Dartanbeck’s EnvironKit series leverage the power of Carrara’s nature, terrain, and environment tools. While he tours this extensive product you will see how he has organized light and sky elements into presets that can be loaded from the browser, and created custom morphing helper objects to control the distribution of Carrara’s clouds using surface replicators.
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To me, Project Dogwaffle Pro: Howler is the perfect addition for applying post-work to my rendered animations from Carrara prior to the final production editing. I plan to do more video tutorials on some of these subjects, and discuss them quite a bit at the Carrara Discussion Forum at DAZ 3D.com
In this tutorial I slowly proceed through the process of using Howler’s Roto tools from within it’s curve tool to create an animated selection for the use of adding a post-work motion trail to the part of the animation where I want the effect to take place. In my own production, I would take less time doing the process, but would focus more on the final result, rather than just getting to the end of the process. For example, if I kept going with the project as it was by the end of this tutorial, I would undo the animated effect that I end with, and tweak the settings or perhaps even reshape the entire animated roto selection and start from scratch. The end result of this one was just a simple run through so that I could explain the tool, not focus on a great end result.
That all said, I find it much easier, faster, and much more predictable to add blurs and such to final rendered animations, rather than to use the included post working in Carrara. But in times before owning Howler, this was not the case, and I got pretty far with doing much of my work using only Carrara, as it has the ability to load it’s own end results and work with them further, and render them again to a new animated clip. So I’m not trying to discount Carrara’s fine features, or the fact that they are included in the amazing Carrara software. It never ceases to amaze me at how much work can be done without ever leaving it.
There are times when we’ll get a perfect rendered animation with the exception of a few little flaws. These flaws can create the need to destroy the render and try again, often trying to increase some setting or other in an attempt to correct the inaccuracy, or whatever went wrong. This adds even more time as now the render times per frame are also increased!
Since I’ve owned Howler, however, I would far rather use this amazing roto tool setup to quickly correct the issue with the original render. In my learning how to do that, I’ve found that we can truly do limitless wonders to our clips without the need of the really expensive alternatives to getting our hands on abilities like these. And the ability to save lengthy renders has been a huge blessing! Project Dogwaffle’s Howler is a lot more than I would have imagined it to be, and I’m really grateful to have found it.
In this first installment, I begin to cover the complexities of Carrara’s powerful shader system. This is part 1 in a short series intended for new users of Carrara. In Part 1 I start by loading Daz3d’s V4 figure and demonstrate how to perform simple shader tweaks to get her to look properly. Part 1 ends as we begin to explore how to make full use of specular and bump maps, and I’ve already provided a decent amount of detail to get one going on adjusting the Highlight and shader channels, with some measure of explanation towards what they do together, with the available light in the scene.
By the end of this series, I’ll have covered a simple outline to shaders – but hopefully enough to get Carrara users in to that texture room with a bit more understanding of what’s going on. After I complete more in the general walkthrough topics, I’s like to revisit many topics, such as this one, and explore in much greater depth. Shaders are a really in depth topic in Carrara, as there is so much that we can do inside that console – to get our models looking however we want them to look. One of my favorite aspects of Carrara!
Join Barbara Bastrup as she demonstrates the basics of character animation using primitives (basic shapes) to create “Eddie the Eraser Dog” in Carrara 8. A beginner level introduction to 3D, modeling, and animation.
Eddie was created in Carrara 3d Pro 8, music created in Garage Band with an Alesis Q49 Midi. Each second of animation averaged 4 hours of modeling, keyframing and music composition.
Using the Blade Runner inspired Dirigible with an animated advert.
This tutorial shows two different ways of bringing a movie onto a texture and how to make it fit a uv mapped area.
Some post processing is inevitable and so the tutorial explains how to do the extra stuff in sony vegas.
More tips at http://www.facebook.com/scififunk
How to use IES Lighting in your 3D app and how to edit IES lights. (Use them for volumetric lighting). More info and examples at facebook.com/scififunk
IES lighting (Illuminating Engineering Society file type to describe lighting volume, fall off and shape) can be used to add realism to your renders.
After describing what IES is and where you might use it, I show some site which give free IES lights and (more importantly) how to edit them (plus create your own IES lights).
Ultimately you’ll probably have to create and edit your own (to match your work up against a source photo) and I show 2 programs which show you how to do this.
Please note, the pictures look better at http://www.facebook.com/scififunk (the colours haven’t been compressed as you see them on youtube).
How to create walk loops for lots of low poly people, with separate walk loops so that they DON’T look like an army of robots. more info like http://www.facebook.com/scififunk
See earlier tutorials on how to create the people and get the walk loops for free.
Now it’s time to put them all in a scene. This is tricky as you’ll be pushing your software to the max (unless it’s been rewritten for 64bit in every internal routine (which I doubt)).
Anyway I organize the figures into columns and use a mixture of replicators to achieve a reasonably realistic effect.
I then go on to talk about the kind of things which might crash the software, and how to avoid.
In part 2, I look into signs that the scene file is becoming so big that Carrara will regularly crash. This is obviously the time to back off a little (delete a few characters, ease up on the groups, or the amount of characters within the groups).
I look at the organization of the file. How to replicate in such a way as to achieve maximum flexibility with the replication.
There will be a fair amount of editing to do. Feet on ground (esp. when walking on the road vs walking on the pavement (sidewalk)), avoiding people walking through each other or through objects / walls etc.
Poke through is inevitable. However the edit within the scene option is not available as these are NOT Daz characters, they are one object file each. Instead the shading domains within the editor comes to the rescue.
