Carrara Challenge #27: “Carrara 9, Give us a Sign” WIP Thread: Voting has started.

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  • cdordonicdordoni Posts: 583
    cdordoni - that's a really neat sculpture! Are you in MIT? Student? Professor?

    I live in Massachusetts, occasionally drive into Boston and happened to see it one day. I grabbed that night photo off the internet.

  • wgdjohnwgdjohn Posts: 2,634

    Dart, Perhaps a bit "babble on" but I get great info from your posts. :)  Spent last night just installing all my newest DCG plug-ins... got a bit of learning to do... it can wait, possibly, until I have at least 1 thing ready for Carrara Challeng.

    Misty, How about two of the Daily Planet, world with logo style. One could be as is the other showing "DAZ3D" text spun around revealing. "Carrara 9 Available Today" sorta like a headline... then compose the two, one next to the other, as one image to count as one entry... or even just the last text.

    Everyone... very nice ideas/renders all.

    Spending this week packing up to list house... so not much time to mess with my idea, much less 3.

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,187
    cdordoni said:
    cdordoni - that's a really neat sculpture! Are you in MIT? Student? Professor?

    I live in Massachusetts, occasionally drive into Boston and happened to see it one day. I grabbed that night photo off the internet.

    Cool! Are you a cream pie fan as well? My 3D modeling mentor lives in Massachusetts - he loves his Boston Cream Pie!!! :)

  • wgdjohnwgdjohn Posts: 2,634
    edited August 2016

    Mmmmm... cream pie!

    Have to model one so I can stare at the model and work up my appetite. :)

    Post edited by wgdjohn on
  • DiomedeDiomede Posts: 15,073
    edited August 2016

    Some accessories modeled in Carrara.

    EDIT: Bat made by using polylines and the lathe tool.  Hat made by starting with sphere and extruding the bill, but the back has a gap for the size adjuster strap (not shown in pic).  Ball was a challenge because I wanted to raise the seams like a real baseball.  Started with a cube, selected some of the edges, used filet, then added points to middle of big squares and scaled those points up to make more sperical, then applied smoothing to get back to a ball shape.  Made seams their own shading domain.

     

    Suggestions most welcome, especially for improving the uvmaps.  I used the seam/pin/unfold method for the bat and the hat, separated by shading domain.  I applied the spherical preset to the ball.

    baseball stuff.jpg
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    gg baseball bat mesh.JPG
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    gg baseball hat mesh.JPG
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    gg baseball mesh seams.JPG
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    Post edited by Diomede on
  • pnewhookpnewhook Posts: 70
    edited August 2016

    Hey Dart, thats amazing!  Really good!  You and I seem to have had the same idea for content, but honestly I like yours better.

    Heres what I was able to come up with.  There's still a bunch I want to adjust (my wife wants rainbow particles coming off the wings, but uggh!!)

     

    dragon scene 2.png
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    Post edited by pnewhook on
  • MarkIsSleepyMarkIsSleepy Posts: 1,496
    edited August 2016

    @diomede - love the bat, hat and ball.  For the hat, I wonder if you would get better UVs if you put seams where there are actually seams on a baseball cap so that you end up with six separate panels for the top (see attached photo).  It probably doesn't matter if you are just going to apply a flat color to them but if you wanted to add a bump map it might be a little better. 

    For the ball, here's what I would do:

    1. Insert vertex cube with no subdivisions
    2. Add two levels of smoothing and convert
    3. Select edges where you want your seams to be
    4. Extract around
    5. Scale down your seam lines 
    6. Switch to UV editing mode with the seam lines still selected and add a seam
    7. Unwrap
    8. Move the islands around so they fill up more of the UV space

    I didn't separate the ball into shading domains, but with my ending UV map I could just paint a quick black and white mask in any paint program and use mixers in the various channels.

    I think that is basically what you did, but starting with no divisions in the cube results in a lower poly model that's a bit easier to work with.

    cap_PNG5686.jpg
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    BallModelUnwrapA.JPG
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    BallModelUnwrap.JPG
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    Post edited by MarkIsSleepy on
  • AntaraAntara Posts: 444

    Hi Everyone.

