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Top one looks better. What are the render times?
both around 4 minutes but in carrara we don't have mamita naked (I apologize for nudity I noticed just now); in thea we notice a sort of azure haze that interacts with shadows and shaded areas; we can do that in carrara as well
Well put indeed!
In the age of Lomocams and Hipstermatic apps that deliberately make your snapshots have emotional impact by stepping all over them... Photorealism is a quaint but DATED idea.
Perhaps we will go back to wearing togas and wrapping our houses in Italian porticos... We will modestly drape our marble statues with silk clothes, and all camera angles will be absolutely perpendicular to the circumference of the Earth so as not to lose the effect of symmetrically squared diminishing perspective....
Forget Disney..., Forget Hitchcock... Ignore everything we ever learned from 1500yrs of Japanese art.
Ignore every trend in Western art for the 19th and 20th century...
I think that snap broke the sound barrier... The point (it was indeed a piercing observation) is well-made and reminded of Christopher Hitchens when he was on the warpath! :lol:
both around 4 minutes but in carrara we don't have mamita naked (I apologize for nudity I noticed just now); in thea we notice a sort of azure haze that interacts with shadows and shaded areas; we can do that in carrara as well
So no significant time difference... Or maybe Carrara is slower because no nekkidness, but either way these are not time killing renders.
The Carrara image looks more like where I grew up in New Mexico. The sky is very dry and clean.
The other image is more Central California.... LOL
The challenge is on. Go check it out. Lol.
I wonder if carfor will accept? :lol:
I have a question:
Why is it a bad thing for us to want Carrara to be improved? None of us that are on the "complainers" side hate Carrara. We love it, and that's why we want it to be updated. No one buys 3D software anymore without expecting an updated version down the road with new features. Also regardless of the great features that Carrara does have, it is falling behind the state of the art by leaps and bounds, and I feel safe saying that's not just an opinion.
As for the "cheerleading" team, you love Carrara just as much as the rest of us, but why do you consider it a bad thing for us to want Carrara to be even better?
Everyone wants Carrara to be "even better" but you are not being specific. What is "better" for one person is just "presets" for another person.
Can you be more specific about what "better" means to you? Otherwise this is all academic.
My personal view is that it's not a bad thing to want the improvements, but do we need a new thread every week, rehashing the same things over and over? Things that are generally pure speculation? Don't you think someone coming here looking for information about Carrara could get scared away? You don't see any danger of creating a self fulfilling prophecy?
I say, if someone asks about Carrara and wants to know what it's strengths and weaknesses are, an honest discussion should be had, but it should be limited to the facts at hand. i.e. Does Carrara have dynamic clothes All this negativity about what DAZ is or isn't doing is all speculation. As Holly recently pointed out, there was a major recession and everybody has had to tighten their belts to survive. To me it's a given that development has slowed.
My personal view is that it's not a bad thing to want the improvements, but do we need a new thread every week, rehashing the same things over and over? Things that are generally pure speculation? Don't you think someone coming here looking for information about Carrara could get scared away? You don't see any danger of creating a self fulfilling prophecy?
I say, if someone asks about Carrara and wants to know what it's strengths and weaknesses are, an honest discussion should be had, but it should be limited to the facts at hand. i.e. Does Carrara have dynamic clothes All this negativity about what DAZ is or isn't doing is all speculation. As Holly recently pointed out, there was a major recession and everybody has had to tighten their belts to survive. To me it's a given that development has slowed.
And Europe is still in a recession. I live in the Detroit area and the auto business has been coming back here in the USA, but we hear almost every day on the news how the auto companies are hurting in Europe... all of them. The guy who used to own the mocap site, Eclipse Studios, said a couple years ago that most of his sales came from Europe and they were way down, and that's for mocaps working mostly with V4/M4 and older sets for V3/M3. It was a fraction of the business DAZ does, but we are talking about many of the same kind of customers for DAZ so their sales to European customers are probably down, too. So a slow economy is probably making DAZ do what they can with the resources they have. I know I couldn't buy much of anything until the latter part of last year. And this year is still slow.
I don't think anyone has come down on making improvements, but often times people will blurt out the render engine stinks or whatever, and those of us who have learned better know that's not true. I used to think that way, but not anymore. And Evil is right. We don't need a new thread continually re-hashing what has gone before. It's almost to a point where I can copy and paste my previous responses. It is silly. Now if someone has some real things that DAZ can do and specific examples then fire away. But keep in mind that much of what we like about Carrara will not convert or render in some spiffy new render engine. The shaders, lights will not and hair will not at all. It's better to learn what Carrara can do and what the numerous plugins can do -- DT's sets, Tim Payne's GI fakes, Digital Carvers', Inagoni's, Fenric's and Sparrowhawke's to name a few.
