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Comments
After running all of her simulations, it's so fun to see little Rosie laughing her tush off!
Every time I go to check on the render, I bust a gut!
She's been animating through some pretty trying times lately, so it's ultra-refreshing to see her smile, let alone laugh!
I just posted a little outline in my Art Studio Filmmaking thread of the workflow I'm currently using, which is very much part of my Bridging Technology ideas.
I've never disliked the idea of using Daz Studio as a plugin for Carrara.
With this new method, Daz Studio is playing a much bigger role, which is really quite fun!
Bringing my OctaneRendered dForce/VWD simulated Rosie 5.2 into Carrara to interact with the full scene and characters is really quite a trip! Can't seem to make something work inside the box, it's time to start thinking outside!
In doing so, I've become much more proficient with aniMate 2 and am learning more all the time. The same is true with Daz Studio's awkward animation tools... but that still Always makes me wish that I could do that part directly in Carrara - but I'm doing okay with it.
wow Dart your site is so IMPRESSIVE! a great bible and advertisment for Carrara thank you
Thanks Headwax
I'm hoping to be able to have the actual visual content side of things rolling off the line fairly soon here, which will help to tie a lot of these elements in the site together - and all work even better as a big tutorial zone type of thing.
It just really needs a bit of a "Film" to be able to break down and make demonstration how-tos and such that will go along with more descriptive written articles.
That part is in Theory stage until I get this film done, but I think it will work really nice.
I really should be able to 'call it a wrap' pretty soon for Rosie animations and move on to the rest of the elements.
It's an entire new philosophy I'm creating to do my work - very much the way one would work on still images in photoshop.
I can only render Rosie using Octane because her hair really only works in Daz Studio.
Luckily, VWD comes with a Daz Studio bridge, so I'm using that for her soft-body dynamics and clothing, dForce on her hair, and toiling away with Studio's clunky animation tools.
Octane does a lovely render in a relatively short time, and it incredibly easy to use, when used with the Octane Render Kit.
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After that, I will do one of two workflows, depending on the scene.
The first method is the one I started doing around the time when I got my new computer built.
Set up and animate the scenery in Carrara and render using the same (if any) camera movements as I used on Rosie.
Being in Carrara affords me a lot more headway, so I can include all other characters in this scene if I want. This is the way I was doing it even when Rosie was rendered in Carrara - like on my "Introducing Rosie 5" video and the others that followed.
If Rosie needs to do more interaction with scene elements, I can do it using that first method with shadow catchers and collision objects, but I've come up with the second methd to make it more interactive during the scene render.
For the second method, I make a plane at 1280 x 720 and put my Rosie render into that as its texture. Since it has an alpha channel it doesn't need to fill the whole camera - just place that where it needs to be in the scene, which is really, really cool!
My next run using this method is going to test how good the shadows are from the alpha render onto the surfaces of the scene. I didn't need that in the scenes I've run so far. I don't actually need them at all, but I did some Rosie renders specifically for the purpose of testing this.
ORK comes with a nice shadow catcher. She (Valzheimer) also shows us how to make the shader in Octane if we want to apply it to anything else, but I just grab the shader from Octane and apply it to anything I want to be a catcher of shadows.
I did another test - unconscious Rosie getting lain down onto a table - where the table used in the Daz Studio scene is just a shadow catcher with a shelf for the table top. Looks pretty cool in the alpha view.
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Rosie animations take forever. The animation work goes pretty smoothly if I don't crash Studio. Even when I do I can reconstruct the steps that I took in a jiffy. Studio's TCB tweener will sometimes send values into unreadable property values if we delete a few keys or add new ones - and then it just hangs there indefinitely.
The long part is the hair simulation. Takes about two hours for a five to six second animation.
I'm willing to do that because the hair looks so nice, even though the way I'm using it, it still doesn't really look real.
Carrara's hair takes about a minute and a quarter for the same length of animation, but it (to me, at least) has some serious limitations.
All dynamic hair is time-consuming in the end though.
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Render times are very similar, except that in Octane I'm getting all of the bells and whistles, although a bit muted for speed. In Carrara I am using much, much lower quality render settings. But low render settings in Carrara can turn out excellent scene stage animated renders as well as characters and creatures, etc., that don't really get a benefit from SSS and translucency.
What else is really cool is that in either Studio or Carrara I can render a spherical image to use in the other software so that reflections match from one app to the next - in those times when I need that.
Lighting in Octane is an entirely different skill that I'm still kind of struggling with - but doing okay.
