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Can I interrupt this love-in to ask a question?! Dart - the ship in the second image you posted looks like a dead ringer for one that Roger Dean used in one of the Yessongs images and has become something of a trademark for his work - where did you get it?
Agree... Agree!
From 1999 to around 2002 we had some vendors at our Gateway Amiga Computer Shows that sold plugins. These were for LW and were quite expensive then. The more the program costs the higher the price for it's plugins, IMO. When I bought Carrara 4 Pro I also bought 3 packs, two from inagoni, Pro Pack and Architools, the other from DCG, Pro Pack... no longer available as a Pack but still available since Eric will sell his products either individual or in packs of 4. Back to my point... All 3 together were very close to 1 for LW years before.
I've nothing against any LW or other programs nor their users... I envy both but the programs are out of my price range.
When I bought Carrara I'd first looked into upgrading LW as well as the other programs. I chose Carrara simply because it was half the price of upgrading to LW. Originally paying for the Standard version... in less than a week I paid the difference to get the Pro version. When it arrived in it's box with a printed manual which I sunk myself into going straight to the modeling section and skimming the others.
Felt as if I'd discovered Gold... I learned afterwards that was not wrong. This past year I've tried to have Carrara 8.5 Pro on every day... can't think of the last day I didn't.
Oh darn.:( I usually catch myself.
Phil, is this what you are referring to ?
http://www.daz3d.com/steam-aircraft-dragon
That's it. Petipet strikes again!
On the comments about the wonderfulness of Lightwave, etc:
The grass is always greener. But with Carrara, I don't feel the tug of other programs so much. I kind of like what I've got.
That is absolutely the one - thank you, I have it now.
apparently so have I, it says purchased, I really need to look through and use more of my stuff!!!
I have used Lightwave, Poser, and Vue in the past, and Carrara in many ways seems to combine the best of all of these, delivering a complete environment which I feel very comfortable with using. Yes, it is disappointing that it has not been updated recently (and let's not get into that again!), but that is offset by a number of wonderful plugins which have become available over the last couple of years. And it is such a wide ranging program that I still find new things and new ways to use it, as well as learning from my fellow Carrara users here. I really don't feel a tug for any other 3D program as the core of what I do.
Sorry I was late to the game! Yeah... from one of my faves - petipet!!!
I know this is quickly turning into an "I Love Carrara!" topic, but I did this one when I was first learning to render in Iray
...and since we're also talking about tutorials and such, here's a YouTube tutorial I made, putting this fine vessel to motion
and here I demonstrate some simple post work on animation techniques in Howler, which was the main purpose for the above scene setup
The lack of interest in camera movement in the Carrara shot was actually done intentionally to set up for this one
So, what I'm feeling out of this is that you, too, still prefer using Carrara as your main 3D software?
Yeah, I do feel bad for folks whom really need something to be fixed, and are awaiting some elusive new version. Personally, I'm in no hurry.
I have a strong feeling that the next version will have Genesis 3 support, and that scares me, because then I'll inherently start purchasing all of the stuff I've been passing by! LOL
If there's one thing that I've learnt when I was getting to grips with how to do CG in any software, is that we often have to think outside the box in order to get what we want. In fact, all of this came to be by people (visual effects engineers) thinking outside the box.
One cool experiment is to post a question about a certain dilemma we're having getting a certain shot completed. That's where we start to see how there are so many ways to achieve the same or similar, and often even better, results. The way they've designed and built-up Carrara into what it is now paves the way for us all to be able to solve our CG needs for many years to come... and then some!
The only problem here is, things added (recently or otherwise) in other software (GPU rendering and particles in Vue, for example) will be worked on and improved on in the future, when was the last time Carrara's particles were updated ?
Here is WebGL experiment in which over one million particles interact with each other in real time: https://haxiomic.github.io/GPU-Fluid-Experiments/html5/?q=UltraHigh
Another "problem": not enough people are interested in Carrara being truely improved upon, lots of them want their cheap update for $30 or so and the most fixes focused on whatever new figure DAZ serves to their loyal base, and that is fine...but let's try not to tell new users that Carrara has the best of what other (even much more expensive) software is offering...
Right, and I do try to never say that Carrara is better in any one area.
I paid more for Carrara than many folks have - as well as for the upgrade. And I still find Carrara to be worth well over the price I'd have paid if I'd have paid full price.
That's kind of where I was going with the fact that I'm often lured into considering other software. I'd be looking at these new, and more frequently updated possibilities, like those particles you mention.
In the end, however, I'll consider if I can get my own needs accommodated in Carrara along with my current workflow with other tools, like Howler, and the answer (so far) always results in a big ol' "Yes". So I quit looking harder into obtaining the other stuff.
While I'm now learning to mostly rely on VFX techniques to apply my particles needs via post, I still enjoy using Carrara's particles for a good many things, including making visual effects specifically for adding in post using Howler - so I guess my confidence comes from a lot (LOT) of heavy practice, experimentation, and studying.
