oh yeah...thanks for the Bones shot Ringo...that was pretty sweet...did you model that arm?

Well it's still weird that this close to going gold they havnt been forth coming with the info. I am not saying that they have anything to hide, but now isnt really the time to be secrative as to how things work. I never agreed with eovia's policy of not telling us about whats coming, but it made sense. I just don't see any justification about holding back the new info any longer. Good news is the price is cheap, and I will definatly be upgradeing. Come on Litst...Post up some stuff !!! :) -brent

You know it almost makes me think that they are hiding something....but hey..at $150 bucks I will probably take the gamble.

Yeah, thats great. The real question is what are the features? So close to release and we are still not privy to those details :)

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 :)

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

I dont know what the heck you are talking about... You know what would be nice maybe? A complete list of numeric commands you can use..is that even in the manual? I dont remember seeing it. -brent

well I hardly ever get the rendering stages of my stuff so thats why I probably didnt think of that :) Eovia has said that the new C2 render will be awesome, so I am assuming that the AA problem is taken care of. As for alpha mattes I would say dont give up yet. Look around in this forum for how to do it. The normal intuitive way is to put the mask in the transparency channel but that is incorrect...you need to put it in a blender channel...Anotine & a few others have screen captures showing the process...if you do it the way the engineer's developed it, then it works great. If you do it the way a normal sane person would, you get some weirdo edge.

the intolerant remark was said with a smile :) .. that means I am not serious... As for size..thats what I care about. Even if you have a 1-1.5mb cable modem 5 megs still takes a bit to download, and everyone in business knows that time = money. If mpeg4 will get me 640x480 at under 5megs then I am going to use it. The Mac factor is insignificat in my world..we usually only have 2 or 3 people a year complain about it, and when they do we just send them a vhs copy. When qt6 is released with mpeg 4 we may switch to it. Our advantage now is that our Avid will export the mpeg4 in about 3 min on a p3 500...to make a quicktime of lesser quality averages us about 10-12 min a spot and we have to use a third party program.

sigh..you mac users are so intolerant of others :) Actually it isnt avi that I care about its mpeg. I do not have a great way to make mpegs right now. The AVI codec I am using is the microsoft mpeg4 codec, and in my research nothing except for DIVX comes close to the resulotion/size of this codec. I edit video's for a living and everyday I kick out 2-8 thumbnails for clients. I would LOVE to have a great multi platform solution. If ANYone here can come up with one I would love to hear it b/c I would adapt it to use here instantly. - brent * please for the love of all this right and true...DO NOT tell me to use the sorenson codec....thats all I hear about from the carrara community, but compared to even mpeg1 I have only seen it look like crap, and it is never near the size I am looking for (under 5megs for a 30sec spot at 640x480).

rrr...sorry about that. Its in microsofts mpeg4 codec...windows only :( Also this one is encoded at 640x480 so you will prob need at least a p3 500 to get a nice smooth viewing. One day I will bust out the money for quicktime but this way is just so much easier in avid...plus its only 4.5meg at very nice quality.

My experience has been this...when I set it up it stays there...BUT it works like object collsion in the assembly room. If your hit the limit it stops...if you keep yanking on it it ignores the limit. I animated a robot once. I really like the feature b/c sometimes you want to go past the limit in certin moves (ie: sometimes whats correct and what looks right is not the same) but then you do have to reset. As for losing constraints after a save/reboot cycle..it never was a problem for me. Sometimes I have lost 1 constraint but never a whole skeleton of constraints..... -brent

WOW!!! those bad boys look Huge! It reminds me of when discovery channel shows things like m1a1 tanks roll off the assembly line. That is some great modeling, and it is a very very nice render!

I have never used poser, but C2 will include bones so whats the big deal? Can't you just import your poser model and bone it? If Eovia has a great easy way of animating then i think the plug-inn would be pointless. Of course I do not use Poser (due to my fear of having all my models look excatly the way they came in the box :) ) so I may not understand the need.... -brent

If it's any help the Avid Media Composer (1000, 9000, symphony) all want 720x486. What you will want to do is find out the correct Codec for what you want to sell. Every edit system has a different standard. Notice that AzChip and I both work @ different places and we both have different standards...you will find the same anywhere...even each TV station in your town has different standards. If you can render with the correct codec in the correct format (avi,quicktime) you can save your client hours in importing....a 720x540 .psd seq thats 30sec takes 45min for my avid to import...where as the same sequence with the avid codec only takes 45sec to import. For instance if we wanted an animation for you for our Sonic DVD authoring station it would have to be 720x480...I have no ideal why even a piece of video can't be standardized :) Long and Short: Every place is different and will have alternatives for you...