In Studio, we can use HDRI and Emission shaders on physical mesh for Octane lighting.
ORK comes with soft lights which are similar to a huge wide screen TV, Key lights are a cone and the light emitter disc can be pulled into the cone shield via a morph, just like the spot lights, which are smaller cylinders.
HDRI made for Iray are really, really overly powerful for Octane, but I can get them to work.
HDRI are the easiest way since mesh lights tend to be difficult to predict the outcome.
This is where I think Carrara really shines - not in using HDRI, heavens no. It does that well, I'm sure, but that Really slows down the render. But I really like Carrara's lights since the 8.5 upgrade.
As soon as I finish the Rosie animations, my next immediate focus will be the LightX plugin for Carrara, so I can determine whether or not to switch to those right away.
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Once I get out of the Rosie renders and back into Carrara, the rest will come along Very Quickly, which is really cool. I'm excited that I'm finally starting to produce what will likely be along the lines of "Just a Bit of Fun 2"
Awaiting a hair sim, I've put the finishing touches on my first draft of Wild Animals in my Animal Kindom section.
Pretty cool, I think! ;)
...new philosophy continued
Carrara has a multitude of animation tools that can really help a one-person movie project get all of the elements needed to perform this "work as one would in Photoshop" philosophy.
For example, if I need a smoke or fog element to combine with several animations, I can create the effect using one or more of many features that would allow ne to render such a thing in Carrara, and render it to alpha. I now have an element that I can work with in post.
Particles can work very well for a good many things, including smoke, fog, dust, etc., but also blood splats, debris blasts or falling chunks... the possibilities are really only limited by what we think up.
The Fog and Fire primiitives are very flexible in how we can make them render. They don't have to look at all as they were intended, and the animation process is handled using a "completion" slider, so we can make them go really s l o w or incredibly fast.
Modifiers can vastly alter the shapes and behaviors of whatever it is we apply them to.
Ocean primitive animates a plasma noise with several altering parameters.
I can go on and on. Multipass rendering options are another great asset.
Using Carrara to render things that we can 'blend' into our final work in layers, as we would if we were to combine images from the web in Photoshop, is how I'm planning all of this. It makes me glad that I grabbed Inagoni's plugins before they disappeared because PrimiVol has become an essential tool for me lately, and I'm sure I'll be breaking back into the others again soon too.
Our current Carrara plugin creators have been a real asset to all of this as well.
Looking forward to sharing all of this as soon as I can unwrap it all into some presentations
These "elements" that I'm creating to add as layers 'in post' were intended as extra elements to bring into Fusion.
Well using my new (second) method I'm seeing how we can also apply these elements to planes, cubes, spheres - whatever we need - and add them directly to renders within Carrara!
Usually more than one way to perform a task. Wonderful to see the choices you have had to face and how you have put together your workflow.
I'm relieved that I finally took off my Daz Studio blinders and created this flow.
It removes compatibility isues in a whole new way!
When it comes to matching the DS clips to Carrara, if I have a question about the lighting, I'll load the scene in Carrara and make my obsrvations - even fire off a single frame render so that I can match the lighting in DS.
It's a trick I've picked up from watching ILM work between CG and live plates (actual filmed footage)
do you have a HDR recommendation to use with starry night?
thanks.
I don't, simply because I don't use HDR in Carrara.
I do. however, have a little worflow regarding using TheDigiVault's Stardomes, and use that with Starry Sky.
It comes with so many options, I just use a single gigantic sphere and made shader presets for each of the maps, and then I also do funky things with the shaders for different effects, like inverting the map and using it in the Transparency channel, for example... space adventures can be a Lot of fun in Carrara!
EDIT: The workflow is on the right side of the page
i have the TP domes. a planetarium set would be kewl. the big dipper. and the dippers in between, lol
do you know if the mil dragon2 animations work on dragon3?
thanks.
the deep sea eagle has animates. guess it depends if the wings have the same bones, prolly won't work
I think I tried them a long time ago without success. Entirely different rig setups.
I did, however, just try out some Genesis 8 Male aniBlocks on Drago, and it works with a bit of tweaking. But I did this in Studio with aniMate 2, not in Carrara. With such little time to work with, I've given up on trying to make incompatible things compatible.
I've just written a short post as to why HERE in the Art Studio forum
And now I've just released my Animal Kindom - Dragons!!! page, along with the subpage: Drago HD for Genesis 8 Male(s)
I am utterly amazed at how well I got on with this dragon in just a few minutes!!!
