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UnifiedBrain, Hello and welcome to Carrara 8.5 Pro!
You might find Dartanbeck's DAZ 3D Installation Manager 101a helpful for using DIM... be warned it's nearly an hour long. It's intro shows some cool animation/effects all done in Carrara.
Recommended other Dartanbeck videos are 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.
Must Haves... DAZ Pay Tutorials: Note that these are on sale now and often are... well worth it when they are not.
If you have any questions don't hesitate to ask... Everyone is eager to help... and quickly too.
Thanks Dartanbeck, for trying to help. I had already looked at the Cararra 8.5 Install Guide. But I needed more specifics. Still, I will attempt to start jumping through the hoops by asking the following questions.
Please keep in mind that my biggest issue is that I need to keep my small SSD C drive as clean as possible. Unless support files MUST be installed on the same drive as the main program, I need to move them elsewhere.
Step 1 - Install the Carrara 8.5 Application. OK, the one I want is 64 bit. I assume that I will let the DIM put it on my C drive (SSD). Probably no choice there.
Step 2 - Install the Carrara 8 Native Content. Here there are listed 3 Native Contents (NC) - Cararra 8 NC (176 MB), Cararra 8.5 NC (1.7 MB) and Cararra 8.5 Pro NC (156 kb). Do all of these go on the C drive?
Further, Digital Painters 3D Paint Brushes Sampler is listed at the top of the page as Native Content, but not where it actually gives instructions in the middle of the page. Does this need to go on the C drive as well? There are other things not mentioned at all, such as Digital shaders, Dararra render node, Carrara hair caps, etc. Do all of these go on the C drive?
None of these are deal breakers. I simply need to know what to do.
I'll stop there, but that is just the beginning of the questions, I regret to say.
Hmmm... all of that stuff (native content, Digital Painters, etc,) does get installed into to main installation folder of Carrara... Yikes.
That was my main reason for opting for something other than SSD when I built my Carrara machine - I like a lot of stuff installed on my main C drive, since a lot of stuff wants to be there anyways - but I'm not helping here... sorry.
Perhaps Carrara doesn't 'need' to be installed on C? This stuff is (at this time) beyond me. I'd hate to lead you astray. Let's see if someone else chimes in on this fairly soon.
That's OK, I will do it, thanks. I can always delete it later if this doesn't work out. And if it does work out, I can buy a bigger drive. :-)
But that is only step one. How do I install content? Can I install content both in Studio and in Cararra at the same time? When installing content, how do I set the path from my T drive (storage drive) to Cararra? Do I install Poser content into Cararra, or Daz content, or both? It's very confusing.
When I say that I have regrets, the regrets are that this stuff isn't spelled out more clearly by DAZ. But given that, the advice on this forum is pretty much a treasure.
UnifiedBrain, You install both DS and Carrara content at the same time.
Carrara Native Content goes into the main Carrara Program folder.
Carrara files created by yourself, scenes, objects etc can go to almost any location you wish. I have a separate partition for saving a lot of things... it acts as a different drive. I save these to G:Projects/3D/Carrara and have subfolders there for even more projects... mostly older ones that I may need to reference later. I created G:Projects because that's where I keep anything that I create... Art, DTP, Fonts, WordPerfect etc projects. Hope that helps.
Note that when you drag anything to the Browser in Carrara it gets saved to a special folder, not in the Carrara folder, but on the C: drive... there maybe a way to way to change where it goes but I have no idea how and it's not a problem at this time for me.
If you buy additional Carrara PA products, like Shaders, Plug-ins etc, they will also need to go into the main Carrara folder as far as I know. I have heard that others have both Carrara and Carrara content on a different drive... I've not been able to successfully do this. DAZ Help Support instructed me to install it on C: Since I was have a problem with finding everything... but I know it will... just not how. Note also that Carrara files normally take up very little room compared to DS files.
Hope this make sense. As Dart said... perhaps someone else will chime in. I would certainly like to know how to get Carrara working on my other Partition.
Newer Carrara Content by PA's auto install and create their own folders which are auto recognized by Carrara. I've bought a lot of Older and other content which needs to be told where it's folder is. See Dartanbeck's earlier post Here.
Do Not run either Carrara or DAZ Studio and install content at the same time this could create problems. You can run DIM while either is running... just don't install anything.
You can keep Carrara and its content off of your C drive. Mine is installed to my D: drive for similar reasons as yours. Download and install Carrara to your D: drive, then tell DIM where it is. In the future, DIM will install your Carrara (and Bryce if apprpriate) content to where you specified.
Thanks, I went ahead and put and the support files it on the C drive, as it was only half a gig. DIM did it automatically, and I let it do so. But everything else has to go on the T drive.
