One of the neato things Carrara lets you do is take an image file and use it as a texture on an object. Now that's not surprising. What's good though - the file can be a movie file, Quicktime or AVI for instance. The movie clip can be the source of a color channel on a complex, multi-channel texture. But it can also be used for a different channel, such as transperency, thus affecting the shadow intensity of light shining through it, or bump, changing the appearance of a surface over  time as the animated texture is rendered into an animation. Other examples of using a movie file as a texture are shown here.
 

To start, let's take a short movie clip. We  have Pierre Bretagnolle in the TGS booth at Mac World expo, filmed with a regular video camera, and captured into a short AVI clip. Click the imagte to see a RealMedia version of the clip. It's just 10 seconds long.  If you don't have the RealPlayer, get it here. (there's a free basic player too).

Putting 2D back into 3D - Texture-mapping with a Movie Clip

When you apply a texture to an object in Carrara's texture room, select 'Pixmap' and apply an  AVI or Quicktime movie file to the color channel of the shader.  In this example, we've got a 3D model of a computer screen (one of the many models included on the Carrara Studio content CD), and the movie has been textured onto the screen. Then, when rendering an animation where the camera is moving around the computer, the texture is changing over time, as it is playing through the movie clip.

Here are a few examples:
 

160x120 pixels low bandwidth: >>> 45kb

160x120 pixels medium bandwidth: >>> 190kb

160x120 pixels high bandwidth >>> 525kb

320x240 pixels medium bandwidth >>> 442kb

The resulting animation can be saved from Carrara as AVI or Quicktime (or animated GIF or image sequence). The sound track from the original clip is not included, so it was simply composited back into the final clip, and the result converted to RealMedia.

Towards the end of that animation, you'll also notice that the monitor is not just sitting there - it is looking around to follow you the observing camera, while the camera turns to the right and back side of the computer. Also, in the back of the computer you'll see the light cone of a spot light, with a bit of granularity in the air. Carrara calls this lumpiness. Spot lights can carry a lightcone and you can set the lumpiness of the particles in the air, and you can even animate them and make it so that the cone casts 3D shadows though the air.

More impressively, Carrara lets you place an image in front of such a a light cone. What happens when you do that? Well, you turn the spot light into a movie projector.

Putting animated Gels in front of Spot lights

When an image is placed in front of a spot light in the form of a gel, it sort of creates the effect of a slideshow projector. If the image is in fact a movie clip, then you will get something like a film projector. When the lightcone is eneabled on the spot light, one option is to use the Gel. In this case, the light cone doesn't remain homogeneously shaded. Instead, it displays various rays of varrying colors and intensity as the movie file unfolds through the gel. It's like sitting in a movie theatre with thick air (filled with smoke) and seeing the rays through the room before they hit the screen.

Here is an example of what you can do with that:
 

160x120 pixels low bandwidth: >>> 87kb

160x120 pixels medium bandwidth: >>> 369kb

320x240 pixels medium bandwidth >>> 1.0Mb

Note that in the above examples there's also a small point light (bulb) at the projector lens to create the lens flares and glare.
 

Stay tuned for more examples of mixing 2D animations into 3D scenes with Carrara Studio.