Daz user takes Carrara plunge -- What should I know about using Genesis and G2 content?
ModernWizard
Posts: 850
Howdy, everyone. I'm a longtime Daz Studio user who just took the Carrara plunge last night. PC+ brought 8.5 Pro < $30.00, and the PA sale send-off allowed me to get Maple Meadows and World Gardens Maze very affordably. With all the included content in 8.5, plus its varied capabilities, I figured that was a deal too good to pass up.
I blame Howie Farkes for bringing me to Carrara. :p Maple Meadows, for example, is the only digital set I've ever seen that accurately replicates the area where I live [the Champlain Valley of Vermont], with its gentle, rolling, rounded hills. I am also a huge labyrinth [and Labyrinth] fan, so I just had to get World Gardens Maze. I haven't seen any landscapes like these two matched anywhere else by any other software, so you might ultimately say that it was Maple Meadows that did me in. :D
After using Daz Studio for several years, I have great familiarity with it. I basically use it as a way to play with digital dolls that I dress up to my liking, then place in various settings to act out multi-panel sequential stories [oh okay, comics!]. I'd love to use my Daz [and Poser] content in Carrara for the same effects. And here I come to my questions...
I read the Carrara 7 manual [except for the parts about animation, which does not interest me], but note that it does not cover using Gen1 and G2F content in Carrara. Are there tutorials specifically about using these new figures in Carrara? Do duf files even work in Carrara, or would I have to set up my characters from scratch in Carrara? Are there Gen1 and G2F things that DON'T work in Carrara?
I have to say that I'm really excited about using Carrara. After reading the manual, I think that the program seems clear and logical and maybe even intuitive in a way that Daz Studio isn't. Daz Studio does so much, but its lack of documentation makes getting beyond a beginner level challenging. It also hides things in illogical places. Carrara's rooms, plus its wizards to help you make terrains, for example, just make the software more approachable. Of course, a manual helps too, even if it is for 7. After reading that thing, I want to run my characters through World Gardens Maze and design some fantastical trees with heart-shaped leaves and do some spline modeling of jewelry and make some snowy terrain and import 3ds files... You get the idea. :D
--MW
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Comments
I'm in a similar boat, using Studio since 2007, but very new to Cararra. However, I haven't read the manual. I'm following some online tutorials, and just poking around a lot.
So far, I haven't had issues with G1, while there were issues loading G2 skin. However, someone with greater experience will likely give you a better answer.
The following thread can get a bit advanced, but it does address some basic content issues:
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/8916/buy-something-that-doesn-t-work-in-carrara-post-your-questions-and-workarounds-here-please#latest
And after breakfast?
Seriously though, while I'm mostly about making stuff in Carrara and then exporting it to DS, when it comes to Genesis and Genesis 2, I do find it slightly easier to clothe, hair and set the initial pose inside Studio (the Smart Content menus are just a bit more polished...), then I save each figure as a scene subset, open in Carrara and make whatever tweaks are necessary - mostly shaders, but sometimes you need to move a clothing item up or down the hierarchy. Then final pose and render (or animate, as some are about to suggest)
BTW, I first got into Carrara to make graphic novels and book covers.That was several years ago. Got a little distracted along the way (although many of my sets do look suspiciously like locations from my novels), but I'll get to it eventually, really I will. Just need to make one more set, okay maybe two . . . er, three?
By coincidence, I am in the middle of putting together a mini tutorial on getting started in Carrara. I am just putting together some screengrabs, not a video. Until I get it finished, you might skim through the folliwing thread. I had been putting it together when switching from the M4/V4 figures to genesis and genesis 2. Many people use the workflow that TangoAlpha suggests (assemble the figures and poses in Studio first and export as a scene subset), but I prefer to load everything directly in Carrara and do the posing / fitting there. Just persnal preference.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/45361/best-practices-using-genesis-and-genesis-2-content-in-carrara/p1
Thanks Diomede and UnifiedBrain for the links to tips'n'tricks threads. People here are very helpful, and there is a wealth of information, but it's sometimes hard to know where to look.
