Modeling Objects in Carrara - Q&A - Come One and All

Oso3D

Yeah, my freehand stinks so I was hoping to avoid relying on painting anything as much as possible.

I ended up deciding on just upping the model resolution.

It was roughly on par with a Genesis figure at Base resolution. I upped it to the equivalent of subd 1, and I figure I can justify tesselating it two more times if I want.

3DAGE

Can you take the displacement painted object and bake it into real polygons?

Yes,.  Export Object with Morphs and skinning,.... will convert the displacement and smoothing into mesh

NOTE: you will get a pretty serious resolution model,.

 

 

3DAGE

Thanks Fifth :) 

I never though of it that way :(

so,.. NO,. Carara doesn't have the ability to take a High poly mesh and auto create lower poly meshes from that,. In my short experience of using the Carrara decimate option is ,. not to.

If that's what you need,. then you're most likely working back to a Game type asset with low poly using the Disp/Normal maps to create the appearance of high res.

Programs like 3D-Coat and Z-Brush are much better for that type of workflow.

Working in Carrara, you can use real high poly detail or SUB-D plus Normal and Displacement maps, to create the high res look, and work with that. with no thought of reduction.  

Rather than converting the Displacement to real mesh, or working with High res meshes,. it's better (IMO) and easier,.. to work with lower resolution sub-D smoothed models which can use textures to create the appearance of a higher resolution mesh

 

TabascoJack

Latest WIP - 

Diomede

Great job.  Love the shaders! 

I know that you are expecting me to ask for picnic tables and food trucks.  ​  But no.  I think you should include some benches and a brick sidewalk.  Your model is fantastic, and could seriously be one of the attractions along the US Department of Transportation's walking museum at M and 3rd Street, SE.  If you look closely at the attached pic, you might be able to identify the wagon wheel along the sidewalk.  The USDOT walking tour has transportation-related exhibits along the sidewalk in front of the office complex.  The details and shaders of your model are excellent.

http://www.capitolriverfront.org/go/walking-museum-of-transportation

TabascoJack

I wish I could take credit for the shader, but it's straight out of MEC4D's PBS Shaders Vol 2.

The version I'm working on is below.  Still needs work.

Diomede

Straight to the wishlist.   But on the expensive side, will need to wait for a sale.

TabascoJack said:

I wish I could take credit for the shader, but it's straight out of MEC4D's PBS Shaders Vol 2.

 

 

TangoAlpha

TabascoJack said:

Latest WIP - 

Nice bogie  Will the rest of the train follow?

TabascoJack

 

TangoAlpha said:

Nice bogie  Will the rest of the train follow?

 

That's the plan.   A well car to go with the shipping container.

TabascoJack

diomede said:

Straight to the wishlist.   But on the expensive side, will need to wait for a sale.

Yeah, all her PBS sets are worth the money, but vol 2 is amazing for the breadth of materials from glass to construction to metals to food.

 

 

Stezza

is much adjustment needed to the shaders as they are for DS & are iRay?

Oso3D

Is there a way to copy and paste UV maps?

I'm doing some stuff with geografting, and I find that the minute I 'bridge' a bit of the original figure to new stuff, it resets the UV map of that bit of anatomy. Which is going to be annoying down the road.

 

wgdjohn

Hi Will,  Are you wanting to copy from one UVMap project to another?  l read the Carrara 7 manual on UVMapping and UNWrapping and found no mention of a Copy/Paste function.  Bear with me as I'm just learning UVMapping/UNWrapping... from what I understand is that you are adding new geometry to existing geometry which would result in brand new geometry... I would expect it to require being UVMapped again.  Hopefully someone will jump in and correct me and answer your question much better than I.