Well said Kevin.
I'm no Polly Anna, and I believe in truth in advertising, but having been through the down years at Apple, I can tell ManStan and Kodiak, things come back- Sometimes with a vengeance. Granted, DAZ and Apple are completely different, but FUD is FUD and all it does is scare away potential users, thus shrinking the customer base even further. Apple hired a person specifically to counteract the FUD, an Evangalista. DAZ clearly doesn't have that luxury, so if a few of us here evangelize Carrara and are truthful about it's abilities, then expect comments in the gloom and doom type threads to try and counteract the negative speculation.
Render engine "improvements" that I'd lrather see would be an overhaul of the NPR. We need to be able to control the NPR effects with shader zones and fall off... Also all post effects need to be multi-threaded. Back in the RayDream days there was a render plugin called Pen and Ink or Sketch or something similar.... It was very nice! Our current NPR choices are more watercolor-y... It's not an effect I want to go for.
The HDR IBL could use some sort of "smoothing" or "averaging" that would help it be faster without the ashiness. I'm not a fan of HDR IBL, but when it works it looks great with no setup time (just a few buttons). I definitely don't want a completely different render engine created by DAZ (since they have never released a program with an original render engine), but better hooks to other renderers so we can get 3rd-part plugins would be awesome! But DAZ, don't touch the Ray Dream engine...
In the meantime, Carrara users need to just start adding falloff to every shader and (coincidentally) falloff to every light. It's ALL about the falloff. Pity there is no built-in falloff shader. Honestly you cannot do any sort of realism without it. Buy SHADER OPS at DCG. Don't hesitate. Go buy it.
Now that's what I'm talking about. Definitely well spelled out, Holly -- things DAZ CAN do!
It's not so much carrara I have issues with ;)
Well, I've never considered myself one of the doomsayers. To those who don't want complaints on the forums for fear of scaring others off I ask: where SHOULD we complain? I'm not complaining about Carrara, my complaints are about DAZ. Simple fact: when you say a new beta will be out within days and then say nothing for over 7 months, that is reason for customers to be upset.
As for specific improvements to Carrara I'd like to see: access to other render engines, fluid dynamics, improved particle system (current isn't bad, but has its limitations), ability to "clothify" content clothing (how long has Poser had that feature?), and perhaps a few shader tweaks. Carrara's shader engine is wonderful, but stuff like map support for SSS has been wanted for a while.
This is the Carrara forum. People discuss things related to Carrara here whether it's positive, negative, artistic, technical, or whatever. Just don't tell people not to complain when they have a valid reason to do so.
And like I said, please don't consider me a doomsayer. I figure the announcement will be Carrara 9, probably with a couple of new things. I just don't like people pretending that Carrara is a state-of-the-art piece of software when it's not or that DAZ has not done wrong (a little) by their customers.
If your gonna copy and paste line and beat on people about it, get it right, eh?
I was responding to the post just before that. Pardon the slight OT, but if you read it back... very slight.In that sense, you were probably there with the Kawasaki sitting in the back of your pickup. So the head mechanic comes out and goes, "Hmmm '87 eh? Nice bike. Was a Kawi mech for years before I took this job"
Damn straight. I'm the last of the doom sayers, and that is simply because I am the most stubborn of the bunch.
Do I want newer features in carrara that some apps have had for years? Sure. Do I want bugs fixed and features improved? Well of coarse. Do I want to be left in the dark for months on end with nothing to do but speculate due to the complete lacking of information?
Hell no.
So yes, I'm going to drop this right on DAZ's feet. If we were kept informed we would have nothing to speculate about. Not saying this is the case, but I would think much more highly of DAZ if some one had just come out to begin with and said due to the bad economy and the slow down in sales DAZ has had to lay off some personal and carrara development will have to moth balled for the foreseeable future. And there you go, nothing to speculate about, no guessing whats up, no asking every week or so what is happening. If anything it would serve as encouragement to do something to boost carrara sales, so DAZ could get back on track with it.
But that is speculation as well. there is little bad news DAZ could give us that could be worse then the speculation.
Guilty.
"Information!"
"Information! NOW!"
