Digital Art Zone

Heya Fenric, haven’t seen you round hope you are
I was working away today and I realised that having a short cut key to select the next bone down in a skeleton (up or down for that matter)
would make posing figures a lot easier.
Any chance of magicking something like that up in your next package?
Or does it already exist?

My question:

I use Tree duplicator stacks but I have noticed that it tends to put the figure hotpoint off centre.
Which means that, for example, if I want t0 duplicate the same figure over and over then give them different clothes etc - the clothes come in all wonky, courtesy of the misaligned hot point of the skeleton ?
and I can’t get them to sit.
Any way around this apart from getting them organised before I duplicate them?

thanks in advance

anyone else reading this, if you have a suggestion for Fenric feel free to post it here

I have posted a few, but he is MIA
getting Carrara animation inc trees, ocean primitives and Carrara rigged figures into Daz studio and Poser via morph target sequences being one
I HAVE done it manually one obj at a time and used dynamic cloth on the figure but a nice little sequenced morph plugin would be so nifty
(if only studio IMPORTED mdd!!! I would just use that ofcourse)

The best favour anyone, especially Fenric, could do for me regarding animation is to change those blasted bones from dotted lines to solids and to force the selection to stay selected.  So annoying when you have a bone selected, try to move it and the selection jumps to an underlying or nearby bone.

Roygee - 23 August 2012 02:32 AM

snip…. So annoying when you have a bone selected, try to move it and the selection jumps to an underlying or nearby bone.

Gah I hate that :(

wendy♥catz - 23 August 2012 12:53 AM

I have posted a few, but he is MIA

yes, I hope he didn’t fall over board :(

Hi!  Yes, I’m back.

So… let’s see…

Select up/down command:  Yep, easy.  I’ll try to get that in.

Hotpoint:  Carrara is re-calculating it for me.  It’s the main group that’s screwing things up - you’ll have to do “HP->Obj” right after duplicating to fix it.  You might also need to zero any clothing that got duplicated, too: the duplication often copies the transforms and that causes things to double up.  It seems to depend on how the clothing was rigged, because not everything suffers the problem.

Morph-object series: Yes, it’s a variation of the MDD exporter that writes each frame out as a separate OBJ.  I’ll try to get this in the next one.

Fix the “Select somthing and have Carrara select something else and simultaneously move it, and Undo doesn’t work” - nope, sorry.

Change the bone display?  No, I can’t.

Fenric - 24 September 2012 07:04 PM

Hi!  Yes, I’m back.

So… let’s see…

Select up/down command:  Yep, easy.  I’ll try to get that in.

Hotpoint:  Carrara is re-calculating it for me.  It’s the main group that’s screwing things up - you’ll have to do “HP->Obj” right after duplicating to fix it.  You might also need to zero any clothing that got duplicated, too: the duplication often copies the transforms and that causes things to double up.  It seems to depend on how the clothing was rigged, because not everything suffers the problem.

thanks Fenric! Glad you are back
People like yourself and a few others have made Carrara a way better tool than it is straight out of the box.

I use Duplicate Tree so often it’s not funny - well it is actually - it saves so much time!

I think we should invent a Carrara medal actually

I’ll try that fix for the hotpoint issue next time I have the problem.

cheers from Oz !

hey head wax -

I feel like Fenric’s tools offer this vast potential for Carrara, but I haven’t gotten facile enough with them to take full advantage.

Can you explain how / why you use the tree replicator so much (or point me to some documentation if it’s already out there)?

Is this for duplicating figures (as opposed to just objects)?

Does it save on memory by using a clone, or is it simply faster than reloading the figure from the browser?

Thanks for any info.

Mosk the Scribe - 25 September 2012 09:33 AM

hey head wax -

I feel like Fenric’s tools offer this vast potential for Carrara, but I haven’t gotten facile enough with them to take full advantage.

Can you explain how / why you use the tree replicator so much (or point me to some documentation if it’s already out there)?

Is this for duplicating figures (as opposed to just objects)?

Does it save on memory by using a clone, or is it simply faster than reloading the figure from the browser?

Thanks for any info.

It duplicates any arbitrary tree of items.  It is functionally equivalent to dragging to the browser and back again, except it is a LOT faster.

Mosk the Scribe - 25 September 2012 09:33 AM

hey head wax -

I feel like Fenric’s tools offer this vast potential for Carrara, but I haven’t gotten facile enough with them to take full advantage.

