I'm Coming Home - Finally
Dartanbeck
Posts: 21,522
I'm not actually getting more time... per se. But my awesome brother just helped me order the parts for me to build a new Carrara machine. It's going to feel strange!
During my absence, I didn't really have time to do anything on the internet because it was taking me so long to do anything (Anything) on this laptop. Not the laptop's fault. Windows 10 likes to use a ton of resources without asking permission. My other laptop won't even work if I turn the WiFi on!
So I had to go through the texture folders of anything I wanted to work with and quarter the resolution. Yikes! But it worked. So 4,000 x 4,000 pixel images were turned into 1,000 x 1,000, and so on. Further, I had to reduce my render setting to the worst (fastest) settings possible, with an output resolution that I finally ended up with at 640 x 360.
Yeah... Oh woe is me, right? LOL
But at least this allowed me to keep learning and pushing ever forward.
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Frustration was abated a bit by the time of year. PC+ Sale!!! Oh does that ever help to brighten the mood of a starving PC+ member!!! :)
So in the process, 3D Universe fitted me with the lovely Jazlyn for Genesis bundle. It was a crime getting her for so little. The new Rosie character will be sporting Jazlyn's amazing face morph!
All manner of fun things are now being added to my collection for free or extremely low=priced via this mst generous event. Thanks to all artists for participating!
welcome home
During times when I couldn't do anything else because animated renders (even at that low resolution) were taking so long on this poor little under-powered box, I spent the time learning throught the amazing 3DXtract e-zine collection, watching PhilW and MMoir videos, and then I got to JonStark's amazing collection regarding Dynamic Hair!
Okay, if you haven't seen Alita - Battle Angel yet, stop reading this and go watch it! Weta digital and the other vfx houses involved did a spectacular job! Alita, herself, is fully CG - performance captured using the amazing Rosa Salazar for most of the action and all of the facial performance, and eight or nine other girls for stunts and other performances. The result is an amazing exhibition of how incredible CG people can be now - and Alita freaking ROCKS!!!
Well, the hair turned out so cool in that movie, that I decided to take another opportunity to try and give my Rosie character Carrara Dynamic Hair. I've tried several times before and failed miserably each time - so my first stop was to watch JonStark's incredible Hair tutorial series.
During his tutorial, he has hopes that someone with animation experience tries this awesome hair and takes the series further - so that's what I aimed to do. I did get to the success of his teachings - and I was so happy it drove me ever forward. But success with turning the head back and forth doesn't neccesarily produce success during motion driven animation. But we just need to buckle down a little, examine what's going on, and keep working at it.
I now have the initial setup for hair that works for my beloved Rosie character!
So a while back I got Genesis GenX2 along with the Genesis 2 addon. The standalone allows us to add any Generation 4 morphs to Genesis. Yup any of them - all of them if we want. The Genesis 2 add-on allows us to add Genesis 2 morphs to Genesis. Why the value of this didn't sink into my mind back when this amazing plugin was first released, I don't know. I was likely off on a different tangent than working on my characters or something.
The current temporary placeholder I've been using as my Rosie Character ( I call her Rosie 5.2) is the Genesis 1 Basic Female so that I can use my V4 textures.
Using GenX2, she has Genesis 2 Female shape as well as Aiko 6 and Gia 6, PokeAway 2 morphs (work better for my needs than the Genesis equivalent, which I also own, but didn't have installed on Rosie 5.2) and some other Genesis 2 expressions, shapes, etc., along with a large selection of expressions, shape enhancements and morphforms from V4.2 with Morphs++
I was using Ysabeau's adorable face until I recently got Jazlyn, whose face morph almost completes Rosie's face alone, but with smaller eyes and a few other facial morph tweaks. Genesis 2 Female shape with part Aiko 6 and part Gia 6 dialed up along with some of the Evolution morphs for Genesis and she's a pretty sweet Actor!
When I mentioned that she's a placeholder temporary character, this is because she's an experiment. An experiment with many successes, but an experiment. I wanted to learn how to get Carrara's Dynamic Hair working effictively on a Genesis figure - and I wanted to test which morphs I need vs don't need so that the Official Rosie won't have morphs she doesn't need - especially since I love having so many expression dials built into her.
I also mentioned that this laptop barely does this work, and that I've been rendering at extremely low settings.
I just wanted to clear those to things up before presenting this incredibly low-quality image of Rosie 5.2 - the temporary placeholder until my new computer is built, and up and running... possibly next week - give or take a few days ;)
The really cool thing bout Rosie 5.2 is that, I can load her up, apply virtually any animation - even really drastic ones - and her hair performs admirably.
