Best way to transfer Car file with textures from one Computer to another.?

Headwax

Hi

I've been working for a week on my desktop and making some not so hefty files (600 mb approx) but I need to transfer them to my crappy little laptop to work on them at a later stage.

Step one - I tried saving the car files with textures internally - but this gives a much larger file that my laptop struggles to open.

So I have been saving them internally on my desktop and then taking that same file and saving the texures externally and getting them all in one folder to take over to my laptop. Of course I get asked a million times whether I want to save blah blah.tiff file and whether I want LZW compression - I got around this by putting a heavy pebble on my enter key and going away and making a cup of coffee.....

Anyways, any ideas in making this more streamlined - apart from copying my whole drive with all my runtimes from one computer to the other?

Would P3dO explorer help in this regard? http://www.senosoft.com/carrara_file_manager.php

thanks in advance

EDit just played with P3Do, it will list the textures but couldn't find a way to copy and paste them (?)

TangoAlpha

In a similar situation, I gritted my teeth and copied all the runtimes across. It was a big job, but once it's done it's done. Also serves the purpose of having a backup, just in case the main rig goes down. Plus for future projects I don't need to worry about the textures etc.

My runtimes were in the order of several hundred GB, so it's more of an overnight job than a quickie, although that depends to an extent on your lan speeds. For the stuff that's in DIM, I just installed DS+DIM on the lappie, told it where the downloads folder was on my main rig (shared folder/external drive) and told it to install everything.

Another option is to copy it all onto a USB stick and transfer that way (assuming you have a stick big enough) - also gives an extra backup "in case"

Headwax

thanks Tim, yes I was afraid of that !
ah the P3Do does have a good use in that it shows the runtimes that the car file accesses.

thanks for the reply :)

0oseven

I have all my installed content and .car files saved to an external drive.
This way if my pc goes down I still have everything [ though I still back up the external ] but it is easy just to plug into my laptop on which I have carrara installed, to start working. just have to point the browser to the external drive folders usually a one time operation the first time you use them..
The only obstacle are files installed in the program folder such as presets etc which you may have modified.
So any scenes/characters / shaders etc that I make go on the external drive. Loading from the USB3 external instead of hard drive doesn't seem an issue speedwise.

Headwax

thanks Ooseven, that sounds like a good plan, I was just being lazy I guess :) !

evilproducer

If you know ahead of time that you are going to make a scene that requires portability, then place all your assets within the same folder structure as the scene file, and load any image maps from there. Save the scene locally, and all the calls for image maps will point to the same folder structure.

No matter what you do, if you're using externally referenced image maps, say for a DAZ figure, it's going to be a PITA to move them and point Carrara to your new location, or Save externally and do all the naming BS you mentioned in your original post.

Headwax

thanks evil

by 'saving assets'? you mean copying the runtimes over to the folder with the car file in it ?

WendyLuvsCatz

Just the textures used and reference them from there in the shader room

TangoAlpha

Will Carrara find textures on a relative path? In other words, if my .car file is in :MacHD/Project, and the assets are in Project/Textures on my Mac, would Carrara still find the assets if the project got copied to C:/Project (and C:\Project\Textures) on Windows -- same relative path?

evilproducer

Headwax, I was getting at more of what Wendy was saying, but if it is easier, you could put the runtime (or create a new one) either in the same folder or on the other computer, and then point Carrara to that runtime.

Or, like Wendy mentioned, copy the image maps from the texture folder to a folder within your project folder and load the image maps from there.

Tim, yes, if you were to create a folder for a Carrara project, then make sub-folders for various assets such as image maps, elevation maps, etc. within the main project folder, then you should be able to move that folder from machine to machine without breaking the links/references. That's how I distribute my Fantasy Village Terrain at ShareCG.

Headwax

thanks Wendy Evil and Tim :)

Ah my textures are all over the place :(
And I have a few drives where my run times are on my desktop and only one on my laptop.
I think I am shooting myself in the foot :)

thanks for that advice !
I'll let you know how it goes !

cheers !

