I know that a number of people here are using Carrara for animations.

I'd love to collect some advice on how to set it up, what to avoid, what to make use of, what works and what doesn't work very well for animation (as opposed to still renders). And, hopefully, this will become a usefull thread to anyone trying to work on animatons in Carrara.

We already have great contribution of many animation-relevant tutorials from SciFiFunk and his YouTube channel is an amazing resource. ( https://www.youtube.com/user/SciFiFunk )

Some of the things I've learned myself so far:

• If render time is of an essence, avoid transparencies like a plague! :) (Or render with light-though-transparency off as much as possible) But Light through transparency can in some cases be replaced by Caustics with faster render times, though not always fast enough.

• Indirect lighting, while wonderful for still images, is too full of artefacts on less than absolutely perfect super-slow settings, so not really usable for animation.

-To speed up dinamic hair renders : set two sets of lights: one to affect the hair and nothing else, and the other to affect everything except the hair. These could be duplicate light sets, the hair-only set can be a subset of non-hair set, or they can even be different, sicne hair interracts with light differently anyway, so the discrepancy in lighting setups isn't readily percieved as such, unless intenitionally glaring.

(to be continued, hopefully, as I learn more)

Do you have your own go-to methods, to which you automatically switch whenever you need to do an animation?

Some of the more specific issues I currently would like to know more aout are:

• what are good ways to fake soft-shadow GI and indirect bounce with highly lit environments at minimal render cost?

• is it possible to render out 12 fps and then use some post-processing to convert it into a smooth non-blurry 24 fps animation? Is there goos software for such interpolation? (What about 8fps to 24fps conversion)

• has anyone use shader-baking to speed up animations? Having the Baker plug-in, what would be the workflow to set it up?

• are there good rules for layer-splitting for animation (movin characker, foreground, backround, etc) to minimize how many frames of each layer need to be rendered out? Is it a good idea to render tham at differeent scale or, say, as wider frames for FG and BG to composite a narrow frame character renders as moving between the FG and BG layers, or is it too difficult to composite naturally with all the requisite shaders and to counter-act camera distortions? If the camera is moving in the sequence, is it a good idea to render HDRI backgrounds and then only render a sub-set of relevant objects inside the HDRI sphere? How are distortions to be dealt with in these cases? or is it a bad idea altogether?

- SciFiFunk has an interesting method for creating low-poly versions of characters, but I wonder whether anyone has had any success with DS decimator results or LOD's inside Carrara to have several versions of same character for various-distance shots? How do those tricks work? Do any of these methods work with Genesis-based figures? Can skeletons be transferred and BVH imported (with plug-ins if necessary) to simplify the animation of such versions?

As I try out more animation-related things, I will probably come back with more questions, and hopefully will also be able to share more useful discoveries of my own, but for now, I'd love to hear everyone's opinions. If you know of good publically available resourses on the subject, please post links to them too!

Thank you! And happy Carrara-using!

Antara.

"- is it possible to render out 12 fps and then use some post-processing to convert it into a smooth non-blurry 24 fps animation? Is there goos software for such interpolation? (What about 8fps to 24fps conversion)"

http://www.thebest3d.com/howler/7/motion-prediction-module.html

Motion Prediction in Dogwaffle does that. It can produce a noticeable framing effect around the edges, and they recommend rendering larger than you need, and cropping the edges out. Otherwise, it looks pretty good, and is very fast. 

Hi Antara!
I make only animation and I don't accept any compromise on the quality of the renders (everything is checked in the up render tab).
If one needs 48h for a sequence of 6 seconds, it is not a problem, you stop it when you want and you start again when you want with the following image (you can sleep when your PC is working).
I rarely use the global illumination but my scenes contain a quantity of lights intended to emerge the "black holes" and, only one, the principal one, catch the shadows, the others are allotted to separate objects (except interior scenes with a few electric lamps).
I often use compositing for special effects (AE/Combustion) and it is for that I makes almost all the time Targa sequences, but for the “normal” scenes, I make .bmp sequences (always use square pixels).
About speed, I strongly disadvise you not using the number of fps equal to the final project because you will lose enormously in quality.

edit: you can import .bvh, .pz2 directly in your character in Carrara.

cjd, DUDU0001, thank you for your responses!

cjd, have you ever used the software? It was featured in the latest issue of C3DE (Carrara 3D Expo Magazine), and from the tutorial there I understood that you need to set up your animation in a specific way to achieve more or less smooth results, otherwise there will be a lot of artefacts. If you've used it yourself, other than the render-edge distortion, did you run into limitations of the type of scene/footage that could be used?

