I'd like to make a 10 minute countdown clock with Carrara. I seem to vaguely remember a plug in for doing such things. Does anyone know if it really exists, and if so, where to find it? Also, any hints as to how to go about making a counter? Some have suggested analog (i.e. dials) or using Cognito to do a barrel based counter. But I'd prefer to just do a "simple" 3D text digital counter. - Jasen.

Are you intending on doing any motion? If not, then just make 10 stills, drop each into your video-editing timeline, as 1 sec stills, and render from there. Simple, easy, quick. I did just that and made a seperate animation with a spinning dial, by setting the 'hot-spot' of the dial hand to one end, giving it a 'spin' modifier, setting it to spin at 1 sec intervals, then rendered a 1 sec animation. This I then dropped behind the rendered stills of the different second markers in my video editor, 10 times. Hope this helps. :>

If you made a 9 - 0 countdown movie, you could use it as a shader on an object in your final animation. Using rotoscoping you could then repeat the object and change the oscillation tweening to get minutes, seconds etc. - although I don't know how precise that would be. If your little shader movie was black and white you could use it to mask the glow channel and have lit numerals on your clock. Mark

Aww. What's wrong with Nixie tubes? I thought I saw, long ago, a free nixie tube model. Or you could do an old seven-segment (or the more modern 15-seg) and activate a glow channel on a number-by-number basis. The trick would be to use the "Discrete" tweener so nothing changes for most of the second, then a bezier tweener over a quarter-second or less to turn several segments off and others on. The cute thing with this is that you could add a single blinking segment or four in rotation as some stop-watches do to show fractions of a second spinning past.

What's wrong with Nixier tubes? Why, nothing of course... except... that is... what ARE Nixie tubes? (feeling embarassed, but goes forward anyway...) I've never heard of the term before.

You ever look at a vacuum tube and seen the glowing filament inside? Nixie tubes have ten filaments, each in the shape of a number from 0 to 9. I mentioned them as more of an esoteric geek joke. More fool me. It seems they've become popular again! http://www.sphere.bc.ca/test/nixies.html

More fool I. Just read a little further and "Nixie" is a former trademark of Burroughs, soon used generally to refer to the family of cold-cathode displays. So these are actually low-pressure cathode systems similar in principle to neon lamps. No "filament", or heating, involved. A very cute site showing nice pictures of old display systems; www.vintagecalculators.com/html/ calculator_displays.html