Rocking it with MoCap!!! Thanks MoCap Vendors!!!
Dartanbeck
Posts: 21,937
Man,
Poser MoCap, Bonetech3d, GoFigure,
you folks are totally Rocking My World!!!
I'm no stranger to making my own animations, which helps even more. But every time I buy a new pack from you folks broadens my horizons at Light Speed!!! But more, there's always something special about having the ability to use well-made, professional animations to work with - and I love yours.
As you may have read already (in the Carrara forum over the years), I'll use your amazing data in Carrara either via PZ2 (thanks for that Poser MoCap!) or the aniBlock Importer for Carrara, and keep parts of the data and delete the rest, then load in others and do the same, etc., over and over to create entirely new animations according to what I need my charactersd to do... it's awesome!
For example, I can have a figure walk down the stairs (Poser MoCap) while frantically complaining about something (GoFigure) and then say "Just Kidding" with a comical apology spin (Bonetech3d).
I'm sure that someone capable of animating in Daz Studio could do this as well, but in Carrara, I can easily adjust the hip location and rotation to match from one animation to the next, and have full access to how I time everything - even totally exaggerate movements either in time or in translation/rotation, etc.,
...and I'm now using Carrara's incredible Dynamic Hair, and your (all of your) animations really show off how excellent this hair works! Since switching to Dynamic hair, I've been using your most wild movements to try and 'break' the hair. Before, when I didn't have any experience with it, it broke with a simple walk cycle. Now it just won't break! I'm using physics forces as part of the actual figure set-up - forces that remain with the figure as default when I load him or her in, and then I can add wind or explosioin forces... whatever.
Soon I'll be testing some gravity tweaks to simulate underwater sequences.
Anyway, I just couldn't take it anymore. I had to come in and thank you folks for the Amazing products!!!
Sincelerly Fan-Forever,
Dartanbeck
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Rosie 5
I have since updated the character shaping and hair. As well, I've made a twin of her in G2F uising Victoria 4 for Genesis 2 Female by Mallen Lane
You would not believe how well this hair works in animated renders! I wish I'd have perfected this years ago - but here we go! First production coming soonish!
I use an extensive library of aniBlocks and PZ2 animated poses for V4 and M4 by GoFigure and Poser MoCap and have recently been buying more from them, and by Bonetech3d for Genesis, Genesis 2 and Genesis 3 figures. I'm rendering right now, but will soon test Genesis 2 aniBlocks with the Genesis 1 actor to see how it translates. I will also try the Genesis 3 aniBlocks on Genesis 2, even though I have Genesis 2 versions of all of those aniBlocks - but just to know for future purchases.
For V4/M4 on Genesis, I use Carrara's (incredibly powerful and stupendously simple to use) Graph Editor to correct the rotation anomolies due to Generation 4's feet being modeled in a downward position.
With Genesis 1+ figures, the various pose control morphs work great for adding variations to how the arms are positioned, moving around the head, etc.,
The new "Dartanbeck 5" is now in beta stage with the idea of a twin Dartanbeck 6 in the works. He is me and Rosie is my wife (My Hero!)
Dartanbeck also has Carrara Dynamic Hair and an extensive collection of morphs from G2M and M4, sporting Michael 4's High Res Maps.
aniBlocks are a powerful way to quickly put things to motion and, more importantly, blend various such motions as one continuous series.
If such things interest you, and you haven't bought aniMate 2, that means that you're using the Free version. The full version offers more tools and possibilities that what comes free with Daz Studio - and even the free version rocks!
In Poser, I'd create a path and use Walk Designer to have a figure walk that path, setting up how I wanted the head to track along the way... all that stuff. So then I'd save that animation as a multi-frame PZ2 pose file. Well that's fine if that's the end of it. But by importing it into aniMate 2, I can then bake the animation into an aniBlock and use aniMate's powerful tools to edit the motion for various figures or different needs, split it and combine it with other aniBlocks, all manner of things.
So if you are interested, but want to know more, check out GoFigure's YouTube channel. They have some helpful videos regarding some of the power behind this amazing animation tool suite.
For example, here's one for importing - just like what I was just talking about
...and here's just one of the really cool features for tweaking aniBlocks' animations to be specific to what we want... it's only under two minutes... check it out!
This is awesome!
This is JonnyBravo giving a tutorial on the aniBlock Importer for Carrara
FYI, I rarely have the issue shown in the above Carrara workflow - it almost always just works!
When I get it finished, I'll provide a tutorial on how I do this stuff without using NLA clips at all. Carrara's Sequencer is so simple yet powerful that I just do it all right in there with keyframes!
Almost eight years ago, I was still fairly new to Carrara and all of this stuff. I did own it for two years at that point, but I was working long overtime hours, so didn't get a lot of playtime. So I worked on building shaders and animating. When I saw the above video by JonnyBravo, he had some really cool test videos on his channel then, so I asked him a bunch of questions.
After our talks I downloaded a 30 day trial of Sony Vegas Movie HD, which is now owned by Magix.
To try it out, I took a pile of junk test renders and threw them into the timeline and tried arranging them in some semblance of a story, though they weren't created that way - they were just testing various things like, lights in motion, motion timing, camera movements... you know... testing!
Well I added some music ad sound and this is what came out of it! LOL
Working on something new now. If only I can get it done!!! :)
An article I wrote quite a while back on how I worked with aniBlocks in Carrara to create custom results:
► AniMating in Carrara
Carrara's dynamic hair can look amazingly like real hair. The hair I use for my hero character is more stylized, which can actually be a little more tricky than just going for realism.
Since my character has many variations for different things, I like to attach the hair to a low-poly mesh that fits her head - I just parent the mesh (cap) to her head and simulate the hair. Here, my main hero demonstrates