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MDO, Excellent. Love how you explained all the details and new and adventurous ways to create where the objects will be replicated on the terrain. Simply cool... never thought about some things you explain in such great detail. Thanks very much.
I agree. Very nice explanation - and these shader features offer a lot of control without the need for custom maps.
I love using Slope and Elevation to get quick and effective placements.
Wow you guys are seriously awesome! Thank you so much! Hoping to have a bit of time this weekend although with the holiday right around the corner free time to learn is at a premium lol. Our traditional girls day to make Christmas cookies is Friday with a girls night out to top it off. We had to re arrange our traditional German Christmas Eve dinner with my side of the family to the 16th due to scheduling conflicts. And of course, Christmas day. I do however, have the week between Christmas and New Years off work and plan on spending some serious time going through and trying all this stuff. I need a good block of time to go through stuff. I'm far enough along in Studio to put together a somewhat intermediate scene in a couple of hours after dinner, but figuring out new stuff needs a bit more block of time. Although I do try and squeeze a video or two into my lunch hour or if my husband is watching something I find boring lol. I just put the headphones on.
and TD2 for free... good for the textures that come with it as itself don't work in Carrara that I can see.
This was mentioned in another thread and I was curious as to how you would get the textures into Carrara without installing the whole system? I'm not sure how to load things into Carrara to begin with. I know how to do it in Daz and Poser
What is "TD2?" When I Google it, the top results are for an oncology drug... I am pretty sure there is no way to get that into Carrara!
Terradome 2 http://www.daz3d.com/terradome2-environment-system
Ah. Thanks. :)
Looks like the answer is being covered. http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/132171/help-with-terradome-2-inside-carrara
I've lost my working box on the right. I accidently clicked it off and now I can't find where to click it back on again...I tried pulling out from the right side but there isn't anything there.
Try hitting control +I a couple times and see if it comes back. Or go to the Windows menu on the very top bar and make sure "properties" is ticked.
You might also have undocked it and moved it off somewhere - closing Carrara and reopening it will fix that one.
Okay found my box but now having issues with skies. Feeling a wee bit frustrated. I open a new medium scene. add a terrain and scale to 100 by 100. drag a sky over to the working box. I get nothing. it renders black or it renders with light but no background. It was working just fine then I must have done SOMETHING and now, it doesn't work Tried exiting and redoing. I can now put this scene together in less than 5 minutes I've done it so often.
Try this
Aha! Thank you! Pretty sure someone may have mentioned that before but I could not find it! Thank you!
Once you get the sky added you can then click the "edit" button, under Atmosphere, to make changes to it... which direction the sun or moon shines and all kinds of cool stuff.
yup. I did a while back. Don't worry... you still have a lot to absorb. I'm really happy to see that you're taking the route of working with skies and terrains instead of focussing on TD2. You'll get a lot better at Carrara in the long run.
Something else to digest:
Look in the browser under "Shaders" and scroll down to "Terrains"
We can drag these shaders onto anything - even other scenery that comes with Poser products.
But what I wanted you to know is that we can just drag these onto our terrains to change how they look. When I was first learning terrains, I tried all of these shaders to see how they look in a render. Each one is actually a set of different shaders that get applied depending upon angle, height, etc., they're "Smart" shaders.
Later on, we'll teach you how to really tweak these shaders to make your terrain look how ever you want it to look. For now, though, just keep working away as you're doing.
Proud of you! You're doing great!
Thank you! I'm having a blast actually lol. I've been going in and just pushing buttons as far as the terrain shaders go. I usually end up with mud but I always learn something lol. I will give that a try next time I open Carrara and see what kind of trouble I can get into. We are doing our Christmas Eve tomorrow night so will be be offline most of the day and evening tomorrow but hopefully will have a bit of time Sat and Sun.
On a different topic, I am curious about this saving things to the browser thing I keep seeing. What exactly does that mean? I understand that you are saving characters, lights, bits and pieces etc., kind of like character presets, material presets etc in Daz Studio? But I'm not sure where they are being saved to and how to find them again to use them.
Sonja, This is where they are placed on my computer "C:\Users\<UserName>\Documents\DAZ 3D\Carrara 8.5\My Presets". There will be a list of folders inside "My Presets". Should be "My Artwork, My Clips, My Constraints, My Effects, My Modifiers, My Artwork, My Objects, My Shaders, My Objects and My Shaders". Those are the default installation for Windoze. I imagine that for MAC it is the same subfolders but it may be located elswere. Note that "<UserName>" might be Sonja or the name for the comupter owner you use. I've not tried yet but I believe that you can create different subfloders in the ones that like Shaders, Objects that appear in the browser tab... not sure about any of the others. Dartanbeck will be able to explain that part much better.
