Digital Art Zone

question, i’am trying to animate three characters in Carrrara Pro V 8. I’ve placed a run cycle lasting about 36 sec on two of the characters, but on the third when i try to extend the run sequence using the repeat in the sequencer, the program crashes. I have a 2009 Mac, with eight cores, 16GB of ram, & a nvidia geforce gt 120 card, is it the computer or is the software just not able to animate more than two characters at a time?
thanks Chris

There is no specific limit to the number of characters you can render, and the specs of your machine tell us nothing very useful other than you are on a Mac. The issues with the scene is probably polygon count, total texture area (pixel) memory, the number of lights in the scene, displacement (if any), etc, etc, etc. But there is no magic rule that says 2 figures at 30sec but no more….

There are often lower res figures you can use (LOD = Level of Detail), or you can reduce the size of your textures, or you could animate the third figure separately and combine animations in your video editor…. In otherwords, what is holding you back is not Carrara, but your desire to do it all in one go. Could another program handle all of it? Maybe…, but if someone in another program hit a similar “wall”, they’d have to consider making the scene load lighter also.

when i try to extend the run sequence using the repeat in the sequencer, the program crashes.

Have you tried using NLA clips in the figure tracks, ..NLA clips can be “Looped” and extended, rather than repeating manual key-frame sections.

Hope it helps

3DAGE, thanks. I have heard of NLA clips but not sure how to do them. will do some research & figure out how to make it work.
Holly, the reason why I hate forums is b.c. responses like that. That tells me absolutely nothing. Thanks

HI Deadspeak

Holly is trying to help you, and is right, it’s one of those (it depends)  questions, so it depends on what’s n the scene as well as possibly what your doing.

Making NLA clips is easy .

If you already have key-frames for your figure in the sequencer, and if the figure is somthing you made in Carrara, make sure your figure is an “Animated group”.
If you’re using a Daz3D figure, then it’s already an Animated group, and it’ll have an NLA track in the sequencer timeline.

Select your Figure, then go to the top right panels, and you’ll see an NLA tab. in there you can either click, (Create Master Clip, or Create Master Pose).

If you click the option for Clip, you get a pop up options box,.
in here, you can select a reference bone (used for looping the animation) this is usually the HIP in a human figure. although, you can select any bone.

You also have a list of all the bones,. so you can selectively choose the animation you want to store in the new clip,.

Normally you’d just select the reference bone and click OK, to create the clip and delete the keyframes from the timeline.
There is an option to NOT delete the keyframes,.
But if you want the keyframes back , then you can use the “Import Clip data” option in the NLA tab, to copy the keyframes from a clip, back into the timeline.

Once you create a Clip, and delete the keyframes,. Carrara will place the new NLA clip in the “Scene” (Clips) tab, on the Bottom Right.

From there, you can drag and drop that clip into the NLA track for your figure.

If you select that clip in the sequencer timeline,. then look at the top right section, you’ll see a set of options for the NLA clip.
you can adjust the speed of playback,. reverse it, and Loop it.

If you choose “Loop”, then you can drag the end of your NLA clip out as much as you need. each loop point is marked with a Dotted line.

You can also create additional NLA Tracks for your figure, and you can have multiple clips in each Track.

Each NLA Track, also has “options” which allow you to specify which part of the Animation that track effects, so, you could have one track which only effects the arms of the figure,. while another track effects the rest of the figure (except the arms).

Hopefully some of that will make sense