Does anyone know a good animation technique for making an invisible object appear using Carrara. I have a ship I am trying to make uncloak. I have been using modifiers such as dissolve and blur together but the effect isn't too convincing. Any input would be appreciated, thanks. memaci

try using some of the shaders in the transparency chanel and changing them over the time line so that you bet both decreasing transparency and a moving transparency. An ecample would be set transparency to mixer with the blendermarble, celular, waves (try them each for effect) set the two colores as both black (all transparent) then over the time line that you want the ship to decloak start changing just one color from black to white (some will now be less transparent) during the same time modify some of the shader properties to give the effect of the transparent sections moving about the ship as it decloaks. the end point should be both colores white (no transparency). If I remember correctly in Startrek they would decloak in a wavy pattern, try using the wave shader under four elements shaders- you will have to play with it, my first test found that you have to apply the mixer in the color chanel also with you texter in one and black in the other to get full transparency- I will work on it some more tonight if I can and post some infor but have to go to work now.

I've been down this road several times. You can get it to work ALMOST! It will crap out on you right at the frame or two when you're almost completely invisible. The way I've done it is to make your shader tree a multi channel mixer with your original shader tree in the first channel, transparency in the second with a value of 100% mixed with a value you use to animate. There are several threads in the forum which talk about how to do transparency. Take a search and see what you find. -Kix

Thanks for the input and help. I will give this a shot tonight. I should use that search function more often - lots of info has passed through this forum! memaci

Another suggestion would be to do the composite effect outside of Carrara. While Carrara is a very powerful tool, there are other tools that are more suited to what you're trying to do. You could pull off an old-style fade out (remember "the Enterprise Incident" from the old series) by rendering the animation without the cloaked ship present up to 15 frames after the ship is supposed to appear. Then, render the animation with the ship in place from 15 frames before the end of the first render. Overlap the two in a video editing package (Premiere, Video Wave, whatever), use the dissolve feature, and poof! you have a ship dissolving into view. Hope this is helpful. - Dex

Why not use the a combo of the dissolve modifier and transparency in shaders. I didn't read everything that other have said but take a look at the dissolve modifier in the manual as to how it works and it should be pretty straight forward. Oh wait...lol Dex said that...well anyway..just experiment:) Brian ps. I'm sure there is a way to do this with formulas;)

Thanks again to everyone. I think the effect outside Carrara could be very cool Dex, unfortunately I don't have any video software. I tried the suggestions by ppowellaa and Kixum. I am not certain what crapped out on you Kix. At first I tried a blender with a single channel mixer and I got a bizzare ghost effect. I went with a complete multi-channel mixer and set all values to zero except transparency which I moved to 100%. While the effect is closer it is still not quite right. A cool effect to work with the transparency is blur. Unfortunately I couldn't find a way to universally apply to the entire object and didn't have the patience to apply to each object in the model. Thanks all. memaci

Attached Link: http://www.webattack.com/freeware/gmm/fwvideo.shtml

Cool. I'm glad you were able to figure it out in Carrara. For future projects, the link takes you to a freeware site that has a couple video editing programs. (PC only, I think, and I don't remember if your a mac or pc person.) One that looked particularly interesting was zwei-stein or something like that. And, hey, it's free. Also, if you have Windows ME or later, you have MS movie maker which can do simple dissolves, and Mac folks have iMovie wiht can also do simple dissolves. PS: cool to see that you're doing some Star Trek stuff. Don't see enough of that lately. - Dex

Thanks for the link Dex, I am a Mac person though. I thought about iMovie when it first came out but never had a real good reason to explore that option, until now. memaci