    Thank you head wax for the fun theme! :) And WOW did it inspite some amazing exciting convepts!

    Question: Does anyone know whatn font is used by the official Carrara logo?

    My first attempt - just throwing ideas in. Very simple. Seconf image has DOF in post (tried it in render and found it lacking - it's the same post-ptocess step, only iy takes about half an hour instead of several seconds and does not produce comparable results...)

    Doc20.jpg
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    Doc20ed.jpg
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  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,187

    Fantastic! Welcome home, Antara!!!

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,187
    pnewhook said:

    Hey Dart, thats amazing!  Really good!  You and I seem to have had the same idea for content, but honestly I like yours better.

    Heres what I was able to come up with.  There's still a bunch I want to adjust (my wife wants rainbow particles coming off the wings, but uggh!!)

    I like yours - you've got the character right up front in-camera! Sweet!

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,187
    edited August 2016

    diomede and MDO2010, very nice WIPs!

    Post edited by Dartanbeck on
  • DiomedeDiomede Posts: 15,073
    edited August 2016

    Mark - thanks for the suggestions and the illustration.  Very helpful.  Per your idea, I have changed the hat's uvmap so that the dome is made up of panels, each separated by seams.  The mesh is not changed.  I will have to delay optimizing the use of space.  Also, I will work on the ball after I get back from attending (wait for it...) a baseball game this afternoon.  laugh​    Nationals vs Braves

    Pnewhook - great start!  But I agree with your wife, rainbow particles coming off the wings would be cool.  Just teasing.  One thing you might consider is using some translucency/caustics on the wings to give it a membrane look.

    Antara, great start and thanks for the DOF tip.  Will be a real time saver.

    Wgdjohn - best of luck with the house listing.  I know that can be a stressful time.  Maybe a little Carrara on your laptop can be soothing?

    Here is the updated uvmap for the hat with checkered shaders applied.  You can see the effect of the panels, but I did get them to be roughly the same size.

     

     

     

    hat update uvmap2.JPG
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    hat update uvmap.jpg
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    Post edited by Diomede on
  • MarkIsSleepyMarkIsSleepy Posts: 1,496
    edited August 2016
    Antara said:

    Question: Does anyone know whatn font is used by the official Carrara logo?

    @Antara - I tried to figure this out about a year ago and I don't think it is a font - if you look at it, both the A's and the R's have two different appearances. I guess one could be the lowercase and the other the uppercase, but that would be a bit weird.  I htink it is just a logo someone made without bothering about a full font.

    I looked around for something similar but my usual go-to source, WhatTheFont (which lets you upload an image and then compares it to their database) on MyFont.com, came up blank on it - it's not very reliable with so few characters to compare.  I did eventually find something that was pretty close (with some additional minor editing of the final text in Photoshop) but I am a bit of a font collector and have so many I have no idea which one I used.  I'll see if I can find the PSD on one of my backup drives and maybe figure it out.

    EDIT: The attached image is not my own result - it's just the logo from the startup screen that I isolated and converted to B&W when I was trying to find the font.

    CarraraFont.JPG
    274 x 73 - 31K
    Post edited by MarkIsSleepy on
  • WendyLuvsCatzWendyLuvsCatz Posts: 37,784

    I traced it in the vertex room

  • MarkIsSleepyMarkIsSleepy Posts: 1,496
    edited August 2016

    @Sad - I've done that for things too, but if you just wanted to get the shape into Carrara and have Photoshop there is an even faster way:

    1. In Photoshop, select the letters
    2. Convert selection to a Path
    3. Export the path as an Illustrator .ai file
    4. In Carrara, insert a spline object
    5. In the spline editor, use File>Import and import your path file
    6. Ta da!

    Example attached (I really should have cleaned up my selection some, I literally just used the magic wand to select the black letters and left it as is and my image is so low res that it is pixellated - that's why it is so jagged).  I've also used this technique to get gear shapes, logos and fairly complicated bits of decoration into Carrara quickly.  You could trace them in the vertex room, but Photoshop has more tools for doing that sort of thing accurately.

