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224 S 200 W, Suite #250
Salt Lake City, UT 84101
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I have no idea what's in store for us. Man Stan has placed heavy wants towards being able to import dynamic clothes from DS to Carrara. Many others thought that you'd be able to bring in DS lights and entire scenes with all of the stuff they made using all of these various plugins for DS. I'd imagine that, in order to actually submit a release candidate, these poor developers will have to come up with a clever and friendly way of keeping people from importing what they can't. Which likely makes the whole thing a lot harder. Too bad. If only potential Carrara owners knew how much better everything would be if they'd just build it in Carrara first....
But Dynamic clothes is what Carrara is truly lacking right now, for the masses. It has been reported that DS dynamic clothes will never be compatible with Carrara until Optitex themselves develop a plugin for Carrara. ManStan reports his ability to import it over using older versions of DS and Carrara - using the Collada file extension. Poser already works fine, but it is very different. Personally, I'm happy either way. Dynamic clothes have always given me a headache anyways.
Fair enough. It's probably been since C8's release that I was very active in the 3D world. So I'm sure I've missed many things. I do realize what a game changer Genesis has been. Was duly impressed when DAZ was recognized by magazines like 3D World for their innovation.
Part of me has always wished that content developers would support native Carrara instead of trying to get Carrara to read and use other formats. But I've also worked very closely with some content creators. I know how hard it is just to support two products (DAZ Studio and Poser); so I certainly can't blame them for not wanting to support a 3rd product (especially one with a significantly smaller user base than the other two).
Carrara has always had a bit of a hard time in the DAZ software lineup. The people who use it, use it extremely well. People like Howie Farkes and 3DAge and Patrick show how capable a product it is. But it was always designed with the idea of being a modeling to animation type suite. It wasn't designed like Poser and Studio with the expectation that it would be consuming pre-made content. Which has always made getting content into Carrara a challenge.
I remember back in the 7.0 days the discussion about dynamic cloth and could we get the Optitex stuff into Carrara? The answer hasn't changed there. Unfortunately, it seems that the dream of content creators being able to have some easy to use tools to create their own dynamic clothing hasn't come to full realization either. It seems (to a somewhat poorly informed observer) that the Optitex / DAZ partnership hasn't worked out as resoundingly as everyone had hoped when it was first announced.
Have you taken up Daz on their offer of free DS, Bryce and Hex?
More importantly, have you tried DS4.5 Pro?
It may take for ever to start up, but once your in, it's really an amazing app. Well, I've spent some time a while back, for 4 pro, looking into Genesis and how it works and such. Then watched some more YouTubve on making stuff for Genesis, and more DS functionality, and watching one of the Daz Devs in Modo... This is some impressive software. Now that it includes all of the Content Creation Toolkit features, along with its Hex bridge, and Hex being updated, I was feeling pretty lucky to have gotten it for free - well, I had Hex - but DS Pro and Bryce Pro for free is way freaking cool, in my book. Too bad I never have the time to play in DS pro more often, or even try Bryce again - what a strange place that seems, I installed it once...
...once!
I grabbed the programs but have never used them. Well...I played with Hex for about an hour...that's it. I live in Carrara (and now LightWave too).
For example, I'll take a short walk through David Brinnen's Store and just drool over all of those cool products. There actually are a lot of really cool addons for Bryce. Brinnen and Horo put out that Bryce Learning DVD - I love watching that sort of thing. I know I'm going to buy it fairly soon - but I'm still rather doubtful that I'll run Bryce. Carrara fulfills my needs perfectly. But I enjoy those kinds of shows, so it really isn't wasting $$$
I guess, when I bought Carrara, I was so enthused. I still am. The tools are so perfect for me. I ended up tailoring my movie project around Carrara. The whole look is being tailored to what "I" can do within the confines of Carrara. But as I look back, I think it was Carrara that molded me - at least to a degree.
Funny long story, so I'll tell it short:
I actually began in 3d using 3ds max on a friends computer. Back then they had G-Max (free version of 3ds with limited features). He had me making assets for a game called Neverwinter Nights. Well, the nwn community made a plugin for GMax. So I got that and basically learned 3d between GMax and 3DS - and then went to Poser. I've been told that That is ass backwards! By the time I was introduced to Daz3d, they were giving away Victoria 3 for a limited promotion - no morphs, though. Well it was right around then when they released Daz|Studio Beta version 0.7
I still have that saved on one of my discs. Version 1, blah blah... shorten further...
