I have only been rendering still images in Carrara until now. But now I was thinking it's time I start looking into the animation features of Carrara. So far I got the basics of creating keyframes and actually feel like a little director.

I also realized pretty much anything is animatable (is that actually a word?). I can animate shaders to shift colors, glossiness or any property I want for that matter. Really cool. But I also got stuck with all thist as a slight problem...what if I don't want to animate a shader but change the settings for it?

I mean like this, I want to animate a driving car through six keyframes. After a draft render I realize the car should be red and not yellow. If I then change the car's shader to red, it only applies to whatever keyframe I'm currently at. But I obviously want the car red through the entire animation. I can of course copy the shader settings and paste them in all keyframes. Which is doable with six keyframes, but what if I would have like 34 keyframes or more?

Changing the color for a shader in all keyframes is just one example. How do I apply anything to all keyframes? What if I want to move a tree slightly to the left for the entire animation? Or like when I accidently moved my main camera in a keyframe. That got me wishing I could go to another keyframe where the camera is perfect and apply the camera properties to all keyframes.

So that's basically my question. How do I "globally" change settings for something to apply to all keyframes? Or is there some way to disable animation for a specific object such as a shader, camera or a primitive?

 Hi Ravenous,

Animation is definitely a learned process. The cardinal rule is to double check that you are always on frame one prior to making changes on any object that is not supposed to change over time. If you accidently do make a change to a shader (or anything else) while the playhead is in the middle of the animation, you can simply delete the offending keyframe. You can even drag a marquee selector across multiple keyframes to select more than one. 

Carrara automatically keyframes. So, if you changed the color of the car mid animation and then continued to animate the motion of the car, the shader itself won't be automatically keyframed even though the motion of the car is. 

Mark

Alright, if I got it right then any adjustments made to the first keyframe will apply for the entire animation. That explains why I managed to get funny shader animations, I kept flipping between keyframes while I was editing the shaders.

I also tried to create a smoke trail like in one of your tutorials with the particle emitter. That's when I really messed up. I didn't use a path like in your tutorial so I moved the emitter around the scene between my six keyframes instead. I ended up trying different values for the emitter in all keyframes by mistake (it would also be fair to say by ignorance). I couldn't for my life understand the erratic behaviour of my particle emitter until I read that Carrara animates just about any changes to a keyframe.