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Comments
The timing of the sound was obviously much better. Is the sound scratchy because it is an old recording?
Never mind, I found the original. :)
Whatever. The whole thing is very creative and unique.
Thanks for the comment, UB.
Yes, the music and sound effect are from old recordings. I believe that there are a number of ways to reduce the distortion of the noise. If I get a chance, I may continue to tinker with the animation. Could swap out an improved version. Just in case I don't improve it, I have entered the bowling project. Learned a lot. Much more to learn.
Top work !!!
+ have entered one Greeting from SomeWhere Else & yay-yay
Ed3D, looks good!
I have another animation question. I animated a big chunk of visemes for one character. Was able to speed up the process by copying sections and then doing alt-drag to further in the timeline.
However, when I tried that same process on the next character (create a little, duplicate and add further down the line), the the lips immediately started out way distorted.
There is probably an easy answer to this, but it is not clear at the moment. One thing I noticed is that on the first character, there is a little plus sign in the very first keyframe where the animation starts in each channel I animated. What is that plus sign? Not sure it will help, but I want to know, as I can't find a reference for it.
2 keyframes adjacent to each other get a+
you are applying 2 morphs most likely, one from the end of the previous group, a default/neutral one probably needs to be applied inbetween
Thanks Wendy! I think you meant "on top of the other." It didn't fix the issue, but nice to know. Had major wonkiness this afternoon when trying to build from previous viseme chains, but I kept redoing it, and somehow it worked out. At the very least, I'm getting good practice with common controls and lip synching by hand.
+ well , Thanx -
Polar UFO Animation Update - Adding Carrara Fur to Poser Mammoth
This beastie should be moving around in a segment of my final entry - which is the tribute animation to the alien ship approaching Earth in the John Carpenter remake of The Thing. The old Poser format Mammoth comes with a conforming hair figure, but I don't think it looks very good in Carrara. It uses a lot of planes with alpha channels, and ends up with lots of bare patches. At least that is the result I get. So, here I have grown Carrara hair directly on the mesh. I used the mammoth's diffuse texture map for the body in the color channels of the root and tip for the hair. The scene file is 'Mount' in Landscapes in Scene browser.
@diomede the mammoth looks awesome with the fur ... just asked Alexa to play Tusk after seeing the image.
nice wooly
+1
& the 57th Bryce Contest ( POLL ) voting is up + Thanx
+ 2
+3, really good hair. You hit a sweet spot.
In working on an animation, I'm having to rethink everything. One issue is how long it takes to render each frame. I think that PhilW said that he shoots for 5 minutes or less. Currently I'm at 10 minutes..
I've shut off the pesky sub surface scattering stuff, and also reduced the size of the render. Also trying to keep the lighting simple.
The biggest hangup is the Carrara hair. How can I reduce the render time? If I use Philmo's hair converter, will that speed up the render time?
Other tips in speeding up rendering are appreciated.
OMG if it's longer than 30s a frame I give up
one word
Shadowcatch
it will save you a world of pain
render beautiful backgrounds and add them to your backdrop and use a shadowcatcher plane under your characters
Ha, thanks Wendy. Great minds.
I finally figured out that I had some soft shadows set at at "best" active. They work well for high quality single frame renders, which is where this project started out.
Now I am down to 1 minute. Yay!
Got it down to 20 seconds per frame when the scene is fairly static. But if I move the head with the Carrara hair, the render slows down considerably.
Wendy, how long of a scene do you most often render? My scene is about a minute long. I know that a scene normally has cuts for closeups, etc, but I suspect that I will run out of time if I try that.
varies a lot
hair slower but you can do tricks like use shadow buffer lighting on hair only and exclude it from the main light
can look odd though
using shadow buffer on the whole thing can be faster if not going for realiistic
I've loaded a music vocal track in the Carrara timeline, and done much of the lip sync animation. When I play back the animation in the timeline, it looks pretty good, but only if I turn off the V4 Carrara hair. When I leave the hair on, and move the head, the timeline starts getting unstable. The audio skips, etc. I assume that the Carrara timeline view cannot handle the hair, and that if I instead render it out to sequenced pngs, that it will look fine.
Is that correct?
PS - I've got the relatively static scenes (no hair movement) down to 10 seconds per frame! Considering I started at 10 minutes, that is pretty ridiculous. Carrara is amazing.
carrara worse than DAZ studio for stutter on preview playback, it uses openCL or CPU not Cuda
So again, the preview only gets you in the ballpark, and the stutter there does not affect the output, correct?
yes, is in no whay indicative
rendering a small video with draft settings a better option
I finished my first animation!
Click on the above image.
Carrara did a great job of outputting the png's. Most of the renders were about 12 seconds long, so it took a little over 5 hours for the main file. However, PowerDirector choked on the load a bit, and I ended up with the same problem as before - the sequenced pngs were slower than the audio. My solution was to load the pngs by themselves in PowerDirector, and turn them into a mp4 file. When I reloaded the mp4 back into the editing room, it synched closely with the audio. Yes, it is an extra step, but it only took a minute to make the mp4. For me, it's just nice to find something that consistently works.
Uploading to Vimeo was much easier than the first time (a few years ago).
Animation in Carrara is like learning a new language. A different way of thinking. Many thanks to everyone for your advice (especially Wendy) and to PhilW for his Carrara Animation tutorial.
Congratulations, UB!!!!
That is fatastic. I tried to give the video a 'like' by clicking the heart icon but instead it gave me an error related to Vimeo wanting to show me who had already given likes. Strange. Vimeo aside, wonderful job lip syncing the animals. The exotic-headed farmer is genius. What a great entry.
very cool...
took me ages to work out I had to click the hard to see link and not the image to get to see it..... tricky stuff that .. but awesome work on your first time animation
apologies for being away so long, called out of town again and can't login on ipad.
looking forward to playing catchup!
4 days to go if anyone wants more time let me know -
quick comment - love that animation UB :) great lyp sync,
apologies will be back and check all the images and animations !
Fabulous !!!
the heart
need to be already signed in when you open the link
Thanks everyone for the nice comments! And Wendy, thanks for the heart. :)
Sorry for the link problems. I copied that link while I was logged in, so that is likely the issue. I thought I was being kind of creative, linking the video URL to an image - almost as good as having the video play in the post (like Youtube).
I logged out, copied the link, and reattached it to the image. Hope this helps. For some reason, it doesn't go right to the video (I don't think that Vimeo permits direct links), but is does go to the main channel page.
I also apologize for the sloppiness (at times) of the lip synch. Making it cleaner was possible, but with a deadline looming, I thought it better to move forward.