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aniMate 2 - New to aniMate? - YouTube Playlist
This playlist has some really useful information on using this wonderful tool. I don't like animating in Daz Studio - I really don't. It gives me a headache, but that's probably more due to my lack of experience with it than anything.
Using aniMate 2 in Daz Studio is much different (to me) than actually trying to create animations in DS. Instead of "Creating" animations in Daz Studio, I use Daz Studio as a tool to run aniMate 2, and it runs it very well and very quickly. I'm unfamiliar with what the free version of aniMate 2 (that ships with DS) has or doesn't have, because I bought it pretty much right away.
Have you ever wanted to put heels on an animation file? Retarget parts of the action? Join several animation files together, but trimming and/or retiming parts of one or more of them?
Yeah... aniMate 2 can help us with all of this stuff. Just watch this list and see what we can do. Of course, we'll need to have the aniBlock Importer for Carrara in order to use them in Carrara ;) For that we have options depending upon what we have for aniBlocks and our budget:
aniBlock Importer for Carrara - Just the Plugin alone
Carrara Starter Bundle - Includes the plugin + 3 aniBlock packs for V4
Carrara Pro Bundle - Includes the plugin + 4 packs for V4 and 2 for M4
Just know that we can also load Poser animated poses to our figures and use aniMate 2 to turn them into aniBlocks - so collecting aniBlock packs can happen as patiently as we want. I started by just grabbing a pack here and there as I could.
aniMate 2 - New Features - YouTube Playlist
Yeah, I know it's not that new anymore, but these videos show some pretty cool features of a wonderful tool!
I'm showing this stuff for those interested in aniMate - please don't confuse this for me pushing anyone towards its use. I really like how the system works but I've really looked into it before going headlong into buying too much. As a matter of fact, I bought just the plugin to start with and used some free aniBlocks to try it out. This is a very good system in my opinion. The GoFigure team does a professional job of motion capture and do a great job of retargeting the motions to the V4 and M4 figures. They've expanded to Genesis, and I've purchased some of them, but I haven't tried them yet.
On this subject, I also really like the motions I've bought from Posermocap and SKAmotion as well. I haven't bought and tried any of BoneTech3D's motion packs yet - but I think they look pretty cool. It's a different form of motion than what I usually look for... but I like the difference and want to try them one day. I also want to try Cliff Bowman's packs. His sample videos look really cool! :) Have any of you tried them yet? Any other motion vendors using Poser animated Poses or aniBlock files that you think I should know about?
I also really like these Content Creation videos for Daz Studio, so I saved that playlist as well.
I applaud Daz3d for incorporating all of these tools in such a classy, easy to use way - it really is a dream to work with and easy to get down with practice, and Josh Darling does a wonderful job of demonstrating how easy it can be to make our creations come to life - we just need to know what to click, and when ;)
As a sample, check out how we can create our own "Easy Pose" morph dials!
Ever want to get into Visual Effects?
Fusion Lessons by Eric Westphal at Eyeon - This guy really knows his stuff - as you may find out here!
What's Fusion? Why would I want or need that? Well here you go!
Ten Reasons why You Need Fusion (sample below)
Get Fusion Here
VFX Techniques in HitFilm
Just be aware that many of these HitFilm tutorials are for the Pro version - HitFilm 4 Express has no particle emitter available for it as 3 Express did.
What's that? What is HitFilm 4 Express? These Pros are the best people to answer that question, briefly, but in a very cool way!
Buckle up for Heads Up!
These guys (Simon left, Josh right) and gal (Kirstie - IronGirl) plus Axel, their other pal, make fantastic tutorial and other videos. They produce shorts, they perform VFX for other Director's shorts, they take stuff apart, they put stuff together, more importantly, they Show Us How!!!
They're getting into subjects like "What's the Best PC for this stuff?", "What kind of Camera or Microphones Should We Use?", "How do I Make A Successful YouTube Video?" - a bunch of helpful topics in their very fun format.
Even if one prefers using some other software, these folks have plenty of inspiration and ideas to help in no matter which tools one uses!
Get HitFilm Here
Cool VFX E-Zines and Resources
VFX City - Motion Design, Filmmaking, & VFX - LEARN & BE INSPIRED
The Art of VFX - Interviews, Breakdowns & Showreels, Movie & Game Trailers and More
The Amazing Allan McKay - 3ds Max/Houdini Master
Toothless and no tongue (maybe one of these days I'll finish that), but, yeah, I was very happy with the result, 3DAGE did a good job rigging it too
He's a good kitty! He really is!
Gareth Edwards in:
Monsters - Behind The Scenes
A Great bit of Filmmaking Advice and Inspiration
Writer's Block?
Have a little fun firing up those creative juices with
Random Plot Generator - The aim of this writing prompt is to help you develop a story-line - just fill in the blanks!
Ten Minute Writing Exercises - Stimulate your Creativity!