WendyLuvsCatz

the only way to keep the uv would be to make any added bits a different  domain, not quite sure how to join but I have done it.

think if make a default and a new domain on original as selection, I know its touchy

WendyLuvsCatz

oh geografts fail in Carrara for just that reason BTW

are correctly UV'd in vertex room but not assembly

wgdjohn

Crazy John's Misadventures:  Problems found with my PanelBox

Last night I wanted a simple object to finish and see if I could UVMap and UNWrap it.  Don't ask why but I first decided to check out it's Normals before doing anything.  Little did I know...  I'd made a few mistakes.

Pic 1 simply shows how to show Normals which are those white lines indicating which direction is out or the face of a poly.  I call this Porcupine View so I've something to chuckle about... Oh yeah... back to the pic... I've highlighted the ones which face the wrong direction.  This is a view from the back and tilted to show the bottom... I've circled all the Normals which only face inwards.

Pic 2 I've hidden the frame to show only the panels and discover the error I made 5 times.  Instead of Double Clicking on my panel which I Added Thickness to I only Single Clicked on it and made all the copies from 1 poly.  I thought nothing of it at the time as they should all be copies of my thick panel which didn't require a need to pay attention to having Faces facing outwards, or rather towards the camera, since adding thickness creates all faces in correct directions.

Pic 3 Shows a Top View with the top and bottom panels hidden and explains how I will go about correcting the errors of my ways.

So... Did I Learn Anything:  "Oh please share with us."

• Check work often. Luckily I wasn't designing an intricate model... making more than 5 simple to fix errors.
• It pays to spin that model around to view all sides.
• If you design a single poly with no thickness there are a few ways to correct it's Normals... Rotate the poly 180 degrees or use Reverse Polygons Normals. Note that the latter will Reverse all the polygons normals of a polymesh.
• Add Thickness to a simple cube and likely other objects will result in all Normals facing the same direction... However if you cut an opening in the cube etc the result will have inwards and outwards facing normals.  Think of it like this... when adding thickness to a simple cube with no holes/openings is like making an exact copy of the cube but on the in/out side.  When that cube has an opening then Add Thickness extrudes the cube in or outwards creating Normals on all surface.

 

PhilW

Just to add to this, the Reverse Polygon Normals command also does a check for inconsistent normals, and so will automatically align normal directions - you may need to use it twice if they are all aligned inwards!

I have been having issues with normals for some clothing put together in Marvelous Designer, specifically when an edge has three polygons associated with it.  If for example you have a pocket on the outside of a piece of cloth and you are using single-sided geometry. the edges of the pocket where they meet the main cloth will have three polygons - left and right on the main cloth plus the pocket cloth. This confuses the normal calculations and you get nasty artifacts when rendering or applying smoothing, and the Reverse Normals command doesn't work properly because the mesh is amibiguous (it even has a specific name - Non-Manifold). It is possible to correct by Adding Thickness, but as the thickness is added in the direction of the Normal, it sometimes still produces a messed up mesh.

Oso3D

Can someone explain how 'pins' work? I understand seams...

 

Oso3D

Ugh. So with the geograft, half-heartedly attempted to at least weld something in Hexagon, maybe then bring it back into Carrara once I got past the UV weirdness.

Whereupon Hexagon crashed.

 

Maybe I'll just have to use Blender. ugh

 

Oso3D

So the problem seems to be Unwrap. I can't figure out how to get Unwrap to ONLY affect one shader domain. Although the projection stuff DOES. Weird.

 

 

Diomede

Geografts do not work natively in Carrara.  The UVs get screwed up.  Misty has been helping in this regard, but if your end goal is to just use Carrara as a middle step for Studio, expect trouble bringing a model converted to geograft in Studio back to Carrara for tweaking.  Would love to see someone tackle this, but...

Oso3D

Actually, so long as I avoid unwrap like the plague, I'm ok... which is... doable, for some stuff.

I'll have to keep in mind that for complex stuff, I'm just going to have to have a sharp demarcation between the normal body and the new stuff. Which, for some stuff, might not be that big a deal.

