A friend of mine is a great musician that does electronic / chip-tune type of music and he posted his a w.i.p of the latest thing he is working on, so with his permission I made this short clip.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoCUsyP_LVA

Duration: 42 seconds
Render Time: 6 Hours
Render Farm:   Mine 5 PC's
Version: Carrara 6 Pro

I'm sure the render time could have been reduced if the scene was optimized better, could have probably used different type of lighting.

PS: would be nice if we could imbed youtube video in rendo posts.  Its easy to do, thats what I've done for my wifes Website / Forums.

Very nice!  Thanks for sharing.

Cool animation! Nice job with the wave modifier of the text background.

Quote - Cool animation! Nice job with the wave modifier of the text background.

I wanted to visually do something that goes with the mood and pace of the song.

There is lots of room for improvement.

I tried doing that wave text but with a long string with a lot of words, and what ends up happening is you lose the wave effect over a long text.

I might have posted this link before, but this is the type of text scrolling / sine wave effect I want to create.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jNsIQpBgHA

Like the music and your animation.  Does after effects have a plugin for music that pulses of thumps the image according to the beat?  Adding audio (equalizer ?) keyframes would make for an interesting effect to your movie.  Like the mirror reflection too.

Quote - Like the music and your animation.  Does after effects have a plugin for music that pulses of thumps the image according to the beat?  Adding audio (equalizer ?) keyframes would make for an interesting effect to your movie.  Like the mirror reflection too.

Hehehe you read my mind :)  I'm building up to that.  

I downloaded PyCarrara which is a  Python interpreter based plugin, its available for C6, C7 and C8.  I was thinking of introducing other elements in the scene that would be bouncing or pumping of sorts to the beat of the music. 

Now I have to figure out how to write the script in Python.  Its been a long time since I've tried to do any kind of programming.

There's an included script in the PyCarrara demo containing the speaker. You go to the timeline for that object and then the script for the tweener should be in there somewhere. Save that back out as a Python script file, and then it's possible to use it for other objects by loading it. Yeah, that's cheap, but copy-paste is easier unless you exactly what all the code does. The speaker script only detects "loudness" afaik, but you can use it in any object that has two separate states in the tweener timeline period it's applied to. (So you can start at 100% or 0% if the other end of the timeline is the opposite, or do things like rotate 180° for that timeline span, and have a VU meter effect.)

If you do get into your own scripting, it might also be better writing some of the scripts in a text editor. I found that on occasion a bug pops up if you enter it in Carrara directly. Maybe it'll be fixed in a newer version of PyCarrara, or perhaps it could be a C6 thing (which Daz wont fix, because obviously C8 has priority.)

As for the wave thing, did you try the oscillate tweener with sawtooth and up at 100% applied to the effect? (It should look like: /|/|/| above the settings.) You should be able to get the long scrolling text to look alright by simply moving it sideways. The number of oscillation repeats does take trial and error though. (You may also have to disable the frame skipping thingy on the timeline controls when testing it, in order to get it right.)

I'd also try something more interesting with the metaball particle thing. Have it flow over invisible objects or through funky tubes or something. (I think alpha does the trick, since transparancy still seems to have reflection, and I believe no-visibility on the main object settings prevents interactions.) Also it might look better behind the text. You can take that suggestion or leave it though, since it's your project afterall.

Thanks Pauljs75 your input is very much appreciated, always with good wealth of information.

On Sunday I had a breakthrough with the waving/sine wave scroll text.  As you mentioned it was a bit of trial and error but I think I got the formula now, but I still have to figure out the timing.  Because as it stands now, the speed of the text scrolling will depend on the length of the text.  So for example if I have a 40 Second Clip and 20 Words  0 seconds will be the start of the first word and 40 seconds will be the last word in that 20 word sentence.  If I decide to use 40 words instead the speed of the scroll text will increase.   So I was going to make some kind of a chart, to tell me depending on how many words, and how fast I want the text to scroll how long the clip should be.

Having the metaball particle flow over invisible objects is a great idea.  I was going to try and have it fall over the actual wavy text and see how it looked.

Now for the PyCarrara.  I was thinking of several Cubes rotating on the XYZ axis, like the video I posted a few weeks back.  Smaller cubes place around everything, and make them grow in size with the beat while at the same time rotating. :)

Although I only know about 2% of what Carrara is capable of doing, I like the fact that It can do some of the ideas that I can think of.

The end result of all these ideas that I'm experimenting with will result in a 3 minute video, some of which I haven't shown publicly.