Is Carrara Still A Good Option

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Comments

  • PhilWPhilW Posts: 5,144

    If you want to have the Carrara texture to export, set up an isometric camerera above the terrain and adjust the field of view to match the terrain and render, then use this as an image map in DS.

  • Ron KnightsRon Knights Posts: 1,763

    I've had Carrara 5 & 6 Pro. I've never used them. I just can't get beyond the fact that they have no manuals. I haven't been able to learn Carrara the way I have learned DAZ Studio and Poser. Oh, and the lack of support for Genesis 3 is a big failure for me.

  • evilproducerevilproducer Posts: 9,050

    I've had Carrara 5 & 6 Pro. I've never used them. I just can't get beyond the fact that they have no manuals. I haven't been able to learn Carrara the way I have learned DAZ Studio and Poser. Oh, and the lack of support for Genesis 3 is a big failure for me.

    Can't help about Gen3, but there have been manuals. C7.2 Pro was the last big revision. There have been some minor updates and fits and starts to update it.

  • Ron KnightsRon Knights Posts: 1,763

    I've never seen a printed manual. I believe the latest book published was for Carrara 5. I bought it, and it didn't help me at all.

  • mikael-aronssonmikael-aronsson Posts: 549
    edited March 2017

    First of all, here you have a Carrara 7 manual, not that far away from 8.5, vey nice and well written and not many things missing: http://docs.daz3d.com/lib/exe/fetch.php/artzone/pub/software/carrara/carrara7_user_guide.pdf

    Carrara has way better documentation than DS. when did you see a manual for DS the last time (there is one around the time they invented the wheel though...) ?

    There is a bunch of html documents spread out all over the place, most often with missing images for DS, that's about it.

     

     

    Post edited by mikael-aronsson on
  • 3DAGE3DAGE Posts: 3,311

    Hi Ron :)

    I'm not sure where you've looked,. but C6 has a manual included in the program

    Go to the HELP menu, and select Carrara Help (see pic)

     

    Printing and distributing manuals is not a good idea,. ask your postal worker
    Digital PDF's or web pages make much more sense. from any perspective,. economic, environmental, or physical.

    We're here to help each other learn ,. IMHO ,.. this forum is the best place to get help learning carrara

    Unless you have C8,.    no genesis figures will work,. C6 added support for V4/M4

    if you really must use only genesis 3,. then the only program you can currently use that figure fully in,. is daz studio

    G3 was designed to be used in Daz studio,. and no other program fully supports all of its features.

    there are multiple generations of figures prior to genesis, and most of those work in carrara,. no other 3D suite can say the same.

    Tell us what you're having problems with,. and we'll try to help.

    :)

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  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,326

    Yeah... Carrara 6 manual is fantastic! It's certainly an excellent way to learn any software. I've learned a lot from that tome of well over 800 pages!

    I printed out the Carrara 7 manual, revision G, onto paper, two-sided, like a book, then bound all of those pages into a single Giant three-ring binder. It's an excellent book!

  • l_56289l_56289 Posts: 0

    Ok, this has to do with the original thread title "Is Carrara Still A Good Option" According to the check out page I can get Carrara for about $70 if I join the member ship, If after 3 months I don't renew, do I lose Carrara?

    Can anyone tell me if Carrara will work with an HP Z420 has E5-2660 Xeon win 7 -64bit quadro 2000 GPU, but I have a new GPU on the way MSI GTX 660 and I have 16gbs ram

    Also what is the difference between DAZ studio and Carrara?

    thank you so much for any info you can help me with.

  • ChoholeChohole Posts: 33,604

    I can answer the question about membership.  No you won't lose Carrara after 3 months if you don't renew PC membership.

     

  • TangoAlphaTangoAlpha Posts: 4,584
    edited May 2017

    Daz Studio is a program for rendering and animating existing content purchased from the Daz store, or other stores, or built in another program such as Carrara.

