Use of Carrara in Professional/Indie or Even Hobby Projects

Samuel S.

Can you please share your experience using Carrara in Professional/Indie Environment (Old or new Projects)?

PhilW

I have been doing paid work for clients for a number of years and Carrara is central to what I do. I have done a complete animated short ("Trick or Treat"), an animated part of a music video, graphics and animations for websites or to enhance a business's training assets, etc.  In general clients do not care what software is used as long as the output stills or animations are the quality they need, and Carrara - either natively or with Octane - is fully capable of doing that.

I am an independent so don't interface with a larger pipeline, although I have sometimes provided models in OBJ format for others to use in their (non-Carrara) work.

Dartanbeck

  He's being modest!

PhilW has also played an influential role as a professional video course educator/investigator for the Carrara community as well - and along the way has created some fantastic new Carrara add-ons for us to harness into our work!

Phil Wilkes, you totally ROCK!!!

I bought Carrara to slowly hobby my way into eventually making some Indie films of my own - just doing everything all by myself. As many know, I was never a computer guy, but an over-worked stone guy, baking in the sun with chisels and hammers and picks. I love it though... don't get me wrong. Carrara was my favorite part of the computer, and the computer was a part-time (at best) bit of fun for me.

My first challenge was (is) to get to know the software and get my art and animations to the point I want them to be. I feel I'm getting close with that - close enough for what I wanted to do with it. But it's been a long journey. I mean... I barely run these things (computers) except for doing this.

I was working with some star ships in space and didn't like using background images - nor did I realize their actual potential. Back then, I still didn't know the difference between backdrop and background, or that background could load spherical maps to fully encompass a scene in all 360 degrees. But I wanted a more powerful stars system - not a still image. Not an image at all - I wanted Stars!

So that's how my first Daz3d product came to be - Starry Sky for Carrara - a system that I initially created to answer my own needs, and then realizing that it was really cool... I should show this to someone, so I sent it to Daz3d! ;)

At that time I lived in a nicely secluded, yet open sky area and had just finished refurbishing an old telescope that was otherwise unusable. I had star charts on the brain, and printed and scattered all around the house. In making Starry Sky, I didn't want an accurate sky from Earth, but I did make a constellation replication dome which does simulate the constellations from Earth, as we see them - not accurately - but enough where we can spot some of our favorite shapes in the heavens ;)

I love this product. I really do.

I also love putting things in motion. In fact, in the same purchase order when I first bought Carrara, I also added GoFigure's aniBlocks Importer for Carrara and a few packs of aniBlocks as well as aniMate 2 paid version for Daz Studio, which allows for more features, like timeline baking and other editing goodness. Not sure if the new Daz Studio comes with the full version or not... but I love the system and how it works.

I started working on putting the Millennium Dragon 2 into motion. If you've ever loaded that dragon into a scene, you'll know what I mean by that thing being a real Beast! I painstakingly worked out some motions that I needed for him and used Fenric's PZ2 Exporter plugin to get the motions into Poser, then used those animated PZ2s to get the motions onto the dragon in Daz Studio, and used aniMate 2 to create those motions into aniBlocks, and hence my next product at Daz3d - dB Animation Kit 1 for Millennium Dragon 2 - which has several animations which can fit together to make longer animations... just the sort of thing I needed - and now have.

Eventually I created another animation kit in the same way, but for Michael 4 - dB Animation Kit - Swordworks for M4 - which was made after closely watching how many fight scenes were filmed for movies - especially using Conan as a reference. But that one came after my first two products of the EnvironKit series.

A pal of mine from the forum mentioned that it would be really nice to have different kinds of presets for Carrara's browser. What I came up with, I'm sure, isn't really what he had in mind, but it truly was that idea which got me going in the direction of creating a Carrara Modular Natural Environment System, which eventually became Carrara EnvironKit - Woodlands, which is a really cool system that I use constantly and will use forever more.

Woodlands adds a lot of stuff to the browser, like new trees and shrubs, including dead wood and bare shrubs to help add a more natural feel to things, some berries for those plants, presets for all of that to work in the plant editor, and three chunks of land at different sizes which are already covered with plants and deadwood, shaders for terrains and water, a collection of spherical maps for use in the background scene settings, and a bunch of scene presets in both realistic sky and background map versions - even one animated preset scene with a stormy backdrop.

But the heart of the whole thing is the Base system. All of the presets started from this. It is a central terrain with a natural, yet flat central region for placing content, like vehicles, buildings, people, monsters, etc., I kept it flat for easier use with aniBlocks and matching up with larger content pieces. Two more larger terrains surround the whole thing for deeper background geometry to break up the sky line - because this Base also includes a full realistic sky system with a clouds system, which also includes a special ground fog, Sun Light, artificial global illumination system, including uplighting to simulate indirect lighting, and then easy-to-follow instructions and tips built into the hierarchy of the instances tray to describe everything that's going on and offers some suggestions for changing it. 

I've spent years making a system very similar to this for my own uses, but when I set about creating one as a product, it evolved into so much more! 

So I created another EnvironKit, Underwater Realms, and then another, Badlands. 

Anyway, I think I'm likely most known, however, as being the annoyingly optimistic Carrara enthusiast. It is a passion of mine that all Carrara users have a pleasant time working with Carrara. 

I'm still working away toward my goal as an Indie filmmaker. So much to learn!

Samuel S.

PhilW  and Dartanbeck . Very Impressive!!!!

Samuel S.

I came to know Carrara a few years back when one of my friend told me that Hexagon, Bryce and DAZ are free. I was really impressed with Carrara but at that time it was like $550/- to $ 700/- for Pro version so was bit expensive for hobby work.

Platinum Club helped me a lot to get best deal for Carrara; it was like half the price and now it is just $ 45/- if I want another copy of license.

I feel lucky that DAZ owns Carrara otherwise it would have been easy $1,500-$2,000/- or above if owned by Autodesk or Foundry etc. They would have made some tweaked after adding Buzz new stuff and using their name to sell it like a charm or bundle it with susbcription etc.

 After trying out so many expensive 3D software and frustration of limited indie 3D packages and expensive subscription; I kept coming back to Carrara and noticed that it is very easy and powerful 3D package that one can have. Currently I am using Carrara for Unity real-time prototypes.