Hear Hear! It was a very nice concept, too. I love that it's tied into traditional fine arts. That's something that we all too often forget when we're doing 3D work. Congrats, Ed!

Anyway, had to join in. I have been so busy with work, I haven't had any chance to play!

Hope everyone is doing well!

And one other thing, Biggert -- you should probably resize your image for the backdrop to the size you'll be rendering your final output. That way, Carrara won't have to do the resizing, and it'll increase your render speed. (Maybe not hugely, but for an animation or something, every fraction of a second saved on a frame helps!) - Dex

Set Camera 1 go be a zoom camera. Go to the point in the timeline where you want the zoom to start. (In the picture, that's at 10 frames.) Slide the zoom up and release. This creates a keyframe. (Yes, you could click the keyframe icon and do the same thing, but I've always done it this way.) Reset the focal length to the focal length you are starting with. (Default is 50mm.)

Go to the point in the timeline where you want the zoom to finish (in this example that's at 2:00). Set the focal length of the camera to whatever you want. (I zoomed in using this test.)

That's it; your camera should zoom between the first keyframe you set and the second keyframe that automatically set at 2 seconds when you adjusted the focal length of the rendering camera. I clicked the tweener between 0:00 and the first keyframe and made it discrete (the little stair-step image on the timeline shows that) so the camera didn't zoom out a bit before making the zoom as it would with a bezier motion path, and I adjusted the ease in and ease out on the tweener between the focal length keyframes for a smoother start and stop.

Maybe you didn't set a starting keyframe? I can't think of another reason it wouldn't work. Hope this is helpful!

• Dex

OH! Is what you're trying to do is have the shot snap from one "focal length" of the lens to the next focal length immediately? The default tweener on Carrara is a bezier curve, which would make the camera zoom from 100mm to 28mm over the time between key frames. If you want the render to snap from 100mm to 28mm, you'll need to change the tweener to discreet (I think that's the term; I don't have Carrara open in front of me now.) Just double click on the timeline between the keyframes and select the different tweener mode. (There are several -- bezier, linear, oscillate, discreet, maybe another one or two I'm not remembering.) Hope that's helpful! - Dex

The only thing I can think of would be to use the spike deformer, or possibly work with Eric's Anything Grows. I don't have Carrara on this machine, so I can't try anything out.... Good luck!

Thanks for the responses! And, I'll add my voice to Claudio's in asking Eovia for a better motion blur. There was an excellent (albeit slow) free motion blur plug in for Raydream called Pseud-blur. How hard would it be to port the process to Carrara?

Wow! Those are soft shadows from C3? I haven't ordered it yet.... (Bad boy that I am.) Tose look awesome! Ah, fond memories of rubber band airplanes and of old days of RDS.... Looks great, Kix!

Congrats, Kirk! You did some great stuff, here. And I wouldn't have wanted to be one of the judges on this one. I really love this forum for inspiring us to do our best work. - Dex

Hey, Kix and everyone else -- Really nice stuff, here.... And it's always excellent to see Carrara standing up to the "big boys" of 3D. Like EMC (which happens to be my brother's initials -- you aren't my brother, are you?), I spent way too much time in my childhood staring at pictures from the movies, absorbing every tiny detail. Of course, that's been a long time, so some of those details have faded away, but I do have a couple comments. On Darth's TIE, the little eight-sided piece of greebling on the outside of the solar wing at the point the main fuselage joins is a little too narrow. There should also be a small opening (only one visible from this angle, two overall, symetrically placed) in the rear horizontal "wing" area. The lasers on both Darth's TIE and the standard TIE are a little too big. I guess size does matter.... :o) EMC already noted the direction of the lines on the wings of the standard TIE. The interceptor looks perfect to me. And all of these little nit-picks are not to say that these are anything less than amazing models. You've really done some outstanding work here! Hope to see more, and that you eventually do have time to get the movie going! - Dex

There was a great brushed aluminum texture that came with RayDream and should port over just fine. If I can fire up the old machine that has RDS on it still, I'll try to post something up here for you.... Or maybe someone else can port it over before I have the chance....

Looking really great! Awesome stuff. I've been so busy with work that I don't have much time to play, but one animation I created for work might yeild a still or two for the contest....

Really nice! I like the texturing, particularly on the floor. I'll look forward to seeing progressive versions.

I found the problem -- I had the camera hidden in 3D view, so the production frame was hidden, as well. Strange, but true. - Dex