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I use a little Carrara, and I managed to render an animated scene a few days ago. And the result was not bad at all.
However, my tests with Carrara showed that it does not manage to import Daz's .DUFs quite well (at least from Genesis figures onwards, and better not to mention Genesis 3 and 8), and since almost all my characters are Genesis 8, I had to rule out Carrara at least when it came to characters. But just like I mentioned before, I use it for some environments like a city. The same Bryce. Even Iclone 7, Blender, 3ds Max, Maya, MikuMikuDance, among others; And while Blender's result is the most satisfactory so far, it was still not enough.
For the same reason, after a long journey, I realized that Daz is the best for Daz things. I know this is also questionable, but I only leave my testimony in case it will be useful to any user in the future.
So Cool!!! I've been hoping to buy those! I guess I don't have to now. So cool to see Daz 3D putting this kind of love into DS!
So, here's Steph, from Daz 3D demonstration the new Graph Editor in Daz Studio - must have come from GoFigure's GraphMate:
Carrara's timeline is very much like this - with control over everything on the most minute level.
With Carrara 8.5 we've been given some really nice new tools to help this even more. In the video above, where Steph grabs one key and moves it down, then deletes the others from the curve that was left behind, in Carrara 8.5 we can actually grab that whole curve and scale it by changing the shape of the bounding box around whichever keys we have selected! I use this a LOT!
Absolutely! It's amazing how our testimonials help folks who come here to find answers without even having to ask a question!
I am a real Carrara cheerleader, but I'm also quite fond of Daz Studio... and Daz 3D in general. This company has given me So Much over the years - I try my best to give back... to everyone
I have to reluctantly agree even as a Carrara enthusiast, DAZ studio is definitely best for rendering Genesis 8 with all it's extras like joint controlled morphs.
I do it myself then composite into my Carrara scenes or use animated png series billboards because animated textures is so easy in Carrara,
for years I did this with DAZ content in iClone too (wmv files with matching opacity videos there)
what I do do though is just render animated dressed figures as png series not entire scenes as iray is too damned slow and resource intensive for anything more, you can always render a smallish 360 camera view of your intended backdrop and convert it to a HDR file for hidden iray dome lighting put the rendered normal shot as a background instead with iray dome visible unticked.
Exactly, that's the great thing about forums. I like all the shows in the Daz universe, even Bryce, since I feel that each one has its charm
Personally, I feel that what Carrara (and even more so Bryce) lacks, is an update to the current environments, since they are in themselves very powerful tools, and when they were released they were even more so.
PS: Wendy, the photo you have as an image makes it impossible to read your comments without looking at the photo xDDDDDDD. If it was a render, it looked great on you, I would even swear it's a real cat. Congratulations on that :) :)
it is a real cat, my kitty Lynx
he is older and fatter now
How cute, I want one like that.
One day you might try rendering a cat model in the shape of your first photo. It could be an interesting challenge :) :)
Also in case someone will find it useful in the future, as I seek to make cartoons (although with a photorealistic or semi-photorealistic aesthetic), what has given me better results and without paying a penny is to animate the Daz figures (especially Genesis 8 Female and Genesis) in the MikuMikuDance universe, using as an intermediary a combination of Blender with fbx and its Diffomorph plugins (or whatever it is called) both version 1.4 and 1.5 (it is a mix of both versions of the plugin and the fbx format).
I plan to do a tutorial on this forum very soon. What I would like to advise from now on, the biggest drawbacks will be in the hair and .TIF texture formats (and textures that are above 4K). Also that MMD (MikuMikuDance) is not the most suitable for this, but its brother MMM (MikuMikuMoving) is, which is much more powerful and can support the same or almost the same as your pc.
already have
thats where I grabbed the photo upload from on this forum
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/188156/free-stuff-by-wendyluvscatz/p1
The exact position of the photo would be missing and that's it. :) :)
By the way, in Daz Studio timeline, when I make a mistake and press UNDO (or CTRL + Z) it doesn't go back to the previous state. I have to reopen the scene to return to the previous state.
Has it happened to someone else? If so, how would it be solved?
Or is it a bug in the program that has no solution?
click edit tab and choose undo
That's what I do, but the position of the model or camera is still maintained (depending on the case)
I love Lynx! What a cutie!
As for Daz Studio, I'm fairly certain that I could get into it and become proficient at doing my work in there. When I am in DS, I have a lot of fun and enjoy all of the hard work the development team has put into it over the years - which, in its own was very fun and exciting to witness. I downloaded D|S beta 0.7 when I had Poser 5 or 6, and still have a copy of it on one of my backup discs. It was pretty... empty then. But it gave hope when it was announced that Poser may end up getting the plug pulled. I have a few other versions stored along the way as I trudged forward in Poser.
