Post up here if you are working the holiday like me and are trying everything humanly possible to avoid work!!! I Think I am going to go 'research' new carrara techniques soon :) working the holidays sucks.....

I'm researching lots of RDS stuff, myself. Rumor has it that they'll be letting us go early today, but I'll believe that when I'm kicked out the door! And Happy Holidays!

hehe..it always feels better knowing that someone else has to work on days like this! yawns So hows your new job working out? You still working in video?

Thanks for asking.... I love the new job. Yep, I'm working in video and since the department I'm in is pretty new, I'm able to coerce them into using cgi animations pretty often. It's a great chance to force some cool graphics stuff onto an otherwise pretty stodgy atmosphere. The above is the endframe of an animation I did for the open of a quarterly news update show here in California.

Even as I love the new job, I love the new city more. San Francisco is such a great place to be -- so much more alive than Phoenix ever was. And there's a thriving CGI community here. It's really exciting. I've met folks here who do 3D work, know AfterEffects backwards and forwards, all that. It's nice to be able to have a casual conversation in a cafe with someone about the finer points of boolean operations and not feel out of place.

Happy New Year, Brent, and everyone. I wish everyone the best in 2002.

• Dex

So do you use Carrara at all in video production or is it all higher end stuff?

robertzavala... I use carrara in TV all the time. When I first started working here they had lightwave and a $5k mac. know one in the company knew how to use it. I worked on lightwave for about 4 hours and said this is the stupid program I have ever used. I looked around at all the different types of 3d programs and figured Carrara was the easiest. I think I am right....when I work with other graphic artist from other post houses they all laugh at it, but just ask them to type in your name and spin it. We just have to go to the text modeler type it in and drag a texture on it. A light wave user has to type it in...extrude it...make the polys double sided so you can see the back..go thru a big menu system to add a texture...FORGET IT!!! I submitted a 3d animation to eovia for DVworld that they wanted to run, unfortunatly it jumbled up with lawyers on my end so it never made it there...but I was surprised how many people where using carrara in a professional aspect. I think someone on the yahoo list is using it @ espn...and someone else @ nickelodian is using for games.....

I'm not even using Carrara; I'm still with RDS 5.5. And, yes, I use it (and have used it for a couple years, now) in television production. For ID's, opens and such, I don't need more than the tools available in these programs. I've even created an entire educational video that's set in the future using RDS-generated sets. Just before I left Arizona, I did a news show with the anchor chroma-keyed into a CGI set (RDS-generated, of course). The only comments I got in the program evaluations were, "what a cool set" and "where did we get that set?" Nobody even spotted that it was CGI. Let alone CGI created on a program I bought for about 80 bucks. The tools in RDS and Carrara can produce first-rate braodcast-quality material. If Eovia will just put bones and a killer particle generator in C2, I bet a ton of people in broadcast and cable will start using it for television. As for the higher-end stuff, we don't have any of it here. I'm not opposed to using it (I know my way around Lightwave), but we don't have the budget to buy several thousands of dollars of software when the software we have can produce "real" television.

Hay AZ, I'd like to hear what kinds of things you'd like added to the particle generator. -Kix

I'm not sure what's available with Carrara's Particle Generator, but RDS's is pretty weak. I've been playing with the particle generator Litst linked to a few posts ago and it has some amazing features (although it's only 2D). Those are features I'd like to see. But I'll list what I think we should have -- 1. variable particle type (size, shape, etc) 2. variable particle velocity 3. true 3D particles (not the little 2D flakes that RDS generates 4. emitters and attractors that influence the path of each particle 5. completely adjustable particle life and duration 6. adjustable noise perameters in the particle path, life, and impulse 7. collision detect to provide appropriate bounce and deflection off other objects in the scene 8. maybe even the ability to build a small object and assign it to each of the particles in a stream (like a single model of a snowflake that becomes the particles in a stream, simulating a storm of snowflakes -- kind of like what you could do with furrific in RDS by putting an object at the end of each hair) 9. variable disbursion patterns so the particles don't have to come from one single point. Yeah, that's about it. OK, so when they develop it, I'm sure it'll bump C's price right up there with Max.... But a guy can wish.

Ok, Let's see how we're doing so far. 1. variable particle type (size, shape, etc) C doesn't do this yet. 2. variable particle velocity C does this. 3. true 3D particles (not the little 2D flakes that RDS generates I can't remember exactly but I think the objects are simple 3D beasties. You're choices are a little limited. 4. emitters and attractors that influence the path of each particle C doesn't do this yet but it doesn' have variable "wind" and gravity. If you're a little smart about it, you can get the particles to do some cool stuff. 5. completely adjustable particle life and duration C does this. 6. adjustable noise perameters in the particle path, life, and impulse C does this. 7. collision detect to provide appropriate bounce and deflection off other objects in the scene As far as I'm aware, C can only do bounce off a ground plane but I may be wrong on this. It might do more. 8. maybe even the ability to build a small object and assign it to each of the particles in a stream (like a single model of a snowflake that becomes the particles in a stream, simulating a storm of snowflakes -- kind of like what you could do with furrific in RDS by putting an object at the end of each hair) Ok, C can't truly do this but you can assign a shader which has the shape of what you want in the transparency channel and you can get a result which is what you're talking about. Amazing but true. I haven't seen furrific. Is it as furrific as the fur we see in Monsters Inc? 9. variable disbursion patterns so the particles don't have to come from one single point. C doesn't do this yet. It would be very cool. If it could do that, I could finish my version of the Balrog we see in the Lord of The Rings movie I'm working on. Having a smoking body would be mucho cool. -Kix

Sorry about point 4, It does have wind and gravity. -Kix

Hey, Kix -- Thanks for the details on the particles in C. It seems like it must be much more powerful than the particles in RDS. As for Furrific, well, no it's not as amazing as Monsters, Inc., but it's pretty good, nonetheless. Maybe AFX will consider porting some of their plug-ins over to Carrara now that it's a supported program again. Maybe someone here might put a little bug in their ear, eh? Unless I'm mistaken, it shouldn't be all that difficult to change the coding from an RDS plug-in to a Carrara plug-in. (Of course, I know ABSOLUTELY nothing about coding, so I know not whereof I speak.) - Dex

Ok, One more thingy, The particle generator can produce particles from a reasonably wide distribution area (it can do planes and lines of particle generation, maybe even volumetric). It can't do multiple single points but you can just toss in another generator for multiple single points. The wind statement I made is actually a tad unclear, what is true is that you can assign gravitational forces in all three directions. What's neat about this is that if you re-orient the generator the gravity orientation moves with it (stays local to the generator) so it's pretty flexible in how you want it to work. The flakes are just still flakes, not 3D dealies but you can pick from four different flake shapes. If you pick squares and put a snowflake in the transparency channel, you'll get snowflakes (so I've read). I'm going to try it tonight and post something. I'll see what I can do to make some smoke too. C still has a "fountain" which is different than tha particle generator. The generator is way cooler. I haven't played around with the particle fountain enough to know how it works. -Kix