In regards to Spyware and Viruses. For Spyware, just run another browser other than IE. I use Opera, and I can go a month without scanning with SpyBot S&D (FREE). It will find nothing as long as I stick with Opera. If I uses IE for one afternoon it finds all kinds of crap. Either way, Spybot S&D is free and works wonderfully if you must use IE. As for virus protection. AVG Free works great. To be honest though I have never gotten a virus since getting on the internet in 96'. Most viruses are spread either through warez or file sharing programs. Go figure. I didnt start using a virus protection program until a few years ago, AVG. Sounds risky I know, but if people would use a little common sense when downloading and sharing files they would be virus free. A router/firewall combo is actually a better investment. Most people have no idea how often their computer is hit by outside attackers.

If it were a simple matter of making a big leap they would do so. That requires more programmers. Charles Brissart is quite amazing in my opinion, he is the lead programmer for Carrara. He has more help now than he used to, but still they dont have the number of programmers that Maxon does.

Hi. I dont have experience with that shader. What I usually do in these instances is use a bright color in the Color channel to experiment. Start at zero for a height. Then raise it until you see something. Eventually the color should rise up on the object and you can find the right "height". This should be done on a dummy shader. Once you have that height to where you just see color at the very top of the object, copy the channel. Then paste it to the appropriate channel in your "real" shader. I know that is much harder than it sounds, but that is the only way I have found to get that effect. I have an image I did a couple of years ago here that has a shoreline foam. That is the technique I used on that. http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1098481 Of course this water has no height. It was just a flat plane. I actually placed the foam on the terrain object. But I believe you can use the same technique on the ocean object. I look forward to seeing your progress on it. If I get some time this weekend I will see if I can come up with something as well.

Tweeners are short for what happens in the space "between" two keyframes. Before computers it was up to the artist to figure out the in-between motion and appearance, position, etc. for all the objects for the frames in between keyframes. This was back in the day when all animating was done by hand, not that long ago actually. As Mark said, you must create another keyframe further down the timeline for Carrara to know that it needs to "tween" any property. Say for instance you move the object on frame 60, Carrara will do the work of calculating all the intermediate frames in between. That way, if you scrub the timeline to frame 35, the objects' position will be calculated and the object will be drawn where it should be for that frame. The tweener is just the end users ability to decide how Carrara will make that transition between keyframes.

Save yourself some trouble and break it up. In fact for rendering animations that are anything more than tests, you will want to render as seperate frames. If Carrara crashes or your computer, you just start rendering where the program crashed. Or if you need your computer, you can stop rendering and pick up later. After you have rendered all your frames you can use another program to assemble them all at once as a movie. You can also do it in Carrara, but you have to watch that Carrara doesnt oversample your previously rendered images. Besides, it is faster to use another program that supports image sequence import. Look for a program called Fast Movie Processor. It is an old program but it works great for taking rendered image sequences and making movies out of them. Finally, if you watch any films or anything on TV for that matter, you will notice numerous cuts employed. Since, you are going to have cuts anyway, it is better to storyboard your scene with the idea of different shots in mind at the start. Each unique shot can be a different rendering. This gives you more flexibility and will help you organise your ideas. BTW, when I say storyboard I dont mean the one in Carrara. Take some paper or a text document and outline or storyboard your animation. This helps tremendously, especially with lengthy animations.

You can also look into Pixel Accuracy, sometimes that affects the blotchiness. Another option I have used is to group everything together except the glass or transparent objects. Group those objects in their own group. Save the scene, then save it under a different name. Go to the original scene and turn the visibility off for the transparent group. Turn off the transparency options for GI and render it, it should be much faster and easier to control the blotchiness. Save that image. Now, in the other scene, make the other group not visible. You really dont even need GI at this point, take the image from before and use it as a backdrop. Then render. In your scene this might work. But in some scenes, the reflections that you want on the glass would be gone. That is where options such as unseen by camera but still seen in reflections helps, but Carrara lacks that option at the moment. The only time I use transparency with GI is when I need some caustics from the transparent object, otherwise I dont use it, if I can get away with it. Either way, if you want to troubleshoot the blotchiness, I would first make the transparent objects not visible. Then render. You might have a very clean image at this point. If not I would adjust the settings without the transparent objects to get it clean. Once clean without the transparent objects, you have found the minimum settings. Once you add the transparent objects back in and checked light through transparency you might have some more blotchiness, just keep at it. I have found that scenes with transparency can take forever to troubleshoot until you establish the minimum quality settings needed without transparency as a baseline. From there it is often easier. Another thing to consider. It may not apply to this scene, but for interior shots I have had much better luck by using a photon emitter as opposed to a real light. A photon emitter is just an object that has a value or color in the glow channel. Most of the time you will have to use the multipy option with a color. Say pure white with the 0-1000 scale. Doing it this way I have found that blotchiness is less of a problem than relying on a bulb, distant or even spotlight. You also get very soft shadows this way. I will usually place the object outside a window, then it will cast "photons" or light into the scene. The GI (photon mapping) handles the bounced light after this point. Finally, often times ambient occlusion is enough to sell a shot, especially a product shot. The SkyLight option as well is often enough. But when I need full blown GI, personally, I have had better luck using a photon emitter. It really depends if you have the time or not, especially if it is for a client. In a production environment, GI is often too slow, which is why it is generally faked, with Ambient Occlusion and good texturing. Every scene is different though. HTH Donnie

It is faster on PC as well. I dont think the preview render is multithreaded, making it much slower.