Finding Carrara was like finding out that I had polished a Genie's lamp and the Genie had granted my ultimate wish - it really felt like that. Remembering back, yeah... the was a learning curve to getting used to a new way of doing things, but I can manipulate mesh on-the-fly with real modeling tools! That made animating Daz figures work for me!
I was one of the folks who voted in the poll to add support for Daz 3D's next gen figures (the yet unnamed Genesis 1 figure) and I'm glad I did. Genesis 1 is such a versatile figure for me - especially now that I have GenX2 with the Genesis 2 and 3 addons. For a while there, Rosie 5 wore 3D Universe's Jazelyn's face along with other shappes blended in - almost always using at least a few tweaks from Thorne's shaping tweak products. When I got the Genesis 3 addon I tried out Mika 7's face and really liked it. They still didn't quite give me the look I was going for, and I finally ended up with using a blend of Keiko 6 and Aiko 6 with Gia 6 full-on for the body, with a few other tweaks to make her as small as she is (she's only 5'2") and her face is a massive blend of G4, V4++, Girl 5 and a bunch of others blended in there - and I can still use my wonderful collection of V4 maps - currently Reby Sky Elite blended with V4 HiRes.
She has an enormous amount of expression morphs from G4 and V4, Genesis 1 and 2 along with Josie 6 expressions. The incredible side effect of this is that some of them reside under Actor instead of Head, so I am able to use a bunch of them for face shaping, which is how I got her mouth to look the way I want it to.
Ooops... darn it! I'm babbling again!
Animating her is a real blast. I just love it! Dart 5 follows the same sort of path toward getting morphs into him, with my Genesis Morph Reduction process to keep the amount of Morph dials down to only what I need, but his shape is so much easier - closer to standard Daz 3D figure shapes.
The great love you feel for Carrara is enviable, you even want to go use it right now. My case is somewhat similar to yours, I have 2 programs that I adore, and one of them is Daz Studio. The other is the MikuMikuUniverse (I put it like this because there are several tools). I feel that both are very easy to use in what they are their forte (Daz generate models and scenarios, and MMU animate and render them). The rendering times of the MMU even in 4K are lower than those of Daz using OPENGL and with obviously much better results than OPENGL, being a good option to comfortably animate and that the pc does not die during rendering :) :)
Wow, that's really cool! You can actually use Genesis 8 figures in that?
Another thing I love about Carrara is that it's such a 3D atmosphere. Just set the atmosphere to Realistic Sky and click on the Fog, and the fog is less dense the closer we are to the camera. So it's kind of automatic depth to the scene - and this works on interiors too. More on that later.
Many of my animation renders take less than a minute per frame, which I think is just fine. Rosie, especially closeups and with other characters involved takes a bit longer, but not unreasonably so. That freaked me out coming to Carrara from Poser - So much Faster! Even libraries load into the browser night and day faster. I mean... no comparison.
The fact that Daz 3D/Poser content loads straight in from the browser was the biggest game-changer. It's a 3D modeler that can load in our fully rigged figure complete with morphs? Oh, I'm so in!!! Then, as time progressed I just fell in love with all of it - even though after ten years there's still nooks and crannies that I haven't explored! LOL
I am rendering as we speak!!! ;)
Time for bed though. Dreaded work! LOL
this may be of interest to those considering a Daz studio to Blender animation rendering pipeline.
Note this method work's with ALL generations of Genesis ( 1,2,3,8)
LOL, love the ending. Good tutorial.
That's really cool, Wolf!
Nice tutorial, you just encouraged me to do the tutorial on how to perfectly send Genesis and Genesis 8 figures (in fact it will work the same with any other figure that has the same bone names as Genesis or Genesis 8 Female).
I spent months to achieve the perfect form, I even had to adapt a script of a free application that a user left in Deviantart to be able to achieve such a feat with less work.
I mention this because it is one thing to send a Genesis 8 female base with nothing, and another to send an Aiko 8 or Sakura 8 + Hotaru with hair, clothes and various other accessories (and those hair that make mid-range PCs BUM BUM BUM XDDDDD), precisely because I did not download polygons of any kind, I left them as is, at most I downloaded the textures of 3K or higher than 2K. Not to mention morphs (which in MMD are called FACIALS).
The only thing I did change were the pupils, but it's by personal decision, since the ones I brought from Daz looked the same as in Daz and I didn't like that very much.
The only downside is the hair. But there are people who know how to use the PMX EDITOR much better than me, and they can fix those problems, to the point of leaving a Mitsu Hair identical to how we would see it in Daz Studio (attached image about it).
If you want to bring the result a little closer to what is seen in Daz Studio, there is an MME (MikuMikuEffect) that is like a rendering engine called RayCast / Ray (or something like that), which even currently has a version for MMM ( MikuMikuMoving), which depending on how it is configured, can make things more realistic (although I do not use it, so in the image that I attached below of my dear Ana there are only the default values, and still it does not look so bad ).
