Hi. First of all thank you to everyone who has been replying to my posts. I really appreciate all the help. I am working on a complex animation for the dvd of this year's school play. I have been doing some animation tests with ocean waves and have begun constructing the island that will be seen in the opening animation. The island has 69 palm trees and the test render I did took over 15 hours to render with really good light settings at 640 X 480. Now if it was just one image 15 hours would be acceptable, but the animation resolution will be high def quality 1080 x some number I can't remember at the moment, and once I add in the water, the pirates, the boats and messages in bottles floating in the ocean, I know that the render times are going to increase. Now comes the first of my questions: 1) In Bryce it was possible to render out an image (lets say a Palm tree) and projected it onto a 2D plane, which with the added transparency mask, could render a highly detailed palm tree in under a minute. I know that I can insert a 2d plane, but can I project my image of a palm tree onto it, and if so how? And will the image be able to cast a palm tree shadow? I figure that this alone will decrease render times, although i was hoping to have the palm trees swaying in a gentle breeze, but I don't think Carrara can do this.... 2) I asked something simular to this in another thread but perhaps phrased the question wrong. If I create a Poser animation and import it into carrara 5 pro can I loop the Poser animation and still animate the camera around it? Such as having pirates sword fighting over a chest of treasure. 3) If I create an animation in Carrara such as the ocean waves moving or smaller waves lapping up against the shore can I get these animations to loop, or do I have to animate these sections only as they appear on camera. I mean when I create my scene can I set up my waves ahead of time and have them loop continiously until the camera moves onto them and past them in the animation? 4) I created a really nice sky in Bryce. I have imported it as a backdrop but it looks odd. If I create a sky is there away to project it onto a skydome, or make it look more like a sky and less like a backdrop? The sky is the one thing I don't plan on animating. I'm planning to render the animation in one big 2-3 minute animation on Carrara, but is it better to render it out as a movie or can I render it out in an image sequence so that if I have to do post processing (colour correction) I can. Thank you for all the help and advice. Sincerely, David

I dont have much time to answer most of your questions but I can definitely answer one of them.

It is always best to render out to image sequences using any 3D program. Crashes happen, so do power failures. Recovering a broken AVI or QT can be impossible depending on the circumstances.

Render to image sequences. After you have finished with the last frame, create a new scene in Carrara. Import the image sequence and put it in the background. Make sure your rendering size matches the resolution of the original rendered images. Turn off antialiasing and render it out.

This provides you with a ton of options as far as compression, file type, etc. is concerned. It also allows you to preview your animation prior to finish to spot any problems. Just open the images that have rendered and check them.

Rendering 2-3 minutes all at once in any program is a bit much. You are probably going to have camera moves, cuts, etc. It would be pretty boring to have 2-3 minutes of straight animation without some camera moves or some cuts. Save yourself the headache of trying to do it all at once. Break the project up into managable bites. It is best to decide early on which shots are continuous and which can be isolated. You can assemble them later in the cheapest of video editors for post production. Think ahead and you can save yourself a lot of time and headaches.

 

Attached Link: Professor with video on screen

Answer to point 1 - Its possible to have a video as a texture map in carrara, I've done this a couple of times. It should also be possible to have one in the transparency channel but you may need to have separate video with the transparency as pure black/white, I've not tried that.

Hi Pedrith, Ambitious project. ;) Everything you mention is possible but there is a reason that animation companies create render farms with many machines. I'll suggest that you've over-set your render settings. Detail/effects that are apparent in still images are far less apparent with motion involved. So, setting the render using the "best" settings everywhere is not a good idea. Especially, if you're doing a NTSC or PAL TV frame, edge detail is totally lost so anti aliasing doesn't need to be too tight. Animation IS compromise. For animation sequences I work on, my usual target for frame render time is about 3min. max. You can still get great results with a 3 minute target but it does take a little experimenting. While experiment test renders can take sometime to work out, it will save days of render time.Only stuff like transparency or caustics will drive that up so I try to avoid those if possible. Answers to your questions by number: 1) Apply as a texuture to a plane (must be rendered with an alpha map and imported as a 16 bit Targa file or rendered as an image with a separate alpha map placed into the alpha channel) If you use Carrara's Replication feature, your really shouldn't have to worry about doing the alpha map thing. 2) Using Transposer, you can loop the animation by duplicating the start/end keyframes. 3) Again, use duplicated key frames in the texture channel for whatever method you've used. Personally, if I'm using a rotoscoped movie to drive a displacement map, it's fare easier to create a looping movie in a move editor and then simply place the movie with the "right" length as a texture map into the dispacement channel. 4) Render your Bryce sky with the spherical camera and import as a Background, not a Backdrop - then don't load a Bacdrop. You will need to render it out at a pretty high resolution although. You can map a Spherical Camera Render to a very large sphere and and duplicate the texutre map into the Glow channel in Carrara so it illuminates. Everything will need to be lit with spotlights or with distant lights with shadows turned off so that they illuminate "through" the sphere, however. Just a little unsolicited advice: carefully storyboard your animation. Most action sequences are a complex series of fast-cuts with no one camera used for more than about 1-3 seconds. Even "calm" subjects, TV sitcoms, TV news etc, seldom show a single camera reference more than about 5 seconds. People get visually bored very quickly. Doing this will keep your final movie fast paced and make it easier to render and edit afterwords. Long render sequences 15 seconds+ is begging for problems. Mark