Hello Is anybody currently animating characters in C2? I would like to get any feedbacks on the good/bad points... (is IK stable, easy to animate, etc.) thanks!

Yes. See the movie below. I found I had more trouble creating the critter than I did animating it, but that is more a reflection on my poor modeling talents as opposed to any shortcomings in Carrara.

The bones setup was pretty easy. I've used trueSpace and LightWave and never really got bones, Carrara's implementation just clicked for me.

Glider Movie

Best regards,
Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
3D extensions for Carrara
http://digitalcarversguild.com

Nice Thanks a lot!

Hrm. I've had a mixed result of the problem. I don't have an anim to show for all the work I've done. Mainly because after hitting and figuring out 5 bugs with bones in C2 I was too fed up and too frustrated to continue. Plus one of the bugs that I hit was in a very commonly used feature of Carrara.

If it was working all perfectly, C2 would be acing. However, for complex models with large amounts of points, I can see this being a bit of a headache. From pictures in books it looks like Maya uses influence envelopes in order to manipulate vertices of a model. This seems in my opinion the way to go. C2 weights the vertices, all of them, based on how close they are to a bone. This makes it harder to tweak the behaviour of a vertex per bone for a model that has tons of vertices.

Simple models like Eric's mantaray above it'll be ok. His critter doesn't have complex movements. Not too long ago I was trying to animate a humanoid character, one continuous surface/mesh, with bones. The character didn't lend itself to C2's bones system well and to tweak it so that it works fine was more work than it was worth.

I started over with a simplified version of the character where all the moveable parts are separate from each other. Meaning, head was not attached to the torso. Fingers, palm, fore arm, upper arm were all separated. This end up being easier to animate with C2 bones system as each part was basically controlled by one bone. At least for my figure. But then I hit some of the above mentioned 5 bugs and called it quits for now.

As far as I've played with C2, for bones to work well on continuous meshes it's easier to work with thin and simple joints with C2. Tweaking will still be needed and will be a little difficult but not impossible. Otherwise keep it simple. If you're looking for Final Fantasy capability in mesh control with bones then C2 will not do it.

With all the following problems I never got around to making a walk cycle for my humanoid.

Bugs: (Eovia knows of these.)
1/ Duplicate with symetry does not duplicate a bone with a contraint on it the same way as if it didn't have the contraint.

Workaround. Drag the constraint off temporarily and place it in the saved constraint folder in the browser panel. Now Duplicate with sym. Drag the contraint back on.

2/ Place a contraint on a bone. Adjust it's possition using the sliders. Now set the constraint on the bone to none. The mesh stays where it is which I think is invalid because....

Put on a new constraint or the same one as before. Problem here is that the constraint is now on the new bent bone instead of the initial position of the bone. You can into bad situations here.

2.1/ You'll need two Axis constraints. One around z and another around x. Place one of the constraints on a bone. Position the bone. Now place the other on the bone. The limits of the new constraint gets applied but the axis doesn't.

2.2/ With the custom constraint. There is a popdown for order of rotation. Changing it from XZY, YXZ, YZX, ZXY, ZYX, works fine, the bone gets readjusted. Changing it to XYZ from any of those other ones does nothing, not good.

3/ Working with 2. DO NOT HIT UNDO (Ctrl-Z). Kiss your bone system goodbye as returing it to the reference position is now fubarred. Like my friend said, "Undo is suppose to get yout out of trouble, not further in it."

3.1/ similar to 3. Change the position of the bone with a constriant. Hit undo. The angle of the constraint reverts back to 0 but the bone remains bent. I'm working from memory here so you may need to modify a few bones in the chain. But after that if you undo all the way back things get royally stuffed.

4/ Changing a bunch of bones and then sending back to the reference position via the menu item to reset the bone system can cause the bone system to get whacked.

Workaround for 3 - 4: Just don't do it! You're hooped once your skeleton is stuffed. You basically have to remove the constraints on the bones and then reset their position and then reapply the constraints. A lot of work and you end up back at the beginning.

5/ related to 4. after this close the project by clicking on the box of the viewer beside the title. Now go to the file menu. All the items are grayed out. Even quit.

Workaround: Drag and drop a car file on the program to reactivate the file menu.

Hum... so humanoid characters seem to be out of the question for C2... thanks!

Not completely out of the question but just difficult to do. I am by no means an expert here with either character animation or Carrara but this is what my feeling is with using Carrara for this purpose. Others may have had more luck than I have.

Its no where near impossible. I've animated Characters in Carrara many times,you can skip bones if its a problem and use linkages. Or you can use bones, I'll be posting a WIP I am doing later this evening. Brian

In order to use linkages you will need to build your charater in unique pieces. Modify the hotpoints for proper rotation etc. Not any more or less difficult than bones. The problem is that it's not a model that is a continuous mesh. Say, like Daz Victoria figure.

To animate Victoria in Carrara will require quite a bit of tweaking at the joints so that they deform properly. Not a simple task as far as I can see.

I bought C2 expressly for the purpose of character animation. The traps that I constantly fell into when working with them and the 'n' times I had to restart from the begining basically killed it for me. I'm hoping C3 will be a much better experience with these issue fixed up.

At any rate, I'd still be interested in any examples or tutorials about character animation in Carrara.

Chin up. There are some nice things in the future. You can't blame Carrara for the Victoria problems. Thats a geometry problem, the C bones are designed to work well with the SDS feature. My suggestion is build your model in Carrara. As far as linkages and bone structure being complicated, thats the nature of the beast, it take animators hours in Maya to tweak and retweak linkages and FK and IK. Granted they are quite different programs and there aren't so many bugs..lol. Anyway, just keep the chin up, there are some good things in the future for Carrara I'm sure. Brian

great thread I was playing with bones and came across some of thee bugs you mentioned thought it was just me. Especially the deformation of the mesh when you move an arm even with constraints. Question: I was going thru the tutorial on character animation and everything was fine except when I try to add my saved constraints from the right shoulder/ elbow / wrist of the left arm to the right arm. When I look at the motion transform section I see that that the constraints have been added but the arm will not move. Is this a bug or am I doing something wrong? John

I haven't really hit this case yet. If you have a sample and steps to reproduce, that will help. Do you have the latest patches attached? I'm not sure if that will help at all. What type of constraint are you using or applying? Possibly remove the constraint and reset the bone. Then reapply the constraint.

Copying constraints from bones to bones, especially when you do a flip from side to side, bugs up in a lot of software... (we use max at work and the problem also arises when working with bones instead of character studio). Sometimes its just faster to redo your constraints set-ups on the other side from scratch rather than trying to de-bug it when its acts up...