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Bees in my Trees

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  • starboardstarboard Posts: 452

    Dart,

    The footage is excellent - . I have never seen this before. The description says  "Crazy splicing of piles of test renders"   Well, it really works in a story line also... Geez.....how long did it take you ?..there is a lot of clips..  Have you thought of adding a narrative track....The story is there...a voice would add color.... Its quite impressive.  This is obviously part of a larger project.... I will be getting Mystic Gorge, some of the assets in it sound sound very useful.

    I tried using 0.5 it made no difference. I am still playing around with it.. Will have to end this playing around and turn out some product.

    Dondrec,

    I like that tip for AE..I have duplicated layers, changed one, then blended them.  But the idea of duplicating and moving one layer ahead  one frame and blending is very clever.  Its got to work..and the objects that move intraframe more will have the most blur - fiendishly clever.    Will be putting it to use.

    I have never rendered using multi-pass. I just watched a tutorial on it.  Not as scary as I thought... Again thanks for pointing the way.  

    3DAGE.. I was confused I thought that the splat had a built in x feature... which I could not find.  I have used  x and parallel configurations of layers in AE they are very effective for simulating depth... I was playing with parallel tree  layers in Carrara..the problem was that the tree layers were fuzzy. The splat gives good results. I will try extracting masking three layers in PS and (front of the tree, middle and back) and put them onto 3 splats in Carrara... It might fool the eye..

    Thanks every body for your help..I started out with one problem and have learned so much about other aspects of 3D and compositing.   

     

     

     

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,326

    Yeah, I almost never use 0.5 Object accuracy since I'm in it for speed. When I use Starry Sky for Carrara, however, I always use it or the stars blink too much.

    That Just for Fun video was just that... junk render clips sewn together to test out Sony Vegas Movie HD software - so I was very happy that I hadn't deleted them yet! LOL

    But when you ask about narrative... absolutely! That's why I bought Carrara in the first place... that's what I've been working on. Before 8.5 came out with all of this new stuff, I was pretty much ready to start production. Since then I've bought PhilW's Realism Rendering course and decided to rethink how I render my production. I need it to be consistent since I'll be making a series of episodes once it's rolling. So scenes like the Mystic Gorge, his (mmoir) Island Butte, Parts of his BMF Landscape have been optimized to render smoothly. I have a huge selection of "stages" all ready to plunk in my animated characters, whom are also ready to render, add the voice tracks, optimize the mimic results, and the whole thing will be under way. :)

    My singer (I'm a drummer in a Rock band as another hobby - but I get paid to drum!) has a full-blown recording studio and is trading his professional services just for an opportunity to be in it... such a deal, eh?

    So he'll be recording the soundtrack as well, where I'll be playing almost all of the instruments myself, but I'll leave the guitar solos to him - he's a fantastic (one of my favorite) guitarist! And we'll be doing the Foley tracks together as well.

    Pretty much ready to go now... I just need to get my head out of my arse and write the script! LOL  But all while we wait for my script, I keep picking up Platinum Club items and other things from my list, bring them into Carrara and optimize them to work with my scenes. So each saved element includes it's own custom lighting which will enhance it within the lighting system that all of my 'stages' are lit with - it's all optimized to get as close to, if not under one minute per frame. Some scenes just have to go way beyond that - and I let them. 

    Sometimes there's just nothing we can do if we need to see a certain effect. But I work VERY hard to get those render times down while maintaining an acceptable result. Now that I have learned how to use Howler on my animations, I've figured out how to layer my renders using VFX methods, like compositing, tracking, etc., where several renders' times added together can be much less render time that trying to pull off the same effect in one pass. So that changed my strategies yet again... but not by much, because that is just allowing me to add things that I was otherwise going to leave out.

    You'll see... it's a pretty cool workflow. Soon (I think?) I'll be releasing some of all this fun stuff. I think it's really cool = and it's a huge relief to see that all of these years of 'practicing' (and saving the results, when completed) are truly amounting to something very special! yes

    Yup... those clips were all just my learning curve towards making animated clips in Carrara. Researching lights without soft shadows, testing animation timing, testing the Ocean primitive's waves (when she's walking along the pier over the water), figuring out how to animate my heroes riding horseback and other creatures, timing fighting actions... just plain getting to know Carrara as best I can.

    The funny thing is that the video made of throw-away clips feels really old to me now - I've come a  l o n g  way with all of this since then.