How to Write a Screenplay - Script Writing Example & Screenwriting Tips - along with plenty of tips for books on the subject
The book I'm learning from is by David Trottier - The Screenwriter's Bible - this site has all manner of professional assistance by David as well
This may move around a bit for convenience of navigating this thread
This image was made using only the "City Background" element from mmoir's Carrara's BMF Landscape Pack duplicate and rearranged into a group, which was then duplicated with the hotpoint in the center of the scene's 3d space, and rotated around to create a spherical map. I then used only a few copies of the city in the center with the newly created map as the background map - added some volumetric clouds and a simple lighting setup. Sun rays added using Howler's Lens Flares effects tool.
Renders REALLY FAST - Great for action animation shots!
Okay , I started an assets page for our Animators Club forr Carrara Users. we can add the model links to this page in the future This is a work in progress that will hopefully grow over time.
Animators Club for Carrara Users Models Page.
Phantastique, Mike!!! Request sent, but no hurries ;) I just wanted to get in line!
Mike, Purrfect. Have sent the request... waiting for the door to open. :)
Ditto :)
Animation Club Presentations
Here are the completed works of the club so far. I'll try to keep these updated. Give me a nudge if I forget, will ya? ;)
001 - The Final Gesture
002 - Spooky Night
I'm wondering if any folks use or has used Carrara Enhanced Remote Control. Will it my help me once I start learning and animating in Carrara.
In the world of producing films, one of the teams that gets leaned on pretty hard to make sure that everything lives up to the Director's dreams is the Visual Effects (VFX) department.
"Fix it in Post", "Leave it for Post"... these are common phases on many film sets. What does it mean? It means: "Good enough - we'll have the VFX team fix it up".
Visual Effects - Effects applied "After" the original footage is created.
Special Effects - Effects created "During" the making of the original footage - commonly finished in Post, by the VFX team.
As a solo filmmaker, I need to be able to do my own visual effects. This is something that I originally thought I could bypass, and only use Special Effects created right in Carrara during my initial renders. That particular thought process has cost me years of production time. While I've learned an awful lot about performing effects directly in a scene, I've also enjoyed figuring out that Carrara may also be used to composite new renders over other renders, simply by playing the previous render in the Backdrop of the current render - effectively creating layers of composited video clips using only Carrara.
My good friend, evilproducer, began a thread: Pros and Cons of Carrara DOF Vs. Postworked DOF, which effectively sparked my memory about seeing Project Dogwaffle in the store - and in that memory was the fact the the promo spoke about having Animation possibilities. You see, the idea of trying to "Post" animated video clips scared the heck out of me back then. I had no clue how easy it can be with practice.
I have been fighting financial battles through my entire time in this field, and while I really wanted to get my hands on Adobe's Pro products, I just couldn't. I did have an older copy of PaintShop Pro along with an older version of PhotoShop - both of which I thought were the Bee's knees.
When I started looking into Project Dogwaffle, I was hoping for a PhotoShop replacement sort of thing, but found out (before I ever bought it) that that is exactly what the Dogwaffle Project was NOT. The philosophy was that there are already plenty of PhotoShop-like options available - Dogwaffle was to be different - and it is. Anyways....
In the "Visual Effects for Guerrilla Filmmakers" course I took through Future Learn, I was introduced to HitFilm 3 Express (now updated to HitFilm 4 Express - Express being the Free version), which is really cool software for this stuff. We were given some film footage and given the other stock footage elements we needed to complete the VFX for this short clip. It was great fun, and I learned a lot, just in this simple assignment.
This one was illustrating safety issues, where they've filmed the actor with an unlit flare, and we were given stock footage of the flare flames and sparks to add to the original, by tracking the end of the flare and fixing the sparks to it. The Director of Photography applied the practical lighting (Special Effect) during the film shoot. Simple start, but it was amazing how easy it is to screw it up - especially if the techniques aren't practiced.
Next we had to be able to apply a warping piece of footage onto a clip of videa shot with a moving camera - so we need to track four points and use those points to warp the visuals being applied - a technique often used to change or eliminate logos of 'real' companies or some other alteration to the origianl filming. I used Carrara to create my own "Original Film Footage" and applied my homewrok above to a screen in the set using HitFilm's Quad Warp features
Next we recieved some Green Screen footage of the actor driving a car and we were to add some moving footage that we were also given to use - day and night, using various techniques to remove any green spilling onto the actor and then using the new background to add a realistic light wrap onto him. Applying subtle blurring and other effects helped to make it a bit more believeable
As the course got into compositing and applying VFX techniques, I was amazed at how easily I could perform a lot of this stuff directly in Howler (Project Dogwaffle Pro)! So I demonstrated to my classmates how I could use Howler to complete my homework.
This one is about Cloning - where we can use footage shot of the same several actors and combine them to form mobs of people. This next video is my half-hour process of showing how I did the work in Howler to show my classmates the similarities between Howler and the techniques demonstrated by Simon Jones using HitFlim
Here I add some fire and smoke to the above scene
...and this is the end result
The course was great fun and we all learned a lot - some of us even became good friends and still chat to this day!
