Polyloop - 3D & 2D Forums - View Single Post

DaveH · 23rd October 2007, 18:50

> I'm afraid my IK tutorials are basic as well since that's the target audience.

Is that true of the ones I'd pay for as well as the free ones (which I've seen)?

A bit 'o context here. What drove me to posting this thread was a problem I'm having here: http://forums.polyloop.net/carrara-e...hat-i-get.html

Quick if not completely accurate analogy: I'm kind of animating an octopus where some of the tentacles have forks at the end. It's really a neuron, but you get the idea.

> Honestly, it's not that hard to apply information from any other program into Carrara.

I have no doubt that's true up to a point, and I'm hoping what I'm trying to do falls into the category of needs that are common enough that they can be addressed by most products, though perhaps in different ways. But there is so much that I don't know about the nuts and bolts of any program and how things can be combined that I'm having difficulty trying to determine what, if anything, I can do to help myself.

For example: I think it was the robot arm tutorial where I saw someone specifying using ball joints in their IK rig. I discovered though experimentation that the rig didn't work unless I specified ball joints. So I looked at "canned" IK created using the Carrara tool, expecting that the joints would have the ball joint modifier applied automagically by the IK tool. They didn't - they were unadorned, and yet they worked just fine. So there's at least one rule I don't understand.

Another example is the Maya spine IK; I have absolutely no idea how they do that and didn't understand some of the steps needed to set it up, so I wouldn't be able to map that on anything in Carrara. I don't know enough to guess whether there is a different set of rules than for regular IK, or if it could have been done with existing primitives and all they did was automate some of the steps.

Tutorials for me are kind of hit or miss. I've read them in many different disciplines (CG, software development, sculpting, and a few others) and a common thing is that most don't say *why* some things are done, just that they are done. Sometimes omissions like that are for brevity, sometimes because the audience is expected to know certain things, and sometimes because the people writing the tutorials aren't good teachers. The difficult thing is that the omissions tend to be critical to the process and you *need* to understand them in order take that information and apply it to different situations.

Someone must know how all the parts interact and when certain features are desirable. Certainly the developers at Carrara would, but the manuals just barely skim the surface. Hence my plea for help.

23rd October 2007, 18:50	#4 (permalink)
DaveH Spline Join Date: Sep 2007 Posts: 44	> I'm afraid my IK tutorials are basic as well since that's the target audience. Is that true of the ones I'd pay for as well as the free ones (which I've seen)? A bit 'o context here. What drove me to posting this thread was a problem I'm having here: http://forums.polyloop.net/carrara-e...hat-i-get.html Quick if not completely accurate analogy: I'm kind of animating an octopus where some of the tentacles have forks at the end. It's really a neuron, but you get the idea. > Honestly, it's not that hard to apply information from any other program into Carrara. I have no doubt that's true up to a point, and I'm hoping what I'm trying to do falls into the category of needs that are common enough that they can be addressed by most products, though perhaps in different ways. But there is so much that I don't know about the nuts and bolts of any program and how things can be combined that I'm having difficulty trying to determine what, if anything, I can do to help myself. For example: I think it was the robot arm tutorial where I saw someone specifying using ball joints in their IK rig. I discovered though experimentation that the rig didn't work unless I specified ball joints. So I looked at "canned" IK created using the Carrara tool, expecting that the joints would have the ball joint modifier applied automagically by the IK tool. They didn't - they were unadorned, and yet they worked just fine. So there's at least one rule I don't understand. Another example is the Maya spine IK; I have absolutely no idea how they do that and didn't understand some of the steps needed to set it up, so I wouldn't be able to map that on anything in Carrara. I don't know enough to guess whether there is a different set of rules than for regular IK, or if it could have been done with existing primitives and all they did was automate some of the steps. Tutorials for me are kind of hit or miss. I've read them in many different disciplines (CG, software development, sculpting, and a few others) and a common thing is that most don't say why some things are done, just that they are done. Sometimes omissions like that are for brevity, sometimes because the audience is expected to know certain things, and sometimes because the people writing the tutorials aren't good teachers. The difficult thing is that the omissions tend to be critical to the process and you need to understand them in order take that information and apply it to different situations. Someone must know how all the parts interact and when certain features are desirable. Certainly the developers at Carrara would, but the manuals just barely skim the surface. Hence my plea for help.