Wow!  I can't imagine using Carrara to do that instead of AfterEffects, but good for you in making it work!  And work it does.  Very well done.

This will be a bit vague, as I'm at work and don't have C6 here, but hopefully it'll point you in a useful direction:

When you're importing a Poser figure into Carrara from the browser, an option pops up with something or other about using target helper objects.  I don't recall exactly what it's called, but do import the target helper objects.  Then, you'll have the green boxes that Dwarg mentions; they're at the end of IK chains on the characters.  You can manipulate those to handle foot movements via inverse kinematics.  If you don't move the helper object associated with a foot, the foot won't move.

That's not entirely true, though.  The foot will not tesselate, but it will rotate.  So, I've had to go back and clean up the rotation of the feet, but their positions stay pretty well locked down. 

Hope that's helpful.

 - Dex

Thanks for sharing that, Hoofd....  I have only cracked CS3Extended a bit and saw that you can export 3D content and thought, hey, that might work for photogrammetry.  You've indicated that it clearly can.

Now, I just need to knuckle down and actually figure out how to do it!

And Mark, was it the Canoma tech that is in CS3?  I remember that Adobe bought that from MetaCreations and Canoma vanished immediately thereafter....

 - Dex

Awesome!  And welcome to the fold.  :D

Hi, Krewz --

Glad I could be of help.  I don't have V4 yet so I'm not familiar with the bending magnets, so this may be an ignorant suggestion, but that rarely stops me!  Is it possible to select the V4 character and the bending magnets and group them?  That way you'd be able to collapse her into one line on the hierarchy.

And as for real-time playback, it's been an adjustment to test render each shot a number of times, but since I go 'way back to the old days of stop-motion animation on film, where you didn't get to see how the motion looked until you got the film back from the lab, it was a fairly quick adjustment for me! 

Carrara's renderer is fantastic and with plug-ins like Digital Carvers Guild's toon!pro and wireframe pro, you can get some really cool cartoon results that I've not been able to get from Poser itself.  I bring that up just because Carrara does open a wide variety of options once you're using it.

Good luck,
Dex

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSR_BzNudTc

I use Carrara daily at work doing basic TV animation packages -- opens, bumpers, illo graphics, etc -- and it works quite well.  As Mark mentioned above, it's missing some of the pro integration aspects of C4D (which I have at home and use, but not nearly so much as I use Carrara).

Outside the day job, I'm putting together a cartoon-style animation project -- the link above is to one of our teasers.  All of the modeling and rendering was done in Carrara, with characters from Poser (this was Carrara 5 which didn't support character animation as well as C6 does -- I'm currently doing most of my character animation inside C6P).  This clip shows off one of the wonderful and inexpensive plug-ins Mark mentioned -- toon!pro from digital carvers guild (www.digitalcarversguild.com) -- it was around 40 bucks for the plug-in, and a similar plug (sketch and toon) for Cinema 4D is $595.00 -- more than the cost of Carrara Pro entirely.

Carrara is a bit funky, but you can certainly get pro results from it.

 - Dex

Short answers -- no and no.

That said, to answer with more detail:

Question 2:  I often render draft versions of shots to make sure timing is working properly -- it's a pain, but it's also pretty quick.  I'm doing 1920X1080 24FPS  sequences, and dropping the resolution by half (960x540) and using the draft renderer (gourard shader? I don't remember and am not in front of Carrara right now) I've been able to render out scenes in near real time.  It's not quite as easy as Poser in that you just click play and see something not working, change it, play again....  But it does work.

Question 2:  Oh, how I wish there was a shy switch in the sequencer like the AE timeline.  Unfortunately, not.  But I do collapse the items so that my characters take up only one line of space when I'm not animating with them.  And I group things frequently so I can minimize the amout of lines on the sequencer.

Hope that's helpful.  Carrara is a powerful program, particularly for the price, but it is missing some professional elements like these.

 - Dex

I'm at work now and can't check until I get home, so thought I'd ask; did they improve the render speed for multi-threaded Macintosh machines?

Thanks for keeping us posted.

 - Dex

You're right, as I recall RayDream didn't have rooms, per se, but there were individual modelers.  RayDream 3D, which is what I started with only had the splne modeler, but it was called something else -- freeform, maybe?  The Vertex modeler was a different sub-program, one that had its own set of tools and workspace.  They just didn't call it a room.

Hadn't thought of the price comparison to XSI.  Of course, I haven't paid full price for years; just upgrade prices, and DAZ practically gave me C6P, and I'm not complaining.

Yes, I'd also agree that Carrara is more geared toward inexperienced 3D folks; as I recall, the mission of RayDream was to bring 3D art capabilities to everyone.  And Carrara stays accessible for casual users.

Interesting idea about different levels.

 - Dex

Hmm, Wayne, interesting.  Problem with that for me (on a Mac) is that Transposer material runs incredibly slowly in Carrara.  Of course, it may be because it's using reference geometry, so maybe it's better the way it is....

I'm putting a feature request in, nonetheless....

Thanks!
Dex

These are all Carrara rendered with Poser and DAZ content, and figure animation in Poser.  Our newest projects are more animated inside Carrara, though we're still using Poser for some of the work.[

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV3f5HxSV48](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV3f5HxSV48)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIwzp581y9w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSR_BzNudTc

Dex

Maybe it's because I've been a user of this code since it was RayDream, and it's what I learned 3D on (though I now do use C4D and Lightwave), but I find the different rooms easy to use.  Yeah, I can see how it's annoying to not have certain tools in the Spline modeler that exist in the Vertex modeler, but since I'm kinda wired for this workflow, it doesn't bother me.  I just know what I can do in one modeler versus another.

That said, there are a lot of things I'd love to have in C7.  One would be external geometry reference.  Similar to how AfterEffects works -- it doesn't store a complete version of every layer you have within the AE project, but rather references the external file.  That way, the AE projects don't get enormous.  The project I'm currently working on has some gargantuan Carrara files because Carrara has to copy the entire model into the .car file.  Alas, I doubt this will be implemented, though, because I'm sure it's a major rewrite of the code to make it happen.

Overall, I'm really happy with the additions to C6P.  It's a remarkable piece of software, particularly when you consider its price.

 - Dex

No worries, Thelby, about "newbie," I've been using Carrara since it was RayDream and only learned about removing unused masters a year ago or so.

Thanks, GKDantas -- that's what I was afraid of.  Alas.  Feature request, here I come!

 - Dex

Cool Guinea Pig model!  I hope we get to see what he looks like with fur.  

 - Dex

I use Mimic and Carrara all the time, but I don't use the sound features in Carrara, so I can't answer your question directly.  Much like GKDantas, I use a video editing software package to marry the sound and picture.  Audition is a sound editing package; you'd need to be using Premiere Elements or Premiere Pro (or other editing software -- Vegas, iMovie, etc) to put the sound and video together, after you've rendered the file from Carrara.  You can use AfterEffects for this, as well, but again, it's not software that's designed for audio and video work.

The sound features in Carrara are a nice thought, but for proper alignment and such, a video editing package is the answer.