Sci Fi Query for a Newbie

[Greg]

Hi there everyone!

I am a total 3d virgin and would welcome the advice of you kind people .

I make live action Mini DV films and for my next project I need to incorporate some space scenes. It will involve a flying saucer zooming through space with the camera following and tracking, so I will also need a moving star field and assorted planets. The spaceship will need to incorporate flashing lights and moving parts i.e. rotating engines. It is going to be in the style of a '50's Sci-Fi 'B' movie so photorealism isn't too important. I am quite experienced with compositing so incorporating the 3D elements should'nt be too much of a problem (ha! famous last words... ).

Before I jump in and buy Carrara 5 can anyone tell me if there are any appropriate tutorials available? At the moment I only need to learn stuff that is directly relevant to my requirements so I don't need to learn everything (just yet!).

Also, I was thinking of making the alien beastie as a live puppet and incorporating it into the 3D scene's by green-screen keying. However, if I wanted to create it in 3D is Carrara suitable for modelling and animating without any plug-in's? I appreciate that any 3D program takes loads of time and effort to achieve decent results but roughly how long would it take for a fairly competent person to achieve results?

Finally, can I export animations direct to Autodesk Combustion?

I have tried seaching the forum, and Google, for these tutorials but unfortunately I have not been successful. Perhaps I'm just looking in the wrong places!

Anyway, many thanks for any help you can offer

Greg

[bwtr]

Firstly, lookat all the tutorials on this site then go through all the tutorials and tutorial sources at the Eovia home site. And look at the HUGE gallery site even here. You can do most things without extra plugins in Carrara but those available are superb and cheap.. (And, you won't find a better all round pragramme at any where near the Carrara price). Carrara exports to all the comman formats. You will find more info on the Eovia site product sheets.
Download a free trial of Carrara----Today!

[WillBellJr]

Yeah, I would say play with the demo as well.

It was pretty easy (for me) to pick up the interface and >surface< of the toolset. Of course it will take me longer to dig deeper and learn the details such as the material editor (though that's not really all that hard) and I have yet to touch the animation features...

My goals are very similar to yours being a scifi nutt myself...

As far as compositing, as long as you render out to a format that Combustion can load I don't see any problems - I use AfterFX without any issues.

Unless you have another modeler, I'd think most of your time will be spent learning the different modelers within C5 so you can build your scene objects (the spline modeler is a hoot - totally new way to work compared with polygon modeling...)

Again, see of the demo works for you - enjoy!

-Will

[xavierpayne]

I bought Carrara pro just about three weeks ago after playing with the demo for about a week and it's one of the few 3D purchases I have made that I did not end up regretting. The entire interface appears to have been designed by God himself and the more I use it the more I'm finding it can do all kinds of stuff that in many cases they didn't even advertise it as being able to do. Weird eh? It can actually do MORE than what they advertise.

First of all you know all the teaser stuff they show you in the demo download? I mean the icons that say "no no not till you buy" Well the full product has MANY MANY more tutorial/demos included in it than what the demo shows. Pro also comes with a content CD that has tons of freebies from DAZ and other places so you can give the Poser integration a try. The poser integration... I swear... God must be on their payroll.

Most interesting to you would probably be that the Pro version comes with a demo of the solar system complete with texture mapped planets (although the text maps are *very* low res so you'd need to scare up higher res textures), starry background and an animated camera flying through the solor system. I don't know what the license is but I could probably post a render of a few frames if you wanted to check it out.

[bwtr]

Xavier. I think the Solar stuff is in both versions. However, in the files in the Contents CD you will find FOUR levels of res textures for each of the planetary items! Yes Eovia is about the most user friendly place in this part of the universe.

[AWBenson]

One of the ways to create a star field without buying plugins would be to enclose your scene a huge sphere with a texture map of the star field applied. If you want to simulate a star-ship going really fast, you can make a sphere in a sphere in a sphere, etc and this will give your stars the look of some being closer and moving past faster.

The star field itself can be built as a mutli-colored cell-like pattern which uses the alpha channel to only show "dots" from the extremely colorful, color channel. This would also be applied to the glow setting because it would need to be bright and unaffected by object shadows.

You can add nublas and other space adnomalities on the star-sphere or on "2D" planes that are scene in the distance.