 

Oso3D

Through a failure in planning, the 'neck' portion is unfortunately M4 UV map, but at least it CAN mesh up when needed.

But for the curious, my latest.

 

Diomede

Here is the exhibit on the DOT transportation museum walk. 

.

 

 

TabascoJack said:

Latest WIP - 

 

 

Scarecrow

timmins.william said:

So the problem seems to be Unwrap. I can't figure out how to get Unwrap to ONLY affect one shader domain. Although the projection stuff DOES. Weird.

 

 

When you unwrap something the whole obj gets unwrapped. With the polygon selector double click on the mesh you want to unwrap, the resulting selection is what will be unwrapped.

Select the shading domain you  want to unwrap. Go to the edit menu and select "duplicate". you'll be able to unwrap the duplicate without unwrapping the whole model. 

Oso3D

And how do I bring that back to the model?

 

Scarecrow

I've been building robots, so I've just been deleting the original and leaving them separate, that works fine for machines. You could weld it back together, but Carrara doesn't seem to do that very well for me, I get strange distortions when I've tried that. 

wgdjohn

PhilW said:

Just to add to this, the Reverse Polygon Normals command also does a check for inconsistent normals, and so will automatically align normal directions - you may need to use it twice if they are all aligned inwards!

I just had to try that tonight.  Appears that Reverse Polgon Normals will simply not work in some situations... no matter how many times it is repeated. I tried this on different sized cubes added via Construct/Insert 3D menu. In both cases picture the Cube as an a box within a box... not connected in any way.

• First I added the cube at default size 5x5x5 ft.  Then, unlike last night, I added thickness of -.25 ft.  Resulting inner cube had Normals facing inwards so there was no need to use reverse the normals.
• Next I tried a 3x3x3 ft cube.  This time I added thicknes of -.25 in.  Inner and outer cubes normals faced outwards... Reverse Polygon Normals only switched the direction, inward/outward, for both no matter how many times it was repeated.  Note I also tried -.50 in with the same result.

 I have Carrara set to show ft by default... there could be a number of reasons for this behaviour... perhaps I'll remember to experiment more... think I know the reason but hesitate to mention my thoughts since they could very well turn out to be wrong.

PhilW said:

I have been having issues with normals for some clothing put together in Marvelous Designer, specifically when an edge has three polygons associated with it.  If for example you have a pocket on the outside of a piece of cloth and you are using single-sided geometry. the edges of the pocket where they meet the main cloth will have three polygons - left and right on the main cloth plus the pocket cloth. This confuses the normal calculations and you get nasty artifacts when rendering or applying smoothing, and the Reverse Normals command doesn't work properly because the mesh is amibiguous (it even has a specific name - Non-Manifold). It is possible to correct by Adding Thickness, but as the thickness is added in the direction of the Normal, it sometimes still produces a messed up mesh.

 

PhilW

That's very odd! So just changing the size of the initial cube affected the result? Very strange!  Although I can see that using the Reverse Polygon Normals will not solve this issue - it basically (as far as I can tell) starts reversing normals and then checks the polys that are adjacent across the surface and adjusts them appropriately - repeat across the whole model.  But because the inner and outer cubes are not joined in any way, they will be processed independently.

That is why "non-manifold" meshes cause issues (not that your cube example is like this) - imagine you have modelled a bottle which is just a mesh without thickness, but have added thickness to the lip of the bottle only (to reduce the number of polys required). It starts processing - let's say on the outside of the bottle and pointing the Normals outwards - as it propogates across the surface it goes around the lip, still pointing the Normals outwards from the surface, but then it reconnects with the single sided mesh - and now what was the outside is now the inside, of the same polygons!  So it ends up with a mess of polys pointing both ways, and there is no single "right" way of resolving it.

DesertDude

timmins.william said:

Through a failure in planning, the 'neck' portion is unfortunately M4 UV map, but at least it CAN mesh up when needed.

But for the curious, my latest.

 

I really, really like what you have done there. Super cool!