My First Two Music Videos Done With Carrara (One with Octane, one without)
teknostorm
Posts: 163
Hi,
Here's my first video rendered with Octane plugin, and the second done with Carrara. The animation took one day, and the rendering with the newly purchased Octane took around 30 hours using path tracing and 100 samples per frame. I have a lower end 2 GB graphics card, i7 PC with 16GB ram. The opening sequence (subscribe) was done without Octane because octane wouldn't work for me after the first render, which was solved after I updated the Octane plugin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMxssNWiU-g
(ABC Song for Children with Bob the Car)
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Comments
And here's the first one, done without Octane. This one took a lot of time as I was learning and also because of the crashes and failure to open the Carrara projects with motion capture data loaded. That problem still persists in many projects where I load complex motion data (bvh or pz2). Also, there wasn't enough time to get the lip sync done right and many corrections had to be ignored. The total time was around 3 weeks during the live shoot also took place. The rendering times were 1:30 minutes and up per frame, if I had Octane it would probably have been much better and faster.
It's a music video (not in English) -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYrqP_R00_4
Wow, great work in both animations!
I was surprised by the ABC one because I clicked on the link without reading the description first and I was expecting to see the nightclub dancer scene since you had posted screenshots previously :)
Then I saw that was the 2nd link, and wow, looks like it came out quite well too!
Great work :)
Additional notes for the vids. On the 1st vid I think it's probably intentional but maybe not, one of the trees is off the ground and hovering in the air. Also the car wheels hubcaps have a lovely bright yellow flower painted on, which looks very nice, but since the flower doesn't move it makes it apparent the wheels aren't really spinning (not sure if that matters). Also I wasn't sure why the door of the car is sort of smashed in/laying sideways across the driver's seat in the last shot?
For the dance club vid, it's very apparent a lot of great work went into this, very cool stuff! Had a few times where hands were passing through other objects, and one time when one of the girls was kneeling her knees were passing through the floor. Visually very exciting and matched to the song very well :)
Nice work teknostorm, I'm inspired by your effort. I loved them both, in different ways. I noticed the same things Jonstark pointed out but I know only too well how tiring it can be for one person to put all that work together...well done!
Thanks...and it was instructive too.
I always thought it was "el-ma-nen-oh-pee", but it's L M N O P" huh? Wow, who knew? :) :) :)
Standing applause!! Wow, those were awesome.
Gotta ask... how did you organize the second project? I'm assuming you broke it up into separate .car files, but there was so much there, not to mention the video under and overlays, its hard to even guess how you set it up. Minor issues aside...
Most impressive!
- Don
I never get notifications of replies from Carrara forum.. Just saw these, thanks for the kind words everyone!
Jonstark - Haha, that must have been a surprise watching the yellow car instead of the girl!
Tree off the ground I noticed after the render and decided to ignore it. Ditto with the car wheel flowers, I noticed that only after I started rendering.. And ditto with the car door smashed in, that one I noticed after it had been uploaded. When I saw it on youtube I was thinking when did I do that?? I must have hit the gate node by mistake instead of rotating the car in one of the scenes. Since it was on the other side of the camera it showed only in the last shots and I missed them :(
We had a promotion strategy for the video so I could not reupload.. it is doing quite well on youtube at the moment!
Jonstark - The dance video was another thing altogether. Most of the errors I had noticed, but they could not be corrected because I was on a deadline. And the deadline was not a problem except that Carrara behaved very very badly with imported bvh files. I actually had to import the bvh to Daz Studio then save as pz2 then import in Carrara (Wendy's suggestion). But I had to animate the camera and render immediately after that without closing the project. Because the project with the pz2 file imported would not open a second time. This was true for most of the scenes in the video. So that left little room for trial and error and corrections later.
Thanks DADAuniverse, the dance video was indeed a toughie, but I got to learn Carrara (and 3d animation) through it!
Haha! Glad to be of help!
Thank you so much Don, glad you like these!!
The workflow for the dance video went like this -
- I setup the various scenes with props lights and textures and saved each as different car files. I had 4 scenes, the dancing bottles, the bridge with bikes and cars, the pole dance scene and the white room scene (white scene was white because I was extremely short of time so just added reflections to white walls on a cube).
- Put the models in each scene and textured and dressed them up.
- Cut the song according to the scene I wanted (intro / first verse / second verse) and loaded and ran Mimic Pro in Carrara to lip sync. Added expressions at some places. In some parts I missed lip sync altogether because of shortage of time.
- Imported the choreography motion data (bvh files loaded on Genesis 2 in Daz Studio then saved as pz2 files and imported on the models in Carrara). If I imported bvh directly the models would jump all over the scene weirdly.
- Now for the big mess - the .car files with imported pz2 would not open again after closing ('NULL Point Error'). So for every scene I had to immediately animate the camera and render. If I was displeased with the render later or noticed errors, I would have to reload the scene, import pz2, animate the camera and render again.
- For the scenes where we had the live video mapped on screens, I had to wait for the live video before I could render. The whole reason I used Carrara was because Daz Studio would not map video textures. (Also Carrara could animate better and render faster.)
- The live shoot was shot in during this and edited according to the song. I cut the edited live shoot according to the scene to be rendered and texture mapped that on the screen, then rendered the scene.
- Once all scenes were rendered, I edited them in Sony Vegas (video editor), including the live shoot.
(btw I also composed the song and sang the male parts, and I'm also the guy singing in the video, although I am quite embarrassed by that!)
Oh Man! I loved these!
My favorite? Hmmm... tough call. I was just going to say: "The ABC song"!
I really loved that! But darn... something about that second one makes me want to just keep watching it over and over! LOL
Very nice job! Keep it up!
Thank you for the encouraging words Dartanbeck! You and Jonstark and a lot of other forum members were invaluable in my getting the videos done!
Man, that is SO cool to hear!
I can hardly wait to turn my Granddaughter on to the ABC's video! Next time I see her! She's just at that age: 20 months and starting to talk! ;)
Wow that would be great, we need all the viewers we can get!
Somehow the video has made it into the 'In The News' section when I search google for 'Kids Songs' or 'ABC Song' -
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=kids+songs
it sounds like the file is referencing something moved.
Was the pose loaded from a mapped runtime?
Though that should make little difference.
Saving compressed is never a good idea either.
No I don't think so. Supposing I have a car file with all sets and models loaded. I can save it and open it fine. Then I open it and import a pz2 file onto the genesis 2 figure. The figure dances just fine and I can set up a camera and render. But if I save the car file and reopen, I get a 'Null point' error. So it's definitely a pz2 problem. The same pz2 loaded in Daz Studio can be saved and reopened.
Here is the thread where I figured out it was the pz2 that was causing the problem. When I deleted the whole pz2 clipsequence from the .car file in a text editor then the file would open again.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/52936/
Forgot to mention, I stopped saving compressed as it took too long, so all my car files were saved without compression (thanks to whoever had given me that golden advise!)
...you mean I have to quit compressing on save? I won't do it... or will I?
I didn't have any problems with compression, except each time I saved the .car files it took upto 10 minutes, which was a major workflow stopper. When I removed that option it took less than 2 minutes. So for speedy saves you can try removing the compress option on save.
I might as well join the club, eh?
There are issues with file corruption sometimes when saving as compressed. Fortunately, there are some ways to fix it, but it sounds like a PITA.