    Thanks to Mark Bremmer, who I learned this technique from. :)

    CarraraSpline.JPG
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    Post edited by MarkIsSleepy on
  • MistaraMistara Posts: 38,675
    edited August 2016

    splines for lightning?! smiley

    one of these modifiers can curve text round a ball

     

    Post edited by Mistara on
  • DiomedeDiomede Posts: 15,073

    Nationals won.  Too hot and too humid.  Should have stayed inside playing with Carrara.

     

     

    diomede said:

    I will have to delay optimizing the use of space.  Also, I will work on the ball after I get back from attending (wait for it...) a baseball game this afternoon.  laugh​    Nationals vs Braves

     

  • Nice theme this one, instantly inspired a thought, but alas same issues with time and committments that've kept me from Carrara and the forum would most likely keep me from creating the image, but we'll see. Nice to see the WIPs so far.

  • wgdjohnwgdjohn Posts: 2,634
    edited August 2016

    Sad and MDO2010... the letters "WGD" above my name are a custom font I designed on the Amiga and later transferred over to TypeTool by Fontlab. I now have a few custom, made by your's truely, complete fonts sets. I used the Font editor in Carrara to load and extrude them.Even sometimes will convert to Vertex objects if wanting more control for editing them further... but then that does get time consuming for those as slow as I am making/perfecting some vector designs.

    Post edited by wgdjohn on
  • MarkIsSleepyMarkIsSleepy Posts: 1,496
    wgdjohn said:

    Sad and MDO2010... the letters "WGD" above my name are a custom font I designed on the Amiga and later transferred over to TypeTool by Fontlab. I now have a few custom, made by your's truely, complete fonts sets.

    That's really cool.  As a long-time font addict (a font for every occasion! ;) ) I have occasionally considered trying to design a font or two just for fun - I even went so far as to get a couple books on the subject (which I still haven't read all the way through).  Do you still use TypeTool?  It seems pretty reasonably priced and looks like it has more than enough functionality to keep a beginner hobbyist busy for a long time. 

  • cdordonicdordoni Posts: 583

    Cool! Are you a cream pie fan as well? My 3D modeling mentor lives in Massachusetts - he loves his Boston Cream Pie!!! :)

    Hehe, its at least as good as anything else with fat, sugar and chocolate.

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,187
    cdordoni said:

    Cool! Are you a cream pie fan as well? My 3D modeling mentor lives in Massachusetts - he loves his Boston Cream Pie!!! :)

    Hehe, its at least as good as anything else with fat, sugar and chocolate.

    My Rosie makes me these really killer cream-puff rings... Ouch! Covered in strawberries and chocolate! cheeky I love yummies!!!!

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,187
    edited August 2016

    Antara, since we're doing Carrara 9, you want a different font anyways! wink

    Post edited by Dartanbeck on
  • wgdjohnwgdjohn Posts: 2,634
    edited August 2016
    MDO2010 said:
    wgdjohn said:

    Sad and MDO2010... the letters "WGD" above my name are a custom font I designed on the Amiga and later transferred over to TypeTool by Fontlab. I now have a few custom, made by your's truely, complete fonts sets.

    That's really cool.  As a long-time font addict (a font for every occasion! ;) ) I have occasionally considered trying to design a font or two just for fun - I even went so far as to get a couple books on the subject (which I still haven't read all the way through).  Do you still use TypeTool?  It seems pretty reasonably priced and looks like it has more than enough functionality to keep a beginner hobbyist busy for a long time. 

    I do still use TypeTool 3 but only occasionally. A really neat feature of it is that you can design the fonts in Illustrator and import them into TypeTool. I'd love to have Fontographer but TypeTool 3 can handle nearly anything if not all that an occasional user wants... that is me. The price is well worth it!!  Another feature of TypeTool is that can convert some older postscript typefaces, .ps, which I had that needed to be TrueType, OpenType and one other which escapes me at the moment. What it didn't convert I used a trial basis converter which did all that I needed to convert nearly all for Windoze.

    One font I have I call WGD Designer has entire logos as well as unique symbols, arrows, NorthEastSouthWest and pointers etc as a single font character each.

