Why is Carrara soo kewl?
Mistara
Posts: 38,675
Why is Carrara soo kewl?
i mean, she isna just a skylab with date/time/ longitudinals and lattitudinals
Post edited by Mistara on
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she isna just dynamic trees
https://www.youtube.com/edit?ar=2&o=U&video_id=OUxOARvp1lY
Kewl because of inspirational artists like the animation team behind Dinner for Few.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3788934/
Second youtube link is broken.
Back to the thread. Decent Bullt physics support:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XGRj4VjPqk
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCODXwCFHLebKXpyaoHkSGFg/
Well, dang! That was some awesome work. PGre, are you Pete? You created most of this long before I started Carrara. I hope you post here more often.
Also, there's an artist named Selina on this site that you need to meet.
high quality video, thanks, can read the menu selections
And dynamic ocean plane with surface replication
whatz that thing called, the kewl thing carrara does with shader and height terrain?
tjere was a tutt somewhere in cafe about how to use that kewl height shader thingie on the kewl ocean primitive to kewly froth the waves.
+1 kewly awesome tuttorials
Yeah, Thats me. Hopefully will be able to post more stuff soon.
Awesome PGre! Love your stuff!
I love this tutorial!
Hmmm... I can't seem to locate the tutorial either. I think evilproducer did one on that. But the Shader feature you're asking about is the Snow field of a Terrain shader. You need to tweak the elevation limit of the snow field to just the right height, and give it a nice, frothy shader - like the snow shader, for example ;)
Thomas Schwenke also does some really cool videos using Carrara, like this one, for example:
...and this one
I also (still) really love this 2010 Carrara 8 Demo Reel
Why is Carrara so Kewl?
I think a lot has to do with the wonderful people that use it, like those (everyone) whom contribute to this very forum, from the new user to the highly skilled veteran, everyone posting in this forum helps to remind each of us how incredible this gem of a software can be - because it can solve so many visual tasks!
Speaking of Kewl Carrara-using people, some of them go above and beyond from time to time to promote public outreach. Don't get me wrong here... even our most quiet contributers add a lot to our community. But I think it's really neat that we can still grab amazing information that still drives inspiration to do incredible things, even if some of the material seems to be a little 'dated' if we actually pay attention to when it might have been created in the first place. But if we ignore the dates, the information contained within remains as interesting now as it did the day it was released.
For a few examples, how about the die-hard contributers of the Carrara Cafe and the Carrara 3D Expo E-Zine!
what is there to know about hot points?
hot point is the key to opening doors
swinging
tipping candle holders over
Red Hot Poker
its just another name for pivot point where the gizmo arrows intersect
shape lights soo handy. and kewl. perfect for space stations
Loves me some Shape Lights! Hot Points too!
Amazing how it's just become second nature to just tap that Caps and float the hot point to where I need it. Even more often, I'm dropping in another Target Helper, giving it a color that signals me to its purpose and then making it a permanent part of the scene - often dropping a group of something into it.
Shape lights are so much more useful than I've realized for many years (all those years I never used them). It was the 8.5 upgrade that first got me to enjoy trying them. Before that I just didn't like guessing what their bondaries were.
Still a long time passed without my using them other than for maybe illumination coming from a computer screen or some such. Which brings me to a point that I've found myself doing incorrectly for a LOT of years - putting an actual illuminating light at every part of the scene that should be casting illumination, getting the angle and spread just the way it should be. I always thought: "well, if my character comes over here and pushes this lit button...." Utter nonsense! Well... unless that's what one wants to do. I mean, I did like the way it looked, all those different lights doing their thing. But my renders really sucked back then. I think I'm finally starting to get somewhere.
Okay, so when I do a scene like this now, it's done very simply keeping this thought process as I begin to add the first light: "What do I want the audience to see, and what color should it be or not be?"
Yeah... it's a dark scene. It's using the "Aged" texture pack, which has a really dark tone with deep red tones for illuminating surfaces. So I guess I want the light that I use to be red - but here's the kicker: all of the apparent lights in the scene are some form of red.
With a shape light I can illuminate the whole room. In this case, I made shape light strips for each side of a split in the room.For some situations, I might find it more productive to use tube lights instead, but in the same way, using that same frame of mind. I just want to illuminate parts of the geometry - illuminate it and force it to cast shadows, especialy in this dark scene.
Aura is my friend next. I used to minimize the size of my aura because of the taboo rants that were being said about it. I mean... it's not a perfect light glare by any means. So I started cranking it up a bit more and giving it a somewhat larger radius and I think it does a much better job like that - but the point being is that it gives the illusion that those glow channel glows are what is casting the light in the scene!
Then comes my ever-so-overused volumetric fog - a spot light with a gel and a light cone. The gel really makes it because it makes the cone anything but the perfect, uniform cone it is otherwise. Even with just noise in it - it may as well be a cone of geometry with a glow on it if we don't break it up at least a little. But that volumetric light also help to explain to the audience where all of this light is coming from.
If I haven't done so already, my next step is to set up a realistic sky. No sky? I know... I only want the atmospheric density - that's it. No sun light, just a realistic sky and I turn on fog and set it up for my scene.
Kits like this (Marcoor series by Ravnheart) are really cool because it has several parts, like Marcoor Control Room (this main scene), Marcoor Corridor (just beyond this room's back door) and Corridor 2 (beyond the corridor). This scene is made up of all three.
I don't have to set the whole thing up because I also use each of these parts by themselves and I set them up the same way - intentionally to work together. Another huge advantage to doing it this way is that I can quickly build other parts of the interior of the ship or other scifi interior on a moments notice.
In this one (below) we're standing at the adge of Marcoor Corridor and the door at the end is attached to Marcoor Corridor 2, which is an intersection of up to six of these (or other) corridors or rooms. We can't see it here, but experimenting with the idea of how modular this all is, the Corridor 2 has five (including this) Corridors branching off, and the door opposite from where we're standing is the room in the first image, the Marcoor Control Room.
For this one, I rendered a spherical map of the City I built using inception8's Future City Blocks, added that as a map to a giant sphere's glow channel and ran Aura on it. Being awesome low-poly props, I opened my city in another window in Carrara and copied chunks of the city to place between the Helicon Station and the interior wall of the sphere.
Oh... right! To make the Helicon Station a taller structure, I duplicated it along the z axis to make an upside down mirror of it and just lined it all up and manipulated parts of it around modeling in the Assemble room. The ship is another fun kit bash!
Great stuff, thanks Dart.
Helicon station
+ the carrara fog feature
...and being able to multipass UV Normals - especially using the Spherical cam, so we can use the normal map on the glowing sphere!
...and then we can cast Aura on that glowing sphere... that and/or Glare!
Yikes Carrara is Kewl!!!
the spherical cam mysterious ways
something to do with 360 degreeses?
must play more with auras, not to be confused with harry potter aurors
Use the spherical camera to create a spherical map of it's entire surroundings. These can be used as the Iray Dome map, for example, as well as Carrara's Background or mapped to a sphere.
I've been rendering with Gamma Correction = 2.2, so rendering a background scene map doesn't work as expected, so I'll instead put the map(s) onto a sphere.
touring the shader wizard for a space station flooring.
as much as i luv the checkered square transparency look
, is overkill on the light thru transparency
or could use a terrain if a biodome parked on a big asteroid, or Pluto sized planetoid
other forum has someone praising the metaball modeler.
sorry to say i've never tried metaball.
i have tried the boolean kewlness. for etching text primitive from a cube
is soooooo kewl can have more than 1 scene open at a time.