Thanks TangoAlpha for the information on your workflow.
Off to read more documentation...
--MW
Good, but I hope it is just not simply another general tutorial. There are a ton of those out there. What I seek is a tutorial targeted specifically for experienced Studio users. It should be written for those people who are familiar with the basic functions in Studio - finding and loading characters and terrain, dressing and posing, lights and rendering, maybe a bit on shaders - and then show how to most easily replicate those functions in Cararra. Most other Cararra tutorials seem top-heavy with cool stuff that you cannot do in Studio, but I don't care about that YET. Let me get comfortable with the basic manipilation of characters in scenes first. Right now, replicating those basic actions in Cararra is a chore to say the least.
Frankly, the lack of targeted support for the migration of people from Studio to Cararra puzzles me. Does Daz not want people - in large numbers - to change to Cararra? Do they want it to forever be a tiny niche? Even if that is true, I would think that people in this forum would want more Cararra users, as it gives them more leverage to force Daz into putting more resources into updating the software, and creating more Cararra-specific content. And with a huge base of Studio users already in place, it seems natural to desire to get them on board using the best resources possible.
If someone doesn't make such a tutorial, then I will - eventually - assuming that I fall in love with the program. I have done this in other fields. But right now, I'm too busy figuring it out for myself.
Yes, I know that Phil sells tutorials, and they seem very well done. I will get them eventually. But it seems unreasonable to spend 100 bucks just to learn basic functions. A standard Studio-to-Cararra tutorial, covering the basics, which hits all the major ways that people learn, should have been done a long time ago, IMO.
Or, am I wrong?
With regard to "what you should know", I remember thinking that G2 was just about the sweet spot for use in Carrara - better than Genesis - although I can't now remember exactly why I thought that.
One thing you will find is that certain Carrara content -- poses and material poses etc. -- won't show up in your Content library. This is because it uses a particular file format that Carrara doesn't recognize (.duf? .dsf? Can't remember). So in some cases you may need to manually apply texture maps etc. to figures, which can be tedious.
When you're applying a pose to a loaded figure, make sure you have the correct object selected in your scene (or rather in the scene browser). For example, if I load Undead Fiend, I will get a hierarchy in the Scene Browser that looks like "Undead Fiend" --> "Genesis" --> "Actor" --> "Hip" --> .... If I click on the object in the scene, Carrara will select "Actor" in the Scene Browser. Choosing a pose from the Content pane and double-clicking it will not apply that pose to the figure. Likewise, if I click "Undead Fiend" in the Scene Browser and then double-click the pose, again, the pose is not applied. I need to click on "Genesis" in the Scene Browser to be able to apply the pose.
Carrara files with saved Genesis 2 content tend to get enormous. When modern versions of DAZ Studio save a file, they save references to the objects in your library, so the files can be kept very small: a few hundred kilobytes, often. Carrara seems to write the complete model data to the file. This has the advantage that if aliens come along and abduct your library, you can still open the Carrara scene (although objects may end up untextured), whereas DAZ Studio will just tell you it can't find the required objects. The disadvantage is that the saved files can be many 10's or 100's of megabytes in size: you'll need a big hard disk. Also, the Save process can take forever.
I believe at one point there was a way to make Carrara's file-saving process work more like DAZ Studio's, but either that was a feature of a previous version of Carrara, or I've accidentally changed a preference, but now whenever I save I get a giant file.
Scenes containing Genesis take a bit less space; V4 and M4 are pretty economical.
Sorry if these comments are a bit vague; since the advent of Iray, I've been using DAZ Studio a lot more, and it's been a while since I worked with Carrara. This is why my memory for some of its quirks is a little inexact.
Nice suggestions!
I would be interested in knowing more about this, if you remember.