The scariest part of this whole endeavor is wondering how well it will all work at higher resolution. The Rosie 5.2 placeholder uses only 1 SubD level and the hair is sparse and of low build quality. In testing, it seems like higher quality hair will get even better animation resulta - but we'll see.
Either way, I have a whole series of tests completed - even a battle with a rather nasty demon that literally towers over her and another test with her walking out of the water using DCG's Terrain Tools, which is very new to me. I love it!
Continuing on with JonStark's truly wonderful instructions will become a complete set of additional tutorials and notes in the near future - in the hopes of carrying out his dream that more people will start sharing their Carrara hair exploits to the whole CG community and get Carrara some well-deserved recognition. Not only that, I want to show everyone what I ended up doing in my own Lo-Tech style to get the hair working so effectively for any occasion on a Genesis figure, which will also work for any figure, no matter who makes it.
It is important to me that I mention JonStark and his video tutorials throughout the series, since anyone following what I do will want to watch his whole series before mine begins. He set the initial stage, so I'm not going to repeat that. Like JonStark, I'll also be giving a shout out to other Carrara friends whom have done some amazing work with this great hair, and who have passes their wisdom on to the community.
HI
glad you back!
new drum rhythms?
welcome back Carrara temple hasnt been the same since you wandered
lets kill the fatted calf and have a BBQ
with fingerbuns
So excited! Yeah... I'm a starving artist, so it'll be easy to beat the stats of my coming Carrara Monster that I'll be building in a few days. On such a tight budget, I always have to endeavor to build the best I can with yesteryear's best gear - at least, the best I can get my hands on according to what little $$$ I have.
So here's the main components:
As you can see, it's not the latest and greatest tech, but it will get me rockin' with Carrara again! I think that the Ryzen 7 is going to please the Dickens out of me! The machine that died on me (I can't believe I went six years without upgrading) had a much older AMD eight core. Their first series of Zambezi, in fact. I bought the lowest model (as I am now), while DAZ_Spooky bought the high-end one. We were both tickled pink! That machine had 16GB RAM, but Windows 7 let us use our RAM, unlike Windows 10, which seems to want to use up RAM on a whim - even if we're in the middle of doing something on a low-end machine(?). Wierd. But oh well. As long as I can get ahead of it and run my Carrara, I'll be happy. Probably just use this laptop for internet, and keep Windows 10 away from the web.
The rest of the parts will be used from my current build, so I know I'll need to endeavor to replace stuff as I can.
Wow! I didn't even see your posts until I left the thread and came back! Forums do change, eh!
Love you guys and gals! It truly is good to be HOME!!!
its actually much better than both my computers
my new one was simply to use Win10 and my card, its not terribly good
Welcome back !!!!!
Thanks!
It blows away what I had before, and that machine was like lightning when working with Carrara - well... everything, actually. I'm really quite excited!
Hmnpf. It's been a while since I've visited that wishlist. The CPU was on sale driving the price of the whole build down quite a bit, so I forgot what all I had in this particular one - like the nicer graphics card than I was looking at earlier. 1408 Cuda cores should rock my movie editor like a sleeping baby!
The motherboard is darned nice too. I loved my previous MSI Military-class, so I did that again with the MSI B450-A-Pro which, while not the top of the game is still no slouch. The thing that bothered me was the Max RAM of 64GB, but I think 64 should do me just fine, actually - for what I do. I'm still not entirely sure if I have 32GB coming, or if he (my amazingly awesome brother!) added the extra pair of chips to make 64GB.
This will be my first experience with an SSD. I was made to understand that this will make a huge difference when it comes to video editing, color grading, and (more importantly to me) VFX work. But I also recall DAZ_Spooky mentioning that it'll also make Carrara much faster - loading textures, mesh (incl. morphs, etc.,)... anything that reads/writes from the HDD. We shall see!
I've also never used anything better than the cheapest mouse. This time around will be my first experience with something with night and day better accuracy. I think the keyboard I picked out will be better than what I've had before too - though I really liked my Z-Board.
Finally, while Ryzen 7 has a faster option, mine only uses 65W, which is awesome! It also comes with AMD's amazing Wraith Spire cooler. When I first started building my own, I was told to just by the chip (cpu) and an aftermarket cooler. So that's what I did. For my last one, AMD convinced me that I wouldn't need to do that - and it also voids the warranty. The cooler that came with my old Zambezi was awesome! Wraith Spire is supposed to be even better. Much better.
