Hey Blender users I am a longtime user of Carrara but haven't done much 3d in the last couple of years but I want to learn to use Blender better. I have created a bunch of animations in Carrara with a group of Carrara users and want to do the same with blender. I don't know how busy or active this forum is but I am looking for a bunch (2-5) blender users who want to participate. This is just for fun and a learning experience. I am a 3d generalist I guess but if there are people interested please let me know.. I will find the links to the carrara animations we did and post links to them in a bit.

Here is some links to the animations we did . The boat one we didn't finish.

Spooky nite

Boat Animation

Cactus Corner

The Final Gesture

Hi mmoir

One person off the top of my head who might be interested is LuxXeon he has done many animations in Blender and also has a background with 3Ds max hopefully he will see this thread and answer you himself I know currently he has a couple of projects he is working on also wolf359 does some animations as well and has been using Blender with IClone to make animations.

Lobo3433, thanks for the reply. Hopefully they look in here every so often.

They usually do I know LuxXeon has been busy but he sometimes drops in over the weekend and you can see some of wolf359 animations in this post which will take you also to his YouTube channel I was really impressed

Twenty seconds of Blender Carnage

@Lobo3433 Thank you for the mention, my friend. I'm not sure what a group animation is exactly, but I did reply to him via IM so I'm waiting to hear back. I hope everyone is doing well.

Doing OK on this end I mentioned you well because you make some amazing animations and if it is something you might be interested in when it comes to animations in Blender your always at the top of my list

@Lobo Many thanks for the kind words and visiting my youtube channel.?

Although am not able to participate in the OP's project, (extremely busy with my HALO series), I would encourage more people to get into animation with Blender.

I come from a Lightwave3D & Maxon Cinema4D background and IMHO Blender has an industry standard professional animation system at this point,particularly with support for external human mocap systems like Roccoco and VDB import from simulation software Like Ambergen & Houdini.

wolf359 posted at 10:04AM Sat, 14 November 2020 - #4404532

@Lobo Many thanks for the kind words and visiting my youtube channel.?

Although am not able to participate in the OP's project, (extremely busy with my HALO series), I would encourage more people to get into animation with Blender.

I come from a Lightwave3D & Maxon Cinema4D background and IMHO Blender has an industry standard professional animation system at this point,particularly with support for external human mocap systems like Roccoco and VDB import from simulation software Like Ambergen & Houdini.

It is my pleasure to mention your work and LuxXeon because that is my way plus both of you have shown work that can truly inspire our group here LuxXeon has such a gift for doing some very non-traditional modeling and his geometric shapes are just fantastic and your work is thrilling to watch and on the level that I hope will get recognized by some studio even if you can not currently participate in what mmoir wants to do he can still see that we have some stand out talent in our group here

Okay, I am going to start a project here and post as I go along and show you my progress. Eventually I will post a story of the animation I want to do and if anyone wants to participate that would be great.. Like I said I am a Carrara user but I seem to have lost the human models I created in Carrara so I created a base mesh in blender that I want to sculpt . Don't know how to do this yet so if anyone knows a good tutorial online showing the general process of sculpting please post a link. Here is the image of the base mesh

Found an interesting beginner sculpting tutorial if anyone is interested.
Tutorial Link

Make a duplicate of your base mesh and use that to sculpt on. This way, down the road, you might be able to use the base mesh as a retopology mesh and bake all the details you sculpted into your high poly mesh into that base mesh as displacement or normal maps. This way, you can animate the low poly mesh but render a much more detailed and realistic result without as much stress on your cpu/gpu.

Blender has a decent sculpting package, but if you use the Dyntopo option to create fine detail, then polygon count can skyrocket really fast to the point you will certainly need to retopo the mesh in the end in order to get a useable result for animation.

Okay, LuxXeon, what you describe is the process I don't know/understand yet so thanks for the info. I was going to do the Dynotopo option described in the video below. Or should I use the Remesh option? Found another interesting link here.

Yeah, Pixxo 3d is a very good channel and resource for Blender. I would recommend his channel. Dyntopo is a must if you are going to sculpt anything from scratch. It will add detail only to the areas of the mesh where you are sculpting, and will automatically generate new topology (triangles) as you brush. It's very similar to how Sculptris or Sculptris Pro in Zbrush works. In fact, the technology was based on the same dynamic tessellation technology that was first introduced in Sculptris many years ago.

