, here's another version of the image, using the new C9 fire and smoke simulator....uh oh, I wasn't supposed to....
Oh, no, wait, I just drew the fire and smoke in Photoshop. Sucks, didn't use a reference, but it took all of 10 minutes and came out at least reasonable. Just to make a point that you can do a LOT in Photoshop, and with a decent reference and some practice you can get some nice results, rather than making a 12 hour render and/or using only what Carrara has, which ain't much.
Thanks for mentioning that! I know Joe Mamma2000 mentioned doing that, I couldn't find it, but now I'll go look in the scene tab for that.
Using a medium scene as you mentioned and editing the terrain object, as well as making duplicates to cascade the effect to make mountains is a great idea. One that kind of slipped my mind for some reason (I used that technique often in Bryce). I kind of like using a 6ft. sphere as well, it makes a good reference to height and scale to compare other things with. After a bit of work I got the sniper-like shot I wanted, now all I have to do is somehow make a new shader domain for the top of the plateau and make it look better from such an extreme closeup, and throw some rocks around. When I'm done It'll be quite a bit different, but I was able to achieve the position I wanted with the general look I'm trying to get. Thanks for all the tips, suggestions and examples!
Really? You like Bryce? I've had it on my computer for years, and only used it a few times way back when. I guess I have a hard time getting past the fact it doesn't have (or at least didn't have) any OGL preview, just a wireframe thing that was IMO pretty useless.
Bryce's wireframe mode for showing terrains can make it INCREDIBLY hard to place objects just right and etc. but it can be done. I've used it quite often. I don't know why, but I love Bryce. I find it easy to use. lol @ your photoshop comment. I need to look up some brushes (i'm sure there are some somewhere) for GIMP. IMO Photoshop is over-priced. But I only do this for fun at home. I'm not a professional making money off of any of the software I've bought. So it's only a very expensive hobby. lol.
This is a render I made using Bryce a while back. I believe I just got that outfit for Victoria and wanted to see how it rendered in Bryce (It was my first intro to DOF use as well).
If you crank up the preview render setting of the terrain, it will give a much more accurate view of the terrain in the OpenGL view in the Assembly room. This will allow for easier placement of items on the terrain.
It's also helpful to learn to use the director's camera for zooming in to place objects while keeping your render camera in its original location. Saving camera postions is another useful tool.
Patrick beat me to it. The "secret" to positioning objects on a landscape terrain is the difference between preview and render quality.
To add something to this, given the photo that shows the desired result using a single terrain object is *not* the way to go. Instead, use one object for where the character will be located. It can be small to where the difference in preview/render won't really matter. Then use another object for the landscape. There are many benefits to this approach, but a few are:
- you can shade the close terrain appropriately
- you can use an appropriate size based on distance
- facilitates using replicators for trees, rocks, et
Let me echo the last two posts. The preview quality should be the same as the render quality for the terrain. The other thing I would suggest is working in a medium sized scene. You can still load the giant landscape in them if you need to, but I would suggest you borrow a trick from Howie's Farke's Snow Scene that came with Carrara, and that's use a smaller terrain for the close up and a larger terrain for the background. If you don't want to do that, you can set up a medium scale scene, and when you want to work in a larger scale scene, select scene from the instances panel, and then select the interface tab in the scene settings and change the magnitude to large. Don't forget to click the Change Magnitude button.
I've added a couple screen shots of Howie's Snow Scene viewed from the side with varying degrees of magnification to show what I'm talking about. There's also a screen shot of the scene interface controls.
Thanks guys...
But they have GOT to change the default settings so that at least the preview and render match up. That's just crazy. But I noticed that for high values of render quality you can't even get comparable preview quality, since it's limited in its range. Which, I suppose, is reasonable due to preview limitations, but at least they should match up by default, and you can tweak it from there if you want.
In any case, once you have the character near the terrain, even without the matchup it's a quick bit of tweaking to get it standing on the ground. And if you Align the character with a 6 foot sphere or cube that you have dropped with Bullet, the character should be just about standing on the ground in the first place. Though I suppose you could make the sphere at the exact diameter as the character's height if you want to get even closer.
The preview options mentioned by Patrick and Thoro are great tips for working with landscapes. So many of you have used the medium scene as an example, esp. for being able to control your terrain's look from a close up view. Quite a few tips here, thanks for all the responses and clever tips! Glad there are quite a few knowledgeable folks here at the forums.
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Hi revenger681.
...adding to other suggestions...
Convert a terrain editor setup to a vertex model and the OpenGL view should match. Edit->Convert to Other Modeler..., then choose Vertex Modeler. The terrain editor options will be lost from the conversion but you can duplicate and hide one terrain to try it out first.
With a terrain as a vertex model you can model directly around an object using the Assemble room vertex mode(upper left wrench icon). Terrain shaders and 3D painting(etc.) can still be used. Hope this helps.
Thanks, That's exactly what I had in mind. Haven't gotten around to it just yet, but I'll definitely give it a go.