Good news: here is a new release of the PyCarrara plugin with some new exciting features

• First release of the very awaited User Manual !
• Support for Carrara 6.x and Carrara 7.x / Windows
• Simplified installation process
• c3d.sound_power() takes a new parameter for audio track selection
• New demo scenes :
• “PyCarrara_symetric_bones.car” : dynamically update slave bones position according to master bones position in a symmetrical manner
• “PyCarrara_midi_shader.car” : demonstrates how a shader alpha channel can be driven by a MIDI file

As usual, the plugin is available from http://pycarrara.sourceforge.net

I am waiting for your feedback, especially for the user manual: I believe that some parts may need additional wording work !

Here is an example of shader alpha channel animation : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JthuvE-0P68
Frederic

I tested a little in Carrara 6.2. The included demos work ok. Outside of the demos it seems there are some bugs that come up, but I think they're something that has always been in that version of Carrara rather than anything you did. (Seems like certain actions can trigger a bad memory leak when dealing with sound. Ends up freezing and needing task manager if not a full reboot.) The only thing that might be PyCarrara related is that occasionally some MicroSoft Visual C++ error will occur when editing a Python script in the window in Carrara. Why it does that, who knows?

I did get something simple working to show for it though. So it does have its uses when Carrara is willing to go along with it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1a7RIJgSXq8

Oh and the manual seems to read alright, I didn't catch anything in the technical stuff. (But then again, my knowledge of Python is limited.) Only thing that I'd change in translation is "boomer" to "speaker" or "woofer" depending on how specific you'd want it. Oh and you might want to note that the sound has to be at very first frame for the script to detect it. (Just have to edit the sound and add silence to the beginning if you need it timed different.)

Congratulations, you are the first one to post a render with this new release !
With C7 I experience also some freezes with PyCarrara, especially when closing the software. Did not yet found what is wrong in my code.
Thank you for the feedback. Ok, I will update the doc.
Frederic.

Quote -

I did get something simple working to show for it though. So it does have its uses when Carrara is willing to go along with it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1a7RIJgSXq8

Interesting work :)

dont know how I missed this thread, but its funny today, being at home due to a holiday.  I decided to revisit this plugin and sure enough I noticed it has been updated to 0.4 alpha.

I installed it on my C6 Pro 6.2 and didnt crash, it actually ran for me.

So next step is to try and get something animated and pumping to the beat of a song.

Welcome ! For sure, the number of users for this plugin is not yet very high.
Do not hesitate to ask for help.
The 0.4-alpha is an update for C8/32bit. C6 and C7 are still ok and I will continue to support them.

Frederic.

Thanks for doing this Frederic it is appreciated.  Now I'll have to learn how to use it, I have no knowledge of Python.

Here is a new test with my PyCarrara Python plugin : a fountain driven by an audio spectrum.

www.youtube.com/watch

The fountain is built with 100 particle emitters. Each particle emitter is associated to a frequency range of the audio spectrum. The simulation handles about 25.000 particles (250 per emitter).

The Python script contains a loop with 5 steps per second. At each step, the script does:

• compute the audio spectrum with a FFT operator
• evaluate the audio power in each spectrum subband
• compute the velocity parameter of each particle emitter according to the measured power
• set 100 keyframes for the 100 particle emitters

Rendering with Carrara Pro 8. Final compositing and color grading with FXhome VisionLab Studio.

Frederic.

Very interesting concept I like it, its like a rendered audio spectrum analyzer made of water fountain.