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Good to see those Dimension Theory vids again, they still look amazing!
Oh I need to get back to Carrara and soon! Thank you for re-organising and re-doing all of these great tuts and how-to's!
My Pleasure, you two! Thanks for coming ;)
Carrara 5 Pro Handbook arrived this morning
Anyone here working with film, green screens, or the like?
Daniel Ritchie, the author and brain-child of Project Dogwaffle is a Visual Effects artist, and has worked on many cool TV shows and Films. This video kind of explains some of the older pre-CG ways of compositing (Yikes!!!) while he teaches us how to composite green screens using Howler...
VFX is an excellent field to study if you're looking into making your own movies - even CG ones. Since I've delved into the vast world of VFX skills, I find myself far less frustrated trying to get everything to happen all in one render. Compositing various layers or nodes together and working with them in ways that I've never imagined before, has led me to realize that post work in CG video clips really isn't that hard to do and, with practice, can make a world of difference!
So just for fun and inspiration, I've compiled a playlist on YouTube called VFX Inspiration, which has some 'behind the scenes' looks at cinematography of old and new to help get a better understanding, and to just relax with something to watch that's geared toward what my brain needs... or whatever... LOL
Howler users? I have some playlists for us too! Man... I love using Howler for VFX! It does what a lot of other compositors do plus having all of the cool painting tools and puppy stuff! Here are some playlists that I use for Howler inspiration
Anyone using Fusion, or wanting to?
Nothing inspires me better than Star Wars
And there's no better Star Wars than this!
Inspired?
Check out my playlist of Behind the Scenes featurettes of the Clone Wars !
The playlist is in chronological order with, perhaps, a few placed throughout that might not necessarily be in that order, but fit nicely. Anyways, if you scroll down in the list you'll see that there is a LOT covered. Although Season 2 has only four videos, they are longer and feature the new member of the Lucas Film Animation team: Joel Aaron, who shows us some cool tips and tricks that we can even translate nicely to a Carrara workflow - especially if we're using Howler and/or HitFilm or Fusion, etc., in that work flow as well. I have Howler and HitFilm and Fusion, but am sarting to lean more towards HitFilm than Fusion right now... we'll see.
Frederick Ribble has toiled away and brought to us the wonderful PyCarrara and PyCloid. With his permission, I've compiled a playlist of his brief and wonderful demo videos. Enjoy!
Here's the first video in the list, just as a teaser
With all respect, f1oat3d, I love you man!
Brilliant (re)collection of this treasure-trove of information. I've seen snippits of almost all of what's in here, but I've clearly missed a good number of these gems.
A HUGE thanks for keeping the information and community alive, Dartanbeck! This is appreciated as being a huge investment by anyone who manages such infoirmation, for certain.
(We would all do well to (re)visit Dartanbeck's DAZ/Cararra product pages and (re)consider supporting his efforts and adding some good resources to our runtimes - win win)
Unless I missed it, may I suggest adding the Carrara-Centric animation site http://bond3d.wix.com/carrarators to the mix? (is this sort of external link allowed, as it's not a business site...?). For more examples of additional Carrara brilliance @sad's you-tube pages and @joeping's various youtube tests keep me going (along with Dart's and the other already mentioned pages...)
And @philw, I saw mention of your animation tutorial series in progress many moons ago, and have been eagerly waiting the announced release. With your new machine at the ready, and half of the chapters done (if I read your elsewhere mention correctly) I hope you find the motivation and time to finish that series up before I learn all of your lessons again the hard way!
cheers to all,
ms
(edited: to fix the carrarators link)
Welcome home, mindsong!!! Missed ya!
I suppose I could say the same for myself... been absent for a while :(
Yes! We can (and will) mention Carrarators! I just did, not too long ago! I'm putting them in here too... it just takes me so long to get all of this stuff together ;)
Here's the thread, chicken man asked that I mentioned them in there, otherwise I was going to give them their own new Hype thread - which I might still do:
Carrara Cafe and C3DE E-zine
Yeah... Joeping and Wendy will get pages in here too! :) It's like you're reading my mind! LOL
By the way, their linked names above lead to their YouTube channels! ;)
I will always know her as WendyLovesCats! :)
It's Jade's Turn!
