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Thank you very much, Eric!
Now you can work ...
Very kind of you. Thanks.
I may use Cararra for something else.
thank you again Eric.
Selina, a sleeping genius you are ;)
Wow. I had already purchased nearly all of the plugins over the years. Some of the best purchases I've made.
I definitely wish you the best whereever life takes you.
I think the giant pile of plugins gave me artists block.
What to make, what to make, what to make...
Thank you so much Eric. Your advice has always been a huge help and this generous gift of your source code will help me and other developers to gain a better understanding of how to code in Carrara - from a Master.
Some tutorials for DCG plugins are in 3Dxtract magazine: see this post to download all issues: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewthread/29265/
Anything goos tutorial by Andrew Benson : http://web.archive.org/web/20060825003307/http://awbenson.com:80/tutorials/Carrara_plugins/anything_goos.htm
Eric - I purchased most of your Carrara plugins a few years back and have nothing but admiration for you and your contributions to the Carrara community.
@Selina - could you paste the settings you used in the different channels for the last animation you posted? And are you using an additional object inside of the dodecahedron or is that all done with shaders on the main object? (I'm getting some similar results but not quite as nice and somewhat lacking in control to get color of translucent areas as I'd like it)
Thanks
I have a question for our Carrara community.
I have visited the site where the DCG plug-in source code is now available, and although I didn't expect to be able to understand it (having only a tiny bit of programming knowledge), I found it completely incomprehensible.
Are there members in our community with the skills required to understand the uploaded source code and modify, or simply fix it if or when it malfunctions due to Carrara, or Operating System updates? And is the source code provided by Eric all that is required to compile both Windows and Macintosh versions?
If not, then the presently compiled versions may be the last that we will see, and our use of these great tools may be short lived, despite Eric's generosity.
Has anyone with coding skills taken a look at the source code and come to any conclusions?
Hey de3an,
I've had a skim over some of the source code. It's all there complete with classes to handle facet intersections and octree mesh optimizations - much as I have done with my own code library (though I expect Eric's is better). Some of the plugins date back to Carrara 4 and could be improved with the selection lists that were added with Carrara 5 onwards.
I heavily comment and document my own code but when I come back to some projects I can't always follow myself. Without a description and deep understanding of the algorithm behind any code it will never make complete sense and be hard to debug or improve.
When we make plugins for Carrara we rely on the SDK to interface with Windows and Macintosh OS at a higher level and except for a few changes due to Carrara version compatibilty there is no reason to think it this will not work long into the foreseeable future.
Thanks for the reply! I appreciate the information.
I guess what we really need then are more coders in our community, especially those with Macintosh skills.
Sadly the Mac side is the more troublesome. I actually keep around a virtual machine with Snow Leopard on it so that I can reliably run the correct version of XCode to compile for Carrara. I've seen some folks talking about ways to get the old OSX SDKs running on newer versions, but I've never tried it (looked fragile).
Having said all that. I wasn't planning on completely disappearing, just shutting down the commercial side. The site will stay up for the foreseable future (hosting is shared with the wife's business so doesn't save me anything to make it go away). If someone fixes something or makes it do cool new stuff and can't build for the Mac, I should be able to jump in and do that. I don't think there's been much Mac specific code since the PPC days so it's really just can it be compiled.
Wait... Are you saying that any plug-in written for the Mac version of Carrara must be compiled with Xcode tools running under Snow Leopard (Mac OS 10.6), namely Xcode 3.2.6? And would this mean that anyone who purchased a new Mac, after Mac OS 10.7 (Lion) was introduced, cannot produce code compatible with Carrara?
Although I see that Xcode 3.2.6 is still available to download from Apple's Developer site, If the method involves running a virtual machine such as Parallels, one would still need to acquire Mac OS 10.6 to install on it. Is it even possible to get your hands on a 10.6 installer?
I'm often one of the first to post a request for a Mac version of a plug-in when a new one is announced. Have I been asking for the impossible all this time?