Smart content in Carara seems really squirrely. I can see why some users clothe and pose in Studio and transfer to Carrara, I get the idea of different tools for different jobs, but I hope that I get comfortable with it enough with Cararra to stay in it most of the time.
I found that out yesterday. My first saved scene with G2F and lights was 250 MB! It took forever to save. Weirdly, the second scene I tried, with G2F, lights, terrain, and prop, was only 10 MB. Still a lot, but I have no idea why one was so much bigger than the other.
Hope to learn more about this as well.
Thanks, very useful. Can you share why you chose IRAY in Studio over working in Cararra?
At one point I had a theory that if you started your scene in Studio, loaded the file in Carrara and then saved, it would save in a more economical file-format, using references rather than including the whole object data. I've just done a test and confirmed that that is apparently not the case. So I don't know what the answer is.
Short answer: DAZ Studio/Iray makes everything super easy.
Long answer: I never made very much use of DAZ Studio as a rendering platform because I was never able to get the 3Delight rendering engine to give me results that I really liked. I know that there are people who can do amazing things with 3DL; I am not one of them. I got a little more mileage out of Studio once Reality/LuxRender came along, but I found the scene setup process slow. I don't mind waiting for final renders, but LuxRender is slow enough to make trial-and-error adjustment of lighting painful. Whereas Carrara -- particularly when using Tim Payne's lightdomes -- reliably gave me results that I liked, and it was easy to set up and do test renders. Carrara's biased renderer is noticeably faster than PBRs, so Carrara became my rendering platform of choice.
Iray changed that. Because DAZ Studio properly supports all the newer DAZ technology (and Carrara does not), I find working with Studio easier in general. With Carrara, there's always the risk that something you want to use won't work because Carrara can't load the poses or materials (and, of course, there's no support for Genesis 3). And the Iray renderer gives excellent, largely predictable results. My laptop only supports CPU rendering, so I often have to leave the final render running overnight, but even so, I find the DAZ Studio/Iray workflow pretty convenient.
One downside is that I think DAZ Studio makes me less creative: I take Piece of Content A by some insanely talented content creator, pair it with Piece of Content B by some other insanely talented content creator, hit Render, and look, wow, I made a picture. And it looks awesome. With Carrara, I probably did more work myself. Instead of just slapping together bits of other people's genius and calling it 'my' work, I tended to add more elements that I had modeled or textured myself (for some very basic value of 'modeling' and 'texturing').
I haven't abandoned Carrara. It's a very capable application, I do like working with it, and I do like the results it gives. In particular, the renderer produces images with a somewhat 'painterly' look that I like, noticeably different from the look of images you get out of the PBRs like LuxRender or Iray. And because I don't have an Nvidia graphics card with scads of RAM to accelerate my Iray renders, Carrara will always be much faster. But DAZ Studio wins out when I'm feeling lazy (which is most of the time).
Thanks for the thoughtful response. You are a good writer, so I suspected that you would have good artistic composition skills as well. I checked out your web page, and was not disappointed.
Actually, I love 3DL. Just love it. I dislike IRAY almost as much as I love 3DL, so we interpret the world differently here.
So, how do you compare 3DL with the Cararra rendering engine? I've asked this question previously on this forum, but only one person responded - Dartanbeck. I suspect that a lot of Studio users would be interested in the answer to that question.
After looking at your gallery, I understand what you are saying. The content was often amazing. But the composition was why I looked twice. I didn't like every render you did, but it was readily apparent how creative you were in composing the scenes. Never underestimate that skill. Not everyone has it. You should be doing product ads for PA's here. Seriously.
In recently getting back into Daz, I actually bought a fast computer and Nvidia card in anticipation of diving into IRAY. There are some great IRAY tutorials online, which ironically caused me to drop it. Once I clearly understood how it worked, I realized that it wasn't my cup of tea.
So far, the Cararra experiment has shown more promise.
