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I suppose the nearest we have in the UK is the Blackpool Illuminations, which are on around Oct-Nov and is a drive-through experience. It's certainly not as common as it seems in the US. I still remember being blown away by the lights on someone's house synched to Wizards In Winter soundtrack by Trans-Siberian Orchestra - search on YouTube, there are now several versions! A Carrara version is surely only a matter of time...
The light display in Marshfield is synced to a low wattage FM radio station on the grounds. I think it has less than a square mile range.
Marshfield has a population of 20,000. I think the light display is now pushing a million lights- all LEDs. The first year it was 500,000 LEDs and the Park/Zoo's electric bill went up around $50.00 for the month they were on display.
Learning Carrara 8.5 - Continued...
I've been plugging away, watching more and more a bit each night that I can. Still haven't finished it, which I think is totally awesome! There's a lot to this thing, just like the Advanced Carrara Training set, which is really, really nice!
It's cool how he goes into all manner of features in this. Animation is a broad topic, and Phil demonstrates this too. It's not just about keyframing characters, but Bullet Physics and particles, shaders and cameras, all sorts of things. I thought that the Bullet Soft Body lessons are fantastic! I haven't played with that stuff yet. I've looked into how to do it, and read many threads on the topic, and know that I will get into Bullet and the Soft Body aspects of it, and having the ability to fire up a video and watch Phil work the settings is always a great reminder, when the time comes.
Phil and I do a lot of things differently, so it's really neat to have him explain, so completely, how he goes about doing his thing. He's so talented at this stuff, that it's fun to catch so much of this from a completely different perspective!
I'm just about to continue on with my lessons as we speak ;)
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Realism Rendering
I was about to fire up a playlist of the above lessons last night and, instead, I decided to watch some of the first several videos in the newest of Phil's courses: "Realism Rendering", and am very, very glad that I've picked that one up! It's on thing to hash through all of this in threads on the forum, but it's so beneficial to watch and listen to the whole topic from Phil, himself, without any interruptions or distractions. This is an excellent course for anyone whom might be interested in making realistic looking images in Carrara. Wow. It's amazing how real Carrara renders can become if you want them to! I haven't been much of a realism artist, but find all of these lessons to be incredibly useful for what I do too! As with any of these... it's always good to know everything that we can about the software we use, and it's amazing how much we know after asking professor Phil Wilkes!
Bravo!
Wow, I got scolded in another training thread for veering slightly off into a discussion of non-Carrara-based training, and you guys are off discussing Christmas lights... :) :) :)
Christmas lights just keep your mesmerized and the time just fly's by.
Yeah... Christmas lights are really cool!
On that note, I really like Phil tips in the texture room too!
By the way, Evil, I LOVE that first foto of the Christmas lights, with the red line of lights on the left side.
That would make a good Carrara challenge to reproduce that foto in a Carrara render. :)
I was thinking the same thing. You've got water, snow, ice, fog, glowing ambient lights, trees, Christmas lights, night sky, it really would make an excellent challenge to try to reproduce.
And I live maybe 5 minutes away from Thanksgiving Gardens, go there all the time during the summer actually. I'm not really a 'garden' fan, but my mom likes to go, and the place really is phenomenal, so I go occasionally with my mom for walks etc. There's talk that they'll eventually develop a full sized amusement park, and certainly I think there is space for it. And yes, during the winter they often do it up in lights and a lightshow, and just like it sounds you can drive through in your car and enjoy the lights :) I'm surprised to learn this sort of thing isn't as common over there in the UK as it is here, maybe it's an American phenomenon? I have always had the idea that we in the US do a lot more driving of cars than elsewhere in the world, possibly because things are so spaced out from each other, and generally it's more common to own your own vehicle here than it is elsewhere, potentially because we have fewer train/rail systems connecting everything (but more likely in my case because I just like having my own space in a car/truck and the freedom to go anywhere I want, whenever the mood strikes me).
To keep more on topic so that I don't get in trouble, I'm still working my way through the Advanced Carrara series. I'm loving it, and am learning stuff, but not as much as in the 'Learning Carrara' series generally, more like seeing principles applied, which is just as valuable mind you. :) If I had it to do over again, here's order of importance in which I would purchase these tutorials: Realism first (since it's the least expensive, the shortest, and the principles shown will apply to everything else), Learning Carrara second (so that I can really learn how to use Carrara in most of it's uses), and Advanced series third, to see many of the principles already taught applied and to learn some cool nifty new tips and tricks as well. I haven't got all the way through the Advanced series yet, but so far looking at the chapter headings I don't see anything on weight painting in Carrara, and all I could find elsewhere were a tutorial by DimensionTheory and a tutorial by Cripeman, both of which were instructive but neither of which really got in depth. I would like to learn more, because I think it's high time there was a weight-mapped V4/M4 for Carrara.