I also want to leave an image of MMM, showing my toughest test of strength, in which the program ever died (with a pink car (which really has bones, so it would be one more figure (bought from Renderosity)), a scenario of high-end daz (https://www.daz3d.com/i13-estate-agent-s-office), a Genesis figure (Hiro 5 + Takeo) and 6 Genesis 8 females (1 Aiko 8 and 5 Sakura 8 + Hotaru )). In this scene I made a very minimal animation of moving a character's arm from frame 0 to 30, and then all this mess I rendered in 4K. Neither the program nor my pc died, they even rendered faster than 1080p on Daz Studio's OpenGL Medium. IF I did not add more figures that time, it was because my pc was already very slow XD, and at this rate it was collapsing before the MMM, since it also had 2 browsers open, Adobe Premire Pro and 3ds Max.
Finally, I want to leave a test video of all this (I know that it is very little compared to what you show, but I still want to share it with you):
Also something that I forgot to mention is that I have not only sent things from Daz Studio to the MikuMikuUniverse, but also from Bryce 7.1.
I still remember in 2014 or 2015 (I think late 2014) that I sent this free but powerful asset to MMD using 3DS MAX as an intermediary with the free version of an exporter in .X format (long live Messrs. David Brinnen and Horo ):
https://www.daz3d.com/bryce-7-1-pro-golden-lighting
At that time I was using a version of Bryce that my University lent me, and obviously, I made it curious and for purely personal purposes (since the version of Bryce I had was only for academic / personal and non-commercial purposes). And as you well know, pre-made realistic Bryce scenes aren't very friendly in other shows, but even the MMD back then, they opened them up.
Well, my point is that now I have a Bryce license along with a Carrara license (I bought them a few months ago both in a pack for less than $ 20 dollars (thanks to the platinium club) (including the more expensive version of Carrara, which for things inexplicable was cheaper than the initial version of Carrara XDDDDDDDDDD)). And in the next few days (when I have time) I will try to send something made in Carrara to the MikuMikuUniverse (more than anything curious hehehehehehe).
Wow! Very cool stuff - a lot to digest so I will be revisiting that post more.
So using Ray Cast, is this an HDRI or other image background, or did you composite that in? It's cool that you can do all of that in MMD! Love the video, by the way. I also really like how the glass in the glasses turned out in this image. I like it All!
Awesome! Looking forward! Yeah, I bought that Bryce product (and several others), but haven't even tried it yet. After lifting, laying, chiseling and leveling stone for 10-12 hours, I'm often too beat up to work on a computer - not to mention the heat from the sun baking through me! LOL
I actually printed both the Bryce and Carrara User's Manuals to paper and bound them into books. Perusing through the Bryce manual I'm so intrigued to give it a try, but when I get behing the computer screen, it's Carrara that gets opened and I get to work -happily.
Every so often I run across another Bryce product in the store and add it to my collection (good ol' PC+!!!) for that magical day when I force myself to sit down and open up this amazing gold mine I have in my account!
Rosie's in space right now and her Liquid Knight shoulders combined with her dynamic hair have my average frame times up to 3 minutes, 30 second renders, so I have a few hours before I can see the results of the animation I made last night. Most of my renders are never seen by anyone but me. Once in a while I put snippets of them in my videos. I'm working up to a point where I can stitch a few together for a bit of a mini show, of sorts! LOL
I thought nobody would like it, really thank you very much. And that HDRI comes by default (along with several others) in the Raycast, so it is something typical of the MMU, and also free even for commercial use as I read in its terms and conditions, I mention it because it can probably also serve you in Carrara :) :)
From my experience with both programs (Carrara and Bryce), I feel that the interface of both are very similar (so much so that I thought they were created by the same person / company originally).
And yes, it is always good to capture the free items in the store even if you don't think you can EVER use them, since that is NEVER too long and no one is certain about the future.
I thought about it and would also like to try some Hexagon on MMU, but I don't have any Hexagon assets beyond the program. I don't know if you or the others can recommend me any free but powerful Hexagon (even if it's from SHARED CG, RENDEROSITY, RENDERHUB or even RENDEROTICA (hopefully not a pornographic asset)).
Finally, sip Carrara, I already thought about which asset to use for an extreme litmus test. It is an asset that I am sure that you and all Carrara users know, but just in case, I will leave a link on it:
https://www.daz3d.com/night-and-day-city
I don't know if they are going to put up with it even if it's the MMM, but it's an interesting challenge that just thinking about it makes me want to try it right now (and I don't mean just a segment of that, but the complete scenes instantiated in Carrara ( I have only tested them like this in 3ds max and opened them)).
