Hi list, Here is something that I am sure will be of interest to anyone doing, or thinking about doing, character animation in Carrara. The last part might be spam (I don't think so, spam-lite maybe) so you might not want to read any further if you are not interested in add on programs for Carrara . Brian Retford over at LostHorizonSoftware has something new and agreed to let me pass on some info a little early, while it is still being worked on. The reason for the urgency should be clear farther down. It is code named Zmotion and the part of it I want to talk about is the bvh importer. Bvh is a file format that will allow keyframed motion to be imported into Carrara and attached to a skeleton to get some animation going. Here are 2 movie clips to show how well it works at this point: http://ice.prohosting.com/~docgac/zm/zm1.htm You can see that they still need a lot of work but there is some real nice motion in there that didn't have to be set at all, inside Carrara. Raw keyframes dumped in there with very little tweaking to get what you see. Even the bone influences are just about the way that Carrara set them. I did almost no editing on both figures. (Not sure what the download limit is on that server but if you guys break it maybe I can get Ringo to mirror the files on some of his space and post the link) Another key benefit from Zmotion is that you can generate a detailed (right down to the finger joints), named (real names like head, collar, left shoulder - not bone1, bone2 etc), parented skeleton, with one mouse click. Carrara knows it is a bone hierarchy that is ready to attach to your model. I know you are thinking "Well that's great and all, but I don't have any bvh files on my hard drive, why should I care?" Here are some easy ways to get a hold of motion files in bvh format. 1. Off the net: There are quite a few sites with free files for download. There are even some libraries of basic motions that are set up in categories like run - walk - sit etc. 3. Poser 3, 4 or 5 With a copy of Poser you can make your own animation or even use their neat walk cycle designer to get bvh. Animation works but the walk paths don't look like they go along with the export (figure ends up walking in place, but that's an easy fix in Carrara). 3. Rent some time at your local mocap studio Get into that skintight rubber suit with the little yellow balls all over and lay down some of those fancy dance moves that made you so popular in high school. (This might be the least practical with most of us not being able to fit into the same mocap suit we could have in high school.) Now the reason why this needed to come out before Zmotion is ready for prime time: 4. Motionbuilder This was mentioned one time on the list before but there was no real tie in with Carrara ....until now. If you are the least bit interested in character animation you need to go here and take a look at it: www.kaydara.com This could be the spam-lite part. But adding this app to your toolbox will push Carrara right up there with the big guys in terms of character animation. The program is too amazing to lay out here, just go look. The best part is: Right now they have a special going on that will land you with a full working copy that normally sells for 3 to 4000 dollars for just $100. It will run for 1 year and then time out. There are other ways to get the 1 year license without even spending $100. There are copies of it in some of the current 3d magazines and you can get it directly off the Kaydara site too. They have an answer to the question "Why should I spend a year learning something that will just time out on me?" For a total investment of $200 (plus the shipping if you want the books) you can upgrade the license to a permanent one. It will be the new version 5 (standard) that they will roll out at Siggraph next month. There is a change in the feature set from the 1yr demo. It gets a little complicated so it is best to get the info directly from them. I will upgrade as soon as it goes on line. I think the special will end very soon (the reason this is coming out now) but I am not completely sure. I sent an email to get the details. Their support comes across as very good in the user's comments on the Motionbuilder forums, with the president of the company jumping in to answer questions often, just like our Antoine here. I'm not working for the Kaydara folks or anything but I think they have a high value product that will be useful to some on the list, at a price that is not out of sight for us Carrara users. There is a small splinter group of Carrara users who also have Motionbuilder that hang out in the Carrara chat room. There are 5 confirmed users and a few suspected closet cases so far. Now the caveats 1. The plug in is not done yet and Brian has not hinted at a price so don't ask me how much it will cost. 2. Not all bvh files are the same, so some you find on the net may take some work to get them to do what you want them to. 3. This is all new stuff so it is not yet a turn-key solution, you can't (yet) click the mouse and have Toy Story quality animation show up in your timeline. It takes some work and fussing around, so if you get easily discouraged or don't like work-a-rounds this might not be for you. 4. Notes on Motionbuilder. It is cross platform but it looks like only OS-X 10.2 or above is supported. Because of what it can do it is pretty complicated but they have excellent free training on the net. At this point the motionbuilder bvh files don't go directly into Carrara smoothly. I am sure Brian will have it taken care of soon (the work around for now is not too bad). Bvh does not support all the advanced features you can use in Motionbuilder so they will not be available in Carrara. My plan is to get enough interest (money) in this going to get Brain (or Eovia) to write the full Motionbuilder fbx plug-in. With that it will be possible to move entire Carrara scenes into Motionbuilder, do all the animation keyframing then take it back into Carrara for rendering. thats it Thanks for reading this far mdc same message was posted over at yahoo and 3dc go check out that motionbuilder :>)

Sounds interesting! I just downloaded the MotionBuilder Free version yesterday, thinking that I would play with it to see what it can do, and then hope that C3 would have an animation import option. Thanx for the info! :>

I have MotionBuilder 3 and it looks like it would save a lot of time. The only thing that is getting me is why buy a new license every year. If a see a plug-in that will work with both Carrara and Poser I would just fork out the $200 and be done with it. From what I have seen the program has major potential for what I am trying to do.