Felt really good when my wife informed me that she had saved up enough money for me to buy Carrara! At that time, Daz3d was still selling that figures and avatars book which came with DS 2.3, Hexagon 2.5, Carrara 6 Pro and a buttload of excellent content. Not to mention the cool book - all for $20! Also at that time, Carrara 7 users could get Carrara 8 beta. But if you bought Carrara 7, you got Carrara 8 free once it came out - if you bought pro, it was pro you got for free, and vice versa. So with the money she had saved for me, I became an Annual Platinum Club Member, Bought the book, upgraded to C7 Pro and added on the rest in content. You would not believe how much content came with all of that! PC got me a free bundle, Carrara came with a small army of stuff, the book... and then the rest of what I would have spent on Carrara if it was an off day and I had to pay full price. I was downloading for three days!
Since even before that day, Daz3d has always been great to me. Carrara has been my dream come true - I just love it.
I always think of Lightwave as a 3ds max sort of thing. I bet it's excellent. How are you liking it so far, is it mostly a modeler?
It is two separate programs, Modeler (natch!) and Layout (cameras, lights, objects, rendering).
It has its quirks that take getting used to -- but I'm starting to really groove on it. Many things are much faster in LW than Carrara...but there are still a few places that Carrara sings a prettier tune for me.
* the Q, W, E, D keys to move the camera around
* exporting a UV map as a PSD file
* native terrain / ocean primitive (don't have a clue how to make these in LW yet)
* Shader Room -- LW has wickedly powerful shading; but I'm just not used to it yet...hell, you can argue that I'm not used to Carrara's yet either! :lol:
What I'm really starting to deeply love in LW is layers -- yeah, like PhotoShop. Immensely powerful things that make modeling a breeze.
I got a similar hardware: GTS360M , Intel I5 , and when I enable multicore , I go from 40FPS to over 100FPS , I literally triple my FPS XD .
Actually, "back in the day" when I was much more active in 3D in general than I have been lately I tried DS 4. Provided a lot of feedback to the devs, especially on the shader mixer as in my youth I studied graphics from a programming perspective.
I tried Bryce, but couldn't get used to the different way that it looks at 3D rendering. I could load presets and get things to look good, but experimenting on my own just generated a mess. Actually had better luck with Carrara's landscape than Bryce.
I basically learned what little I know about 3D modeling in Hexagon. Have license keys in my account for 1.0, 2.0, and 2.5. :) I've done a bit of modeling in Carrara.
I also have Maya 2010 and a set of tutorials from 3D buzz that I've started and stopped trying to follow several times. Seems like following the tutorials is pretty simple, but whenever I try to do something on my own, I get frustrated when after 30 minutes I haven't figured out how to do something I could have done in 5 in Hexagon.
DS4? Sounds weird to refer to DS4 as "Back in the day"! lol
I know... you're probably talking about that secret circle of beta testing going on behind the scenes for a year or two...
I almost joined in that too, but I felt it would be unfair to the rest, since I really didn't have much real experience in DS, and certainly couldn't commit enough time to do any good. Carrara's different. I actually found some stuff to fix in here. They must like me or something - 'cause they fixed them!
I feel the same about Bryce. Beautifully power piece of software. Different. Very Different. But those who DO get used to it really turn out some nice stuff! I still have this crazy passion to get Brinnen and Horo's DVD, install Bryce 7 pro and all of the Master Series learning packs, and go nuts for a month or three. :)
It's the one piece of the Daz Software circle that I don't know yet.
If I didn't get into modeling in Carrara as much, I probably would prefer Hexagon over Carrara for modeling, since that bridge can just end up turning out a CR2 anyways - then pull it right into Carrara from there. I actually do that a bit for introducing new Morph targets to figures that don't allow that in Carrara.
Those brief moments in Hexagon have shown me one nice piece of modeling softy - in my opinion. Like the rest of the collection, it seems to have a super-friendly interface. I did buy the Genesis Starter Kit, where Fugazi gives you a shirt template, and uses that to teach you how to create clothes for Genesis in Hex - then sending it into DS. Pretty cool. And, for me, it was worth it - I like watching that kind of thing. Sure beats TV :)
Hey johnny,
I'm glad you came in. This is an interesting conversation... to me at least. And it's really refreshing to hear from another person that you actually prefer Carrara (or Hex) to Maya (Max for me). I tried Maya once, but - like you explained, you'd almost need to take a $100,000+ USD college course to learn all of its secrets. Max is sort of that way too... but I had a buddy over my shoulder who DID go to college for it. lol