I hate to deluge this forum with my questions, but BONES is driving me crazy. The problems are so erratic, and so varied that I don't quite know where to begin. I know that it's a poor craftsman who blames his tools...but...is BONES unstable in Carrara 2.0? Am I simply letting myself in for major headaches here?

I fully intend to upgrade to 4.0. Is BONES any better in 4.0? If it is, I'll deal with other parts of the animation and deal with flying birds and such at a later date.

Attached Link: http://www.eovia.com/demos/carrara/carrara.asp

Kelley, take a look on Carrara 4 PRO in action video (IK and walk cycle)and you'll see C4 have better tools for animation.

I do intend to upgrade to Carrara 4.0, but that may be in a month or two. I work on a grounds-crew at a golf course, and I'm laid off during the winter months. The bright side of that is that I have plenty of time to play with Carrara. So...for the moment, I'm stuck with Carrara 2.0.

What is your opinion of the bones and animation in 2.0? Is it a basket of snakes, or is the problem with me? Thanks.

I tried bones in V2 and I hit something like 5 bugs with it. Very very annoying experience. I haven't yet tried the same experiments with V4.

From what I remember.

• Undo is not your friend, it will make things worse and you won't be able to recover from the undo so don't use it. In my case I make a bend with some bones. Don't like it. Undo, and what do you know, the constraint settings were undone but the mesh didn't change. Changing the constraints again causes the mesh to deform from it's current possition. Return to default/start state doesn't help as the constraints are totally fubarred at that point.

• Removing a constraint once it's given a value, I.E. the mesh had been deformed would cause the mesh to stay where it was instead of returning to a state where there wasn't a constraint.

• Sometimes, often, after a whole bunch of bending and posing the return to default/start state doesn't return it to the default state but a wonky one, not the one you started with.

• One of the constraints didn't work right at all in a particular setting (there is one with an order of op in the rotations but the first two were treated the same even though they weren't the same and I don't think it updated the mesh properly)

It's a problem with C v2. Not you. I've hit the same frustrations. I gave up after starting over again and again, rebuilding the skelleton again and again, cursing and waving a certain finger at the screen again and again... It just isn't there in V2.

Message edited on: 01/21/2005 17:35

I've yet to tangle with the 'undo' problem, and I've not gotten as far as setting constraints. But it sounds like if I solve my current problems, I have worse ones waiting for me down the road. I think I'll bite the bullet [as far as getting C4.0], but if that doesn't perform to expectations, then I'm going to make the big leap to Maya and be done with it. Thanks for the responses.