Let's talk about the storyboard room
Pjotter
Posts: 274
There was a mentioning of the storyboard room in a different thread. Never used it. I do not see the point of seeing 12 frames. I can do the same in Assemble room. The sequenser does weird things and is very slow.
Can someone explain why the Storyboard room is so handy?
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well, if I understand correctly it should help you in (never used anyway, I may be wrong):
- adjusting camera motion especially when the camera plane intersects any object of the scene
- rendering more quickly frames or part of them to correct shaders or lighting/shadows
- adjusting character animations sharply
- tweaking particles and fx
- generally speaking finding unwanted outcomes
- ...
you can see up to 28 frames, if I recall correctly
I wish someone could write a plugin to disable it or at least hide the icon so one cannot click on it.
+1
It does tend to gum up the works if one accidentally clicks on it if the scene is packed full of goodies, doesn't it?
I think the intentions are sound, but every time I tried to use it how I thought it should be used, I couldn't set it up properly to actually be of any help. Only looking across every frame within less than a second's time just wasn't practical for me - I'd need to see more frames and it would be nice to set how often a frame is shown, like every third or fifth frame, etc.,
Still... it's a lot easier to work on in the assembly room for me.
Yes, you can do that, you can set it to show every Xth frame. I think a display mode that showed all the keys might be useful - but I still probably wouldn't use it!
I think it's more a per-object helper, you select and act upon it
That might not be bad either - but it actually loads everything - and I think it has to load it as many times as there are visible frames, making it unruly to work with.
Really? I looked but couldn't find a setting for that. Either way... I wouldn't mind it disappearing! ;)
I always had my doubts about the Storyboard room. Because Carrara is such a good tool, I thought I was missing something. But even the experts here do not have a solid point for using it. So to my surprise Carrara has something that is not very useful. That is a first.
may be considered redundant but If I had,say, a NPR animation and color correction tools it could be really useful, wanna give it a chance
NPR animation?
Tried to google it, but didn't find anything useful
Isn't a storyboard a cartoon type sketch of what the final scene will hopefully look like. If you could put in a few sketches in Storyboard Room and it would translate this into the figures in the Assembly Room mimicing this sketch somehow and fills in all the tweeners, then the Storyboard Room might come close to what the name suggests. As it is you wonder what the developmentteam were thinking.
Non-Photorealistic Render. If you look at the very top of the Rendering panel in the Render room, you will see a little drop down, set to Photorealistic by default, but you also have Draft and Non-Photorealisitic (I also have Luxrender via Luxus, Normal Map and Octane Renderer due to plugins). Draft is meant as a fast way to preview your scene, but it isn't multi-threaded and so can sometimes take longer than a Photorealstic render! But the NPR renderer is worth having a play with, it can generate cartoon or hand-drawn looking outputs in a variety of styles, if that is something you are interested in.
also known as cel shading or toon shading
I feel the same way. So I just get the feeling that I'll find it's golden value much later in life!
Someone obviously thought it should be added some time ago. Perhaps to show on a single page how tweeners work?
Tee Hee Hee!!! Dreaming is Fun, isn't it?
Phil,
Just tried them..your right the draft and non-photorealistic takes almost as long as realistic. This is as useful as the Storeyboard Room... If they had put th amount of effort that they used to create the Storyboard Room, and put it into an automatic save, like After Effects and many other applications have, that would be useful..... Though come to think about it, maybe its best that they didn't considering how well the save works at present when you go to quit. Although it would be nice to have new features, I would be half happy if they just cleaned up the program as it is now.
The big thing there is that those renders only use a single core. I still like them for some things and, yeah... I'd love it if they could multi-core them.
It would be great if they'd be able to save just changes into an already saved file to make the process so much faster - only then would I use an auto-save in Carrara!
Me too! Heck, if they needed some extra cash for a bug-fixes-only update, I'd pay.
Hmm, glad I read this. It seemed to me that the Storyboard room could be a very useful/helpful setup for creating movies. But then I noticed it was difficult to find any substantial information on it.
