Quote - F/X is a factor also if you want to add it I dont think you could add any of it to AVI files.

You should be ok with After Effects and AVI as long as you don't choose an unsupported compression codec, I can't find a page with the details but I would suggest one of the standard PAL or NTSC formats with no compression. The attached link suggests using DivX or XVid.

The shake manual says that it supports AVI and other video formats but it can't use temporary files if you do so it will require more memory and will take longer.

Combustion mentions that it supports AVI for audio but does not specifically mention what video format it supports but I'd presume from that it would support AVI for video too.

Coming from a TV background, I find that editing video "rushes" is simpler than editing a set of frames as I can simply drag to shorten or extend a clip. I've deliberately rendered longer clips than I expect to be need in the final version so I can make small adjustments to the timing. In the screenshot below, you can see how easy it is for me to hold the closeup for a little longer by simply dragging end of the clip.

When I did the stop motion film Ratobat, I converted each scene from frames to WMV (as that was what Movie Maker supported) and then edited together each of the scenes. I saw a talk at the BFI a year or so back where they were using Premiere Pro with one file per frame and this allowed them to edit on a low rez version. They then exited and by renaming folders, swapped the low rez files with high rez ones to allow them to open the project again and generate some output, so I can see how sometimes working with single frames might be better.

But to summarise and to backup aquiavic, you need to ensure that your entire pipeline, animation software, effects and video editing support formats that you can work with otherwise you will end up having to convert files all the time with potential for lost of quality. I've also found that trying to work with non standard sized caused me a problem and I switched to having all my video in 720x576.

All the best with your film.

It's amazing how flexible cats are, I saw one streching at the weekend and found it hard to believe it could make a complete U shape.

You might be interested in Animals in Motion by Eadweard Muybridge and Lewis S. Brown.

Quote - dvlenk6 - *"'model' -> 'triangulate n-gons'"  - 

As the image shows - sadly not - tried some of the other options - not much joy either.  

I believe you can use the crease functionality on the new vertexes to resolve this.

I used the spring plug-in the other day, very easy to use and good results. Thanks.

You can make animations using Windows Movie Maker, the minimum frame duration is 0.125, you can set that in the Options by pressing the spin buttons before loading the frames. You can also zoom in and drag the duration down.

I found the limitation with Movie maker was when I wanted to add lots of sound tracks, the video did not cause a problem.

I've been rendering short sections of movies from Carrara, converting the AVI into a WMV using a convertion tool and then using Premiere Elements 3 which I bought for about £60.

There's a video tutorial for rigging animation using bones with the Feb 2008 (current issue) of 3D World Magazine but unfortunately still no audio with these.

Looks good, I'll have another play with the wheels modifier for my ambulance later in the week

Nate, you can have it in any colour you want. Most browsers support replacing the colours with you own stylesheet.

Quote - You are right, there some software like the Lightwaves FPrime that can do the same job and much fast.

It's a good point, what's the reason to use a GPU accelerated renderer that ends up performing slower than your CPU based one? I still think there's a future in using the GPU's facilities for rendering but perhaps it's further in the future than I thought.

The ram and disk speed don't seem to make any difference the one exception would be if you had a really large scene and it could not all fit in memory.

Quote - Eh. I hasten to point out that everything I've managed so far could be replicated with simple image-maps. So far it's merely cleverness for the sake of being clever. There's an image in here soon, though. I'm working up a little series (first one is already posted, but over where the fairies hang out).

The difference for simple image maps comes when you want to zoom in on your textures. At this point image maps could become blocky where as procedural should not.

It would be interesting to know how memory usage increases for lots of objects using the two different techniques.

As mentioned above it's your CPU that's doing the hard work for rendering.

Appart from a low specification CPU, slow rendering could be one of many things:

My favourite switches to slow down rendering are:

Caustics: A 2s/frame render of a transparent flashing light for an ambulance slowed down to 2 minutes
Raytraced Depth of fields: 1s/frame changed to 3minutes.

The codec you export to may also cause problems. I normally render to uncompress AVI then use a conversion tool to change it to WMV.

Finally if your whole image can't fit in ram then the disk will start swapping and this could result in a 20-30 times slow down. Check task manager's performance tab, Commit Charge Total vs Physical Memory Total (or the equivalent if you are on a Mac)

I've popped my new hardware in place and re-run the Kixum benchmark, it came in almost exactly the same as Kixum suggested it would. So I'd expect this to be the same with most rendering.

Everything else has speeded up though so it's not a complete waste of money.

I think you mean NLA - Non Linear Animation.

Here's my first experiment based on the manual. I made the mistake a couple of times of moving the group not the objects in the group.

http://www.aceanim.com/Carrara/Carrra6NLA.htm

I'm looking at an GEForce 8600 GT card which does support Open GL 2.0 and Direct X 10. Its reasonably expensive at £100 but the cheaper 8500s also support Open GL2 not everyone mentions OpenGL on their sites but you can normally track down if it is supported.

I found an interesting link here about Vista and OpenGL. Windows Vista and OpenGL-the Facts
http://www.opengl.org/pipeline/article/vol003_9/

Open GL is mostly used for graphics and CAD applications such as Carrara, DirectX is biased towards games but also used for some of the game development toolkits and other utilities e.g, http://developer.nvidia.com/object/fx_composer_home.html