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Great job. It would take me 10 times that long just to either find or model the assets, let alone arrange, adjust textures, set up lights, determine render settings, etc!
that's why I love Carrara so much... things can be done so quickly once you have a system set up
Trying to put together an ocean setup that I hopefully can drop into any future underwater scene I want to create.
The light rays and the caustics on the ocean floor are both from a carrara spotlight with a caustics bmp animation in the gel channel (and the lightcone also passes through the same gel animation).
Using Sparrowhawke's Murky Volume plugin to get the murky visibility falloff. Also using bubbles from Dart's Underwater environkit.
Very cool! Did you make the caustics animation in Howler, by chance? PD Howler has an excellent water caustics animation filter!
I've always wanted to try Murky Volume but never really did it. Oh... right. I never got to doing underwater scenes yet. Had fun underwater making the EnvironKit, but that was it.
Oh... another thing. Those bubbles can take quite some time to render. I'd suggest rendering some out and just putting that alpha render onto a plane or two. A whole bunch of them really look cool, so if we take that time to render out a good bunch of bubbles, and then a few with far less for variety and effect, we can run those renders onto a few planes for depth.
Just (sea)food for thought ;)
JonStark doing animation? What is this world coming to?
Neat animation. Great to see you posting here again. Hope you can stay a while.
For some reason, I too have recently made the jump to animation. I have Phil's course, which after months is starting to make sense. I'm also hoping that Dart's NEW course will be helpful in Carrara, but have not received any verification of that yet.
Dart?
For me, 3D output has really slowed, but not because of animation. I currently have a lot of other activities going on, and only get to Carrara once or twice a week.
Doh! I didn't even think about using PD Howler! That could have saved me some trouble lol... but in fairness I had no idea Howler could do that. I went googling and hunted for a free caustics generator thingie.
Murky volume is great, I highly recommend it. Actually I saw over on Sparrowhawke's patreon that he has a bunch of new plugins he's been coming out with steadily, right up until very recently (July of this year) when he released a very cool plugin that lets characters hands automatically close to grasp things (flashlights, sword hilts, etc). And that plugin also has been updated so that it has a point-at feature for the eyes, but so much better than the regular point-at modifier, it shifts the eyes, and turns the neck and head too, looks really good. I've been offsite for a while, so maybe all this is already well-known in the forums here, but I was really pleasantly surprised to see how much more work he's done on Carrara plugins. :)
I feel chagrined about my long absences, but life has a habit of getting in the way. It's always fun to come back and catch up. I'm a Carrarist for life. :)
I also don't really do animations, or underwater scenes even, but it's bothered me for a while that I have all the tools now (I think) to make a good template for underwater scenes, so I got fixated on it. The animation isn't much, just an alligator turning his head and a fish getting yanked through the scene. But I really wanted to make sure I had a method of animating the caustics on the seafloor as well as light rays coming from the surface. Carrara has it's own caustics, but they don't give that swimming pool glimmer shifting effect, not unless you crank the photons up to stratospheric (render crash imminent) levels. I'm not sure, but I think Carrara's caustic engine is better reserved for use with glassware rather than swimming pools.
The course is all about tips and tricks that make Daz Studio less impossible for animation. Carrara is an animator's dream in comparison. However, the main focus of the course - building custom control dials of many different types, is certainly a boon to anyone animating figures that work in Studio - like we can in Carrara.
These custom controls alleviate having to use to graph editor almost entirely, making animation a Lot more fun.
All done in Studio, meaning that the animations themselves would have been even easier in Carrara.
Looks great. I am not familiar with that plug in. I had a recent uninstall.reinstall so I don't have many plugins active anymore. Have to take some time and review Sparrowhawke's collection. I think there was one that could animate a rotating loop, like tank tracks. I have been watching some nearby construction equipment and might want to model a tractor.
Keep up the great work, @Johnstark. Scene looks terrific. Stop back in when you get the chance. Your insights are sorely missed.
I must admit I do not use many third party plugins also because they often cause issues with other ones.
Even some of the paid DAZ shop ones clash with others hence my having multiple builds of Carrara installed
Sparrowhawke's plugins ROCK!
Agreed! I couldn't do without them, tbh. But I never realized til recently that he has a whole bunch more he's been working on steadily on his patreon site. For example, he's got one for a starfield with shooting stars and much more control over the night sky, or one for Cirrus clouds, or his Autopose one:
(22) Pose Automation Tests - YouTube
Though that vid is for an earlier version, and the latest version includes very cool 'point at' functions for the eyes, much superior to using the Carrara point-at modifier, in that it naturally turns the eyes, the head and the neck in the direction you want the character to look at.
That is Very Cool!!! I'd love to become a Patreon of his some day!
I refuse to buy into the Paetron model for the same reason I do the subsciption model
I will always willingly pay a once off fee for a software, service whatever and an upgrade fee if needed, I will donate or "buy someone a coffee"
but I don't make ongoing payments for services
the exception being DAZ+ but I don't always renew that either and only subscribe if heavily discounted
I have so many people wanting patreonage and feel bad but it is what it is
nothing personal against Sparrowhawk, there are people much closer to me I also won't patreonize
don't fault them for trying but this is a hobby that only costs me money not a job.
update to explain
Again not saying I don't appreciate the work, I do use one of his plugins regulary and made a donation, UV unwrap
it's the only one I have installed, if I did use others I certainly would make a donation
I get that it might be a matter of principle, but in this specific case it was literally 2 dollars to join Sparrowhawke's patreon, and I immediately got like 5 new plugins, each of which I would have been happy to pay $10 - $20 for. (Another cool one he's made is called River System, which allows for the modification of terrains to include river channels, he's got some improvement plugins for the Vertex modeller that I haven't explored yet; there's kind of a lot there). I could have joined, grabbed the plugins, and dropped the membership, maybe to come back in another 6 months to a year to see what's new, but I didn't because I felt that $2 was just too little to pay, so I'll leave it going for a few months til I feel a bit less like I'm getting away with robbery :)
Of course I think over time all of these plugins will probably make it over to his laboratory for free distribution anyway, so it's probably just a matter of waiting. From his notes on the many entries on his patreon it looks to me like he's just creating these plugins as he encounters problems with his own Carrara projects, then solves the problem with a plugin, then puts it up on his Patreon. It's very cool to see how regularly he updates and adds. It's not like a new plugin every day, but more like every few months, which he does improved versions of as he refines them, so I don't want to give the wrong idea, but since Daz is plainly never going to update Carrara, it's nice to have someone consistantly adding features in the form of plugins (much like some of the other great plugin developers). :)
yep, I got his vertex plugin but haven't worked it out yet
I don't do Patreon because I'm poor. But Jeremy is a different case. I love Jeremy and all he does!!!
Ha, kinda funny. Yesterday I posted that Jeremy doesn't add new plugins every day, and today I see he's just uploaded the test renders and concept for a new plugin. So maybe I jinxed it (but in a good way). Looks like this new one will give a way to add more detail/tesselation/finer details to specific parts of a terrain that is closer to the camera. Very cool stuff!
Very cool, Wendy! How'd you do the simulation, Bullet in Carrara? VWD?
VWD original version on my Win7
verry cool work.
thanks
video
Exotic !!!
Retro UFO
Very cool - both of you!