Digital Art Zone

Hold on Roy, it just hit me…sometimes I’m real slow on the uptake…

It sounds like you’re saying that the only way to modify the rigging is using the tools in D|S, then exporting that to Carrara. Which means if I have a scene and character all set up in Carrara and decide I want to tweak the rigging I need to start with a fresh character in D|S, modify it, then send it into the scene and transfer all morphs and textures and everything else to it. Is that the case? No way to just make the tweaks directly in Carrara? 

If so, then ackk…...too much work. And I dread having to get back into D|S and figure it out again. It’s always a chore with that thing. Heck, just finding my content and stuff is a challenge with that content management thing. D|S and I just don’t get along at all.

Okay, instead of complaining I tried it in DS, and really the tools are pretty cool. Once you figure out that it’s the Joint Editor under Building/Scripting you need to use to add a bone. I guess they changed it a lot since the last time I used the whatever-it-was-called tool to rig characters. Still haven’t figured out the details, but it’s pretty sad that those tools aren’t included in Carrara. I mean, come on guys, Carrara should have that and then some.

There ya go!

My sentiments exactly - Carrara rigging is probably the world’s easiest to set up and the world’s most frustrating to use.  Could never figure out why they have this so-called Flagship and all the good character tools are in the free version.  Carrara is set up for animation, with the better keyfraning of the two, but the best animation tools are in DS, which is not set for fast rendering of animation.

Don’t know about that Building/Scripting you mention?  I’m using the Darkside UI - up on the top row there is a bone icon - select that, then all you need do to edit bones is right-click in the scene and get the menu.

There is a quite a lot of documentation and a few vids on YouTube to help out, but Daz has hidden them pretty well and they need some searching out - easier to Google than try to find them through the site.  They are pretty shallow, but with some reading between the lines and experimentation it becomes pretty straightforward.

futubab!
the aniblock importer for Carrara going really cheap today for the PA sale!
and there is a Poser plugin too!

I love to do animation in Carrara but it lacks some of the tools that makes CA a lot easier to do. I am not saying it is impossible. It just takes more time to do it.

Here is an animated character done in C6 I think.

http://www.rustboy.com/rustweb.htm

on Youtube the promo for it

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRms4B_iaSo

Wonderful work.

It took about 20 mins to come up with this for a start to a walk cycle and it has a ton of work still to do to. In fact I would most likely start over. I started out using target helpers but they were more trouble than I wanted so I stopped. The tools I used were Puppet Master and Fenric pose helper. I rushed it a bit. It would not be as jumpy if I had setup poses better and such. I made a list of poses and created a new puppet master dot for each one, Contact,  pass position, contact. (I should have made it like Contact, down, Pass position, Up, and contact. This would have given way better results.) I added some in between frames to help the legs pass through points and then used Fenric’s plugin to reverse the poses from PM.

It is an animated gif. It is not playing back very well in the forum. Have to click on it to see it better.