    I am getting much better at 3D Modeling thanks to all the help on my Carrara Modeling thread. I've always been rather good at 2D graphics as well as DTP. The latter I created forms, business cards, pamphlets and anything that one of my clients needs. I've also created a lot of web pages, all but 2 are gone now... I always include 3D models for unique logos and animations for some websites... but that depends on what they want. When I did an animation for fun in Carrara 6 Pro it was instantly wanted... cool.

    Hee Hee... I have a hand in everthing but not everything in my hand. :)

    Post edited by wgdjohn on
  • HeadwaxHeadwax Posts: 9,922

    wonderful ;)

    Antara, welcome back! Now you need to give us a lesson on the clouds :)

    Great image!. I had a go and mine was pretty terrible.

  • HeadwaxHeadwax Posts: 9,922
    MistyMist said:

    splines for lightning?! smiley

    one of these modifiers can curve text round a ball

     

    good question :)

    MistyMist said:

     

     

  • WendyLuvsCatzWendyLuvsCatz Posts: 37,784

    I actually tried clouds too initially, replicated on that vertex word hidden for sunrays to shine through (using Carrara native render) mine looked pretty crap and rendered very slow blush

  • AntaraAntara Posts: 444

    Thank you everyone for the answers! (And sorry for the copious typos, I forgot we had to check the SpellCheckAsYouType option manually)

    About the font - those are some cool ways to make it happen, MDO2010 and Sad! Thank you!

    Dartanbeck, that's a good workaround :) But I wanted the classic look for another idea I had. I think I'll try the AI approach. Thank you for the large logo!

    About clouds: I am rendering out a test, so I cannot post screen caps. But the method is very simple: I have my text created using the Text tool and I am using the surface replicator applied to the front faces shading domain only. The replicator uses a single small volumetric cloud (much smaller than the default size something along the lines of 0.003 mi). The cloud itself does not interact with any lights, does not cast or receive shadows. I am avoiding sky light (slow) by using fake GI rig instead (a low intencity light blue colored long distance spot replicated on a large dome). I'll try to remember to post the cloud settings. I pretty much shuffled both the cloud shape and the replicator instances until I got the shape I liked. There are about 3000+ clouds there. And although it did slow the rendering down a bit, the final render time was under or about 20 minutes with all the transparent bubbles and all.

  • wgdjohnwgdjohn Posts: 2,634
    edited August 2016

    Misty, Very interesting question... my gears are meshing. :)

    I have a program on my Amiga, ImageFX for 2D graphics which has a Lighting effect which is quite good. I would imagine that it might be done easier and faster in postwork in a program like Paint Shop Pro, Photoshop etc, with the proper plug-in or effect. I have both mentioned but nearly always use PSP simply because I'm more familiar with it.

    I am Spline room illiterate so please cut me some slack here. :)  If wanting a single bolt of lightening I'd drop in a circle and extrude it then section it. It's path could be adjusted via the vector style path to give it an irregular, not straight, look. Do-able yes. I've no idea how to add lightening branches to a spline object... perhaps someone has done something similar. There are tools I've not used in the Spline modeler.  --> me = spline illiterate <--

    Are you wanting a single lightening bolt, no branches? If you want it to have branches I think of it like an upside down or angled tree with branches only for the sides and not front and back. I could probably do this fairly easily in the Vertex room. One way would be to load an existing tree and start removing branches wanted and rotate it 90°. Another way would be to drop in a circle and use Dynamic Extrusion to create the main lightening bolt and then select polys on it and do the extrusion again for each branch wanted. Afterwards I would would loop polys around the branch wherever you wanted a crooked branch and give "soft selection" then nudge them to create different effects/bends... hmm could also use scale tool to make more pointy/tapered if desired. Forgot to mention to taper the lightening branches. That is one method that I would try which would likely be the fastest for me. I'm sure there are other methods.

    If I am wrong about anything someone please correct me. :)

    Post edited by wgdjohn on
  • HeadwaxHeadwax Posts: 9,922

    thanks Antara! 3000 clouds ! I was making them too big :) lazy devil that's me :)

     

    @wgdjohn ha, I thought it said splines for LIGHTING! must get new spex ! I'd just do a texture map on a plane I think - (see above - lazy devil that I am :)

    you could put a glow on it then add aura ?(???) ion the Scene filters

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