Hi,

Just a general opinion question. I am aiming to animate a story (I've chronicled them in the gallery here) and have worked with Carrara throughout. I love Carrara and am  concidering making my animations with this.
 
 Before I jump into thinking more seriously of a different program to use, My initial thoughts were to use Carrara for some of the character animation, all of the scenery and prop animations, and D|S for some of the animations as I have found I like a lot of features such as Puppeteer, Dynamic clothe sims, and even some of the Animate functions.

Has anyone else tackled some big character animation projects using Carrara here?  I am hesitant to jump into a different program and the months of learning it, developing characters, etc, until I worry out my thinking of using Carrara.

Advice, suggestions are welcome.

 Having good tools is important. Knowing how to use the tools is more important. There's an old western saying, "Beware of the man that carries just one gun."

Carrara and DS are a pretty potent combination and they've been created for hobbyists and pros that want to work with pre-rigged content. This is a huge luxury when compared to some of the other choices out there.

There are some applications out there that are more mature and handle character animation better but they come at a price increase and a substantial learning curve (trust me on this one). Additionally, you need to re-rig your characters since Carrara's FBX export is a little underwhelming. 

Unless you have cash and time to burn, sticking with what you have is probably wise. 

If you haven't seen it, e-brink has done some pretty decent work with Carrara here. Check out the movie - fun stuff. 

Mark

Thanks Mark, I tend to agree with you. Cash is one thing, Time quite another. Time is one thing that I think is always short and working on animation, from what I've done, is time consuming.
Again, I am learning more and more of Carrara's capabilities and am very comfortable in it. Plus, I like the characters I've created using Daz's meshs.

Rigging is definitely a challenge and your correct, having nice prerigged characters is a good luxury to have.

I expect I'll spend the next few months putting somethings together with Carrara.

e-brinks animation is great, definitely inspiring.

Thanks again!!

 The Little shrot from Eva was done with Poser and Carrara (Poser for the dynamic cloth and rig of the character), the all rest is Carrara:

http://www.vimeo.com/7247521

Quote -  The Little shrot from Eva was done with Poser and Carrara (Poser for the dynamic cloth and rig of the character), the all rest is Carrara:

http://www.vimeo.com/7247521

That is very good! It shows that Carrara is capable of doing a pretty decent job!! (of course, a very talented person on the other side of the screen helps a lot!) :biggrin:

Quote - > Quote -  The Little shrot from Eva was done with Poser and Carrara (Poser for the dynamic cloth and rig of the character), the all rest is Carrara:

http://www.vimeo.com/7247521

That is very good! It shows that Carrara is capable of doing a pretty decent job!! (of course, a very talented person on the other side of the screen helps a lot!) :biggrin:

Nicely done!!  Just curious....what was the render time for a short film as that??

Hello Propose001,

unfortunately I cannot tell you the pure render time.
Anyway rendering was the least time consuming part and most of it was done over night.
Most time consuming was creating the animation part, since I didn't have
much clue about it when I started. So it was much try and error.

All in all (modeling, rigging, texturing, animating, rendering) it took me the weekends of about 9 months.
I hope next time it will be faster ;)

Eva's bear short was great.  Amazing what can be done if someone puts their mind to it.

This is good stuff to know.  I sooooo badly want to animate the story I've been posting, but I feel like kind of a doofus when it comes to the whole concept.  ;P

Seeing that bear animation has just rekindled the desire to learn, so we'll see what happens on that front.   hugs her computer  It was nice knowing you.

i have a video in the animation section of renderosity showing right now that was done in carrara. the only part that was done in poser was the part where the alien girl talks. It's titled Monster Wars. to find animations just click on features at the top of th page.  another recent one i've done with carrara is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGucwYkAeJo  and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzDoNwjjmCY. they certainly aren't as good nor as elaborate as the little bear short, but they were fun to do.

I like the lochness flying squirrel very much. Unfortunately it's just a short flyby, I want to see more!

thank you.