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,326

    Wow that's a long babble! Sorry about that! Waiting for a render to finish! =D

  • starboardstarboard Posts: 452

    That is the problem with learning and doing....your skills evolve. With more sophisticated methods and results your previous work appears - not as brilliant as your first thought. I am going through similar cycles. I originally was creating footage for the web... now I am creating it in HD.  As my skills evolve I reallize that much of my prvious footage needs to be redone.  Where will it end.... Somewhere you have to draw the line and say the project has to be done at this level of skill. I think the trick is to keep the projects small enough to complete in a short enough time. The advantage of this is that the enthusiasm does not run out before the project is finished.   The other factor is that a large project  can be done in chapters. How many  movie sequences have been done over time..Star Wars, Harry Potter, Tolkien...All of them show the improvements in technology and animation as they go from the first to the last. These days it is almost expected.  Since you seem to be a one man show like myself, you have the perogitive of setting any goals you like...and that is the problem...over-reach...Reaching beyond our grasp. If either one of us worked for a professional house..someone would be keeping us in check....supplying the disipline.  Sine we do not have this..we have to provide it ourselves...if we can.

    The animated gif..The horses gait is top shelf....very natural...big improvement over the horse gait in "just a bit of fun".   

     

  • DondecDondec Posts: 243

    Dart, lovin the whole thing, actually its perfect.  WIth that kind of quality you start to focus in.  I zerod in on the lightning hilights on the horse... eeow.  Well done.

      - Don

  • starboardstarboard Posts: 452

    I have been looking at FX Revisited again...I like the atmospherics..rain lightning... and the  music really fits.. Hope to see more

     

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,326
    msteaka said:

    That is the problem with learning and doing....your skills evolve. With more sophisticated methods and results your previous work appears - not as brilliant as your first thought. I am going through similar cycles. I originally was creating footage for the web... now I am creating it in HD.  As my skills evolve I reallize that much of my prvious footage needs to be redone.  Where will it end.... Somewhere you have to draw the line and say the project has to be done at this level of skill. I think the trick is to keep the projects small enough to complete in a short enough time. The advantage of this is that the enthusiasm does not run out before the project is finished.

    Right you are, and I've always kept that in mind. Here's the thing with my story:

    I've been a hard manual labor guy all my life and, in this place where I live, people never run out of needs for hard, manual labor! So I worked really long hours from very early Spring/late Winter through late Fall/early Winter, leaving the rest of the year for recharging. In 2010 I gave that time to Carrara with this vision in mind - but not wanting to actually produce my first episode until I'm good and ready - like, after I'm done with this broken back syndrome! LOL

    So here I am now... done with that broken back creating, and trying to lick those wounds being careful not to stiffen up, which inlies the hardest part!

    During the time mentioned above, I was having a lot of fun... very exciting learning all of this stuff, so I did so with a real passion - a LOT of tests and throwaway renders... Lots of 'em! But just because they were throwaways certainly didn't take any of the love out of making them. This forum became my vacation resort, this forum. Any time that I had after work was often devoted to writing my discoveries in vast columns within the older forum, now defunct. I might try and go back in there to resurrect some of those articles.

    Now is a strange time for me... switching gears. I have new ideas mixed with the old. With Daz 3D changing their forums software at least twice since I've been here, I'm not as quick at providing helpful service to new (and not-so-new) users as I was not that long ago, so part of my new inspiration is to reconfigure some informational stuff.

    My main characters that you've met in that video have been working hard, exercising... practicing... taking care of themselves. They've also acquire a good plenty of friends. allies, villains, helpless bystanders, old acquaintances, etc., animals, vehicles, and fully-realized scene-sets in which to conduct their affairs. I've experimented with Mimic Pro for Carrara just enough to be comfortable with it - the rest will come after we've recorded the dialog. So along with that, I've come up with a really cool workflow for animating bits and pieces of my characters - sort of construction-kit style - so that I can start with Mimic Pro work, and then bring in the rest of their movements to make the whole animation sequence complete. 

    Discovering Carrara has been my main focus over the years and, so far, I cannot see that losing its thrill any time soon! ;)

     

    Dondec said:

    Dart, lovin the whole thing, actually its perfect.  WIth that kind of quality you start to focus in.  I zerod in on the lightning hilights on the horse... eeow.  Well done.

      - Don

    Thanks, Don!

    Yeah... I love that, myself! That came along with my earliest experiments getting acquainted with PD Howler! :)

    Now I'm really addicted to going back and forth between the two... Carrara and Howler, as I'm sure you're accustomed to hearing! LOL

    Thanks, though. I really appreciate it ;)

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