Animating between shaders
Mosk the Scribe
Posts: 888
I'd like to animate an item between several different shader textures (5 total) to show it going from healthy to rotten.
Was easy enough animating between 2 shaders, but not sure best way to approach 5 (each shader will be pretty much the same, except that they'll pull in a different jpeg texture (may add some extra noise in bump as well)
I tried using Shoestring MultiPass Manager at top level, with Shoestring Multipass Control for Pass Control, followed by a Ref Shader - which I thought I could set to a Vlue slider and then animate from 1-100% to shift between the shaders set up in the MultiPass Manager. But either I'm doing something wrong, or it's not designed to be used that way.
Any suggestions on how to approach this?
(and could someone remind me how Reference shaders are supposed to be used - think they were to allow rapid sharing of texture changes across several objects, maybe??)
Thanks
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Just found Shader Ops 2 Multimixer when going through all of my shaders for a solution - and that lets you blend between colors at least with a simple value slider. Can't tell if it's blending between textures or not - will have to try with some very different textures to see if it blends or just flips over. But may work well enough if there aren't other better options.
(could also render with the diffferent shaders required and blend in post, but hoping there's a more elegant solution)
I'm a noob, so I wouldn't know where to begin on animating between textures; but if it turns out that's not possible, could you have five copies of your object, each in its differently shaded state, and animate visibility?
it should be doable with several layers and a mixer operator for eachso each fades in in turn
or you can just use image series with fades between which most image editors can create from layers.
Mosk the Scribe, if you have Carrara 8.5 you could try taking advantage of the 'Multi-layer' and 'Multi-layer elements' options in the Shader room.
In the Color channel, I chose 'Multi-layer' from the chooser Operators > Multi-layer
Using the 'plus' sign you then add a 'Multi-layer elements', which have their own Shaders. For my Shaders I chose Cellular and dialed in 5 very different settings.
I then animated the Opacity slider which you will see when you select 'Multi-layer elements' in the Shader Tree.
I'm pretty new to the concept of being able to stack up textures in 8.5, but the method popped into my mind and thought it worthy of a test. You can use texture maps or even switch between procedurals. Strangely, the bottom most layer seems to be the 'top' layer which seems backwards to me, but like said I'm just experimenting.
Thanks for the suggestion @DesertDude - I think my method (via shader ops2) is working now, but i appreciate those screen shots - makes things very clear - and will give that a try as well.
Mosk, Take a look at a post to my Animation in Carrara - Let's Animate - Q&A - Come One & All thread... right Here is a very short anim I did last month... it goes from one shader to a different one and then back again. Also take a look at the link to AgeOfAmor's YouTube vid that I reffered on how to do this. If you want I'll post the car file for my vid so you will have my shader and anim setting... I'd have to look but it uses a few diff DCG shaders in it which you would need or just change of course.
DesertDude, Just watched your vid a few hours ago, very nice!, it should work a bit better than mine... perhaps I'll try a mix of yours with mine sometime.
Thanks wgdjohn. I watched the Multi Channel Mixer tutorial by AgeofArmour - very informative. After watching I was able to set up a Multi Channel Mixer, then nested two more in so I could switch to several new shaders. In my first test above I was only switching between shaders in one channel. In this test I used completely different shaders chosen randomly from the native content. I included a few screen grabs to show the Shader set up, timeline and the order of the blends (including numbers and color coding!). It seemed to work...don't know if it is 'correct'.
Good example on how to control the nesting. Six secs is still not enough time to show the transitions very well... The examples I put in my Animation thread are waaay too short. I'd rather spread those keyframes out a bit to better show the transitions/blending between each colour change. I should redo each of mine and stretch them out to 10 secs each... still not long but enough time to have a bit more control. Please excuse my rambling.
Thanks for tips and links to tutorial about Multi-Channel mixer - that looks like a great solution / technique to add.
Yes. Multi-channel mixer.
We then create the full shaders we need at both stages of the animation, and control the switch. I use a value 1-100 slider.
That's exactly how I did this:
When I made that, Carrara 8.5 beta was still pretty new, and I wanted to show off Genesis in Carrara, and I wanted to show it morph from plain, basic (and gray) Genesis without any morphs applied, to my Rosie character.
It took me a while to figure out how I would do it. I found the Multi-channel mixer at the top level and knew that was the tool to use right away!
Everything after the window that says: "Genesis can be anything YOU want it to be" before the switch to the close-up of Rosie at the end, is a single rendered scene - just using the "Visible" checkbox to turn things on behind her. I added some black frames to the animated backdrop and controlled when it started in the tweeners, as it was a plane with an avi texture.
I was still pretty green to compositing back then, as can be seen with the plane being used as the Carrara interface that Genesis walks in front of, casting shadows onto it! LOL
It's all a part of the learning curve, I guess.
