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.