I guess you're right. Perhaps some people DO buy software just to expect it to be updated/upgraded at regular intervals.
Just reading through this post has all the evidence of it. Pick a smallish company, because they're certain to have limited resources, Buy their product and wait. Well, I'd like to say, "Thanks for your patience", but...
Sorry. Wrong room. I bought Carrara to make art. Is that down this hall?
Dart, you're really missing my point.
I use Carrara to make art as well. However, I don't expect it to stay the way it is. I've been with Carrara since version 5. After getting a new version ever year and a half or so, DAZ has set a precedence. They have said "We will update this program." As recently as last July, they've said we will get 8.5, and at a reasonable price.
Why is is expecting them to follow through a problem? I love Carrara and love using it, but with a resounding YES, expect them to update it.
There are a couple ways to complain. "Hey this doesn't work, isn't there a way to do it?" is fine and dandy. "DAZ better fix this or all hell's gonna break loose," is the other. The first one is on every software forum around and perfectly accepatble. The second one is to a degree, but it doesn't do any good complaining like that here as we are the only people seeing it (along with potential customers) - not DAZ. They generally do not read the forums and I would hope they wouldn't as they have work to do. The second one also generates boat loads of negativity and turns off potential customers. Hey, all the negativity on the Vue forums drove me away from there. I haven't upgraded in years feeling I'd never get help from that forum and would have to pay to get help from eon All the negativity here a few years ago convinced me I had wasted my money so I stopped trying to learn and do things in Carrara (I have limited time and energy from a crazy work schedule and don't want to waste what little I have) until I finally came across some great renders and Howie's stuff, and found out the idiots that had been posting negative crap didn't know what they were talking about.
There are degrees of everything. I would say most of the real negative folks are long gone, but we do get visits from new trolls from time to time. I would also say here that I don't consider JoeMama a troll like some do as he generally knows what he's talking about. But he's in the camp, like you, saying Carrara is falling way behind, when in reality it's been way ahead on some things and is just a little behind now (I read a new software package feature list from a couple of the big guys and was surprised they were just getting a couple things Carrara has had for a long time). It just needs some love to spiff those features up. Sales of the software will get that from DAZ. Negative comments turn off potential buyers. No buyers means no Carrara love from DAZ. You don't have to be sunshine, lollipops and rainbows, but much of the negative comments here have been pointless. Another thread moaning about DAZ not talking to us is pointless. You know they won't until there's something to say. That won't change. Constructive comments are much better.
Now for the SSS map thing, you can do something similar with the MultiChannelMixer trick, save render times and get great results right now without an upgrade. Look for posts from jt411 and his examples: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2859803
I still maintain that there is a ton of untapped potential in Carrara and we just haven't figured out how to do it. JoeMama's gone on about the fire in Blender... well I bet there's a better way to do it in Carrara, just nobody has taken the time to figure out how. Blender's fire looks nice but there are a lot of steps to get there. I have a hunch it can be done much more quickly and simply in Carrara. The reason I say that is I bought a fire tutorial for messiah, and found that Wegg was basically adding particles to special rotating geometry. He also made a flame thrower that was not in the tute, but knowing what I know now, it was probably geometry related as well. That whole process was long and involved but I bet Cripeman could make it very simply as Carrara is not as complex as messiah and has a modeler. If I had more time and skill I probably could, too. I might just try it some time. Fluids are there, but they could probably be improved with some testing and tweaks nobody has taken the time to do. I downladed a freebie from Age of Armour's site but haven't tweaked it yet. Somebody recently ooohed and ahhhed about some plugin to make oceans and it got me thinking, maybe it could be done with animated terrains in Carrara because that's what it basically looked like to me... an animated mountain range... don't know if it's possible, but maybe someone will try it. A lot of stuff in the past was harder because computers were behind speed wise, but some folks here have blazingly fast machines and they could be cutting edge trying the stuff that was thought to be impossible in the past.
If DAZ was reading this, my suggestion has already been mentioned many times before, but multi-thread more of the current single-thread features.
I gotta agree with ManStan and Kodiak3D on this one. I've oft said with them "DAZ, please tell us something. Even if the news isn't sunshine and lollipops...just keep us in the loop and stop the baseless speculation and paranoia."
There you go again! Getting me to spend money at DCG! (I know it is a worthwhile investment though) ;)
I gotta agree with ManStan and Kodiak3D on this one. I've oft said with them "DAZ, please tell us something. Even if the news isn't sunshine and lollipops...just keep us in the loop and stop the baseless speculation and paranoia."