- by Mad Cat Lady
Thanks! I really appreciate that! ;)
Fire & Ice - A Robert Frost Peom
- by Joe Pingleton
- a poem by Dartanbeck
She really just pours out her thoughts, often several of completely different topic, all at once. Then we just take what she gives us and run with it! It's reaally amazing what all comes of it! So many discussions of different ways of performing the same thing, because everybody has their own, preferred method of doing stuff in Carrara!
Wanna have some fun? Give it a read sometime!
I was recently trying to implement the advice on hiding bones you provide in your tutorial (also explained in the Infinte Skills training series).
I'm a newcomer and late to the Carrara party, and it looks like Fenric's Change Bone Visibility is no longer viable? He has shut up shop and is not selling or supporting his products any more; the trial version doesn't load properly for me either.
Is that the end of that, and our only recourse is to manually change visibility of each bone?
Hmmm... bummer. We'll have to find out for sure. We need that thing!
While we are on the subject, I bought a bunch of Fenric's plugins some years ago. With re-setting up my new machine, I found the original downloads but they are reporting that the licence keys cannot be found, and I don't know how to register/authosise them so that it stops reporting this for each plugin every time I load Carrara. Anyone have any ideas? I tried emailing Fenric but he has not responded.
Aha, I'm opening cans of worms!
On an unrelated tack, I've started working with NLA - expressions to start with.
Animations between static poses work fine but when I introduce a clip, the figure does a funky wee thing in between. I've tried a bunch of ways but can't get past this - what is happening is the figure's scale going jiggy; it is interpolating a dip between two values which are the same - the value in the screenshot dips from what should be a constant 1.67 down to 1.65 and I don't know why.
Still can't figure that out why that's happening - only on mixture of clips and static poses.
Workaround is to make actual clips of static poses, even if there is no change of state in said clips. :-|
Start a thread on it... we'll get you straightened out. We'll have to pick your mind for more info, though! LOL
You could also look through here to see if there's a similar issue:
► Forum Help Links
Hi Colin
When you add NLA clips or NLA poses,. there's a couple of things to be aware of.
NLA clips will normally change the default pose of the figure on frame 0 ,. even when the clip is removed,. the figure needs to be zero'd or re-posed,. before adding a different clip.
when you're Mixing poses and clips,. try to work on different NLA tracks,. this helps to organise things a wee bit,. clips on one track, poses on another.
Using diffrent NLA tracks,. also allows you to specify which parts of the figure are effected by the animations in each NLA track,. since each track has a "parameters" panel,. where you can select or deselect parts of the figure to limit what parts of the figure the animation effects.
also the NLA track options ,. whether it's set to Additive or Override. will produce different effects,.
Hope it helps :)
Brilliant guys, I'm gathering momentum. I hope to eke my way onto this forum like I'm eking my way into the software, and get used to where to post and all that. Maybe even figure out how to give myself a cool username. ;-)
Fenric's Tools
I am putting some of these tools to Constant use, while others I still need to explore more - as with many things in Carrara, both things that are included in Carrara Pro as well as after-market supplements. All in all, however, when I was going from laptop to desktop to my home-built workstation I ended up reinstalling Carrara a few times and, each time, if I tried messing around in Carrara before installing my Fenric tools, Carrara just didn't feel right. Fenric has certainly played a huge role in helping me to achieve my goals.
I use the Advanced Shader Tweaker quite often, but really have to spend some time to get to know and use the others in this pack. They're all very helpful, useful utilities - it just takes me breaking away from old habits and looking at new/different ways of looking at shaders.
Pose Helper for Carrara - Again, unfortunately this doesn't work on Genesis or other Triax figures - but I LOVE this tool! So nice to be able to swap pose directions > send left to right, right to left, along with everything else that it does. Being that I still enjoy using Generation 4 and other Poser Format figures (also works with native figures, primitives, etc.,) I find myself using this handy device quite a lot.
This tool is best explained by the creator himself:
This is one of those that I really need to practice using more! This thing is awesome!