Thanks Joe.
That was taken the first year they had them up, so it has grown since then. I recall I stopped there on whim with the wife and the camera was in the car, but not a tripod, so I had to find railings and other solid, stationary objects to brace the camera on. That's why it is still a bit blurred.
Hmmm..... I am going to have to check, but I do believe I weight painted an A3 once because the thighs kept collapsing when in a seated position. It's been a few years, so I'll have to confirm this...
The haze and the blur is the best part !! It gives it that cold winter's evening feel.
I was thinking the same thing. You've got water, snow, ice, fog, glowing ambient lights, trees, Christmas lights, night sky, it really would make an excellent challenge to try to reproduce.
And I live maybe 5 minutes away from Thanksgiving Gardens, go there all the time during the summer actually. I'm not really a 'garden' fan, but my mom likes to go, and the place really is phenomenal, so I go occasionally with my mom for walks etc. There's talk that they'll eventually develop a full sized amusement park, and certainly I think there is space for it. And yes, during the winter they often do it up in lights and a lightshow, and just like it sounds you can drive through in your car and enjoy the lights :) I'm surprised to learn this sort of thing isn't as common over there in the UK as it is here, maybe it's an American phenomenon? I have always had the idea that we in the US do a lot more driving of cars than elsewhere in the world, possibly because things are so spaced out from each other, and generally it's more common to own your own vehicle here than it is elsewhere, potentially because we have fewer train/rail systems connecting everything (but more likely in my case because I just like having my own space in a car/truck and the freedom to go anywhere I want, whenever the mood strikes me).
To keep more on topic so that I don't get in trouble, I'm still working my way through the Advanced Carrara series. I'm loving it, and am learning stuff, but not as much as in the 'Learning Carrara' series generally, more like seeing principles applied, which is just as valuable mind you. :) If I had it to do over again, here's order of importance in which I would purchase these tutorials: Realism first (since it's the least expensive, the shortest, and the principles shown will apply to everything else), Learning Carrara second (so that I can really learn how to use Carrara in most of it's uses), and Advanced series third, to see many of the principles already taught applied and to learn some cool nifty new tips and tricks as well. I haven't got all the way through the Advanced series yet, but so far looking at the chapter headings I don't see anything on weight painting in Carrara, and all I could find elsewhere were a tutorial by DimensionTheory and a tutorial by Cripeman, both of which were instructive but neither of which really got in depth. I would like to learn more, because I think it's high time there was a weight-mapped V4/M4 for Carrara.
I touch on painting weight maps in chapter 9 of the Advanced course (specifically 0607 - Fine Tuning the Joints). I am not sure what tools for this are in other packages, but the Carrara tools - useful though they are to have - feel a little crude to me. Some extra functions such as a soften/blur tool would be useful.
RE: Carrara weightmapping.
To me, it is crucial to know if the rigged item will only be used in Carrara and if it is for a still or an animation. Now that I have watched PhilW's video tutorial on rigging his antman (great job, Phil!), and also learned about creating morphs, and also about vertex modeling in the posed position (animation mode), I greatly enjoy using Carrara's weightmapping for stills because Carrara has so many options for adjusting posed items, of which weightmapping is just one.
Suppose I modeled my own figure (which I do a lot) or downloaded an unrigged object from sharecg or similar. I would typically enter the vertex modeler and select the entire mesh and create a morph zone called "whole" and then scale to 99.5% for a morph called "smaller". Then I would use the bone tools to create and attach a skeleton. Then I would use the weihtmapping tools to clean it up a bit. Once posed, there are now multiple editing options in the posed position, including using the vertex modeler to edit the morph, or use the weightpanting brush, or selecting problem vertexes and manually adjusting the weight sliders.
Then if you want to make changes to the model, it is relatively easy to detach the skeleton and edit the mesh in any way desired (including changing the number of vertexes).
But if you want to integrate the figure in Poser, Studio, etc., it is best to first work through the mesh by creating bodypart groups. Then it has to be rigged by matching bones to the bodyparts. Then joint zones have to be edited. Then you will probably want some bending morphs for some of the joints. And even then, you are likely to want to make some adjustments in the posed position anyway.
So for me, if I know I am going to be relying on just Carrara, I prefer the simple Carrara skeleton to the bodypart-dependent Poser style rigging.
