Digital Art Zone

Hey head wax and Fenric -

You know, that’s the first thing I tried, but in the Assemble Room it didn’t look like it had worked.
Just tried again and upon rendering . . . turns out it couldn’t be easier.

Thanks.

tsarist - 30 September 2012 12:43 PM

Fenric

I have your ERC and Pose Helper.
The problem is I have no idea what they do.
The description was vague and the instructions weren’t very helpful.

When I used the Pose Helper, all it did was freeze up Carrara, but not actually help with the Pose.

Reagrding Pose Helper, try selecting a bone further down the hierarchy (for example “chest”). I think if you select the character at the top level and call Pose Helper, that is what crashes it. The default parameters are set up to mirror the pose.

ERC is very powerful and well worth getting to know if you do much animation. It basically sets up a relationship between one parameter and another (or many others).  As an example, you can link the biceps morph to the angle of the forearm, so that the muscle flexes automatically.  Or moving one aileron on an aircraft can move the aileron on the opposite wing in the opposite direction (as would happen in real life).

I have to admit that actually setting these things up takes a bit of learning and trial and error, but the effects can be fantastic. You can also use a time delay between movements and there is a good example of this to animate a lizard’s tail which you can download at ShareCG.com.

You certainly can get into trouble with Pose Helper by selecting the wrong level, but it should take either the main figure root or “hip” (model used to cause trouble, but that was a Carrara bug fixed with 8.1.1.x). 

Now, you don’t really want to select higher than that with Poser figures that have anything conformed to them: the conformed figures don’t respond well to manual posing

But it shouldn’t crash, and I’ve never been able to pinpoint or even reproduce the trouble he’s having.  But it’s never worked properly for Tsarist, and I just don’t know why.  Unfortunately, Carrara has nothing resembling proper error handling: when you see “An error has occurred”, my plugin never even gets control back.  No error code, no exception to catch, no logging - if I can’t reproduce an error myself, I have no hope of knowing exactly what happened.

Sorry, don’t want to hijack this post.
Just wanted to post an update on the truck file:

https://vimeo.com/50481659

I’ve added a controller for noise, which works on the front wheels and with delay on the chassis and the back wheels.

http://www.sharecg.com/v/64911/view/5/3D-Model/Carrara-ERC-controlled-wheels