Drago is now fully part of the coming episode! :)
I just finiished a rather substantial amount of edits, corrections and additions to the Dragon Kingdom
While it still isn't complete, it's still a really cool look at dragons that are available at Daz 3d - showcasing a collection of amazing figures that I need to spend more time with - and that's coming! ;)
he must use a lot of dental floss.
he looks good.
wow Dart, dragon page is splendiferous, watched your dragon animation pack vid - what a talent you have, so impressed!
Wow! Thanks! :)
Funny, when I was making that Dragons!!! page, I streamed that old promo video on the large screen TV. Rosie and I haven't watched that together in years.
She said "Wow Dartan, I forgot how cool that video is!"
I look back on it and just see the mistakes, so it's fun to hear nice words about it... thanks!
Digging through the archives, I also found this cool old one-minute promo video I made for Woodlands using a forground element from Stonemason's Enchanted Forest and Gorodin's Toon Chameleon. Every time I bypassed watching this one, I forgot how cool it actually is!
LOL, I also learned a lot over the years, working with Carrara Pro (been working with Carrara since version 6 came out). But I recently (as of today) I visited your website, Dartanbeck, and you showed me a new way of rendering... now I'm using batch renders, and can pause the render anytime I want. Previously I rendered directly only because I believed batch rendering only works if you're rendering over a network. Carrara's 8.5 render node doesn't work on my Windows 10 PC (latest edition), and crashes.
Which is too bad, because I have like 6 computers around the house, and can't use them as a 'render farm' no more. So I gave up the idea of batch rendering altogether. But now, after seeing one of your tutorials, I'm back on track with batch rendering. Thank you so much and I hope you'll keep updating your website and tutorials.
I'm also working with Genesis 2 along with V3.... V3 is still my favorite, after all these years.
Just like you, I work with FX Home (ultimate edition I bought a few years back), Vegas Pro, and ultimatly I started working with DaVinci Resolve --also after seeing one of your tutorials-- so I'd like to thank you for that too.
Since I'm not an American girl, living in Europe, Amsterdam, I use text-to-speech (using Cortana's voice) to do all the talking, since I talk with a funny European accent. Sometimes I wish I was married to an American. But instead I'm married to a Dutch husband.... I love him with all my heart though.
O yes, I totally get the ten years after, Alvin Lee reference. He was great. But I'm more into Jimi Hendrix
LOL!!! I know you're Totally into Hendrix!!! Rock On on that front!!!
Yeah, I actually feel at peace now - using one zippy machine and my Batch Queue over running a network farm. Granted, I only did that for a short while, and it's great for folks that are more network savvy than myself, but my new build renders fast enough for how much animation I can accomplish in a day.
Don't you love DaVinci Resolve?!!! I still hold on to all of my FX Home, Vegas and other apps because they all seem to have features that I like to through into the mix here and there. I will hopefully be doing a little video demonstration and that sort of thing too, once I release my little movie - sometime fairly soon here.
I still keep all of my generations of figures installed and handy, because they do each have their place in all of this. Sometimes I'll have a need that can quickly be taken care of by dropping in Michael 2 with his Adventurer's clothing! LOL
Great to see you again, Cynthia!
Animating is being a really great outlet for me as I chase my tail around through life - doing what Human society demands on me! LOL
I have felt comfortable animating figures for years now, yet I still feel my skills growing all the time, which is really fun!
I have a LOT of demonstrations and tutorials on the workbench to get put together as soon as I finish the main renders for this little Epic I'm working on, so stay tuned!
Also, thanks for the kind words about Dartanbeck.com! It is also another wonderful escape from the normal day-to-day!
P.S.
I have another fun thread regarding this stuff: Dartanbeck's Journey - CG Filmmaking in the Art Studio forum
Great thread, Dart. Unfortunately, traffic in the Art Studio Forum is hit or miss. Not sure why.
Well, it's a big place, these forums.
For years I've never tip-toed out of the Carrara Discussion forum - even though I was here All the Time!
Thanks, by the way! It's a fun little blurb of a thread :)
I really like your Diomede's Notepad, Sketchpad, and Chilling Pad thread as well!!! But you probably already know that! :)
beautiful and effective cinematic result DB, render time? Octane for D/S, right?
Oh my! Nope. That's a promo shot!
I must say, however, that when I loaded in that same environment, and animated te eagle flying in it, it turns out looking just like that in Iray. It's a really nice, easy to use setup.
I haven't tried it in Carrara yet but that's coming
That said, Deepsea is making some nice environments that are very efficient!