Looking forward!
My Corsair power supply should still be awesome. Not very old. I'll also be adding my two 1TB SATA hard drives for storing finished work. My case is filtered and the fans are still in excellent shape. I keep my rig off the floor and have a low rpm fan gently asking dust to settle elsewhere, so the inside of my existing tower is like new. I might swap out the DVD writer for a BluRay eventually... maybe not. We'll see. I'll also still be keeping my Sound Blaster just in case I don't like how the new motherboard delivers to my 5.1 surround setup.
One last thing before I go for the night:
What an amazing PC+ Sale, eh?
Too many great deals to mention just now, but I got a whole slew of really great products for almost no money at all! Well... I did get some for no money at all!
I really like the daily $1.99 deals, but all of the deals are great when they contain something you need/want. The gallery of participating artists is awesome! Can't wait to see what comes next! I already had a lot of the stuff in the free bundles - and they still gave me a pile a awesomeness that I didn't have before - stuff that is great to have in the collection!
Being a huge Predatron fan, my first stops grabbed some of the sale items off the main page, but then also go to the Predatron page and grab some more. TheDigiVault had The Red Zone in the $1.99 daily deals. Had to grab that! I even got some really fun generation 3 items to auto-fit to my Genesis figures!
I guess I'm so excited because, in this day of Genesis 8, they still offer an enormous collection of really top-notch products for those of us still using generations long since retired. I have nothing against the new. But I have such a collection of stuff that I really like, and want to use - and the first Genesis is just really pleasing me in regards to using that stuff - even Generation 4 figure texture maps!!!
I really like kitbashing. So getting piles of stuff that I might not normally get can be fun at times like these. And then something with a fairly high price tag (comparatively) that's been sitting in the wishlist comes on for $1.99 or $2.99 or even just a percentage off... fantastic!
It's going to be fun - as soon as my new machine is alive and kicking with all drivers in place and so on, go to Daz3d.com and download DIM and let that thing run!
I'm also really excited to see how Daz Studio (new 4.12!!!) works with the new Ryzen and GTX1660... should be fun! But I'm a Carrara nut to the end!
Next week I get a visit from evilproducer, and we'll head to the airport and pick up the Gars Man! Even though Garstor switched to LightWave (and is really quite good at it), I'll always consider him a Carraraist! :) For Three days we'll paint my little town DAZ!!!
Rock on, all!
Great to see you back, Dart. Hope you can stay a while.
I think that you will really like the new machine. Looking to upgrade my machine as well.
You seeing Garstor and Evilproducer? Lucky you... what a great trio. Please post pics as you did for your last reuion!
What monitor do you have?? I need a new one to replace my defective AOC.
As to memory eating G2, didn't someone post a way to de-glut a G2 aftr you sort out the figure/character you want? I have not had a chance to work with it and it's bookmarked on my other machine, but could do with a reminder from the Carrarist.
I use Misty's G3 mostly now... more facial expressions. Did not move on to G8 as I want to use what I have without having to buy more figures. I do use the clothes, though not the D-Force. Trying to figure out how to use D-Force... or kit-bash to use it without it.
Glad you are back.. you have been missed!
Thanks again!
Yes, one of our amazing plugin designers have created one that can remove unused/unwanted morphs. I've been away far too long.
Being on such minimal resources, I've been doing the same via the Data folder - I have a TEMP folder on my desktop where I drag all of the morphs I don't want included, then load Genesis into Carrara.
One thing I'm not entirely sure about using my method is whether Auto-fit can do its job correctly if trying to work on morphs that are no longer present (in the Data folder). So I am eager to find and use that plugin as soon as I get up and running!
I wouldn't be good at recommending a monitor. Like I said - starving artist! LOL
I'm using my Acer 21" (?) I think it is. My bro was asking if I wanted to upgrade to an Asus 27" that was on sale at Newegg, but I declined. It was refurbished or OpenBox for just over the cost of the RAM upgrade I'll be performing.
So, I got my parts.
My brother not only ordered the extra RAM (so I have 64GB), but also included the refurbished ASUS 27" monitor!
With Garstor and evilproducer visiting shortly after I finished building it and getting Windows 10 installed, I still haven't had much time to get everything installed, let along play on the thing.
One of the first things installed, after getting hte primary system up and running, was the Daz3d Install Manager. I so love this utility! I spent a whole day (but only one day) installing all of my Daz3d software (except Bryce and Hexagon, which will come soon) and my entire Content library - all sorted into my favorite runtime categories, except for the DUF-Only stuff, which I prefer to install to the default DIM "My Daz 3d Library".