OK, but how? For example, I now want to load M5 into both programs. Neither program is open. DIM (DAZ Install Manager, for those who may be following this even more confused than me) already knows to install M5 to Studio through the specified path. But how can it install M5 to Carrara? I'm assuming that I must specify a path in DIM by using the "content updates install to" button in DIM. Is this correct? Do I then select "respective installed paths" instead of "selected paths," and add a path to the T drive called Carrara Installed Content? Do I also need to open Carrara and set a path in preferences there?
This is neither obvious nor easy. I had the same problem in Studio, and had to write a ticket to tech support to solve it. Based on my experience, using the program will be a breeze compared to the installation process.
Yes, DIM put it there automatically, thank goodness.
It will be helpful, I'm sure, when I finally get the program running. :-) Can you even run Carrara without installed non-native content?
Hmm, that could change things, and I may have to reconfigure at that point. But for now, I'm leaving it on the C drive.
Why would I run DIM unless I was installing something?
Maybe I should make multiple posts with different questions, rather than sticking them all in here. But I need to know something very basic. In Studio, I know to load DAZ files and leave PoserCS files behind. However, I'm hearing that Carrara uses Poser files just fine. So, which files do I load to Carrara, when there is the option of one or the other?
M5 is Studio content and will Not be installed into Carrara's program folder... same is true for any other DS content which comes with Carrara. Only Carrara specific files will be installed in it's folder. You will not end up with duplicates in both folders.
If DIM has installed Carrara and then it's native content files then everything will be fine. As far as I know since you already have Carrara, DS, Poser etc paths set... so the updates will get installed to the correct folders. I can't find a "content updates install to" button for DIM but may be overlooking it. The first pic is how I have paths set in DIM... note that I have Bryce and PhotoShop installed on my G: partition or drive... Carrara and DS are on C: I would need to change the Carrara and DS and set those to your other Drive, T:, like diomede does for his other drive.
Carrara should run fine with *only* it's Native Content files installed. It doesn't/didn't require non-native content... I don't think that has changed since Carrara 4 Pro but could be wrong... but I doubt it.
See the 2nd pic... I will often use DIM to find out where it put certain files... it give me the path that I need to occasionally use "Add Folder" when things didn't auto-installl. Perhaps I'm just nosey. :)
You can post as you wish... all in one post is fine IMO.
DAZ Studio only needs DAZ files... it does not require Poser or PoserCF files. Currently I'm only installing DS and DS CF files and occasionally Poser and PoserCF. Carrara can use either... many users prefer Poser files over DAZ DUF files and recommend that if one doesn't work well to use the other.
Sorry for getting back so late.
Okay, perhaps this video can help some? Here's the thing: Aside from the Carrara-Specific products, like the Digital Painters, Native Content and that sort of thing, you won't need to install your content 'again' for Carrara.
If you've already installed Michael 5 for Daz Studio, for example, that's good enough for Carrara - and you won't need to do anything special for that product.
So here's just a sit back and relax kind of video, just relax and let it play - watch what I'm doing and so on.
About 3 minutes, 40 seconds into the video I go to load in Genesis and continue on from there. I'd like you to notice that back then the My DAZ 3D Library was just called "My Library - so that's why it's different in the video. Also notice that to find Genesis and Genesis 2, open the My DAZ 3D Library (litttle white arrow on the left of the name) and scroll down to "People" and open that. Within Genesis you'll find all of your clothing, hair, materials, poses and props for Genesis. Inside Genesis 2 Male for him and Genesis 2 Female for her stuff. Please know that Genesis 3 is not supported in Carrara yet and will lock you up if you try loading it!
OK, something which I needed spelled out, was not initially spelled out. After reading all your comments, I assume that Cararra and Studio share the same installed content library. And that after installing regular content in the normal way through DIM, that Cararra will know where to look for that content without me setting up any special paths. Is that correct?
Ha! This was less complex than I feared. Studio and Cararra do share the same installed content. I'm up and running, and beginning to look at tutorials.
Sorry for being obtuse, but I was under the impression that Studio and Cararra were totally separate programs, with separate contents. Not true.
You all kind of hit around that idea, but nobody came out and said it directly. wgdjohn came the closest.
Many thanks for all the responses!
Nothing to apologize for. Your boundless enthusiasm for the program is what got me this far. Looking at your suggested video NOW.
Just my opinion, but I would go ahead and put Carrara on the D drive too, right from the beginning. Here's why:
I've been using Carrara for years, on a succession of laptops, and always put everything in the C drive, but recently I bought a high-powered desktop which has a similar setup to what you describe; a very small ssd C drive and a very large non-ssd D drive. I have so much Poser/Studio/Carrara content that it would completely fill up my C drive beyond capacity, so I put it on the D drive instead, but all of this was copying and pasting over from my prior laptop.