The problem is that the mesh that is generated with this technique is very erratic and often very dense. Also, it generates Delaunay triangulation, which is often horrible for UV unwrapping or rigging for animation. Remesh is very useful usually at the early stages of a sculpt. Remesh will basically attempt to keep the detail of your model (if you use a small enough voxel size) while redistributing the edges and vertices in a more logical, grid-like manner. Remesh uses voxel techniques and will always try to maintain the profile of the shape. Unlike Dyntopo, Remesh will not focus specifically on the area beneath your brush, it will mesh the entire object with a new topology. Dyntopo is much more focused on providing more topology detail only to the areas on the model where you are working, but it will not care about preserving any custom data attached to the model and does not care about trying to keep the profile of the shape. These two techniques can, in some cases, be used together during a sculpting session to help achieve a certain result. Usually, you would start by blocking out an overall shape with the help of Remesh, then as you need more detail, you can enable Dyntopo.

Keep in mind that remeshing a model is not the same as retopology. Retopology is done only after a sculpt is finished and you wish to project all the fine details of that sculpt to a lower polygon, cleaner mesh object in the form of texture maps.

LuxXeon, Thanks for this information and I will read it closely, I figured some of this out in the last day or two. Right now I am trying to see if "Instant Meshes" is a good option to retopologize the sculpted mesh, first test wasn't totally successful though. In areas like the mouth, nose and eyes the mesh was partially destroyed while the rest of the body was okay. I do like the sculpting so far as it is a lot easier than poly modeling ...

Instant Meshes is OK. It's free and does a relatively decent job in some cases, but often the topology is still very dense after retopo with Instant Meshes and it's difficult to force the edge flow to generate in such a way as to be useful for animation or deformation. I would recommend retopology by hand in every case except for hard surfaces or static objects. There are some very good addons for "manual" retopology in Blender, but I will usually do my retopology in 3dCoat anyway.

If you really want to avoid doing manual retopo at all costs, then saving the base mesh could be a great solution. With some tweaking, you may be able to fit the sculpted mesh into the original base mesh cage and then snap it to the surface with some of the tools in blender for projection.

If that isn't possible, and you still need a good way to generate a base mesh automatically, I highly recommend using a product called Quad Remesher by a company called Exoside. They have a Blender plugin, and the results of the retopology using that algorithm are far superior to any other automatic retopology process I've seen so far.

This is not a direct link to a marketplace, so I feel comfortable providing you with this link for more information... Quad Remesher

In my opinion, Quad Remesher is an extremely valuable addon and tool for creating quality retopology that can actually be used on organic or deformable models, especially with symmetry.

Thanks, I think I will save my base mesh but I will push my base mesh a little closer to the final figure by more poly modeling then sculpting after like you say. Sounds like a good plan. I will look at the programs you mention.

Here's an example of how Quad Remesher works in Blender. This would really be the only way I'd consider doing automated retopo for any animated objects. Zbrush also has a fantastic automatic retopo solution called Zremesher, which works similar to Quad Remesher. So if you have access to Zbrush, that could be an alternative solution. I really feel both of those solutions are better than Instant Meshes.

Okay, will look into Quad Remesher. Thanks

@mmoir, the last thing I'll mention on the topic is that manual retopo in Blender 2.8x is really quite simple once you get the hang of it. Here's an excellent video by the guys at Flippednormals showing some excellent techniques for manual retopo in Blender using only the standard tools and addons. This could come in handy.

LuxXeon, I will look at this video for sure . Thanks.

Hopefully I will have a simple sculpt to show soon.

Hey , I pushed the base mesh a little further with poly modeling and then did a sculpt. Just using the brushes with no dynatop or remesh. Had problems with fingers and ears, couldn't get detail but overall am happy how quick it is to sculpt a figure from the base mesh.

And here is sculpting a Fat guy , Hero guy and Gaunt guy all from the same base #2 meh.

I like it. You should be able to create Shape Keys from those sculpts on one mesh. Meaning, as long as you didn't add any more polygons during the sculpt, the changes you created from the base mesh can be used as Shape Keys, and then just morphed into the sculpted shape very quickly. If you wanted to do it that way.

Yes, I thought of this as it would look cool.. I don't think I added any polys in the sculpting process as Dynatopo was off. The base mesh I used was about 4,000 polys. So, the next step is to get/bake a normal/displacement map and have it working on the base mesh to create this higher quality model.

