Recently, I have been getting into Poser animation, and I decided I might need to get another app to use for rendering my larger animations. Since Carrara and Vue both import PZ3 files, and are within my price range, I'm debating to myself about which one to get. Does anyone have any examples of Carrara animations? I've been searching the web, but haven't turned up many examples. I see some great stills in the galleries, but I can't find many galleries of animation for the app. I found a few done with Vue that look awesome. I know it all depends on the artist doing the work, but still it would be cool to see some stuff done with the app before buying it. Doesn't matter to me if other softwares were also used in the process, just as long as the original rendering was done with Carrara. A friend of mine warned me that some renderers have issues when it comes to animation, stuff like aliasing? and flicker?, which is why they don't get used a lot for movies and stuff but I probably won't get to doing anything so important that those things would bother me anyway. Thanks guys!

Attached Link: my workflow

Hi I recently got Carrara pro4 for just that purpose I havent imported many animations yet as im still getting a grasp of Carrara's effects features but the third part of this clip was rendered in Carrara pro4

Hey, that looks really good, Wolf359! Is that skin material something that comes with Carrara? One thing I noticed about Poser is that it is very difficult, when using BVH files, to keep the figure's feet from slipping as if on ice. I don't have LifeForms, but I noticed in your first part of the anim, the example of the bones in LifeForms seemed to have the same problem in some parts. Didn't notice it in the final render though. Don't know if you know what I mean, but how do you deal with this in your workflow? For me, it seems that even a simple walk cycle in Poser can bring about a strange movement that makes feet seem to slide or float at different times while walking, or moving. I guess one could always hide this problem with camera angles, but I was wondering if that is something Carrara could help with also? I know it can't be done in Vue, since Vue doesn't have character animation tools, but I'm sure Carrara does?

And don't forget that you can do modeling with Carrara, not in Vue.

Carrara does have character animation tools incorporated in it. And, as Mikeberg just mentioned, it's also a very good modeler. I've used Carrara for animation for broadcast for years and have never had flicker problem in animations. You have to be sure your settings in the render room are correct -- faster, lower quality anti-aliasing or not using the full ray trace mode can sometimes result in shimmer or strange artifacts, but when you're going at full quality, the image stands up very well. - Dex

For that I think carrara is a better choice. Good render, more file support and modeling. While VUE has it's strengths, modeling isn't it, you have to get vue5 infinite to get better file support. Really don't like their almost non-existent export. I do like the basic animation (vue) feature they have. It is very easy and quick. That should be something a program uses as a base then you can adjust it individually. You probably want c4p tho. Certain effects can cause problems if you use an alpha channel, but it is better in version 4 than 3. C4 also has good terrain and sky...plants are weak, but there are programs and plugins to help with that. They also have a terrain painter that works well with a tablet. Which you don't hear much about, but I like...would like to see more tablet usage in all these 3d programs. Particularly modeling related.

Thanks everyone. Aside from the sample WOlf showed me, is there anywhere that has more examples of animations done with Carrara? I only found 1 site that had Vue animations, and while they looked really good, there wasn't much in the way of characters in them. Thats to be expected I guess, since it's mostly for landscape creation. I think I'm going to get Carrara, although I came upon AnimationMaster, which looks pretty awesome too. The only problem I see with AnimationMaster is that it doesn't play well at all with Poser, or any other app for that matter. sfdex, do you have any examples of your Carrara works? I'd love to see some!

Attached Link: Carrara animation

This is an animation rendering from the Carrara content CD using physics in the animation. I haven't had time yet to really work with Carrara but hope to get going soon. You will see a falling chain bumping a cube off the scene. Its more interesting if you loop the movie. I haven't been on this forum before and am hoping to learn from it.

Message edited on: 10/13/2005 14:46

Attached Link: http://www.dexfx.com/Invasion_clip.htm

Here's a clip I did using Carrara 3. Other animations for work I don't have posted in anything other than TINY wmv files, but you can get the idea of how they'd look. Here's a link to an edition of the monthly news program I produce; all the 3D graphics (AOC-TV ID, text spins, and the set that the anchor is reporting from) were created in Carrara 3 or 4P. First link is to my personal site: www.dexfx.com/invasion_clip.htm Second link is to the public California Courts site where you can see my news show (CCN -- California Courts News). http://www2.courtinfo.ca.gov/cjer/aoctv/ccn/ccn101105.htm Click the Play Video link. It's only WMV since that's all the State of California supports for this branch of government. Hope this is helpful. - Dex

Actually, now that I think about it, the AOC-TV ID that's at the beginning of CCN was created in RayDream Studio 5.5 -- the predecessor of Carrara, long since fading from memory. - Dex

I did these animations for the last space shuttle flight. They've been compressed a bit. http://www.ocregister.com/multimedia/shuttle/

Jack whitney has some good examples and others off the links on eovia.com. http://www.eovia.com/resources/carrara_tutorials/carrara_tutorials.asp rustboy.com also used carrara (don't know how much) and the much older infini-d. This was done with c3. http://www.harmonic-uk.co.uk/ Because you said animation c4p would def be better than c4., as I said. You have to be careful looking at work tho because you may not know what other tools or plugins were involved or whether the interface will work for you. The plugin that comes with c4p(transposer is version one which doesn't do poser 5. Transposer2 is now $99 I think they killed the upgrade price of $39. It was not fully working with poser 6 either)This is not clear on the site.

"The only problem I see with AnimationMaster is that it doesn't play well at all with Poser" Yes, that's true. I bought Animation Master and C4Pro both. As a hobbyist I bop back and forth between them as the whim moves me. They're both great products. Animation Master has the strongest character animation toolset available, but you're locked in the world of Hash patches (which isn't necessarily a bad thing if you're just a hobbyist). And you gotta love that Animation Master upgrade path, 99 bucks any time, even if you wait 10 years between upgrades. I'd suggest both if you can justify a few extra bucks.

Hey, thanks for all the great input guys. Very much appreciated. I'm quite sure I'll be going with Carrara 4 Pro this week. Even though I'm no pro. LOL

What about Rustboy? Its made with Carrara, isnt?

Rustboys Site

Raydream and Infiniti-Z (sp?) I think.

Yeah I mentioned that. He says infini-d. and some car, but doesn't state how much car.

Carrara was used to model Rustboy's head. Infini-D has been used for everything else. If you wanna see what can be done with a lot of creativity and work, visit this site. It is incredible. When you view what this guy has done, keep in mind that Infini-D is an old orphaned program that is being run on a Mac on System 9. Carrara, on the whole , is more powerful, as are most 3-D programs these days. Whenever I see these long discussions about whose software is better, I think about this site. Good tools are important but nothing beats pure talent.

"flicker" has to do with materials (anything that is set to "random"), the fine lines in it and the degree of detail you tell the render engine to use. You can adjust these in carrara... c5 (new) allows you to "bake" (my own term) the lighting of the textures into the scenes..which also reduces flicker. c5 is a big bang for the buck... c4 is as well... I have lots of animations from carrara native raytracing and other render modes, but currently no site to post them. from what I have, its just a matter of trial and error to reduce flicker..and in most cases, there is none. If you have a compositing app which will blur frames when you reduce time..its all a moot point anyhow. luck on your decision..but I'd say carrara is head and neck above vue...for stability alone. BT