You could one day render in Carrara in a frame how is your day to day. It could be an interesting challenge, so you mix your things to do in the sun with your favorite show, just like Wendy did with her cat :) :)
Oh, and something that I forgot to mention before, in MMM I managed to make the Genesis 8 Female compatible with the Xbox 360 Kinect (it would also be compatible with the PC Kinect). However, it only works on one of the older versions of MMM, as the current one doesn't really support Kinect, but it does support NEURON (the Chinese-made low-budget motion capture system). So MMD and MMC (MikuMikuCapture, which is the software dedicated solely to capturing movement in the MMU) have serious problems for the Genesis 8 Female figures when it comes to being fully animated with Kinect. However, I know very well that Daz Studio also has a free script to capture motion with Kinect, but unfortunately with Genesis 8 Female it works very poorly.
PhilW's Night and Day City is really cool! It comes with So Many individual parts that can be used to really enhance animated renders without hardly any overhead, but that really bring a scene to life!
I'm a long time, long term fan of Phil Wilkes. I bought all of his Carrara video courses back before Infinite Skills was acquired by someone else and ther disappeared, except for the occasional showing on Amazon and the like. I recently bought his Animation in Carrara video course, and it's excellent. Glad to see him making videos directly under the Daz 3D banner now!
Always being incredibly research intensive, Phil really put a lot of comprehensive animation material into this. Where I say in my tutorials: "drop in an aniBlock and..." Phil makes mention that there are aniBlocks, but then goes on to actually teach animation, which is Superb!
Like all of his courses, he expertly includes Work Files that are very well organized and thought out. For example, the climax of the course has us build a robot using simple modeling techniques and then assemble the parts for animation - and his style is so organic that it's really fun and easy to follow. So if we don't want to build the robot ourselves, we can assemble the pieces he's made, or we could even just load his completed model.
Here's the result of the final class:
It's a pretty cool story. The interface stems from one design that was created for Poser, which Poser still uses tio this day. Carrara Wiki
I was really beginning to like 3ds Max, but I couldn't afford it back when Discreet owned it. Now I really can't afford it! LOL
Discreet used to offer a free version for game modders called Gmax, which is now available again at Turbo Squid. https://www.dartanbeck.com/gallery/humble-beginnings
I would love to send my production assistant that video course, but sadly, we have no money (sad reality).
Who directly helped me in the video I showed you earlier is my assistant. He has almost all the same Daz assets as me. So when I send her a .DUF file made by me, she can open it without problems, especially since we use a common directory for all Daz material. It speeds up the processes quite a bit. That video that I showed you she animated the frames where an arm appears. They are her first animations, and they were not so bad.
Still I wish I had those tutorials, if you are friends with Philw, try to convince him to put them out for free or at very low cost over a period of time. In exchange for that we will put your name in capital letters in the 2 animated productions that we are doing. My assistant loves tutorial courses done by people who really know about the cause, and I know they would treasure them.
Sometimes I forget that Daz Studio and Carrara are 2 different softwares. It would be nice if there was a bridge between the two (I think there was one a long time ago).
I would love to use Carrara to animate (I actually bought it for those purposes), but the lack of support for geensis figures 8 (and also 3) holds me back. And something similar happens when I open other .duf files for example from Genesis. Carrara closes while opening it (what a misfortune mine).
3ds Max has a free version for students and those who do not want to profit, but create things that want to show the world. You could try that version.
Well, the older plugin basically made it so people could use stuff from their Poser/DS libraries using Import > TransPoser. When Daz 3D acquired Carrara, direct support for Poser formats was built right into the browser.
As for using Genesis 3 and 8 in Carrara, check out my Using Genesis in Carrara article (scroll toward the bottom)
I get really inspired when I see new 3D/Animation software promos, and dig into looking at their features and daydreaming. That's when it hits me that Carrara truly is my software of choice. I also love having Daz Studio there as well! Since getting a commercial license is entirely in the $range for pro studios and rich people, I decided to stop looking at 3ds Max, Maya and Modo. I've also had a conversation with Adobe when they started their subscription plan-only option. Now I use PD Howler - and am happy with it! :)
I know a Carrara user created a Genesis 3 and 8 compatibility with the program, and I tested it. The problem is that I noticed (at least in that moment, and if I am wrong, please correct me, because what I wish most at the moment is to be wrong) that it is not a transfer of genese 3 and 8 to Carrara, but a kind of recreation of the characters Genesis 3 and 8 from scratch in Carrara. And that also takes more time. If there was a plugins or script to make the automatic transfer to said figures (it does not matter that Genesis 8 female has an error in the foot, since cutting it and putting the one of another figure would fix the issue), there I think it would not be right to stay at Daz Studio and I would totally opt for Carrara, because it gives very good results in animation.
PS: You have good style on your website.
Congratulations on that :) :)