    Carrara is a program for building 3d content from scratch that can then be rendered or animated with its own render engine or in another rendering program such as Daz Studio. Carrara can also open and use most existing content from the Daz store (except Genesis 3 and a few odds and ends)

    Post edited by TangoAlpha on
  • DiomedeDiomede Posts: 15,125

    Note - Carrara 8.5 Pro is priced significantly less than the standard 8.5 version. 

  • Bunyip02Bunyip02 Posts: 8,341
    Diomede said:

    Note - Carrara 8.5 Pro is priced significantly less than the standard 8.5 version. 

    If you are a member of the Platinum Club there is a nice discount to the Pro version.

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,326
    l_56289 said:

    Can anyone tell me if Carrara will work with an HP Z420 has E5-2660 Xeon win 7 -64bit quadro 2000 GPU, but I have a new GPU on the way MSI GTX 660 and I have 16gbs ram

    It should work great. Cool machine! ;) Carrara might even respond better before you replace your graphic card... not sure. The native render engine uses the cpu instead of GPU - the GPU is used for OpenGL viewing as you work - so I've always wondered how those (even the older ones) Quadro cards perform with Carrara since they are meant for OpenGL excellence.

    As outdated as they may be, I may be grabbing up an HP Z600 or 800 one day. All of those Z series were fine machines, from what I understand.

  • ebergerlyebergerly Posts: 3,255

    I've struggled with the same question as the OP...

    And I guess Carrara is a GREAT option if it meets your needs. laugh

    If you can get the results you want (or your clients want, if you're professional), then it's great. I don't think anyone would argue that it has "state-of-the-art" tools, so I guess if you can get the results given your skill level and the available toolset, then it's a great option. It has strengths and weaknesses, like anything else.

    For me, it's the best solution for rendering characters. Mostly cuz I'm lazy and not good at modelling humans and making morphs and applying bones and stuff. Much more fun to drag and drop a character and clothes and you're ready to go. But personally, aside from characters, I much prefer some other software (Blender, etc.), especially if I have to do fancy stuff like liquids and smoke and cloth and physics and have an awesome renderer and all that. So I'd much rather take a Carrara character render and then composite using some other software onto a different background I modelled and rendered in another app. 

    I really wish they had continued to develop Carrara, but I guess that isn't gonna happen? Looks like from the first thread in the forum the last version was released like 4 years ago? By the way, does anybody know of a way to export a Carrara scene into Blender, with all the character stuff (bones and morphs and materials and animations, etc.)? There was something being developed long ago but I'm not sure what happened. It was really limited at the time.

    Thanks. 

  • How could I go wrong? I am now a carrera owner. Time to animate and get frustrated.

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  • UnifiedBrainUnifiedBrain Posts: 3,588
    edited May 2017

    Welcome!

    Yes, there will be frustration.  But there will also be joy.  And with support from this forum, and a bit of luck, the joys will outweigh the other!

    You may also consider getting Phil's animation course: https://www.daz3d.com/animation-in-carrara-video-tutorials

     

    Post edited by UnifiedBrain on
  • wgdjohnwgdjohn Posts: 2,634
    edited May 2017

    How could I go wrong? I am now a carrera owner. Time to animate and get frustrated.

    Welcome aboard.  Great to hear you took the plunge. yes  ... at such a great price too... kewl.  I bought Carrara 4 Pro from Eovia for almost $500, well worth it, and had nearly every upgrade since... my greatest problem was not spending enough time, work and real life play.  It was not until I started reading everything about Carrara and asking questions in the forums that I hurdled the frustration speed bump.

    I'd been playing with modeling since before Carrara...  I finally decided to learn more of it's feature and to render final images... in order to get on the faaastrack to learning I started entering all the Carrara Challenges which are lessons in themselves since others helped out when I got stuck... the Challenges also help to learn many tools, SFX and the list goes on and on.

    Check out my thread Modeling Objects in Carrara - Q&A - Come One and All for modeling specific... I've also listed some helpful links at the top of page 1 for others like Dartanbeck, Diomede and more.  Also you can find many other links in the forums, YouTube video tutorials and DAZ, pay, modeling tutorials by PhilW and mmoir.

    What do you want to learn?  Just ask... we are here to help. cool

    Post edited by wgdjohn on
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