So far, I haven't done animations, so I'd caution that the virtues of multiple editing options for a still image might become a vice if each frame of an animation had to be adjusted individually. I'd also caution that I personally do not generally pursue realism. Not sure that that matters for comparing the single-mesh Carrara approach to the bodypart grouping Poser approach, but it might.
And back to the subject line of the thread - *** I learned much of what I described above from PhilW's tutorials. ***
EDIT - and the best Christmas lights I've ever seen are on 37th street in Austin, Texas. Google it - and keep in mind that the city's motto is "Keep Austin weird."
I did this video back in Carrara 5. I wanted to use DAZ/Poser figures and couldn't get Transposer to work, so I imported Digital-I's T-rex which I bought at DAZ. I loaded it into Studio first and exported the .obj file and material list into a folder, and then in Carrara I imported the .obj file and the image maps came with it.
I then built a rig for the T-Rex (my first time doing so) and started to animate. Then I discovered weird distortions were occurring, did a little research in the manual, and found out about weight painting. After some trial and error I had I figure I could animate.
During this process, I discovered a couple things: A high poly mesh can be a bear to weight paint, and weight painting/influences seemed to generate keyframes if you weren't at the beginning of the timeline, which also brought home to me the risks of editing anything while also working on animations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taejI7yb2R0
Wow Phil!
That hidden modeling technique that you mention in Chapter 5 of "Realism Rendering" course...
Just recently I've been quietly (almost) discovering my own techniques along those lines, but I REALLY love your example! Awesome! The page just before the above link is where I've first tried a similar concept, then the other one - but those were the very beginning. Since then I've tried a lot of different things and I've found that we can do enormous benefits to our scenes very quickly and easily using that very technique. The example that you do... oh man... I can really run with this!!! Thank you!
On that note, I'm really loving your latest course. I realize that I've been a bit hard-pressed to go 'real' with lighting, even though I've tested and vastly approved of your notes in the previous thread you've started regarding the linear workflow, I've been a bit back and forth in the decision to either go with or without it. This course is very well laid out and enlightening. I love all of the personal research you've done and applied it to Carrara language. It's following beautifully with my learning from Jeremy Birn, and I am very much on board with this now. With the proper forethought and daily practices, you're right... render times can still be amazingly fast with some really high-end results.
Bravo! And Thank You!
In short, he doesn't force any particular flow, but certainly demonstrates the why of it and then some amazing side-by-side results throughout, as he shows different ways to add your lighting and set your shaders. Interiors, exteriors, taking simple models and revealing how to make them look absolutely stunning using some of the finest advice ever on lighting, shading, camera placement, scene setup, post work in PS (which could then be translated to whichever software you use), creating your own texture maps for intricate realism... man... this course is freaking wonderful! :ahhh:
This is truly another one of those that I'll revisit for the wonders of it all... but the overall points are sinking in very well! Too, the working files are an excellent testament to the final results and points you've made. Okay, I'm now going to finish chapter five and see where this takes me... Phil, I'm really loving this! "Learning Carrara 8.5" is also excellent. I've caught most of it and just wanted to sample a touch of this one, and now I'm hooked! I'll get back to my other classes immediately, I promise!
Hi Dart - thanks as ever for your enthusiasm! I know that you are one person I will never have to reprimand for skipping class! ;-)
How could I not be enthused? !!!
Check this out:
I've spent many, Many hours in Carrara. I don't consider any of it to be time wasted - it is an immense bit of kit to explore, and I still feel that, the way the interface was designed and the flow of the various rooms, Carrara developers made it rather easy to "Learn as we explore".
I loved Poser, and would be a bit bummed out if anyone ever thought that I am not a Poser fan by my complete change-over to Carrara, almost never to return to Poser except for the use of some of its super efficient methods of creating and saving various Pose (including animated), Expression, and Hand pose files. It, too, was fairly simple to get to grips with. Get hands on a great tutorial, however, and the ol' light bulbs really begin to brighten at an even more aggressive rate.
Having your videos at my disposal has been a real treat. There are so many features and functions that I knew about, but put on hold because they seemed less important at the time. Actually seeing the tools and workflows in action, with a full explanation, visual guidance on the interface, and rendered out results, really helps to "Lock in" the whole idea of how all of this works, almost as if I've been performing the tasks myself - if you know what I mean. Kind of like music. After playing in bands that perform hits from popular artists for so many years (since New Years Eve, 1980) nowadays when I am told to learn a new song, I don't actually have to sit down behind my drums and play the song... in most places where I've lived, they'll lock me up for such things as drums are quite loud, knock things off the shelves a an adjacent building, etc., Instead, I just need to hear the song and get my head around all of the stops, counts, pace... and then practice the coordination of the maneuvers of anything out of the norm... and I can show up at the next gig and play the song.