This thing adds Tree Duplicate to the list of "Edit > Fenric" commands, which allows us to essentially duplicate things which cannot be duplicated! Instead of actual duplication, these Tree Duplicates are their own instances or separate figures, not the memory-saving instances we get from duplicated props and simple objects. But it makes it so we can get exact copies of - yes - Figures!!! So useful for vehicles, rigged building figures, even character figures. It basically (and quickly) pretends to add whatever is selected into the browser (without adding it to the browser) and drags it back into the scene - really fast! But wait... there's a lot more!
This also adds the aforementioned Unlock Figure and Restore Figure! Wanna add a custom morph zone into a locked figure? Unlock it - change it - Restore it! Yup!
We also get the Set Figure Visibility command which, as I've started this tool's description with, allows us to hide entire chains of hierarchy within a figure with a single click! I gotta tell John and Misty!!!
It also adds Change Rotation, which is a command which will go through the whole figure and change ALL of the joint rotations from Carrara's default Quaternion to Angles! So if you've ever loaded in a figure that ends up looking like it's tied in a knot as soon as you start working with it, you now know how to fix it! :)
If you're wondering about any of these, please ask! I may know what you need to know - if not, I might be able to find out ;)
FAQ & Information
- By Jay_NOLA
Jay compilled and organized a great measure of info regarding Plugins specific to our
beloved Carrara. FAQ, Information and Links to help you determine which are right for you.
Thank You Jay_NOLA!
At the end of Page 1 of this thread I've linked to Dimension Theory's YouTube Playlists. His channel has a LOT of great stuff to watch!
I didn't realize that I had forgotten to mention the value of Carrara learning and assistance found within his Daz 3d Store!
Cloud Nine Atmospheric Clouds for Carrara is packed with cloud presets to explore or simply use so that the clouds part of your project are taken care of - letting you focus on other things. Many ways to approach these things.
HDRI packs galore! They are very professionally made and work beautifully for instantly lighting your scenes via the Scene Background HRDI path and Global Illumination with or without Indirect Lighting - again, either full IL or Ambient Occlusion Only!
Once we're done exploring Delphinia using his kit, we can easily apply what we've learned to any character using any good character maps!
Ecomantics is a really cool product - high quality, low resource hit scene enhancement/building system using somewhat of a billboard style taken to the next level or more.
...and plenty more to explore in his awesome store!!!
Enjoy!
...speaking of 'learning by buying' from our great Daz 3d Artists, here are a few more, but this is certainly not a conclusive list, but more of an 'off-the-top-of-my-head highlight showcase.
For something more like a comprehensive list of Carrara resources, Please see ►►► CARRARA Resources ◄◄◄
They use top notch shaders, great use of Anything Glows lighting, reflective surfaces, mechanical modeling... and they're just gorgeous sets for your characters to have fun get examined in! ;)
His Dragonfly AMU is also Carrara compatible ;)
Ever want to have more presets for cool landscape pieces, instead of having to make your own? Or do you just want to see some more really cool examples of how we can make cool terrain pieces?
Tectonics Evolved Volume 2 - Sci Fi has 25 Highly Detailed Terrains for Carrara (.CAR) - 5 Alien Mounds, 5 Craters, 5 Cybertron, 5 Melted Hills, and 5 Strange Eggs. Each terrain is 2049 x 2049 in size for the best quality. Each terrain also has its own texture map tailored to its unique geology, so no fooling around with difficult shaders to get awesome results.
Both kits include presets for Carrara, Bryce and Vue, so no matter what your favorite software is, you'll be able to use Tectonics with zero effort!
While on the subject of purchasing high-end content to help learn how to expand in our own understanding of how to do it ourselves, I have to spotlight some more stuff!
Mike Moir (mmoir) is an amazing modeler, shader creator, scene builder, lighting master, camera angle finder, and overall Carrara user Master!
Well I do the same thing even if the product is Carrara-specific. I need to know how to get ALL of the stuff that comes with the product into my browser and into my workspace.