Looks promising so far! I don't want to mess up your thread by posting over there, but will you accept suggestions?
I'm pretty busy the next few days. Looking forward to being a guinea pig for you by Friday.
Well, I posted some screengrabs and lots of typos. My keyboard is dropping letters - very annoying. The tutorial is intended for new users not necessarily a Daz user. Hope youstill find it useful.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/119181/first-steps-setting-up-a-sample-scene-in-carrara-with-plant-terrain-sky-and-hair#latest
MW, Hello and welcome to Carrara 8.5 Pro!
Can't help with posing characters in Carrara at the moment... I'm into modeling, terrains and putting scenes together be them all my content or using others content. And finally learning all of Carrara's cool FX. Speaking of Maple meadows I'm using some of it's plants/trees in my current scene for Carrara Challenge #28: “Marriage” WIP Thread see my latest version of the scene HERE. not that it uses Dartanbeck's "Woodlands Environ Kit" for the terrain.
Your mentioned modeling... if you are interested check out my thread Modeling Objects in Carrara - Q&A - Come One and All You are welcome to ask any questions you have there. I've put together some Tips and mini tutorials together for the Vertex model room as well as asking question of my own about how to do one thing or another. Be sure to check the links out at the beginning... I have learned a lot from them and still learning. There are also many PA's and modelers who are much better than I am. They help me and others learn from our problems or questions.
Modeling in Carrara is Funnnn!
I also have my Shader Creating & Settings for Carrara - Q&A - Come One, Come All for learning more about Shaders and Texture maps... as with my other thread I have and keep adding links to other threads and YouTube videos.
'Nuff about me... well maybe not quite enough. :)
Your being very familiar with DS will help you learning Carrara's intuitive Assembly room interface. While you get the Carrara 7 manual... it contains everything. Carrara 8.5 Pro has added features but the guts of the program are in the ver 7 manual.
I've seen some of you stuff you've done with DS... very good! Thanks for mentioning your web pages... I have them bookmarked now.
The reason I use Carrara is because it has the capability to create content for DS. This does stop me for buying content for either program.
You might want to take a look at 2 of Dartanbeck's videos... Carrara 8.5 Pro - FirstLook and Carrara 8.5 First Look 2. I've watched both even though I'm a long time Carrara Pro user.
I have only loaded Genesis 1 and 2 .duf figures. Some folks prefer to use the Poser versions instead. I believe that it's rather easy to pose them since many others have posed them. If I find one specifically for posing figures I'll let you know.
Must Haves... DAZ Pay Tutorials: Note these are not on sale now today but often are.
Go play with Carrara... if you run into more questions just ask.
What should I know about using Genesis and G2 content?
as most content works pretty well with genesis and g2 sometimes some items don't and you will get error messages when loading.
If this happens just start a topic with the problem item so that someone may have a work around for it or an elternative.
Like the Rex outfit for Genesis by 3DU... it just don't work. But with a bit of work the problemm belt can be fixed/reboned sufficiently to work.
It's kind of a hard question to answer, as comparisons betweeen render engines always are.
By way of introduction, I started with Poser back at the beginning of time. Mostly I just used it for D&D character portraits and I was never very happy or comfortable with it. I switched to DAZ Studio when the original Genesis came out and found it much easier to use, but still not terribly clear or easy. I spent a couple years using just DS, learning its ins and outs, and I think I was getting pretty good with 3DL, as implemented in DS at the time. I don't have my gallery here split up by software used, but my DeviantArt page is if you want to check out where I was in skill-level with DS and what sort of things I was doing with it (link in my signature) as compared to my use of Carrara. I had owned Carrara for years, having gotten a free copy of version 7pointsomething on a disc that came with a magazine, but had never really explored it. Then around the end of 2014 I got suckered into entering one of the forum Challenges here by a theme that could not have been better designed to attract my interest (the theme was Pulp magazine covers and you can see both my entries in my gallery here at DAZ3D along with most of my other challenge entries).
