Sparrowhawke 3D

by | May 6, 2011 | Developers

Name: Jeremy

I’ve used Carrara professionally for many years to produce photo-real product images, illustrations and animations.  It is the most important application in my toolset.  In the past I did a lot more coding for commercial desktop applications and 2D games for fun and so I’ve learned to apply those skills to extend Carrara with my plugins.  I also use Carrara in my spare time and have always wanted to produce a comic series or graphic novel.  The application is not quite ready to meet my demands yet so a lot of my spare time is also dedicated to writing plugins to improve it.  Once I get an idea and started on a project I find it hard to stop unless I run into a brick wall.
“I think I spend too much time on plugins at the expense of my other sedentary interests in music, writing, drawing, ancient and medieval history, but with my other long time hobby of running Dungeons & Dragons campaigns (for close friends) I have a creative outlet to express all these interests.”
Many of my plugins have been written to make the animation of complex machine parts easier or to add simple handy tools and shaders, others are purely for fun. I hope to continue to add more plugins and keep them free – but one of these days I might write some intended for sale.

 

JIGGLE

Jiggle is mainly used to give the fleshier parts of CG women more realistic and natural motion during animations or for some outrageous and silly fun.  Unlike a softbody simulator it works as an automated magnet deformer that responds to movement and gravity

TRACKS and CHAINS

Makes the difficult task of animating drive chains and tank tracks and other caterpillar vehicles possible by wrapping the links around sprockets or wheels – as well as handling the task of animation

 

THE TRANSFORMS PACKAGE

Contains some simple but useful operations to speed up your workflow when putting a scene together.  The DropToFloor, PointAt, JumpHotPointTo and JumpObjectTo commands save time in positioning pieces and parts and the Offset and Rotate commands allow for precise changes in position and orientation.

BELT DRIVE

Comes in the form of a primitive to create the belt and a modifier to turn the wheels.  This can be used to make an animated fan belt, drive belt, conveyor belt, escalator etc.

WHEELS

Makes the animation and steering of vehicles easy by rotating their wheels in the right direction and speed as you drive them around the scene.

SPRING PRIMITIVE

Is used to create and realistically animate a variety of helical springs.

 

MIPMAPPER SHADERS

The MipMapper and AutoMipMapper help to remove moire patterns and twinkle noise in both stills and animations by using a blurry and lower resolution texture when the object is farther away or turned away from the rendering camera.

PIN MODIFIER

This modifier can be used to pin one object to another and keep it in place when the object is deformed.  It’s great for adding a button to a conforming or dynamic costume – but it has many other potential applications.

CLOTH DEFORMER

Is a long and challenging work in progress to bring simple and effective cloth simulations into Carrara.  It may not be cutting edge, fast or finished but it can be used for drop cloths and with dynamic costumes when proxy figures are made with simple primitive shapes for faster and reliable collisions and works in all the recent versions of Carrara.

THE LABORATORY

In my Laboratory Windows users can find unfinished and undocumented plugins and experiments such as the EdgeFalloff shader, the FollowTerrain modifier and the latest builds of the Cloth simulator.  Enter at your own risk and become an assistant (or a test subject) and help to suggest improvements for these plugins under development and review.

 

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