I do try to commend the software developers of other apps - even though that particular quote kind of sounds the opposite - and I do apologize if anyone catches only that portion of the conversation. I've never tried LightWave, but am almost already convinced that I would like it - and therefore think that I would like Modo even better.
I have had some (very little) experience in an older (version 5, I think) 3DS Max, when it was still sold through Discreet, and I loved it. It had a lot of plugins added - I was new to 3D at the time and it wasn't my computer, so I wasn't sure what all was 3DS and what was plugin, but I loved it. When I looked at the price, I was very sad - knowing that it's just too heavy for my hobby vs my lowly working-class income. Then another friend had me take his Maya Ultimate for a spin on his AlienWare portable workstation. It was a little strange next to 3DS, but it, too, was outstanding!
Now, when I finally found Carrara, the promo pages were entirely more attractive. Lots of screenshots and explanations of the many various features and workflows. I was excited to see that I could still use Poser figures as if they were Poser figures, right inside the software, but also would have access to a polygonal modeler. I liked the other stuff, and there was a LOT of it, but it was those two things that I really was excited about - and it's those two things that still remain unique to this day!
Once I final owned Carrara, I've been on the older forums for a while. Word had it that the modeler was entirely over-rated and really isn't that great. I didn't pay too close of attention to that because I wasn't really looking to make models, I was looking to tweak content.
However, once I had a need to build my own models, I wanted to try it in Carrara, though through the deal in which I got Carrara, I also got Hexagon, which had (then) a much better reputation for modeling. So I could head into that if I had no success in Carrara.
Wow. Where Carrara got it's bad rap was beyond me. I was taught to box model, starting with a cube and extruding my way into whatever model I wanted to make, and Carrara didn't let me down in the slightest - in the slightest! In fact, I truly enjoy modeling in Carrara!
It seems that the only times I'm seduced into looking at other modeling software is when I'm not right in the middle of a modeling project - because when I am modeling in Carrara, I'm really quite happy.
I do understand that there are limitations to this and that - but those limitations, to me, are nothing compared to its ability to let me use Poser and Daz Studio figures like Poser and Daz Studio figures. When I do run into a short-coming, it's (so far) never long before I overcome it. And it's answering those short-comings that ongoing development solves. While it's really nice to have that kind of development, it's also not such a bad thing to just use my own ingenuity to overcome difficulties.
Well, I consider Carrara to be a fairly good (for it's age that is) software which is mostly dependable as a everyday work horse for general type of projects.
I talked to more then a few people back in the day and even then one of the main reasons people used it was because it's integrated ability to import Poser models ...
I am a LightWave owner and when I told other LW users I'm using Carrara, those who tried it before were surprised that Carrara does not have advanced antialiasing and lights sampling among other things.
That's where bad rap comes from, too narrow focus of the development (Poser, and now DAZ importability), things which were OK (or OK-ish) for the time were left the same or alone and almost never improved later.
When I bought Cararra from Eovia I knew exactly what I was buying, I needed some kind of sofware which had global illumination built in, was not buing it for it's modeling or import capabilities, and, yeah, I paid full price for it, it was more then $300 then
There have been several times when I have been very impressed by the developers who worked on Carrara for including some really leading edge stuff, certainly for the time that most of it was coded. The defaults tend to be set for speed rather than quality, but with the improved computing capabilities over the last few years, you can now take advantage of stuff that was always there but took too long to render on previous generations of computers.
Almost all of my renders are using settings very close to the Carrara defaults.
Even as computers become more and more powerful, having high-end render settings could (IMHO) be a big mistake. Still, I think that a lot of users have the mistake of cranking the settings too high. I see that sort of thing all the time, thinking that higher settings will make scenes look better without any artistic consideration. But, yeah... they really shouldn't have Ambient light ON by default... that's just nasty!
I have my own Default starter scene that I use. I never use File > New - ever. I go to Objects tab and double-click my 1280 x 720 Base, and that has Ambient turned off and my resolution set to something... can't remember exactly what it is... something like 1280 x 720 or something. ;)
Since I almost always work with reflections, and I use this Base scene for creating my shaders, I also added a spherical background that I made to render well with Gamma Correction = 2.2, which I use more times than not.
I didn't know you have LightWave. Is it as cool as it looks in the promos? Man, I see the promos for LightWave and it just seems like a real dream for animating/modeling/particles, etc.,
I knew you to be an (awesome!!!) Silo modeler, didn't know about LW!
Yep, I do, stoped upgrading after version 10.0, do not use it for modeling or texturing much (no cool stuff like in the new promos, but it does have interactive renderer and stereoscopic OpenGL view which is lightning fast, I mean realtime fast), sort of like I use Carrara, only for rendering. I got it when it was cheap and they had promo for people "jumping" ship from another sofware, lol.
It has a very good and fast renderer with lots of fine tuning and no limit on amount of render nodes. I use it for indoor renders when I have something more complex then I normally do. What I like about it, it has an awesome displacement and tons of free plugins