That was the first time I looked at the program seriously and I fell absolutely in love - the interface is clearer and more logically laid out, there were more lighting options, more rendering options and I was amazed at how fun and easy it was to just quickly model some little bit of scene filler right in the scene. But mostly what I love, and still do even though I am doing most of my modeling and about half my rendering in Blender these days, is the shading. I absolutely love the tree-based layout of the shaders in Carrara.
So all of that was just by way of explaining where I came from in terms of using various renderers.
Now the answer to your question: in my opinion, pretty much anything you can do in 3DL (as it was in the last version of DS that I used as my main render program) you can do in Carrara and then some, and most of it is easier and faster. A few things take a little longer (you can't select all the material zones of something and simultaneously set all of their diffuse colors to the same setting, for example - although there is an only slightly slower way of doing that by saving the diffuse color channel to your browser and then dropping it back into each one).
Like any time you start out with a new program, there will be a little initial confusion and frustration and a learning curve, but I don't think the learning curve for Carrara is very steep - at least for the basics, as there always seems to be more to learn in Carrara.
I would say the results are very comparable in quality to 3DL, with a little longer sometimes needed for setup but slightly faster rendering. Any negative differences are more than offset by Carrara's native ability to produce various render passes for post-work (I am not one of those 3D artists who is averse to post-work - it's a key part of my work most of the time
). I personally think the time to learn to create decent quality images in Carrara may actually be a little less than in DS and it doesn't require buying a lot of extra lights and textures that someone else has made.
One key difference is that in DS 3DL you do not really have easy use of ambient light, HDRI lighting, or indirect lighting without using UberEnvironment, which can really kill render times and isn't always intuitive but in Carrara you have all these things built in with relatively clear and simple settings. Carrara also has area lights and the ability to have the glow channel of an object provide real light in the scene.
Wow, I come back, and my thread is buzzing! I knew the Carrara folks were friendly. :D
QUESTION 1: I have done manual installation of all my content, both Daz native and Poser native. I do not use Smart Content at all. Will I still be able to link my custom runtimes to Carrara and open stuff from there in Carrara?
QUESTION 2: Does Carrara have geoshells?
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bytescapes:
This has the advantage that if aliens come along and abduct your library, you can still open the Carrara scene (although objects may end up untextured), whereas DAZ Studio will just tell you it can't find the required objects.
This is why I rely on Daz Studio -- I need to keep my precious scenes safe in case extraterrestrials steal my runtime! Hmmm, they would certainly derive a skewed view of humanity from it, as it's mostly people in REALLY LOUDLY PATTERNED clothes, standing around talking, while smirking a lot. :p
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wgdjohn:
I've seen some of you stuff you've done with DS... very good! Thanks for mentioning your web pages... I have them bookmarked now.
Wow, thanks for the comment. I don't think I've ever heard from anyone that my renders are "very good" [probably because I don't publicize them], so maybe you're talking about my freebies? I have such fun making those, learning a lot in the process and filling a niche that no one else seems to be addressing.
Thanks for the links to the tutorial threads on modeling and using shaders. I figure I'll start off with trying to load a scene and a few people and thus squeeze out a basic render or two before creating my own stuff. These will be good to use in future.
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MDO2010:
Your comments on 3DL vs. Carrara rendering interest me, as I shun Iray and use 3DL exclusively. Your observations about the UI, modeling capabilities, and lighting options suggest that I might actually be able to get a decently lit scene out of Carrara without too much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Thanks for the warm welcome, everyone.
--MW
I am flattered; thank you for your kind words.
I'm an amateur photographer, so I do think about composition. But I mostly feel like I'm fumbling around. It's nice to know that at least one person thinks I'm not getting it totally wrong.
