I finally found a minute to post here :) I started my "computer art" interest in grade school with my C-64. Let me tell you...the light pens back then sucked :) I started with Geos paint, then a friend bought deluxe paint from electronic arts for his Amiga @ his post production studio. That thing let you do animations! I learned to do 2d animation for money on the side. When I wnet to college the Toaster just came out. I tried to learn 3d then but the render times where to crazy. I made some spinning logos but the fun stopped there. Then for the next 5 years or so I only edited..no graphics. I was addicted to video games at the time so I decided to try to make some spaceship models. Thats when I found the worlds most superior modeler, nendo :) That lasted a whole 3 weeks when I realized that I had to have a render and an animation program. I looked all over for something with nendos ease of use. Lightwave and Max where out...to hard. Mirari was to expensive. So when I was looking at ebay for product Ideals I saw carrara. Realizing that it had to be the utlimate solution (hey it replaced like 3 different programs for metacreations :) ) I bought carrara. I cant do anything really complex with carrara yet but I can use it to impress my clients. Nothing on the market is as easy to use as this program right now. Hopefully someone will introduce bones by the end of the year. If they do I am sure I will have a long future with this program.

wow! I love the color..everything really stands out. The mirror in the back was a nice touch also :) I also really like the text..it stands out nicely. very good work!

sweet! I cant wait to see what happens. I think its pretty cool how a little model can spring to life with something even so small as a camera swinging around it.

I dont know if you remember or not but a few months ago I was asking about a render problem with a model of the earth..Carrara kept leaving little black holes in the model. I came to the same conclusion...I had to dump the cellular shader in the bump channel and get rid of a cloud primitive. Looks like some of the info has problems working well with each other. Sometimes I am tempted to learn lightwave or max, but have you ever seen how hard it is just to put in some text? What a pain. I think Carrara is my fav b/c I am so lazy :) I dont know what I am going to do when clients realize that spinning there logo/name over a quickie landscape I made with 4 winds requires little to no work! Well congrads on figuring out your animation...post up some samples when its done :)

Well that sucks about the shimmering. I was assuming that the whole field/frame thing was the problem...if going to a .psd sequence still has the shimmer then you are screwed. fyi: I know with Carrara if you use post render effects that you get those types of shimmies. The post render only effects each frame...it doesnt take the whole animation into account. So if you use motion blur or depth of field and try to render an animation you are screwed. You have to manually add those effects in after effects. Auroua looks to be the only post render filter that doesnt screw up to badly, but it has massive problems with clipping that are only apparent when animating. If you think you will need to try a different program I would suggest you steer away from truespace & animation master. I am still thinking about buying one of those programs but they are lacking big time for broadcast support. They mess up simple things like matte's so its worthless trying to use it for broadcast. Carrara is lacking a lot but it at least lets me key consistantly :) Well good luck and let us know what your solution is.

Well its been a year since I have used 3.1 but you can select to import the animation sequence as one image and AE will put it together for you...then you dont have to put them in one frame at a time. Are you on a mac or a pc? I can find out the sequence...I think we still have some macs with AE 3.1 on it around here. I think you just select the first frame helloXXX.psd and then select an option that says import as sequence or something and it will find them and import them as one .mov it might not be in the import file command..it might be in the prefrences. AE 3.1 had a piss poor interface...4.1 and 5.0 are like new programs b/c of the more user friendly interface. Worse case scenerio I'll email you my # and well figure out. I know you can do it, its a pain to figure out the templete, but once its done its no problem anymore.