Hello,
I do not know if I understood everything, but in fact it's still the same song: "not compatible with Mac"
Open source files are only for PC
.
Maybe. It's been a long time since C8 came out and if I remember correctly, the reason I choose 3.2.6 was because it was the last version that I could support Carrara 6, 7, and 8 at the same time. I chose Snow Leopard because it was the last OSX that would run 3.2.6 reliably. If you're doing C8 alone, newer versions may work, but I have a vague recollection that you do need to link with a specific OSX SDK and Apple tosses those to the side fairly quickly these days. That is part of the fragile looking solution I mentioned in the previous post. There are some folks that have figured out how to extract the OSX SDKs out of old XCode downloads and get them working under the newer XCode. It's some work, but probably can be done.
Apple does really make things hard for anybody who's not writting a brand new app for the latest version of IOS. Between CPU changes, deprecated APIs, dropping support for old SDKs, and their core language du'jour, it's a wonder anyone can keep up.
Yeah, I dropped PPC support with Carrara 8.5's release I believe. Again, been a long time so details are fuzzy. It was another one of those "had to jump through some hoops" to make it happen (something to do with the 10.4 SDK) and I had no place to test it anymore.
Thanks Eric.
My takeaway from this is that you used Mac OS 10.6 and Xcode 3.2.6 because it ensured success for developing your products (the path of least resistance). But current developers could have success when coding for Carrara 8.x (with possibly some SDK wangling).
So perhaps all is not lost on the Mac side.
Thank you so much Eric for this very generous gift to the community!
I wish you the best with your latest endeavors.
Cheers!
Thank you from me as well, Eric. I hope all this means good things for us and also for you.
I definitely must find more time to dedicate to Carrara and its plugins.
Thanks again
just wondering, any updates on ground control? i thought removing the evaluation codes caused it some issues
It was actually back end changes I was making to port to Photoshop. I beat on it for about an hour the next day and it seems to be okay. I think I may have grabbed a bad file to test with. If you see any problems, let me know.
Regards,
Wow, I own most of your plugins, thanks for your hard work.
First play with AnythingGrows (third with wireframe p ro) thank you Eric! A
Andrew, this something looks wonderful and stylish. Could you please describe how it works?
Eric,
It's a shame to see you and your talent leaving Carrara....you have done so much to make this program what it is today, as well as helping many others with their plugin problems and questions.
In the same token, best of luck in your next endeavor.
Dennis
Hi Vyusur, thank you for your kindness.
I started off doing the simple tutorial on Eric's site - grow hair on a head.
I made three vertex spheres. One very small. The other two the same size.
The small one is replicated on the 'ends' of the hairs.
I dialed up anythinggrows as a modifiert for one of the larger spheres.
Added x amount of hairs and played with the segment number (?? sorry am away from my carrara computer) to get the droop
In the advanced section in the anythinggrows modifier I clicked the little flower icon (top left in window) and chose the small vertex sphere to be added to the ends of the hairs.
I also made the base invisable so I could use the a different shader on the one that did not have the anything grows modifier attached.
I picked a random shader - I think it was the space ship hull one from Carrara Cafe free downloads of shaders. Great selection - thanks to the person who made them!!
Lighting is with one distance light with soft shadows "plus" indirect lighting.
I rendered that and then did a wireframepro render and combined the two in post. Postwork with Filter Forge.
And twiddled the lighting a bit in Affinity Photo and sharpened it in Oloneo HDR middle of post work.
If that doesnt make sense please let me know and I will do some screen grabs.
Cant wait to play with Terrain Tools
HW, your "playing" (with Anything Grows) is terrific, as usual. I'm glad that Vyusur asked how you did it (someone needed to). I'll have to keep your notes for future reference, as my Carrara time is significantly reduced for a while.
The shaders you mentioned, also know as the weebly shaders, were made by Kirk Saavedra.