The problem I ran into is that for all of my saved content in Carrara, everytime I load something up it gives me prompts asking for where the textures are for whatever object/character I'm loading (because it was originally on a C drive, Carrara automatically looks for textures on the C drive, can't find them, and then prompts me to guide it to the texture file. For every. single. texture.
Now I can go through and change the textures for every single item in my content browser in Carrara, so that it searches in the right drive for the accompanying texture files, but I have so much content at this point that that would be a monumental task.
So instead it was more worthwhile for me to simply buy a much larger ssd drive, which I will be installing as my new C drive and putting all my Carrara and studio/poser content on the C drive as well. But I could have avoided this if I had originally installed my Carrara and content onto the D drive all along.
So we can do that? It doesn't need to be in "Program Files"?
Yeah, I found out it can be installed anywhere. There's actually a prompt when installing it that asks where you want it (c is the default) but you can elect to install it anywhere. I think it still puts it in its own Program Files folder, but that doesn't have to be in the C drive.
If you've already installed it on the C drive, you can still move it, and set up a virtual folder link to redirect - same as "My documents" etc does. Google the "mklink" command for how to do it. That way DIM etc will still think it's installing to the original location on C:, but really it all gets redirected to your D drive or wherever.
Wow that sounds handy, wish I'd known about that before I hauled off and bought a new larger ssd drive
I'll have to go look it up to see how to set something like that up.
So, it seems that your suggestion is to keep the program and the content on the same drive right from the beginning, mainly to avoid problems (prompts from Cararra) if I have to change to that configuration eventually down the road. Worth considering, thanks!
Right now, both Studio and Cararra are on the C drive, and content is on the D drive. If I change Cararra to the D, then I will likely do the same with Studio. But not sure if I really need to do this at this point. Another consideration is, does anyone know if Studio and Cararra run faster when the content is on the same drive as each program?
Sweet!
Philip, from Project Dogwaffle, often says that the faster the drive, the faster everyhting works. So by having some stuff on a slower drive might cause a bit of a bottleneck - but it likely won't be very noticeable - depending upon the setup.
For example, if the installed content is on a slower D drive, but the software is on a faster ssd drive, the only bottleneck would be during the loading (and possibly saving, depending upon what is saved and where) content, but working with it within the software will make no difference.
I'm guessing though. I have a low rpm 6GB/sec SATA drive as my C drive on my workstation. At the time, large SSD were vastly beyond my budget, and weren't really that large. Nowadays things are different, so I may end up switching to a Large SSD in the future.
I must admit that if there is some form of lag using my SATA drive, it certainly doesn't bother me at this point. But that may be due to the fact that I haven't yet experienced SSD?
Correct me if I am wrong but you must have installed Carrara manually? For Carrara 6 Pro I installed manually which gave me a requester. For Carrara 8 Pro I used DIM but set the path in DIM for where to install it which was not on my C: drive but in D:3D/Daz/Carrara 8 Pro and not in a folder called Program Files. If I'd not had problems installing Carrara 8.5 Pro with DIM and spent nearly a month getting it working, after deleting all older programs, I prefer having it on a different drive. The reason I prefer DIM is that it automatically updates all software and content which is not true for a manual install AFAIK.
Installing on a slower drive... the difference is very minimal and hardly noticed if at all, IMO. On my computer with Studio and Carrara on the same drive the only difference I notice is that Studio loads it's DAZ content listing faster than Carrara loads it's listing for DAZ content. Carrara content of all kinds loads quite fast. This makes sense to me since DAZ content is a tiny bit foreign to Carrara. I only say foreign since it is not created specifically for Carrara.
SSD??... Super Sonic Drive?... Oh yeah... Solid State Drive. :)
LOL!!!
Awesome. Yeah I feel the same. But it makes for a cool comparison! DS Postgre database takes longer in Carrara, compared to DS. But when I first got Carrara, I couldn't believe how much faster Carrara loads runtime structures than Poser! Perhaps it's that my computers have grown so much over those years - now having built my own special Carrara machine. But Poser would sit, and sit, and sit. Back when I first bought Poser (Poser 5 Pro), we had to have several 'runtimes' as our content grew in numbers - because Poser runtimes could only hold 'so much' content before it just stopped showing it - starting from the top - down.
Switching from one fairly full runtime to the next was painful. Walk away and make some coffee time!
Not so in Carrara. I'd go to my content tab, click the little arrow by "Environs", one of my larger runtimes, and yeah... there was (is) a slight pause before... BAM! There it is! ;)
Oh what fun it is to look back at what excited us when we first entered this amazing world of no limits, eh?
Reflecting back... we really have learnt a lot since we started, haven't we?
Carrara is SO worth it, too!
Carrara ROCKS!