I think you might be confused about the use of tweeners. I apologise in advance if I am mistaken. The tweener is for animation. It is an interpretation of a change in some property of an object between keyframes. The name comes from the fact that you dont have to figure out all the motion in between keyframes, the program does it for you. In "between" = "Tweener". The program "tweens" the animation between the keyframes, calculating position, velocity, etc. Prior to computer animation programs, animators had to manually draw all frames, the computer tweens between Keyframes. Think of straight lines and bezier curves. Say for instance you have an object that moves between point A and B. With linear, the speed would be the same throughout, which wouldnt be realistic if the object is supposed to accelerate from a stand still. A curve tweener will allow you to show the object building up speed and then slowing back down to a stop. Carrara can do this with Ease in and Ease out on a linear tweener, but using a bezier curve often gives better results. For that particuliar example, the velocity curve would work well too. That example was for motion, but the concept applies to all animatable properties. Now, regarding image shaprness, as GK said, the object accuracy and the antialiasing options are what you want to explore along with the filter sharpness in the render room. The filter sharpness and the AA settings work hand in hand. If you set the filter sharpness high you will most likely need higher antialiasing. AA settings that work great with a filter sharpness of 75% often arent good enough when the filter sharpness is 100%. Resulting in noisy animations/images. The best thing to do is take a black sphere in an empty scene, set the background to white and experiment with all the settings. One last thing, if you are using texture maps, take a look at the filtering options in the image properties. That will have an impact on final image sharpness as well, if you are using texture maps. Hope that helps. Sorry for the long winded explanation. Donnie

Great work!! Hopefully everyone can appreciate the work involved. Especially working by yourself. How many months have you been working on it, if I may ask? I have a couple of animations with stories written and with character designs that are nearly finished and rigged. Personally I run out of motivation from time to time. My client workload is so heavy lately that I really dont feel like doing much personal animation when I finally get a chance. Bravo to you for undertaking this and seeing it through. Cant wait to see the final short. You are inspiring me to continue working on my projects. Keep posting please!!

With a scene open, look at the area on the bottom right. Click where it says Scene. Once you have done that, go to the top right and click on the Interface Tab. From there you can set what units to use.

Congratulations on that work Mike. I admire your ability to participate in these challenges. You always put up a good showing for Carrara!!

You arent lost. You have it right too. With Carrara's new selective light list you can do it. Still, it is much easier to do with a switch at the light level. You still have the option to do it at shader level, which I do quite often anyway. But the example I mentioned above is a reason that I like it. Simple and quick.

Quote - Lost me I guess?  As I see it in Carrara you can have this Carrara two part specularity assigned to one object and have one specified light only lighting the "specularity" of that object?

The rest of the objects relating to other lights as per each objects particular settings?

Sorry if I am not with you--it's new learning for me.

Yes it can be done with shaders--to a degree. You still couldnt put two lights above a plane side by side and have it work. Imagine a shiny plane with two lights above it side by side. Lets say that you dont want specular highlights from the light on the left, you just want it for some more light. Reducing the specularity in the shader for the plane will not remove the specular highlight from the left light, it will only increase or decrease both equally. So now you will have two hotspots on your shiny plane. I have found this to be a nice feature in Lightwave, especially when doing outdoor scenes, say with a logo floating above an ocean. The distant light wasnt lighting the logo enough, but the ocean would look great. If I add another light it also affects the specularity of the ocean. Selective lighting can solve that too, but a switch that specifies if a light affects specularity, diffuse or both would be nice. Also, I have run into scenes where all I wanted was a bit more specularity--but not brighter specularity that already existed. With a switch I can throw another light in there, not worry about the diffuse getting too bright and place that light where I want to get another highlight. Again, it can be worked around, especially now that Carrara does have selective lighting options. But IMHO it is much easier and quicker to have a switch for the light dialog.

Short anser is no. In Lightwave and other programs you can specify wether a light affects specular only or diffuse only, or both. This can be handy at times, allowing you to have a fill light that does just that and doesnt create hot specular highlights. Sometimes you want an object to have "false or extra" highlights, in Carrara you are also going to get increased diffuse shading. In Carrara every light affects both specularity and diffuse shading. Hopefully this is something that could be added in the future, as I have relied on it more than a few times in Lightwave.

Very nice work. Many users will appreciate the walkthrough. It is nice to watch a project like this from start to end. Good job!!