Messing around just a little (so far) in Carrara, I am stunned at how fast this bad-boy renders! 16 threads running wide open (silently) with my 64GB RAM barely noticing that anything is running. What a dream! While my other computer was down and I was keeping myself into Carrara on this crazy laptop, it took me hours (Hours!) to render three seconds of animation at 640 x 360 using texture maps one-quarter their original size! We'll have no such watering down on this beast!
It helps (big time) that AMD just released a blazing-fast new series of Ryzen CPU - Generation 3. Now they have 12 core desktop Ryzen and a tinier architecture and, while they're made to use a new motherboard socket, many of the new generation will still work (albeit not to their full potential) on the motherboard I just bought (Socket AM4). With them releasing the new line, of course the price of mine dropped, and then it also went on sale - that works for me!
Being a starving artist, I normally build my computers using yesteryear's finest parts and a fraction of the cost of buying a new PC. I still get the punch that I need since I get to truly pick and choose the best parts for what "I" need to do. The closest best thing would be to buy a Gaming computer, but they always put more attention in areas that aren't my best option, and less to where I do need full support.
I'm so happy! Now when I do have "me" time, I can actually get something productive done in the things that I love to do!
The new GTX 1660 is a dream compared to the low-budget Pile of XXXX I bought to limp along on my old computer.
Taking a quick break from installing stuff, I fired up Mass Effect - Andromeda and ran through the intro, and then the same with Dragon Age - Inquisition, both set at "Ultra" in the graphics options. Not a glitch!
So enough gaming for now... I just wanted to give my new GTX a spin.
Now I can't wait to try Iray a bit!
Welcome Back
+
Thanks!
Getting back into the swing of things, rendering in my usual way but this time with dynamic hair and helpful multipass inclusions, I'm getting around 12 to 20 seconds per frame for regular full body shots. Wide shots are more like 4 to 9 seconds, while closeups often beg for better everything, so those take a while.
Really happy with my new dynamic hair for Rosie, so my Dartanbeck hero will likely also get Carrara hair.
Well, in addition to heavily exploring Carrara dynamic hair while I was waiting to build this machine, my other experiments and practice work are really paying off. It's an absolute dream to be working like this - especially since I still don't get a whole lot of time to do it. Pushing ever onward though - even the storyline is coming together nicely.
Looking forward tio getting Rosie and myself into the recording studio to do some voice acting, and getting this whole thing put together at last. It might still be a bit of a ways off... but I feel that it's getting closer and closer each day - which is a great feeling!
So, I'll also be putting these final touches into the form I was hoping for for my website. It's been on hold since I had to work at such low resolution. But now I'm devoting part of my work-mode time into getting that launched - finally, which will basically be a Carrara demonstration site, illustrating how I use Carrara and other tools to create the short that will be released just prior. The site is kinda cool to explore now - I spent a lot of time typing for that in my downtime after the loss of my Carrara machine, so it has a decent structure. I just need to fill in the stuff that I couldn't do with such limitations.
Well... gotta go Rock a Halloween party on my drums. Catch you all on the flipside!
This is a small collection of the low resolution, low quality tests I did on this laptop fairly recently - just before building the new machine. The new results are much better.
The sequence of shots in this go from earlier tests through some of the latest (although some much better LR tests came just after I made this), with a few early tests mixed in here and there to help with a bit of continuity, even though this doesn't really have any continuity! LOL
I should also add that none (NONE!!!) of these animation are complete by any means! They were only a quick testbed for the hair - so keep that in mind when you see crappy, unfinished animations! LOL
Rosie says.... FINALLY.... hair products I can count on!
SIlene
Last night I brought a nearly completed version of Rosie 5 into a Stonemason scene with the new Dartan 5 prototype - both with dynamic Carrara hair and the test worked beautifully!
Seeing (for the first time) how nicely Carrara can work with multiple hair simulations in the same scene was a real treat! Although it was a really simple scene with just under 5 seconds of hair simulation/character animation, my new machine hit an average render time of less than 30 seconds per frame - and that's using the 4K textures on both characters! Happy!
Not all of my renders are even close to being that fast though... that was just a test! LOL
I spent the morning working more on Rosie 5's hair - tweaking it to consistently hold the shape I want it to be, while also flowing nicely to dynamics, and the resulting animation/simulation test (although it crashed my computer in the end) was another glorious success! Yaaay! That means renders should be coming soon!!! :)
Cheers Carrara Family!