DUDU0001, I've had pretty good results with simplified render settings. In fact, when you replace light through transparency with caustics, you sometimes get better looking results. (And faster) But my issue is that for the length of animation I am looking at, if I don't optimize on timing, then with the speed of my machine, it will be rendereding long into the second half of the century. For example, if I do the same as you - by leaving all settings checked in the top render tab, it is normal for my machine to take about 12 hours for as single frame - 12! hours!That is 12 days of non-interrupted rendering for each second of footage. Not an option. Especially since I need the machine for a lot of other things too, so I can't afford to have it as a dedicated renderer.

I know that there is a way to import noth pz2 and bvh, but my question is more about the details of setting up the use of BVH files: what are good resources of BVH files that work well in Carrara, and is there special prep that needs to be done in order to use them.

It sometimes happened to me to have 1 hour of render per image, but it is exceptional!
It is especially when there is a combination of reflections, transparencies and lights that there are many calculations, for the volumetric clouds too.
The particles require sometimes many calculations if they are not well parameterized.
I finish just a footage 6 seconds (25i/s), and that took 3:40 ' for the whole (maximum quality).
There is about 50 peoples who are jogging reflected in a car and a few through the glasses.
Can you explain how you replace the transparency by caustic, I would like to test?
With the .bvh, there is often work to make in the keyframes, that depends on the character whom you use.
You always select the hip for the importation and you select the existing skeleton in the import window.
On Carrarators, we have some links for  downloading some free .bvh.
I also started to make packs of .bvh converted into NLA (it's a beginning).

I have not used Dogwaffle.

I am considering it for Motion Prediction to use a few frames rendered from LuxRender to stretch them into something that looks fairly smooth.

I don't care about broadcast quality, just something I could put on a web page.  

Sorry for my delayed response: I was away from technology for a couple days.

I did some tests to illustrate what I mean about light through transparency and Caustics. In this particualr one, I did get a 6s. increae in render time, but it's not always an increase. Maybe it worked this way because I have a solid transparent object, as opposed to alpha-mapped one, which seems harder for Light-through-transparency to compute.

Also, I like the shadows produced by Caustics more - the object has solidity to it, while still being transparent. It seems more like glass objects in real life.

(In both cases my light sourse has hard shaddows in this case, but you wouldn't know it from the Light-Through-Transparency image).

Without doubt, I love Carrara. I have been toying with working towards more realistic character animations and other animations for a large project I've been working on forever. I always find myself frustrated at points with full body character animation, since I use Daz characters.

I have some stills that are pretty good in achieving the look I want, always find it difficult to do the same with animations *other than fairly short ones, due to time per frame.

I find creating a decent walk/run cycle hard. I use target helpers to prevent foot slide.

What advice would you give for doing a lot of character animation for my project? Love to hear what others have done with character animation.

I think, if I was to actually take the time and really work at rigging I may jump to Lightwave for the speed and render quality. Still, Carrara's ease of use is hard to beat.

Sorry about the ramblings.

Quote - What advice would you give for doing a lot of character animation for my project? Love to hear what others have done with character animation.

I just post a WIP on Carrarators in which I use many characters in some footages.
To do that without strangling the computer too much, the characters far from the camera are groups of duplicated “Lorenzo and Loretta Lo-Rez”.
This is a WIP and I must still improve a few characters animations.

http://www.bond3d.byethost18.com/index.php?topic=147.msg958#msg958

That is impressive work! Doing all the effects looks like it was a challenge!

As for crowds, I think your right, i have a few sequences later where there are a lot of characters on screen, most of the time it will be 1-5 on screen.

I think what it may boil down to for me is to just learn and practice character animation with the tools I have. Practice a lot and see what I can do.

My project has been broken down to 24 3-5 minute sequences, and each is a huge challenge.