TangoAlpha

Excellent, thanks EP. It was when I had to scroll though 150 texture maps, masks etc to find my .car file that I thought, "I could have organised this better..."!

evilproducer

Tim_A said:

Excellent, thanks EP. It was when I had to scroll though 150 texture maps, masks etc to find my .car file that I thought, "I could have organised this better..."!

When I first created that terrain and was testing it, I had done the same thing it sounds like you did. It was a PITA to fix, but compared to your scene, mine was pretty simple. I actually have more distribution maps than texture maps! My goal was to use as many procedural textures as possible. I'm particularly proud of the wooden fencing that I made.

TangoAlpha

I stayed away from procedural textures where I could, because it was always in the back of my mind to do DS/Poser versions and I didn't want to have to start from scratch each time. As it was, the Poser version got blown out of the water by my reliance on DS Instances for trees, weed patches etc (having to hand place/scale/rotate all the replications makes converting 3000+ replicated grass props to DS instances somewhat impractical, especially when it's only a few clicks to export a large obj). That and the fact that my copy of Poser is only 32bit, and gets blown out of the water very quickly!

The one big procedural texture I have is my pond water, which is based on an ocean primitive in CA. Ironically, I made quite a decent shader for it in Poser, but is DS I haven't really managed to get the visibility dropoff right - even at low translucency settings you can still see the bottom! I'm now sortof wondering if I can do that through SSS...

evilproducer

Yeah, my goal was different, as I don't really care if I make a D|S or Poser compatible scene. For me, there are just to many restrictions as to what I can do.

I have an idea for a scene that I have been trying to find the time to build that I would like to offer commercially, and even that scene is going to be Carrara only. I have no illusions about being able to quit my day job if it sells really well because of Carrara's niche market. I do hope to use it to generate more interest in Carrara though.

I know DAZ said they preferred a Studio version, but the way I look at it, is other vendors make Carrara only scenes, such as Dart and Phil, so if they [DAZ] don't want to sell it, maybe someone else will.

TangoAlpha

it would be nice it there were more (any) tools for transferring stuff between CA and Studio. For instance, Studio does have a replicator. It's very crude and basic, but it's there, and you can make thousands of copies of your master object, which is great apart from two things. 1. It will always draw the full mesh of everything; there's no bounding box or "x" type options. 2. It only lays stuff out in a grid, so everything has to be positioned rotated & scaled by hand. Setting up thousands of objects placed perpendicular to an undulating terrain will be . . . tedious (and I'd probably still be at it long after next Christmas). Maybe it can be scripted? I don't know - scripting is a black art as far as I'm concerned.

My original hill scene, which I'm embellishing with extra details, different trees, hedges, flowers etc would definitely be Carrara only. It's over 6 acres! It's still designed for the tower to sit on the top, so the two sets would work well together. But it's hard enough getting the first set accepted (I swear it's easier getting real aircraft designs approved by the LAA - and they're notorious for never approving anything!) Still, one day - assuming I have any hair left!

Anyhow, this is way off the original topic!

WendyLuvsCatz

You can surface replicate objects in DAZ studio using LAMH too but it is pretty resource intensive.

TangoAlpha

I've got a displacement mask for the AoA grass shader, it might work for LAMH too...

TangoAlpha

evilproducer said:

When I first created that terrain and was testing it, I had done the same thing it sounds like you did. It was a PITA to fix, but compared to your scene, mine was pretty simple.

I was putting this off, anticipating a tedious job of keep browsing to the new texture folder. Anyhow, this arvo I gritted my teeth and went for it. Copied all the texture / mask files into the subfolder, then launched Carrara and opened the project.

The first dialog came up, asking for the path to a texture. Click - click - clock - okay - wait . . .

The next dialog never happened! That was it: Carrara figured out for itself that all the other textures were in the same place, and it just all worked. :) Happy bunny! :)