Just a bit more with pictures..
You can create your own folders in the My Presets section as mentioned by @wgdjohn using Windows Explorer which helps with categories.. also you can have your presets folder on another hard drive as over time the presets will grow in file size but you have to edit the Carrara preference file to do it.
here's a pic.. just drag a model from your scene and drop it into the folder of your choice.. same when loading.. just drag it out of the folder and drop it onto the scene.
Stezza thanks for elaborating. When you say "edit the Carrara preference file" do you mean manually? I didn't see anything in Preferences to tell it that I want my presets elswhere. I've got an entire folder with subcatagories ready on a different drive where I keep Carrara projects.
I've tried before and tonight and am unable to drag an object from the Assemble room to the browser... instead I drag the name of the object, "my vertex object", from the right SCENE panel into the browser window. I'm using Windoze... is Mac different?
Yep.. drag it from the tree in the scene panel.. sorry if I confused you with that one ;-)
You edit the file in notepad .. also make a backup copy
located here ( Windows 10 ) - C:\Users\yourname\AppData\Roaming\DAZ 3D\Carrara 8.5\Preferences.txt
FYI- the AppData folder may be hidden so you need to unhide it in windows explorer
you can also backup the other file in the directory CompPrefs.txt if you need to do a Windows reinstall .. very handy
Does'nt take much to cornfuse me. :)
Hey.... very cool tips... thanks.
Awsome thank you! That makes a bit more sense then. I don't have a Mac so windows works for me lol.
Okay so I got my sky in (yay!) and thought I would add a larger distant terrain. Not working so well. Would be great if I was going for a cave or wanted to drop a large rock on my horse. However, that's not really the look I am going for lol. I can't get the terrain to move down at all. I am trying to pull it down with the arrows but its not working. Not sure how else to move something that big especially since I can't really see it in the view port. Maybe I should resize it smaller then move it and resize it bigger? Anyway, I've had enough for tonight and its past my bedtime so I will check back tomorrow.
It'll go down. It's just HUGE is all! ;)
Go into your Director's Camera, select that gigantic terrain and then type the number 0
This will pull the camera out to focus on that extra-large piece of terrain.
Now you'll see the tools better for dragging it down, and it'll move faster from out here
Keep an eye towards the center of the thing to try and see the rest of your scene
If you still have your grids on, they'll be really tiny, but will help you get the terrain down below that point
============================================
TIP:
I love using giant pieces of terrain like this for the distant background, so when I lower it down, I drag ot down way below that grid area
Then I make a much smaller terrain piece for standing my characters and buildings on, say, between 100 x 100 to 1,000 x 1,000, depending on how hilly I make it. The smother the terrain, the smaller it can be, where larger mountains need a larger chunk to level off in the middle.
For this middle terrain piece, I almost always add the "Zero Edge" filter in the terrain room to the bottom of the list
This will make sure that none of the edges of the terrain are sticking up in the air
For a lot more terrain tips, try this:
* Building Carrara Terrains Intro
Other miscellaneous tips to digest at your leisure:
Your Carrara Browser
Making great stuff isn't as cool if you can't remember where you put it. Let's get some good habits going right from the start
Daz Install Manager - Installing Custom Poser Runtimes
Basic walkthrough of designing your own custom runtime structure
Navigating in Carrara
some good tips on how to get around the work space, go to where you want to be at specific times, and how to send stuff to specific locations within your scene
Thank you very much! I figured it was because it was huge but couldn't figure out how to move it lol. Will most definitely check out the rest of the links as well.
It could be that the terrain is in Large scale, but the rest of your scene is in Medium. Consequently when you try to drag it, you're moving it several feet, which on something that might be a mile across is hardly going to notice.
So you can change the scale at which the drag tools operate (which doesn't change the actual scale of the scene, just how easy it is to drag very big or small things). Select the scene in the Instance tab and then the top Interface tab. There you can change the scene's magnitude. Drag the terrain to where you want to put it, and change the magnitude back afterwards.
Worked like a charm as soon as I followed your instructions and loaded the sky from "misc". How can I use skys from the "Scenes" tab also? I've also noticed that sky loaded from either tab lacks all the controls available with the Realistic Sky "edit" button... no big deal but I'm curious. :)
Dartanbec and TangoAlpha, Thanks for the tips.
Sonja, Keep going... I'm so lucky for your questions... I've learned a lot from them.
I had a different question, and figured that i would add it here.
Is the lens flare effect glitchy? A few days ago I was doing Phil's tutorial, and the lens flare worked great. Then I started playing with different flare effects. It soon quit working entirely. I control z'ed everything, and got it back.
It stopped working today as well, on a scene that I can't undo. Keep in mind, all the other lighting special effects work fine. Is the lens flare effect extra touchy?