I thought those shadows were ment to be there... silly me. Perhaps I'm still a very dark green and I need more practice to transition to a lighter green green or different colour entirely. Good example. I've quite a few questions but won't bother this thread with them... they are waay OT.
heh, so did I!, I remember thinking it was a cool design decision, lol! I remember thinking that really added a nice feel to the '3D' sense, having the character throw the shadow like that.
That was a long time ago, wasn't it... wow. I still like the clip, especially the transition to Rosie. Makes me think genesis1 is still plenty capable for my humble hacking.
Nice timing and application of the shader animation technique.
cheers and serendipity,
--ms
If this isn't a case of wanting to see *if* Carrara can do it (I'm curious too), I recently ran a couple of animation renders of the same scene with a figure in a dress that had different textures for each render sequence. The animations were exactly the same except for the texture. I then transitioned them in a video editor using the simplest 'fade' transistion. I'm not sure it would look much different doing it with the shaders, and if you're on a deadline, it'll probably get you a useable, if not great result.
I don't seem to get much real work done, because I always want to know if the tool can do it... and losing focus on my bigger picture. If anyone saw how many test folders I have, they'd be either impressed or appalled - or both.
cheers,
--ms
Everything I do seems to be just a test...
Funny you say that. When I used a similar approach, before know what I know now, I actually used Fenric's "Tree Duplicate" function to get a second version of the figure right in the same scene, and used the Visible check box to switch them out. That's how I switched what the swords are parented to in this video - it uses two Rosies, one with swords parented to her back, one with them parented to her hands. Of course, now I just use four swords and swap which of those ar visible instead of an entire animated figure! LOL
Thanks! Cheers and serendipity to you, too, my friend!
Yeah... I still love Genesis 1!
Hit me up however you like. New thread? - just hit me with a PM to make sure I see it. I love sharing techniques and helping to brainstorm solutions!
Since I bought Carrara back in 2010... me too! Piles and piles of tests leading up (hopefully) realizing a full project. All those tests have really taught me a Lot of stuff!
My bad... I got my Carrara Animation thread started knowing how busy you've been with your own anim. Been trying to add to it fairly often since I've so many questions... same is true with my Carrara Shaders thread also. I want to learn more about those and still have Modeling questions which I can't even think of at the moment. Thanks for mentioning the PM suggestion... will try to keep it in mind should I get another going.
I'd like to animate between regular skin and muscle maps. I saved the multi-shader ball at top of shaders list for body in my browser (doing so for both muscle maps and for normal skin).
In the shader room, however, I can't find a way to load these multilevel shaders (I get a warning saying 'multiple domain shader' ).
I have shoestring shaders, and shader ops 1 and 2 plugins - does anyone know if there's a way to change shader for whole character/figure?
Mosk, check out THIS in my Animation in Carrara - Let's Animate - Q&A - Come One & All thread... while my Source 1 and 2 are simply color/shader settings you might just insert what is below the Multi-Shader... note that I'm using MultiChannel. Also try DesertDude's settings ABOVE using diff settings. But wait... I've been messing around all morning... and you will need to change each shader domain and here is what I do first... Remove Unused Masters/ Unused Masters, Unused Objects and most important Consolidate Duplicate Shaders. The last one is important and will vastly reduduce the number of shaders you will need to change. Then I would load another figure and place the muscle maps on it. If I'm understanding it correct you will need to use the earlier methods for each shading domain... note that I'm assuming that both the skin shader domain names and muscle map domain names match... if they don't you will need to set any that don't to invisible when the other is visible, being used. I couldn't find any musle maps so probably don't have them in my armory. :) I have created an invisible shader, per Dartanbeck's instructions, which you will need for things, I'm guessing, like any hair... possibly for finger/toe nails when you turn on/off the switch for one... now that I think about it you could just choose to have the hair invisible in it's checkbox.
I've looked through both Shader Ops and Ops2 but nothing looks to me to work except for each domain. I did read Shader Power Tools for Carrara by Fenric but don't know if it will work with an anim.
I'm nearly certain there is a way to change from Skin to diff Skin and most probably Muscle maps... sadly I've not tried yet. I'm wondering if there isn't an even easier way... perhaps have both figures exist and move if wanted then simply make one visible at a certain frame while turnig the other invisible. Haa... that would be great.
Hopefully something above might give you some ideas.
For me , it's the only way to do that.
My invisible shader uses alpha channel.
Yes - I use the alpha channel as well to create invisible or partially transparent shaders. Sometimes I'll hide vertices in the model room (though not in a case like this) - but that actually seems hit or miss in some cases. (sometimes the polygons render even once they've been hidden)
For this project, I rendered versions of fully dressed and skinned character, then saved the file and switched to muscle texture. Then saved scene again and turned figure's visibility off and just rendered organs.
Will have to play around in future to see if there's a better method - since creating multiple scenes generates all sorts of potential problems (such as finding a movement that needs to be corrected - and now you'd have to go through all three scenes to do so identically)