During the whole thing I've really learned a lot about how effective these techniques can save a lot of time in the render process for Carrara. Yes, sometimes it truly is best to capture certain things within the original shot, if possible. But face it, some things - when added to a scene - can add a LOT of extra render time to the scene, but can be rendered on its own much faster, and then we have a lot more control over how to apply the effect using the realtime feedaback of the VFX software!
VFX Software? What is it? Do we have choices?
Absolutely.
One of the biggies that major production houses use is called Nuke, by The Foundry - makers of Modo and a selection of other high-end software solutions. I've just learned as I type this that they now offer a free personal version for taking ones time to learn the basics of the software and getting a demo reel together. Neat!
Nuke is pretty expensive for someone like me, whom really has no interest at seeking a career using it. But for someone looking to get into the field, a free non-commercial license is a great way to get acquainted with the kind of popular tools used by Big Studio houses!
Further, Nodal systems allow us to set up various ways to treat the project all in the same work space. What I mean is that, if the client would like to see a couple or more ideas, all of those ideas can be set up in the pipeline, and just use separate output nodes to show the differences.
And there's also an Open Source nodal compositor: Natron
Another high-end Node-Based Compositing solution for anyone from professional movie houses to the solo hobbyist is Fusion, by BlackMagicDesign, which is Free, and is fairly affordable for the full Commercial License, which gets you the same version used by the big boys!
I don't know much about Nuke or Natron, other than that they are both very popular - Nuke being fully funded and developed and kicking tall... things. Natron being frely offered and under constant development pleasing the needs of the Guerrilla VFX enthusiast.
Fusion, on the other hand, I know a little about, but have very little experience actually using it. I have created a YouTube playlist that I use to pick up tips and tricks from, created by Fusion's previous (original) developer: Eyeon Software: Fusion Lessons by Eric Westphal at Eyeon
Here is a cool presentation about Fusion by Eyeon Software: Ten Reasons you need Fusion
More along the lines of PhotShop-style Layers system, rather than Nodes, HitFlim is a powerful compositor combined with an Editor, making it very handy - being able to switch between stitching clips together with sounds and music, etc., and composite shots, where instead of arranging clips along a timeline horizontally (like in Vegas or Video Studio, for example) we arrange footage, images and so on, as layers on a vertical axis, being able to composite effects, filters, particles, etc., even 3d objects.
To get all of that full functionality, however, we have to buy the Pro version. The Free Express version has no particles system and cannot import 3d objects, but still has a wealth of great tools to do real work with, in addition to deciding upon whether we need to go Pro, or just add some additional packs of features to the free version... our choice!
They also have a fun team of tutorial/news video personalities! Check out HitFilm's YouTube Channel
There are a LOT of various software options for VFX - for VFX is a Vast topic. I've been treating the term to be synonymous with Compositing, but it is actually any digital post work, including 3D modeling and rendering.
Along these same lines, I intend to try and show how well we can incorporate Daz Studio into our Carrara pipeline.
But that's another day ;)
Hey Guys,
For anyone who wants to test out a new link which will hopefully work as our model hosting site. It is media fire and has 50gb of space which quite a bit. If you click the link it should lead you to the main folder , this folder has 5 or 6 sub folder with files in them . If you could see if you can open all the folders,download the files , upload files etc. It is supposed to be a "Filedropper" folder so anyone can upload files to this folder. I logged out of media fire and clicked the link below and I could access all the folders and could download and upload files. Looks promising.
Anyways, if you could test out the link that would be great.
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/r6srvq79lu3lp/Animation_Club_for_CarraraUsers
Okay, if you can try uploading to these individual folders and then click the link above and see if your upload made it to the folders.
Upload Link to Nature model Folder
Upload link to Animal model Folder
Upload Link to Exterior model Props
Upload Link to Interior model Props
Upload Link to People Figure models
Mike, link works great. I did not see any files listed yet though.
wgdjohn, most of the folders should have some files in it. I am testing it myself without being logged into media fire. You should see a Animals folder,Nature, Interior props,exterior props. and People figures folder. I thought I could upload folders when logged out but I can't . The folders are supposed to be FileDrop folders which mean anyone with the link can upload files. I will see if I can figure it out.
Mike, Stop... Now the folders/files show up! Kewl. Nice job.
Okay, I am pretty sure I have it working.
If you want to look at or download the models in the Animation Club model database click the link below.
Animation Club Model Database
If you want to upload files to the Animation club model database click the specific link below to upload your model to the specific folder. I think you can only upload files from your computer but I am not sure
Upload Link to Nature model Folder
Upload link to Animal model Folder
Upload Link to Exterior model Props
Upload Link to Interior model Props
Upload Link to People Figure models
After your upload is complete you can check to see if your model made it to the folder by clicking the Animation Club Model Database and looking into the folder you uploaded your model to .
If someone can test this that would be great. It works for me when I am not logged in.
Just uploaded a simple file "Star_5point.car" into Exterior Props. Everything worked very easy. Feel free to delete or move it.
This is great that it is working . I will start the next ACCU animation soon... I wanted to get this database thing sorted out first.