...and it's FUNNNNNN!!!! :D
Yes, I pretty much manually install everything (except for the base program, for which I use the installer executable) . This is because when it first came out DIM used to be a tremendous snafu for installing Carrara stuff, I remember endless threads about people having trouble installing and seeing content show up. Since I already knew where to install stuff for Carrara the way I wanted I just never got involved with DIM.
Nowadays from what I've seen in the forums DIM works great and is a dream for installing stuff, and all the old problems have gone away, but I'm already set in my ways and used to installing stuff manually
Jonstark, Hear ya... I'm a bit set in my ways but did force myself to fight with early DIM days. As easy as DIM is today there is still room for improvement.
In DIM you can set where content updates install to on the Settings > Installation tab. Default is to install wherever the product was installed before. Note that this is for DS/Poser-format content -- files in native Carrara format are installed like plugins to a subfolder of the Carrara application folder.
Part of my hesitation with DIM is that there are things I don't want to be installed on my computer anywhere, lots of content I've gotten for free in the Daz store that I don't really want and I don't want to eat up space. Moreover, I convert content I do want into Carrara objects and save them separately, then clean out the Daz/Poser original version I'll never use, and I don't want DIM re-installing stuff I've already converted and saved elsewhere, again eating up more space.
DIM doesn't reinstall things if you delete files.
That's a cool approach but I don't think I could be that organised!
Me neither - I just buy a bigger hard drive and keep everything downloaded & installed! (It does have the advantage that I can point DIM on my second machine to the firs machine's download folder, and I never have to download anything twice)
Dartanbeck, I watched it yesterday, but probably not as you intended. I used it as a tutorial, copying exactly everything you did. It took about an hour to successfully get through the first 10 minutes. But it was fun, and I appreciate looking over your shoulder. A lot of useful "ergonomic" stuff in that first 10 minutes.
After that, I just wanted to play. So, for the next hour I figured out the Cararra left side controls of movement, rotation and scale - pretty darn intuitive - and loaded some Cararra terrain, genesis, and some skin. Then I posed genesis and rendered the scene, pretty much by trial and error. Not really that different from Studio. In the render, I thought that the terrain looked a bit fake. Maybe different shaders would solve that? But the skin looked great, without any alteration. And that leads to my question.
What render engine is this? Is it just called "The Carrara Render Engine?" Whatever, I thought that the skin (using outdoor lights) looked somewhat softer than in 3DL renders. It reminds me of stuff that I have read about Firefly, from Poser users who claim that it has a pleasing softness that other render engines can't match. I've never used Poser. For you folks with greater experience than me (which is just about everyone) how does the Cararra engine compare to Firefly and 3DL, in both indoor and outdoor scenes? OK, you can add in IRAY as well, but I'm not a fan of it. :-)
For things I don't want to install - at least not yet - I right-click (in DIM) and Hide it.
I love DIM!
I've made a really nice setup for installing things exactly where I want them installed. If I want to move something, I do it with DIM via Uninstall, then re-install to it's new directory ;)
It's Carrara's Photo-Realistic Render engine. It's actual name might be mentioned in here someplece:
► History of Carrara by Ringo Monfort
If you go into the Render Room, at the top you'll see that we can select from different render engines. This grows if you add other things, like Luxus for Carrara, for example.
Non-Photo-Realistic is essentially a Toon renderer I think. I don't use it yet... not sure I ever will. "Draft" allows us to render just as we see things in working view, sketch, or in wire-frame mode. Keep in mind, however, that this does NOT take advantage of multi-core cpus.
I prefer the native Photo-Realistic engine over any other render engine I've ever used.
If you check out some of my articles and/or comments I make throughout the forum, you'll eventually see how I absolutely love it! I work with the shaders (Texture Room) and lighting to create super-fast, yet pretty decent-looking (I think, anywyas) renders.
I like FAST because I'm mostly interested in rendering animations. I still want quality too - so I've spent some years on getting my idea of "where to draw the line" down to a consistent workflow.
So I go for FAST with a touch of Quality, over High Quality with a touch of Speed. We each will have our own idea of what we like best... and I think i's really neat how Carrara's PR Render Engine lets us set it up in such a powerful way.
This is old, and was made with animation clips that where just made for testing certain aspects of what I was learning, after just getting into Carrara, but is quite similar to the level of Quality of Render I go for. Some of the clips are worse that what I use now, and none of it uses what I now use as far as my new shader-making methods, but it still look very similar to my current animations - which aren't released to the public yet (in the middle of building a movie)
This is a fun experiment I did after watching Cripeman's cool tutorial on Global Illumination.
It's certainly NOT using my usual render method, but is a fun way to just play around with lighting ideas and concepts, without going crazy with a full scene. Then we can take our new ideas we learn in here, and try them in our full scenes - even when not using Global Illumination.
I have even gone further and saved some of my favorite lighting set-ups to my Browser, so I can just drag them into my scenes! ;)