Sorry for my delay in adding some info but currently there is a issue with E-mail updates from the forums not working properly but some scuplting channels and animation you might want to look at as well are

Pierrick Picaut

YanSculpts

Hey , that is a lot of interesting videos in these links. Thanks.

Hey, Haven't posted anything in a while but I have a small very rough animation to show. I used very few keyframes in this animation but the process of animation seems ok in Blender (I am not a huge animator) . Over the last while I have learned enough about blender where I can make some simple animations. I can do the basic rigging, uv mapping, texturing and animation in blender as well as the modeling. So, I will next make some simple characters and start creating little animations.

Here is the Rough animation.

Hey mmoir not bad that is more than I can do with animation so great work sure as you progress it will get better great job

mmoir posted at 6:07PM Sun, 03 January 2021 - #4409237

Hey, Haven't posted anything in a while but I have a small very rough animation to show. I used very few keyframes in this animation but the process of animation seems ok in Blender (I am not a huge animator) . Over the last while I have learned enough about blender where I can make some simple animations. I can do the basic rigging, uv mapping, texturing and animation in blender as well as the modeling. So, I will next make some simple characters and start creating little animations.

Here is the Rough animation.

Looks like you got the hang of it now. Now you can have some fun!

Thanks Lobo and LuxXeon. I will continue to show updates.

mmoir posted at 7:22PM Sun, 03 January 2021 - #4409330

Thanks Lobo and LuxXeon. I will continue to show updates.

Look forward to seeing them

I agree. Looking forward to some more clips.

Okay, here is an update , it is the character I will animate. I like how you can mask things fairly easily in blender. I added some shape keys for the Eyes and Face so I can animate smiles,blinking etc. Next I will add my simple rig to the character and animate something simple.

Yeah, Looks good so far. That's one aspect of Blender I truly appreciate having and that's the ability to quickly make maps on a model using the Texture Paint tools, without having the export the model or "round-trip" into any other applications. I use that feature all the time if I need to quickly make masks or adjustments to existing UV textures. It's just so much easier than sending the model out to 3dCoat or Substance or Photoshop for simple stuff like that.

Keep us posted.

Hey , Another update . I worked on a background or scene for the animation , it is a park setting. I used the Sapling Add-on which was okay but it took a while to figure out how to use the Particle system and keep the leaves from disappearing. Also, worked on the lighting a bit as there seems to be quite a bit of difference between Eevee and Cycles. I want to use Eevee. Overall going okay but things like reflections and transparency seem overly complex to learn . Here are a couple of images of the character in the scene.

Hey, it's looking pretty good! Here are a few tips to keep in mind when working with Eevee. Remember that your scene can look "almost" as good as Cycles, but it will never be quite as good. The biggest difference comes in the reflections, refractions, and shadows (basically, the parts that Cycles would typically raytrace). Have a look in my Gingerbread Man Dance thread for some comparisons I made between the two engines on the same scene.

Anyway, you will definitely want to make sure all the bells and whistles are activated in Eevee for best results. This means, obviously, Ambient Occlusion and Screen Space reflections are important. However, there are a few tricks when it comes to reflections and refractions that will help you.

First, be sure you UNcheck the "half trace" option. It is enabled by default. This reduces the quality of your reflections for the sake of speed. You do not want that checked if you are looking for higher quality results.

Second, there are some settings that will play a role on some of your materials that have reflectivity or roughness. Under Screen Space reflections, be sure you increase trace precision if you want higher quality reflections. The default is very low. I typically set this to 1. If you have roughness on your materials, then increase the Max Roughness setting. By default, that is also set very low, which will limit the roughness of your reflective materials to a minimum value. You can increase this with minimal impact to speed.

Third, under Performance, make sure you are using "High Quality Normals". This is not enabled by default. This will use higher quality normals and tangents on materials with normal maps, which will also help improve scene quality at the expense of some minimal render time.

Fourth, under Shadows, make sure High Bitdepth is being used. And then increase the shadow map size to at least 2048px for both cascade (distant sun) and box parameters. This will increase shadow quality for your lights at the expense of some render time. I usually crank these values to 4k, but it depends on your GPU.

Finally, make sure if you have any refractive materials that you enable that option in Screen Space Reflections area, but also it needs to be enabled PER material. If you have glass materials, then select that material, scroll down until you see "Screen Space Refraction" parameter under the settings rollout for that material, and check it. Then change the Blend Mode and Shadow Mode to Hashed for best results.