Can you explain how / why you use the tree replicator so much (or point me to some documentation if it’s already out there)?

Is this for duplicating figures (as opposed to just objects)?

Does it save on memory by using a clone, or is it simply faster than reloading the figure from the browser?

Thanks for any info.

Hey Mosk the Scribe,

The main use is for duplicating figures - as the inbuilt command in Carrara will not.
A typical example for me might be putting a lot of plant figures close to each other in a scene.

Without Fenric’s plug in work flow is :

Drop plant in scene. If scene is complicated then it can take a while to get plant in right place, making the right size etc,
I then drop another plant in, then select the first plant, then the second plant, then use ctrl/k to bring up the align window, alihgn it with the first plant, then change the size of the new plant….

If I am dropping a whole lot of plants in this can get boring.

(Alternatively I can debone the plant but this will lose any morphs or posing you might have done - debone via select figure ‘model’ then smooth it, then detach skeleton. This will give you a mesh that you can then duplicate with the inbuilt Carrara Duplicate command.)

With Fenric plug in I drop my plant figure in, get it set up, then select it, then use Edit>Fenric>Tree Duplicate - and I have another copy of my Figure just where I want it.

Of course this works as Fenric said, for anything in the Tree structure.

If you are wondering why I don’t use replicate command it’s because I find doing this is quicker and gives me Figures etc where I want them

Presto

head wax & fenric -

Thanks.  That definitely sounds like something I need to work into my workflow.  Should be very useful for animations where an exact duplicate is needed in the same location as the first, where one copy is parented to a figure, and the other copy is not.  By toggling visibility, can then have someone drop a glass, throw a football, or whatever is needed.

Any other tips on using Fenric’s products would be welcome, especially simple ones for ERC.

MDD was the most annoying plugin, but ERC is the most awkward because that is the request I get the most:

Why don’t I just make better examples and tutorials? 

Um… well…

I don’t use it. 

Thing is, I don’t do animations.  I wrote it according to Faba’s design and requirements, and so I don’t really know exactly what you would want to do with it…  I can tell you what the various knobs and switches do, but I really can’t tell you why you would want to (at least, not in anything other than generic terms.)

Hey Fenric -

I have a rather specific question you might be able to answer.

Right now, Mimic for Carrara creates a bunch of NLA clips (one for each phoneme) and this can’t be combined as one big clip - thus there’s no way to capture all the data, save it as a single NLA, add it to the browser and then use the lip synch later at your convenience.

Would your BVH/PZ2 Exporter capture this data?  (thus making it possible to simple export all the lip synch data as an animated pz2 which could then be reimported and captured as a single NLA clip?)

Thanks

It should to be able to capture any movement regardless of source.  The plugin works by playing the scene frame by frame and reading the actual position of the object. Morphs end up more hit and miss because the names don’t always match. You’ll end up with a pz2 that has data, but won’t reapply because the channel names are wrong. I haven’t ever tried mimic (don’t do animations), so I don’t know for certain whether the viseme morphs line up or not. I’ll have a look later and see - I’m not at home right now.

Hey Fenric -

I’ll try capturing the lip synch data later and report back on how it works.

I have another question about the ERC Chain.

I’m using it to wag a dog’s tail.

Ideally, I’d crate several basic motions and save those into NLA clips for reuse later.

I’ve added the ERC’s successfully with a 1 frame delay.

First I made a side to side wag by moving the tail root only on the z axis.  I deleted the x and y rotation keyframes.  And saved as an NLA clip.

I then cleared the figure’s pose and repeated the process with rotation on the x axis only, deleted other keys, and saved as new NLA clip.

The NLA clips work fine individually.

When I combine them, however, they don’t give an exact combination of the left right and up and down motion.  They kind of do for part of the time, but not completely.

I’m not sure if this result has to do with NLA problem or if I need to do something slightly different with the ERC chain.  (When adding the chain, I set it up for “ALL” rotation as opposed to going through the whole process twice and creating just one chain with x rotation and another with z.

Should this combination of motions work in theory?

Thanks.

Once you have made your NLA clips, I assume you removed or disabled ERC?  Did you make sure to set the NLA Mode to add instead if replace?  Maybe shoot 3dage a pm and see if he has any ideas- he seems to use NLA clips quite a bit.