Hi Everyone,

A friend of mine who is a musician, wants me to help him create a video to go along with music that he has composed.

He wants things like an Airplane flying making it look like its flapping its wings etc..

There is no rush or deadline to complete the video... he says it will take as long as it takes.

So I want to start with one of the easier scenes... which is a Comet streaking across the screen with come kind of particle trail, this would be done in space so some stars and a few planets sprinkled here and there.

So the question is, do I attempt to render everything including particle trail in Carrara? or should I render the scene and add particle trails in post using something like Particle Illusion software?

PS: I'm slowly building up a RenderFarm to help with this.  So far I have 4 PC's and will add more soon.  Should help with render times.

PPS: If I want to show sample video is there a better alternative than putting them on youtube? I dont want the videos to be seen on youtube before the product is completed.

Personally, I would use particleIllusion for the particle effects given the choice of the 2, or use Particular if you are compositing with After Effects and have the plug-in.

ParticleIllusion, while a 2D app has some great pre-made particles that are hard to duplicate om other apps.

Particular, a 3D particle system, is also extremely versatile and a good choice for this.

Both will allow you to create both the starfield and comet with little work.

Most, if not all, of what you outlined can be done in Carrara without outside app sourcing.

HOWEVER----In this instance, I made use of the free version of Particle Illusion bringing the sky explosion into a billboard, the ground explosions--I think!--spread around using the Surface Replicator and the Mouse--also a Particle Illusion thing, I got to follow the terrain using the Free Sparrowhawke plugin.

PM me with your email if having problems with the idea

Brian

Sorry, I meant the lower priced Particle Illusion version!

Brian

Here's one I did (since my last post) using ParticleIllusion 3.0 and After Effects.  (CC_Ball for the Planet, and Particular for the stars)

Comet

That work by Animajic is very straightforward to do completely within Carrara.
Will try and do a sample or find one of my old files.

Brian

Brian

Excellent samples and gives me lots of ideas.

I use Sony Vegas Pro to do my video editing.

I did some searching on youtube and found this one done in Carrara 6

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSMjicNpUqs

If you put a rocket ship with a bit of exhaust in front of the camera you can have a wild movie using-------

Browser>Scenes>Space>SolarSystem15

Brian

Quote - PPS: If I want to show sample video is there a better alternative than putting them on youtube? I dont want the videos to be seen on youtube before the product is completed.

You do know about the private option when posting vids to YouTube?
If the person or people you're working with has a YouTube account, I'd try using that.

I also think some of the image sites are starting to support video to a limited extent. (Still that doesn't mean that it's impossible for those videos to get indexed by search engines. They're just not readily listed as they would be on popular video sites.)

As for the other options, I don't have the PCs to throw at it. But I think whether you use Carrara particles or not depends on how much the particles need to interact with the environment. (If the particles don't need to collide with anything, it's going to be much faster to use video postwork software. Don't forget that if you have Carrara 7 or later, that it has multipass rendering options. That way you can render different sets of animation frames to make better use of post production software than possible with earlier versions.)

Thanks for Reminding me Paul, I forgot about the privacy settings on YouTube.

Right now I have Carrara 6 Pro, to upgrade to Carrara 7 Pro it costs $169.95.   

I'm waiting to see if a sale/discount comes along so I can upgrade.

When I upgraded from Carrara 5 Pro to Carrara 6 Pro, with a coupoun + sale it cost me around $75 which was a fantastic deal.  I'm waiting for a similar upgrade path.

I'm going to try and use the built in particle emitter to throw sort of dust in the air and disappear over time.

That way I wont have to worry about adding the dust trail in post.

Once I get the renderfarm fully operational with all the PC/Laptops I'm putting in place.  I dont mind sharing Render Time.

The end result will be 5 x Pentium 4 Hyper Threading PC's and  3 x Laptops with Dual Core Processors.