I was thinking about your prob this weekend. I remembered on the yahoo groups list that some editor from espn was complaining about the field render errors that Carrara was creating in the rendering process. When I first rendered my car commercial last year there was a lot of flutter b/c I used Carraras field render. I think that the field render sucks in Carrara & Raydream from what I read. I am pretty sure the best way to do what you want is to render it into an uncompressed pict sequence (.pict, .tiff, .psd) and then use aftereffects to output it in the correct size/resolution/dpi etc that premiere requires. There are 2 many factors that the carrara/raydream engine doesnt take into account..pal/ntsc, square/non-square, etc.

upon quickly re reading your question...heres the summerized version: turn off field rendering...use after effects to break up the frames into fields. Thats what I have ended up doing with carrara also. I'll keep up the long version just incase tho :)

Are you sure this is not a field/frame issue? If you go look at AE forums they are just filled with people asking how to get that part correct. The first thing you need to do is figure out how to import into priemere. Does your version of premiere take odd first or even? Go look in your premiere manual. Find out the exact screen size/dpi/field order that your codex uses. This part has to be correct. Ideally with carrara (and raydream I assume) you then just render the animation with that info and you use the premiere editing codex. I am assuming that the animation is rendered tho and you dont want to do that. What I would do is import the animation into aftereffects and open a new comp. Make the comp the exact screen size that premiere wants, drag in your animation, scale it to fit the screen. Then make the movie in AE but where it says use best settings, click on that. Turn on the field render and set the render to whatever you need (odd/even) Then click on the output module and select .avi or .qt but make sure you go into options and select the primere codec. Render out the animation..this should go quick..its not doing anything but resizing and re encoding. you may also want to apply a small fast blur effect here just to soften it up..but first try it regular..a lot of time just putting your animation into the correct format fixes everything. But buy blurring things you make it take more than one pixel so it covers up the shimming. Lastly after the comp is rendered go into preiemere...import the animation...I dont know aobut priemere but in avid you can tell it to select odd/even/none field order and have it resize etc..make sure these settings are correct in your editor import option. Hopefully that will help? What I have been doing is rendering in Carrara w/o field support and rending to a photoshop sequence with no compression. then I import that sequence into after effects, resize and render into the Avid Codex that I need. The nice thing about having AE and the animation in a format that isnt compressed is that when you move onto a new editor you can have your source archived digitally w/o having to pull it from a tape. So is this to much info? NOt enough info? Wrong info? Id spell check it but Im off to help my buddy out this weekend so I have to scatt...let me know if you need anything clarified tho.

I have 6 megs from my isp but whenever my ftp client connects to it, the isp kicks me off. I think they dont have it activated. I'll check it out on monday.

What you didnt notice was that the winner had to actually make the movie in 3d. Get Busy :) Congrads..pic looks great.

Well its wierd...after this is over next week I have to send the files to evoia. I got it to work twice...on one I was able to select all the options (bump, reflections, shadows, etc) but had to disable aurora. The one I chose to keep worked when I disabled bump mapping but I was able to keep aurora on. This has happened a lot recently. On the tunnel part of the animation it would keep giving me nil errors until I took off motion blur. I think that if you turn everything on the post filters have strange problems. Hopefully Eovia will be able to find them after I send the files to them.

When I have an object and I dupe it, when I go to edit any of the objects I duped (including the master) it says "do you want to edit the master or create a new one?" If I change the master then all the dupes change also. This works with both geometry and textures. Just remember tho, if you ever changed one object by saying create new master then that object is no longer tied to the other objects. I just used this technique in the animation I am working on. I had duplicated a spline about 200 times and I needed to make a texture change. I selected "Edit the Master" at the warning box when I went into the texture room and all the objects changed to the new texture. btw: I'm excited...I think in like 4-5 days my animation will be done...Wahoo!

Well this is my Third big animation with this error and i have found a temporary work around, And I suspect that others will eventually run into this. Apparently Carrara is having problems with the post-effect filters. While I am not a programmer and do not know this for sure, my last two animations kept puking with the motion blur filter on and this one kept puking until I removed the aurora filter. So just a word of warning :)

It's near impossible to produce such effects with a polygon modeler Actually if you use a decent poly modeler you can easily do this type of model. I have seen some awesome organic models come out of nendo and if you bother to look at litst work you will see some awesome organics made in Carrara's VM. I have determined that pretty much any type of model can be made with any modeler type providing you are comfortable with it....So if you like splines you will probably love NURBS, but if like me, you like modeling in poly's, there are no worries...you just have to use a different approach then you would with a spline/nurbs modeler.