Animation Help-wishlist 2005-04-12 - By Michael Rhodes
Back
Hi all!
Since upgrading to C4Pro, I've been very happy with it and the new plug-ins I
got. But there's still issues with animation that continue to get to me.
The biggest issue is with how vertex objects are skinned. It still seems to me
that the skinning thang happens in the Assembly room and can't be transfered to
another file, so if I create a Mad Scientist character, spend hours skinning
and adjusting bones influences, all that work is stuck in the file that I
created the MS in. So, the lab for the MS must be placed in the file where he
/she is. This can get annoying, especially when dealing with a cast of
characters. All of them must be created in the same file. Has anybody figured
out some kind of work-around so that boned and skinned characters can be
imported into a new file w/all the skinning info intact? I've concidered a
"master file" that has the entire cast in it, then do a -Save As- , delete any
characters the scene doesn't need and then import/drag from the browser tray
the props I need for the scene. At first blush, this seems to be an okay work
-around, it's really limited -- because if any characters get modified for the
better, those modifications need to be then added to the Master File by hand.
That can get pretty tedious pretty fast.
Morph Areas aren't duplicated when using either Gemini or the menu command
duplicate with symmetry. It would be so handy to be able to do morph targets on
oneside of a face and then duplicate it all for the other side. One work-around
that's been suggested is to use shading domains (as a way to dupe the area that
the morph tartget affects) to echo the Morph areas and then re-do the
individual morphs for the other side. While this method works, it is no
replacement for actually duplicating the morph. This seems like a great
feature that Gemini (from DCG) could add.
Although Copy and Paste works okay within an animation, it seems to me that it
would be very cool if there could be some way to place these range(s) of
keyframes in the browser tray so they could be re-used on the character (or
different character, if the bone structure & names of bones is/are the same).
Along that train of thought, it would be really handy if skinned objects could
be placed in the browser tray as "puppets" (as the manual calls them) with all
the skinning/bones info intact. If these two features could be made to work in
the Storyboard room, it would actually give a real purpose to that room,
instead of it being just an icon (to me anyway-- as the Storyboard room is a
big pain to use and doesn't really add anything to C's functionality, imho).
And since these "Puppets" would be separate files, maybe they could be edited
as such, so that improvements could be automagically included and that could
solve the problem from the second paragraph. This would be a great boon to
those of us who want to animate from within Carrara: reusability; just like
shaders, constraints and objects can be stored and then reused in any number of
different files.
I'm not interested in buying/upgrading Poser, as I want to work with my own
characters and such, not playing around with somebody else's things (not that
that's a bad thing, it's just not what I'm after). Since Daz Studio is linked
to on Eovia's site, is there plans afoot to make D|S a possible part of the
Carrara Animation work flow? I could create characters in C, port them over to
D|S for boning and animating and then back to C for rendering. Or it could be a
D|S plug in for Carrara that would allow me to do the boning and such from
within Carrara. hmm... sweet!
Even though I've been mentioning Animation, that's not really the goal I'm
after. I really want to use Carrara to create comics (where each panel would be
a keyframe that's rendered, and the separarate renders would be compiled
together to form a page of Comic Art). For the longest time I was wavering
between Carrara and Animation:Master (since the daze of Carrara 2), but it
seems to me that A:M is primarily a PC-centric program (although the program
itself has excellent parity with both Mac and PC platforms, the plug-ins seem
to exist only for the PC version.) and that's not the case with Carrara
(Dogwaffle not withstanding). Add into the mix the fact that Carrara can do
pretty darn good landscapes, trees and its rendering engine is the best and
fastest in most any price range, I'm sticking with Carrara, even though it's
animation ablilities are meager when compared to A:M. However, Carrara is very
stable on my system and I don't have to be a physicst to use the GI controls.
;D
I really feel that with these major improvements to its animation abilities,
Carrara would be an excellent choice for us "table top storytellers" to use...
I would appreciate any and all suggestions, tips or help that this group could
offer.
thanks!
mike rhodes
-- -- --
I tried contacting the Powers That Be --
But got lost in their voice mail.
-- -- --
Welcome Yahoo Members!
http://www.eovia.com
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Carrara/
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
Carrara-unsubscribe@(protected)
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
|
|