Hey , just another animating update of the character walking along the path. I animated the walk cycle stationary (not moving forward) then when I was happy with the walk cycle I just created keyframe for start of path then moved him to the end of the path with a new keyframe. I adjusted the endpoint distance until I got the least amount of foot slippage in my opinion. I don't know how little slippage you can get this way but I will have to hand animate every step forward as there is too much slippage.

Also, since the path is not totally flat it was hard to keep the feet on the ground. Do you guys know if there is a shadow catcher Add-on or do I have to use shader tricks to create a shadow catcher? Again used few keyframes in this test animation. See the video below.

See Video here

Cycles has a Shadow Catcher node. Unfortunately, it doesn't work in Eevee. There is a way to create it with nodes though, but it's not simple. Luckily, there are some material setups for good shadow catchers out there.

Full disclosure, I did not create this screen cap. It was posted publicly somewhere, but I can't recall exactly where. I think I found it on Pinterest a while back. It works though.

Hey LuxXeon , thanks. I started a tips folder for using Blender and this is going in it as well as your previous post..

No problem. To be honest, you can probably do this same effect with principled shader instead of the emission and transparent bsdf mix. I'll experiment with that later. Oh, and I would always recommend using high bitdepth on shadows. Always.

Hey , Just posting an updated video of my character walking with these changes

1. I flattened the walkway so I wouldn't have to worry about the feet going through the ground.
2. Constrained the character walk along a path , took a while but figured out how to do this.
3. I still created the walk cycle in place, then moved him along the path.
4. It was fairly easy to adjust the end point of the path until the feet didn't slip too much. Making slow progress

Here is the Video

That's looking pretty good, mmoir! I don't know if you've seen this video yet, but it has a few tricks for walk cycles that follow a path I thought were useful.

Keep up the good work!

LuxXeon, thanks, I will definitely look at this video.

Okay blenderites, Another update, I animated by hand the boy walking up to a bench and then sitting down. This was all keyframed so I didn't have issues with foot slippage. I added this clip to the previous animation so there is now 15 seconds of animation. I think this last clip looks a little more natural.

The Animation is here

mmoir posted at 9:59PM Tue, 12 January 2021 - #4410132

Okay blenderites, Another update, I animated by hand the boy walking up to a bench and then sitting down. This was all keyframed so I didn't have issues with foot slippage. I added this clip to the previous animation so there is now 15 seconds of animation. I think this last clip looks a little more natural.

The Animation is here

Much better! I think that looks far more fluid and natural now. I like how he sits down on the bench at the end there.

Hey Guys, haven't done much with blender in the last couple of weeks but I played with NLA strips today with some success. I got a little frustrated the last couple of times I played with NLA in blender so the progress was nice.
I used the separate NLA strips for the walk cycle, moving him forward, turning his head, clenching left hand and moving his right hand to his face. I found out how to scale, duplicate, move and transition Strips but don't know how to overlay strips smoothly, blender seems to totally override the NLA strips sometimes. More learning is required.....

The Animation is here

Hey Guys, haven't done much with blender in the last couple of weeks but I played with NLA strips today with some success. I got a little frustrated the last couple of times I played with NLA in blender so the progress was nice.
I used the separate NLA strips for the walk cycle, moving him forward, turning his head, clenching left hand and moving his right hand to his face. I found out how to scale, duplicate, move and transition Strips but don't know how to overlay strips smoothly, blender seems to totally override the NLA strips sometimes. More learning is required.....

The Animation is here

Aaaahhh.... I just learned when you have a "NLA strip" selected and you press "N" it brings up a lot more options for the NLA strips like , repeat, blend modes etc. Cool , I new this was somewhere.

mmoir posted at 12:26AM Sat, 30 January 2021 - #4411329

Aaaahhh.... I just learned when you have a "NLA strip" selected and you press "N" it brings up a lot more options for the NLA strips like , repeat, blend modes etc. Cool , I new this was somewhere.

Yes. Also that works in the Graph Editor to bring up things like modifiers for keyframes. Useful for creating cycles, noise, and other effects on selected keyframes. For example, if you need to create wings flapping for the duration of a timeline, just create 3 or 4 keyframes for the wings flap, then use a Cycle modifier to repeat that for the entire duration of the timeline.