Scanning my pants, back-end Carrara prep, and a question about dem bones
ModernWizard
Posts: 850
After initial excitement and installation of Carrara 8.5, I hit a wall last month when it seemed like someone's materials weren't applying correctly. Well, the materials were actually fine, though there were duplicate shaders. I was just looking at the scene in a view that was NOT texture shaded. Once I figured that out, everything looked much better!
I haven't been in Carrara much these days because I've been doing lots of back-end preparations.
1) I reduced the size of the G2F file by removing unused morphs. It definitely loads faster now.
2) I'm in the midst of modifying textures for my G2F versions of my characters so that they match the G3F base textures in tone and detail.
3) I made some custom textures for Ravenhair's G2F Casual Jeans and T-Shirts for everyone to wear.
4) I encountered poke-through and Carrara's lack of smoothing modifiers.
5) I added the ExpandAll morph to Casual Jeans and T-Shirts to override pokethrough.
6) I decided to forego morph-based or plugin-based solutions to pokethrough in favor of a 100% reliable solution: second skin clothing. That's something I've been wanting to do for a while anyway.
7) I discovered all of zero paid or freebie options for second skin clothing based on the V5 UVs [which all my characters are using], so, after a frustration digression with my V3[!]-based Clother, Texture Converter 2, and Map Transfer, I realized that I wouldn't get satisfactory results from either V3- or V4-based second skins. I had to make my own.
8) I scanned my jeans, as well as my shirt, last night, downloaded SnowSultan's V5 seam guides, and began filling in the maps with cut and pasted elements from the scans. I now have a waistline, fly, front and back pockets, and belt loops for the jeans, as well as a hemline for the shirt. The neckline is in progress.
And now you know about my creative process and its many divagations!
Re dem bones: Is there a way to make Carrara STOP showing them on the sides of the scene boundaries? They add visual clutter, and they're distracting.
Also can you hide body parts, like in Daz Studio, so they don't poke through? If so, does that mess up the lighting?
Carrara's gonna be so much fun once I get my people in there to frolic around!
--MW
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Comments
If you mean stopping them from being projected onto the grid walls, look under Interactive Render Settings (small "up arrow" icon located on top of viewport icons - not sure of terminology) and set Intensity to 0%. (see pictures)
Thread here about a possible solution for hiding body parts: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/31421/hiding-parts-of-body
Yes,.you can make parts of a figure invisible to avoid poke through,..
Select the body part,. go to the General tab, uncheck visibility.
Also,. before doing that,. do a spot render of the area whre you see poke thru in the viewport (openGL)
the actual render may be different from the preview, ..as there is Sub-division Smoothing applied to Genesis and G2 by default.
Hope it helps :)
There is also the No Poke addon that is currently free and works fairly well.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/67410/nopokethrough-plugin-alpha-version-available-for-testing#latest
Hi MW. Glad to see you still walking the Carrara path! I wasn't sure if you had given up or not.
With my relative inexperience, take my input with a grain of salt.
Hiding body parts is done like 3DAGE mentioned above, and it does not mess up the lighting. There are two little check boxes in the right main pane. In the middle right pane, there is a box that says "Show object in 3D view." If you check that one, the selected part will become invisible in the Assembly screen, but it still shows up in the render. Ther other little check box is in the uppermost pane, and says "Visible." That's the one you want.
As for the bones, DesertDude's solution may be all you need. However, I know there is also a plugin to stop them from showing:
http://carraracafe.com/plugins/fenrics-change-bone-visibilty-plugin/
Then again, I don't know if it also eliminates the bones on the sides of the scene. Maybe someone can chip in who actually knows.
Good luck to you!
UB -- I just noticed that you posted on my Carrara update thread. While not as active and experimental as you currently area, I'm still traveling the Carrara line. Carrara itself just took a hiatus to me preparing my characters to put into the Carrara scenes. For me, there's no use prepping my sets without my actors! I'm inching closer and closer to actually getting in there. :p
Thanks for the link to Fenric's plugin as an alternative. I saw someone mention that elsewhere in this forum, but could not figure out how to find the plugin itself.
--MW
Just remember that no matter how much you prep those characters in Daz Studio, they'll need work in Carrara. The materials are different. That's why most of us start our characters directly in Carrara - only doing a Studio Prep fro times when things aren't working properly any other way - so we set it up in Studio first, then open in Carrara and finish setting it up.
I have a Custom Browser setup that I use for storing all of my Carrara-Optimized characters, monsters, dragons, vehicles, scenes... everything!
As I've mentioned in another thread, I save everything individually after I optimize them. Then I can drag the individual elements in as I need them ;)
Also, since I know you're working on custom characters and such, I've made a bit of a tutorial regarding making our own clothing for any of the Genesis figures, but the technique also works perfectly for tweaking clothing made for other figure to work with Genesis 1 or 2 as well. It probably works for Genesis 3 too....
Workflow Tutorial - Conforming Clothes for all Genesis figures