I'm not entirely surprised by this. I have a strong impression that the choice of a rendering engine is a very personal thing: because the results can be subtly different, one person may adore one engine and hate another, while someone else may feel exactly the reverse. And some people seem to have a genius for getting the best from the engine they know best and find working with a different engine difficult and unsatisfactory.
There was a thread somewhere on the forum where David Brinnen and Horo -- who know Bryce inside out -- talked about the challenge of adapting to a different renderer and essentially having to start again, not quite at the beginning, but close.
I can't give a detailed comparison, because my knowledge of 3DL is so limited. To me, the results that I got from Carrara always 'looked better' (and that's a very subjective judgment), so I didn't pay much attention to 3DL. But I was aware that this was more to do with me than the engine: other people seem to have mastered whatever tricks of lighting and texturing are needed to get the most from the renderer, and get stunning results.
Huh, interesting. I'm still considering getting a fast machine just for Iray, if I can somehow persuade myself that it's worth the expense. I was actually on the point of backing the Kickstarter for The Wolfe (external box for Nvidia cards that you can connect to a laptop over Thunderbolt) when they suddenly pulled the Kickstarter. I don't know what happened there.
But that doesn't mean I'm giving up on Carrara, which I still think is a fine application. If DAZ ever ships a Carrara 9 that can handle all their content up to and including G3, I'll be elbowing everyone else out of the way in the scramble to get a copy.
Just for the sake of comparison, by the way, here are my Carrara renders vs. my Iray renders. In some cases, it's surprisingly hard to tell which is which, so I don't think Iray's physically-based renderer necessarily always beats out Carrara's biased render in terms of 'realism'.
You can also look at the Carrara challenge threads found below The Carrara challenges are sponsored by DAZ and are community driven and hold lots of good information on how each of the effects were completed with lots of good screen captures.
The intent is to get us to use parts of the software that we may not be aware of or have not tried out yet.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/45254/learning-tips-and-tricks-from-prior-carrara-challenge-wip-threads#latest
UnifiedBrain and ModernWizard, Be sure to check out Dartanbeck's ►►► Carrara Information Manual ◄◄◄ - He has put oodles of helpful links into catagories for subjects like modeling, terrains, shading or anything you want to do.
Regarding Shaders and Texture maps. These are optomized for use to look good in whichever program you are using be it DS or Poser or another program. In the current Carrara Challenge the DS sword I loaded into Carrara looked a bit dull so I just went to the Shader room and replaced a lot of it's Shader Domains with Carrara's simple and proceedural shaders FX that I created/put together and then tweaked them to my liking.
Some settings seem to be entirely lost when loaded into Carrara. If you are good at changing shaders in DS or any program you should be able to change them in Carrara.
As I understand this... If I am wrong about either of these or anything please feel free to correct me anywhere about anything.
There are shaders by PA's for skin and other shaders available from the DAZ store. Just type in Carrara in search. I use some of them as a good base then tweak ♦ tweak ♦ tweak.
I must be confused about your DS stuff...dunno... I'd probably visited you web page quite awhile ago and then again after seeing your post. Referring to all the images on your freebie page and website... aren't all the images done with DS? If you have un-pblicized images I'd love to see them!
Don't know if you have been in this thread but check out this pic by a *new to Carrara" user... http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/1609606/#Comment_1609606
Cool... I recognize one from a Carrara Challenge earlier this year. All are quite good. :)
Happy Rendering to all!
Ha! that would have sucked me in as well. Some of my greatest incentive comes from the old pulp magazine cover artists. Impressive that you made theSpace Station Zero from scratch. And Portrait of an Outlaw should have won - nice use of shadows. I believe that would be tough to replicate in IRAY.
I have only used a shader once in Cararra so far. It worked perfectly, but I was doing trial and error and got lucky. I love shaders in Studio, so I am looking forward to using them in Cararra.
Good to know!
I've spent the past year learning Gimp, so I get it. But I like the challenge of making the render so good that post work is unneeded (except maybe some titles or captions).
