Here is a short animation that will be a part of a larger project, but gives you an idea
of the type of animation it will be.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bS6uwn9w4Cs

Everything including the music is produced by me.

Rendered in 1280x720  720P HD 24FPS  
Each Frame rendered into a .BMP File and edited using Sony's Vegas Video.

Figuring out how to Rotate each cube on all 3 axis (x,y,z) was quite the challenge and looks easy once you know how, and then doing it while its replicated.

Somethings I still need to figure out.

• Create a shader so that all 6 sides of the cube have different solid colours, i.e. Red, Blue, Green, Yellow etc..
• Slow down the animation
• Better Lighting.

 It would be fun to do some math and find out how much frames the beat (130 to 140 bpm I presume?) is, so you could sync the movement of the cubes to the beat.
You could cheat a little by using different points of view to re-sync if small differences remain.

Keep up the experimenting! Carrara can cater all you are looking into I think!

BWTR: thanks for the tips, I will apply them to the animation and see what results I get, the shader area of Carrara is a bit scary for me, I'll have to dig deep and try and wrap my head around it.

Hoofdcommissaris:  It would be neat if there was sort of builtin feature that would make it easy to time things to sounds.  Maybe Carrara version 9 or 10 :)

Ok... now I'm embarrased :)

Looks like I didnt scroll down enough to notice there was an soundtrack. :)

I'lll to try and do some math or something... if you watch the video and notice all the cubes Pulse.  But if I do a preview of the animation, because the entire thing build of a single cube replicated, all I see is a giant wireframe of cubes rotating, nothing like what the end result looks like, so visually I wont be able to time it.

Ok so here is the result of using Shading Domains, which took me a bit of time to figure, as easy as it is, I didnt quite understand it, looking at the users manual.  I searched the net for some examples and watched some videos on youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tyJ1Z5QKpM

 Analog: very creative, keep on good work :)

I forgot to thank  Brian (bwtr) for putting me in the right path on using Shading Domains to give each side of the cube a different color.

It was almost 1:00AM way past by bed time :)

 Brian is brilliant :)

Please tell my wife!
Brian

Quote - Please tell my wife!
Brian

Dear Mrs Brian,

Your husband is brilliant and very helpful please give him lots of hugs and kisses and let him do whatever he wants to do, and let him come out to play with us.

how is that? hehehe :)

Anyone spot the mistake I made on the 2nd video?  I forgot to turn off the visibility of the source cube that is being replicated.

That looked cool as it was in the first go.

Now if you could somehow integrate that PyCarrara plugin and make the boxes into flying speakers...  And then throw in some trippy stuff and abience using formula backgrounds and animated shaders.  But that's my funny way of looking at it.

In a way it also reminds me of that OT post on the Bryce forum about using a soundcard to drive O-scope images. (And I think it lends itself to a seemingly obvious laser-show application.) If that demo software can be made to display any image using a variety of sweep modes...  Hmmm...

We could be on the edge of something really cool here... I'd like to know how it works out.

paulsj75: 
You are very observant, and understand where I'm going with this project. :) I want to make the end result a surprise and dont want to reveal too much.

I'm going to take a look at the PyCarrara plugin, but the install docs talked about Carrara 7 so I'm not sure it will work for me.

I do need to beef up the scene with some more elements than just the rotating cubes, I was thinking maybe dropping some objects using the article emitter into the mix.

Will see.

"Quote - "Please tell my wife!
Brian"

Dear Mrs Brian,

Your husband is brilliant and very helpful please give him lots of hugs and kisses and let him do whatever he wants to do, and let him come out to play with us.

how is that? hehehe :)"

Printed out.  Framed.
Added to my Awards/Trophies cabinet.
Brian

At times I swear I'm almost better at making (random?) connections than James Burke. It's one of those mental exercises where everything is a puzzle piece that may fit in certain ways. The downside at times it can lead to kooky sounding ideas or catching onto trends or ideas years ahead of time. A useless talent, because I can't really put it in the context of a story like a good sci-fi writer.

I hope I don't put too many spoilers out there because of that. In this case I predict awesomeness no matter what.

BTW, I managed to find a guy on Youtube that made an XY laser scanner as a hobby project and even said he tried one of the things I was thinking of. Apparently there were problems (no details - other than certain things get garbled), I figure inertia seems to be one of the roadblocks on the small budget level. I suspect resonance and secondary vibrations within a rig might be another one. The seemingly easy answer would make the thing as small as possible with the least mass to throw around. But then budget becomes an issue while maintaining the precision it would need to work. The economics for certain things may not favor the typical non-commercial hobbiest approach.

Now if you can figure out how to rapidly and precisely alter the focal plane... That's even cooler! Anyhow, that's getting too tricky quite fast and seems outside the realm of more traditional mechanical approaches (my imagination wanders into hypothetical lenses using the optical properties of fluids and altering their densities), so I won't go there.

Ok...  That was offtopic for Carrara. But if Carrara is used as an element of something that integrates neat visuals into a sucessful display technology project - that's cool! Right?

Ok So I tried to get PyCarrara installed no such luck.

I'm not sure if its because I have Carrara 6Pro vs 7pro or that there needs to be more done than meets the eye.

First attempt I got the Python26.dll is missing.  So I grabbed 2.6 and installed it still gave me the error.  So I moved the Python install folder inside the carrara extensions folder.

Than I got an Open error of some sort.

The PyCarrara comes with a default scene which I've been trying to load.  no such luck.

I posted in the Daz3d forums where there is talk about the PyCarrara.  Hopefully they can help.

If I could get PyCarrara working it will bring my project up to a new level.

Imagine a Particle Fountain where either elements of the particles or other objects in the scene are dancing to the beat of the music. :)

Ok looks like Plugins are version specific.  So for now PyCarrara is only available for C7 Pro.