But some parts of Carrara are like scary, locked doors that I've never opened yet. Not wanting to lose time by opening a whole new can of worms, I'd just put it off for another day... a day that never seems to come... because the door is still locked, and it's still scary! LOL
Take the Spline modeler for an example. That tool does not scare me in the slightest. But I'm so comfortable in the vertex modeler, that I avoid spline modeling entirely. So it's not scary, but it has been locked for the most part, unless I want to answer a forum question - where which I'll hop on in there and research the correct answer - as far as I can find. But the nice segment that you've demonstrated in "Learning Carrara 8.5" has me seeing how it would be very handy for making all manner of scene fillers, doodads, or even focal-point objects very quickly. Almost quicker than finding the stuff in a library of runtimes!
"...and one thing that you'll want to watch out for is...." I love it when you do that! :)
True, there are SO many ways to get similar results from multitudes of workflows and tools. I have come up with a very comfortable workflow in Carrara for bringing my animations to life. It took me a bit to get used to how vast scenes can be in Carrara without a second though from the software... it's like it almost wants us to just fill it up with stuff! Some folks would say: "This is slow and hard to use, so just don't use it", or something similar, about certain aspects of Carrara. Most of the time I simply ignore most of that, while keeping the concerns noted in the back of my mind. Other times I'll see it as an invitation to see how the thing is really meant to be used. A great way that I've found for researching that sort of thing is by opening the wonderful User's Guide that I've printed in its entirety. The author(s) often describe ways where the tool or feature is designed to be used, or whatever. Sometimes there just isn't much written about it before we run into the dreaded TBD, so I try other methods - often just imagining its best use with my own imagination.
You have a wonderful habit of actually telling the student that there are other methods. Your description and use of Blurry Reflections in Realism Rendering brings up valid points and proof, for example, so that we know a bit more what to expect, rather than to just never know what it's actually about. You've even pointed out things to try an avoid if we do decide that they are important enough to include... I like that!
The fact that you include every texture that you create, every mesh that you build, every modifier that you apply, every particles system that you set up, the finished renders, the final scenes... it's all invaluable content to have at our fingertips. It's almost like having a real Carrara class that we can complete at any rate we choose, and in any order we choose, and have the instructor's examples right there in the room with us just in the event that we need a second look. Ask you to repeat what you've said, and you repeat it exactly the same way... you're very patient with this particular student, and I appreciate that!
Great looking gif there, Dart!
I just finished watching the section in the Advanced course on modeling and rigging clothing. Whew, there's a fair bit more to it than I expected, a little daunting!
These tutorials are fantastic. I'm glad I bought them and have them saved on hard disk (an external hard disk that I can usb into my laptop at need, so I free up my laptop hard drive, but it works just as well). There's no way I could retain all the different parameters and settings and tips on just one run through and it's comforting to know there's a library of videos I can revisit at any time when I'm struggling with something and start to ask 'how did Phil do it?'.
Agreed. That Advanced Techniques was my only Phil course for quite some time, and I still enjoy watching various sections of it, as well as the whole thing in its entirety! I can tell that these others will be the same way for me... just love my Phil courses, and will never quit enjoying them!
Glad you are enjoying them and finding them useful! And a nice animation, I like the way Rosie's hair is animated too, it adds a lot. But it looks like it is in slow motion (maybe deliberately) - it would be great to see one with more realistic timing. It is something I have noticed a lot in people's animations generally, that it often looks too slow.
it damned well did it AGAIN DIM killed my carrara, the folder contents there but fail to load, I fixed it reinstalling Carrara but it was because I allowed DIM to install hidden files I hid for a damned good reason,
I added Poser 10 to DIM and that let it run amok again, is because I allowed 32bit and all my 64 bit stuff got overwritten by 32 as was the same path in DIM, I do not have Carrara 32 bit installed.
Carrara easier to fix though than DAZ studio, that REALLY got screwed, I am redoing it all manually now.
my lesson CONTENT ONLY IN DIM!!!! not programs and plugins
ok if conventional set up, mine is not
Phil,
We are all singing your praises once more - well deserved. I can honestly say I would not have stuck with Carrara without your tutorials.
My problem and it may be only my problem, with your tutorials is remembering where I saw a particular action/ process..whatever you want to call it, in all the many lessons. There are so many lessons covering so much ground that I spend a lot of time just searching. My solution, which helps only a little, is to write on the side of the list provided by Infinite Skills, in a sketchy shorthand manner. I was wondering if anybody else had come up with a better method. Please excuse the frayed and soiled example - it has seen a lot of use.
Starboardtack