You are another thoughtful writer. Thanks for taking the time to share your knowledge.
HI Modern Wizard
Yes,. You can add any folder to carrara,,. including any Runtime,. or Content Library folders.
Using DIM to install and "manage" your installed content,. can make your life easier than a manual install / uninstall process.... it's worth having a look.
If you mean,.. an alternative Graphical User Interface "shell" ,. the answer is No,. But,.. you can customize the GUI colours and font in the Carrara preferences.
Hi Unified brain.
The Basic process of Loading "figures",. adding clothing,. Hair,. Poses,. etc.. Should be very similar to the workflow used in either Poser,. or Daz Studio.
You use the "Content Browser" to locate your content,. Double click to load it into a scene,. or,. if you have a figure loaded in your scene,. if you select that figure,. then choose a Pose, Prop, or item of clothing an double click,. it will be added to the selected figure. (and fitted (conformed) to that figures bones.
Once you have a model loaded into Carrara,. then you also have the ability to edit any of the shaders applied to that model.
The easiest way to replicate the basic scene in DS,. in Carrara,. would be...
Open carrara,. Choose FILE / New,. then select a Medium scale,. Empty scene.
This is perfect for working with human scale figures.
Next,. you would load some content,. by using the Carrara Browser,. to navigate to your Figures,. load a figure into the scene by double clicking it's icon,. (same as Poser and DS)
Select a model,. and use the Browser to navigate to your "Poses" to select alternative materials, or figure poses. (same as DS and poser)
You can use the little "Camera" tool (left hand toolbar),. to rect-select an area to render on screen,. or go to the render room and hit render, to render an image, or animation.
The shader system in carrara has many more complex functions than DS or Poser,. but the structure of shaders,. and how to adjust those setings, should be similar, irrespective of the application used,.whether that's Poser, Studio, Carrara,. lightwave, or 3D-Max.
you have a list of channels,. Diffuse,.Highlight, Shininess, bump etc,. which can use either image maps or procedural shader functions to create the type of surface you need.
Since each shader engine,. is linked to the rendering engine used,. there will be some need to adjust shaders imported into Carrara to work better in carrara.
for example: most DS/Poser shaders,. use image maps for the fake reflections in Eyes, or anything else which needs reflections,.
Carrara can calculate the real reflections from objects in the scene,. so it doesn't need a fake image reflection.
Many DS/Poser shaders include an "alpha" map, to add transparency.
Carrara uses transparency and refraction,. to create transparency.
You can of course simply use DS to assemble the figure, clothing etc,. then save s DUF scene,. and open that in carrara,.
Using what's familiar is natural,. but it doesn't help you learn anything new.
Carrara isn't another Daz Studio, or Poser,. for loading premade content,. and hitting render,. it's a creation toolset, where you can model, rig, texture, animate, and render.
it's worth taking some time to explore Carrara's features,.
Hope that helps and makes sense.
[Applause] 3DAGE always has the best explanations. I've learned a lot from him and am thankful for his guidence.
I look at Carrara as a whole suite of design tools. I can literaly design an entire scene from the ground up to the sky or from the floor to ceiling. Anything I want in my scene can be created in Carrara. If I take the time to learn to model better... anything can be modeled from figures, clothing and props etc... for now I sometimes use content from DAZ and elsewhere.
For getting to know some of the modeling tools I found that the following YouTube video is very good... Carrara Vertex Modeling Tutorial Part 1 - by DdimensionT - An Intro to most of the tool icons in Carrara and how to use them, what they do as well creating some cool objects for inspiration. Don't miss Part 2.
UnifiedBrain and ModernWizard, I've found a YouTube video links for posing and one for lighting that are interesting.
If any of them look good I suggest bookmarking them even if you don't need them at the moment. Hope they might help.
Wow!!! Cool thread!