I guess now I know why :p
Well, at least I don't have to worry about learning it, if everything can be done in the assembly room. Good to know!
Dart,
I would pay also....I think the biggest mistake DAZ made was reducing the price of Carrara below $200. Although it was good for all those that could not afford it previously, it also removed I believe incentive to update it further. In a sense you have declared your own product worthless. If you want to offer a limited Carrara at a very low or even free option...that is ok. Let say it has limited rendering only up to 640 x360 for video and 1000 x 1000 for stills. If the DAZ can't make money on Carrara it can't update.
If I was DAZ I would not try to match the options of "the big boys" but work on an even simpler interface that does not rquire months and months of dedicated study to get even a murky understanding. The KISS concept would rule supreme.
Just some thoughts,
Maybe I'm biased because I have been using Carrara for years, but I don't think the interface is that obtuse - I've seen a lot worse (cough, blender, cough). I believe most Carrara users will have used either DS or Poser before, and first of all just want to access their content library and be able to load figures, clothe and pose them and render an image, and it is really pretty easy to be able to do that. You can then build on that as and when required to explore the extra features that Carrara gives you.
Phil,
I agree it is simpler than most ...and that is the point, that is a great niche to have - the easiest 3D program to use . How many post have there been on the forum where people have given up on Carrara and come back much later to try again. I know I struggled understanding the Texture Room and all its manifold combinations. If you are a techy, than you can probably breeze through it, if your brain is more art orientated than it could b e a problem and you will need help such as your excellant tutorials, of which I would have been lost without.
There is no way that Carrara developers ( if they are still developing ?) can stay up with the constant layers of complexitiy that expensive 3D programs are constantly adding to their programs. They have the money to do it and it is what their subscibers want. However, if DAZ concentrated on making a simple, solid program and don't add too many bells and whilstles....I think they could have a share of the market that is begging attention. A good example of how the interface could be simpler is the name of this thread....A whole sector of the program which nobody knows how to use. I agree that Carrara is one of the easiest interfaces...If I had any input I would work on making it even simpler and as I said follow the KISS rule.
Just a quick clarification on something I am late to the conversation for. Carrara's NPR renderer is different from its toon or cel shading. The NPR renderer is based on simulated brush strokes. You can control the direction, length, thickness, and pattern of the brush strokes. You can set different brushes for diffuse, shadows background, and other elements. You might try to use it to create a cel shaded look, but you might also try to use the other renderers to try to simulate a cel haded look.
well, it should be pretty difficult to create a black silhouette outside the NPR
easy use all black shaders in a white BG 100% anbient no lights or shadows
Funny you should say that since I was just doing that yesterday using normal shaders and lights and the PR engine - just no GI or IL and no Ambient. Very easy to pull off! ;)
You know... thanks for pointing this out. For some reason I think (? maybe? it's been so long since I've messed with toon experiments) that I always thought the two were connected. Maybe I'll try more Toon as well as some more NPR. I've alwasy been rather impatient in the setup of the NPR - knowing that I shouldn't be. But I think it may be the Toon that I'd be more after than NPR anyways. Drives me nuts using one cpu core on and eight-core machine! LOL
Never tried that. Sounds fun!
So for pure black silhouette, the all None shader I was talking about in the other thread would work great.
I have not done it for silhouettes but have to create alpha masking videos
Cool idea. I use Depth multipass for that - just hide everything but the subject I want to mask and I get black and white. But this way, we'd get the antialiasing. As NASSOS pointed out, multipass render outputs don't use antialiasing, which is a real bummer.
I'm going to switch to this method
Thanks
There is a simpler way than changing all the shaders - just have no lights in your scene (including Ambient at zero) and use a white Backdrop.
ok
what about a black outline of an object moving or rotating in the 3d space?
Both the Toon 3 filter and the NPR renderer have options for an outline, although both have limited ability to minimize outlines of internal elements. For example, if a belt is a separate object from an overcoat, both will outline the belt across the waist in addition to the outline of the figure against the background. Maybe YAToon plugin or the DCG plugin do this?