Carrara's Mystic Gorge came with a folder full of beautiful maps, a tutorial, shaders, and the scene presets. The tutorials that come with his product show how much this artist cares about the user learning how to get the best possible experience from his products - and just Carrara in general. Any of you whom know him from these forums or from Carrarators (or elsewhere) know what I mean in that Mike is ALWAYS willing and eager to help us become better at whatever it is we're wanting to accomplish.
It's highly impressive how well he's planned everything out - the lit procedural fires on all of the torches - and there's a lot of them. But they're so ingeniously all operated from a single master! Impressive! Duplicates and replications smartly used to get this scene absolutely packed with details that render really well, and really fast!
Many saved camera views, paths, a waterfall, caves, the immediate surroundings are incredible, but there are all manner of distant lands, complete with plants as well!
I could keep going, but I'm not going to. Let it be known that this is by and large my favorite Carrara-specific content purchase ever. I might just be that it perfectly caters to the series of animations that I'm working on... so there's that.
Carrara's BMF Landscape Pack is very flexible and offers a really cool method of creating many different types of scene, with a foreground scene, highly detailed as the main focus point, mid-grounds which can be rotated around the foreground for different scene styles, and the distant grounds which also rotate for different looks, and have several options from which to choose. Very, very cool! Sitting in my wish list are the expansion packs for this cool environment-creation system!
This kit comes with a LOT of stuff that's fun to have in the browser, whether we're using it with this kit or with something else entirely!
Immaculate - just like all of his stuff - though I don't own all of it yet, I'm always very confident in making an mmoir purchase!
Thanks for everything, Mike!!! I so totally love you, man!
I'll be back with my continuation - Howie Farkes
Cheers!
...in the meantime, let's talk for a moment about modeling.
I always used the vertex modeler to reshape conforming clothing and hair, etc., to work with the custom shaped characters I've been making. And it does that very, Very well! I even made special morphs for adding wind and other movements to my clothes and hair - and then even special shaping morphs to add dynamic realism to my characters themselves!
As a matter of fact, these other modelers cannot work with Daz 3d figures as we would expect to use them in Poser or Daz Studio. Being able to do that in Carrara gives us a LOT more power towards making models that support other figures - especially when combined with either Daz Studio's Content Creation Tools or Poser's (I think... haven't tried Poser in quite some time) Content utilities. For example, we don't need to export (from DS or Poser) special OBJs to create special morphs. We can simply load the correct figure, apply the expected morphs, and model accordingly - then export our modeling job as an OBJ for use with the Content Creation Tools or other utilities! It's very dynamic and comfortable!
So anyways, in my adventures within these Carrara Discussion Forums, I've discovered that I am certainly not alone in really enjoying my modeling experiences in Carrara. So I'm going to add some links here to some really cool modeling threads that currently exist - just so that you, too, can see how much fun and success others are having:
* Polygon Modeling, Post your creations! Learn and share experiences - many pages long!
* Modeling Objects in Carrara - Q&A - Come One and All - Adventures of modeling of all sorts and types!
with a cool caveat HERE
* weight painting and rigging issues excellent notes from the mind of diomede64!
* Projection Mapping
* Sculpting alternatives in Carrara 8 Pro
* I need a screw
* Low Poly Modelling for Game Mods another GIF by Wendy >>>
* WIP - English Town Hall / Square - an adventure in modeling by our very own
Tango Alpha before he became published by Daz3d!
* How to create a Triangle Primitive in Carrara? - FUN!
* 5 ways to fix poke through without using conforming clothes! An informative tutorial by diomede64
* Export and paint UVmap - workflow - how to do it…
* Separate Materials on Polygon selections
- For professional courses to purchase:
* Modeling in Carrara with the help of Phil Wilkes
...and mmoir has a good one as well below
You're nothing if not comprehensive, Dart! Thanks for this and in particular, I have had the Delphinia product from Dimension Theory for years and yet never noticed the tutorials that were included!
Thank you, Phil!
Definitely watch those... he's got some really cool stuff in there. You know Jeff, always thinking! Yeah, that's a really nice product, and we can inject any of our textures sets in those shaders too!
►►► Creating a custom Carrara character and morphing in posed position