Sorry for my absence, once again. Heavy stones are getting the best of me right now... AGAIN! Argh! So when I get home, I eat whatever my delicious Rosie made for me, put on some cool PhilW videos, and pass out after Phil gets my mind wandering off into a cool idea to try!
I saw mention of 3DL vs Carrara's Render Engine.
To me there's a HUGE difference in that Carrara's engine allows us to set it up for speed, for exact reality, and everywhere in between - so very easily!
My favorite part of the render engine which has made me really reluctant towards trying Octane or the other after-market engines is the power of Carrara's Texture room in combination with this incredible Renderer.
After spending time getting used to setting up my shaders the way I normally do, I can get my renders to finish in one to three minutes per frame - making it absolutely, undeniably important for my animations.
When I bought Luxus for Carrara, I was actually still very reluctant to use it - and bought it to help support the incredible work that SphericLabs put into the plugin. It was amazing how he catered to everybody's comments, wants and wishes, troubles, etc.,
After trying it out, however, I think it's an excellent solution and intend to look more into working with it. Pages of shader-building advice at the luxrender site, Luxus makes shader-building in Carrara very intuitive and friendly. And Luxrender gives us some major power - like being able to render out to OpenEXR, which can be incredibly valuable for Visual Effects artists working for filmmakers.
LuxusCore is in beta, and it's a beautiful PBR engine which SphericLabs is fitting to Carrara.
Anyways... as usual, I'm getting off track!
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For Genesis 3, we can still use Carrara as the powerful modeler that it is, we'd just have to import the Genesis 3 OBJ (from the Data folder) instead of the actual figure at this point.
Working with Genesis and Genesis 2 in Carrara seems pretty darned nice. Just remember this little thing: If we're running into difficulties adding clothing and such, try loading it directly into the instances tray (the panel on the right, under the word "Scene") instead of adding it to Genesis right from the browser.
After the item is in Carrara, then select Fit-to and conform it. Seems to work better on those objects that don't load onto Genesis directly.
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Yes, there may be a drawback or two. Just remember that, even though Daz 3d owns Carrara and Daz Studio, they are very much different software apps. Carrara is truly magical in how well it treats most of this stuff. So I am always most forgiving if an issue arrises. Then I put on my thinking cap on how to resolve whatever isn't working smoothly.
As mentioned above by Stezza, if something isn't working as expected, just start a new thread in this forum and we'll attack the issue with some good work-arounds to make it happen! ;)
I think this is a reference to a feature in DS where you can add an invisible "second skin" shell around any character or object that perfectly matches the original. It's a pretty neat feature that they added in... I'm not sure, I want to say Daz Studio 4.7, but it might have been 4.6. You can add separate textures to it, fit different layers of clothing to it, change the offset, etc. and it perfectly fits the character. I've used it with one of the toon shaders to create an outline for a character before. It never ocurred to me to try and duplicate the effect in Carrara though.
There is no auto-function for it, but you could do the same sort of thing by opening up the character mesh in the Vertex Modeler, duplicating the whole mesh, giving it new material names and offsetting it by a little bit. I'm not sure how this would work with the skeleton though - you might have to detach the skeleton first then reattach it when done? There are probably a couple ways to do this in Carrara, just not the one-click version that DS has.
Unless it was meant to be the SubD "Cage" which Genesis uses? If so... yeah... Carrara supports SubD
Heh - buncha Carrara users trying to guess what a DAZ Studio term means. This will not end well.
ROTFFLMFAO!!!
Ooops... did I just break TOS? LOL
And yet another cool link but it is by diomede and right here in the forums.
First Steps - Setting up a sample scene in Carrara with plant, terrain, sky and hair
enjoy...!
Yeah, what MDO2010 said. Geoshells are like instances, but they follow along with figures, and you can retexture them. I've used them to great effect, with various transparency masks and shaders, to make simple clothing for figures that aren't really supported.
Carrara probably can do niftier things that I don't even know about! This is so exciting!
--MW