I'm creating a character to animate in Cararra and using my simplified skeleton to control the movement. Does anyone have any experience in creating animated characters and some pointers or wisdom to give. I don't have Poser so Cararra is my tool for now. Thanks in advance!!

For now, animating boned characters isn't possible in Carrara . You can try to make your character in parts, like a robot, and use Inverse Kinematics to animate it . Or you can wait for CS2 . Eovia has promised to put character animation tools in it, and it should be out in June according to the french site 3DMacFan.com (from reliable source) . litst

I've created a skeleton that I attach the body parts to and apply the constraints to the skeleton. This has worked out good for me so far. Hopefully bones will make this process easier.

bones and soft surfaces aside, knightdrake brings up a good question.

i will begin animating my project soon, and it is my first animation work ever.
(i made my character a robot to get around the bones issue), but does
anyone have good advice for how to create a constraint hierarchy that works
really well for animation?

in my tests, i've found that the way you group and link model elements makes
a big difference. are there any experts out there who have advice?

thanks.
-scott

Actually, if I understand you correctly, the Poser hierarchy makes a lot of sense: everything radiates out from the hip. The position/orientation of the hip determines the position/orientation of the body. The basic poser hierarchy is: hip-thigh-shin-foot-toe hip-abdomen-chest-neck-head chest-shoulder-forearm-hand-finger So, in general, start at the center, and work your way outwards. Make sense? This works because you can fairly easily define the position of the fingers relative to the hand, the position of the hand relative to the elbow, the position of the elbow relative to the shoulder, and so on, and so on.

I've had excellent success with my skeleton and I didn't use constraints (never have). I've been very smart with my placement of hot points and groupings and it's been rock solid. I'll post a movie tonight when I get home. -Kix

With linking the limbs, it's good to have IK going for the legs and FK for the arms in most uses. Also FK is easier to manage for the spine. I have two books that are helpful for character animation. Digital Character Animation 2 V1 and 2. Also a book I picked up from Hobby Lobby, Animating Cartoons and Animating Cartoons for Film. Both deal with 2-d work but the sections of biped walking and quad have helped with creating walk cycles.

Kixum..did you hand animate that with noIK??? THAT IS INSANE!!! That means you indiviually moved all the parts yourself? That just ain't normal. Now I don't know what you did yet, but if you did is what I said above then your nuts... IK would make that so much easier and would be perfect for a skeleton, Plus when you put it in different poses you wouldnt have to micromanage your model. If you don't know how IK works you should learn it..it would save you a lot of time. here is a sample that I did last year...the walk cycle isn't perfect and its just a sample. Tripod is tricky so you may have to work to get this 1.5meg mpeg. Pasting this address into a new explorer window usually does the trick... http://brenthomer.tripod.com/robotwalk.mpeg

Nice lil anim, Brent :) . We can see well, have you used a trick to lessen feet sliping ? It loaded okay with Go!Zilla BTW . One of the problems i had with IKs is that they take a lot of time to set up well and then they don't always behave the way i expect to .

Ok, Let me restate what happened with this skel. 1.) I really really hated the textures so I re-textured him (and dude, there are a lot of bones). It took a while. 2.) There were some things about him that I really hated geometrically so they had to be fixed (like one of the cross sections in his skull was crooked, very very annoying). There were quite a few pesky repairs and they took a while. 3.) I re-grouped the entire model. This was done so that I could pose him easily and there were some stupid groupings in it originally and there were empty groupings in it. 4.) The smarter groupings then allowed me to move the hotpoints to strategic locations. After all of this was done (steps three and four took me about 1.5 hours), I was able to create the animation I posted in about ten minutes. I've been able to do other things with him very easily and quickly. I've never looked into IK because I haven't had time, the animation stuff for people was always too clumsy and limited so I never really studied it and it sounds very buggy. Consequently I haven't taken the plunge down that hole yet. The way I've done it works very well for me, is fast, and doesn't break. -Kix

Well for anyone who hasn't tried IK b/c of buggy-ness..its not as damaging as everyone makes it out to be. Sometimes Carrara looses restraint limitations..it never looses the relationships. This means that If you have an arm fixed to only rotate x number of degree's then sometimes carrara looses that number and the arm can rotate further then you specified....the arm wont pop off the body or anything. As for the way you did it Kix...more power to you :) I still think that manually moving all of that stuff is insane, but hey, I've seen your pic's and they rule over anything I have done, so you must know what your doing :)