I'm trying the Carrara trial now and am pretty impressed, moving over from Poser, but I have a couple of questions.

1. Does Carrara have an automatic real time animation preview? For example in Poser, there is a "skip frames" option which will skip frames to maintain the animation's frame rate. Also using poser's box/fast mode which reduces all objects and body parts to simple rectangular prisms will almost always play real time for me.

No matter what settings I use in Carrara the animation preview is very slow and chunky (even using bounding box mode).

1. In the animation sequencer, is there a way to hide or shy (as you can in After Effects) scene elements? For example, let's say I import Vicki 4 and want to animate her, but I'm not going to animate a lot of the morphs or the fingers and I don't need them cluttering up the sequencer. Is there any way to hide them or say rearrange them so the elements I use most would be at the top of the list? I don't want to change the functionality or hierarchy of the model or hide anything in the scene view, I just want to rearrange the list in the sequencer.

Thanks in advance if anyone has answers.

You can try at the Output tab, at the Render Room, the Draft or the Non-Realistic output options. There's a bunch of modes for a fast preview. ;)

I was hoping someone more knowledgeable than me would answer but I guess I'll chime in. For hiding elements you aren't using in the sequencer they should be collapsable within the hierarchy so it should be easy to hide things like fingers that are far down the chain. You can hide objects in the view finder by unchecking the "Show Object in 3D View" box in the properties dialog--that way it will still render but won't take up any redraw time when previewing.

I hope that helps

Short answers -- no and no.

That said, to answer with more detail:

Question 2:  I often render draft versions of shots to make sure timing is working properly -- it's a pain, but it's also pretty quick.  I'm doing 1920X1080 24FPS  sequences, and dropping the resolution by half (960x540) and using the draft renderer (gourard shader? I don't remember and am not in front of Carrara right now) I've been able to render out scenes in near real time.  It's not quite as easy as Poser in that you just click play and see something not working, change it, play again....  But it does work.

Question 2:  Oh, how I wish there was a shy switch in the sequencer like the AE timeline.  Unfortunately, not.  But I do collapse the items so that my characters take up only one line of space when I'm not animating with them.  And I group things frequently so I can minimize the amout of lines on the sequencer.

Hope that's helpful.  Carrara is a powerful program, particularly for the price, but it is missing some professional elements like these.

 - Dex

Quote - Short answers -- no and no.

That said, to answer with more detail:

Question 2:  I often render draft versions of shots to make sure timing is working properly -- it's a pain, but it's also pretty quick.  I'm doing 1920X1080 24FPS  sequences, and dropping the resolution by half (960x540) and using the draft renderer (gourard shader? I don't remember and am not in front of Carrara right now) I've been able to render out scenes in near real time.  It's not quite as easy as Poser in that you just click play and see something not working, change it, play again....  But it does work.

Question 2:  Oh, how I wish there was a shy switch in the sequencer like the AE timeline.  Unfortunately, not.  But I do collapse the items so that my characters take up only one line of space when I'm not animating with them.  And I group things frequently so I can minimize the amout of lines on the sequencer.

Hope that's helpful.  Carrara is a powerful program, particularly for the price, but it is missing some professional elements like these.

 - Dex

Thanks Dex, while I'm disappointed with the answers, I'm glad that they are definitive.  You know exactly what I'm talking about. 

I looked into Carrara as an alternative to poser's rendering engine (which still doesn't work for me as of SR2).  After playing with it a bit I realized it could be able to replace poser for me altogether.  Not having 'click and go' previews is a big drawback, as it really speeds up my workflow.

I could live without a shy switch for regular poser figures, but in the case of Vicki 4, all of her bending magnets show up in the sequencer, which adds tons of clutter for objects that I'm never going to adjust anyway.

Hi, Krewz --

Glad I could be of help.  I don't have V4 yet so I'm not familiar with the bending magnets, so this may be an ignorant suggestion, but that rarely stops me!  Is it possible to select the V4 character and the bending magnets and group them?  That way you'd be able to collapse her into one line on the hierarchy.

And as for real-time playback, it's been an adjustment to test render each shot a number of times, but since I go 'way back to the old days of stop-motion animation on film, where you didn't get to see how the motion looked until you got the film back from the lab, it was a fairly quick adjustment for me! 

Carrara's renderer is fantastic and with plug-ins like Digital Carvers Guild's toon!pro and wireframe pro, you can get some really cool cartoon results that I've not been able to get from Poser itself.  I bring that up just because Carrara does open a wide variety of options once you're using it.

Good luck,
Dex

Quote - Hi, Krewz --

Glad I could be of help.  I don't have V4 yet so I'm not familiar with the bending magnets, so this may be an ignorant suggestion, but that rarely stops me!  Is it possible to select the V4 character and the bending magnets and group them?  That way you'd be able to collapse her into one line on the hierarchy.

And as for real-time playback, it's been an adjustment to test render each shot a number of times, but since I go 'way back to the old days of stop-motion animation on film, where you didn't get to see how the motion looked until you got the film back from the lab, it was a fairly quick adjustment for me! 

Carrara's renderer is fantastic and with plug-ins like Digital Carvers Guild's toon!pro and wireframe pro, you can get some really cool cartoon results that I've not been able to get from Poser itself.  I bring that up just because Carrara does open a wide variety of options once you're using it.

Good luck,
Dex

Actually I just tried grouping the magnets and it works.  I wasn't able to regroup body parts in the hierarchy, so I assumed you couldn't do it with anything else.  Glad I was wrong.

I was originally looking at Vue to render poser scenes in, but its rather pricy.  I started playing with Carrara, and got hooked pretty quick.  It takes away so much of poser's clunkiness, renders an order of magnitude faster, and comes in at the same price point.  And of course, its closer to a high end 3d app.  I'm going to start using Carrara regularly very soon.

Awesome!  And welcome to the fold.  :D