I'm not sure the baseless speculation and especially paranoia would ever go away, even if DAZ spoke to us daily. ;)
Agree with Kodiak... Saying there will be a new beta in a few days then FIRING our project manager and not saying anything for the next 8 months is not winning any confidence from customers.... Carrara usually comes out every 18months or so. This has been quite a wait. C8 came out in 2010...? or was it 2009?
I think one of the DCG terrain plugins can do this: animated displacement. It's the one that adds map data and Terragen import and has it's own terrain primitive....
I think one of the DCG terrain plugins can do this: animated displacement. It's the one that adds map data and Terragen import and has it's own terrain primitive....
I'll have to check that plugin out, Holly. Thanks!
I purchased Carrara 7 Pro upgrade December 31, 2008 and upgraded to Carrara 8 Pro on January 3, 2011. Those can't be too far off the release dates but maybe they are. I know there was a time when I held back.
I just have a different view, is all. Sure I'll install twelve tons of stone at a person's house - tweak it to a perfection nobody cares about anymore. They want me to come back the next year and do some more.
I have some software, not mentioning any names, that is always pestering me about an update. I don't like that so much. Big difference, I know.
I bought Carrara what, Five years ago? Six? Can't remember. But I bought Carrara for what it was when you first bought it. I got 6 Pro instead, but I never got a chance to install it because I was blessed with getting 7.2 pro before 6 came in the mail. This was FAR beyond my expectations - and I've been pleased ever since. Not trying to lead the cheer, yet... just explaining my place in this.
That purchase was amazing, not just because of the Killer software, but because of my good pals at Daz. At which point, I know that I thought the DazDell was a Daz employee! He's the one that sent me the link to the book that scored me C6 Pro, Hexagon, D|S 2.3 and a very large slew of figures and props - not to mention the nice book.
Daz gave me so much free stuff with that transaction. Well, I bought a nice pile as well. As long as I've been here, Daz3d has been holding up their end of the bargain. They really don't "owe" anybody an explanation towards who they fire, or who they talk to about it. That's nobody's business but theirs and the person or peoples involved. When Daz "Cut Back" many of those people are still here. But instead of being on the payroll, they've become freelancers - very much to their benefit.
Where is Blaine, and what's he up to? I don't know. Here's a nice video he made for D|S. In loving memory of our Captain in Chief, Here's The Dragon Slayer by Blaine Furner
Yes Kevin I get your point, but only to a point. I have always been pretty vocal about Daz's lack of communication and its pretty easy to complain about as there is little most of the time. Hardly any. So its only natural that folks are going to speculate in the quiet times as they have nothing else to grasp upon. I would argue that the silence Daz shows is way more detrimental to sales and potential sales then a few people complaining about said silence.
And the vast majority of serious folks here are not expecting huge things here. We just would like a little tidbit now and then. And it can be even disappointing news like ----"we have had loses in our development staff and this is going to alter what we can do and how long it will take so the beta will be delayed 6 more months " or "due to recessionary pressures we have to lengthen the point upgrade timeframe to 2 years please be patient. " --simple short things like this ----just a little bit of concern for your customer base and future customer base. This way as Manstan has said there is no speculation just facts. (Imagine that) .
As far as Carrara ------most folks who use it --love it. Love it loads. It does not do everything on a pro level but it does a lot of things at a pro level and a lot of things close and a lot of things better than those high priced alternatives. Its maybe not going to win the INDY 500 as it were but its an amazing sports car to tool around in none the less.
The thing is -----with a few well targeted improvements -----alot of folks would be happy. At its price point it does not have to "compete" or be equal with the high price 3d packages but it does have to maintain its ease of use and speed of use over cheaper alternatives.
rich
So, when people are nice in their asking, sure I'll come back the following year and build them new creations. But the one's who are argumentative and never satisfied, they can call someone else. Cool thing, that... there ain't nobody else does what I do.
Maybe it has something to do with the forums. Maybe it was here that the team said, "You know what? this is slowing us down more that the help we were looking to get" and decided to keep the clamps on it.
No company, unless under written terms, has an obligation to report their operations to the public. This beta is intended to be a way of finding quirks in conjunction with various system build, OS versions, video card support - it helps find bugs as they are born. Aside from that, it is a courtesy that the company offer such a service. In many cases, like Project Dogwaffle, for instance, where the betas are close to a special focus group who agrees in advance to do what the devs want them to do with the beta.
Instead of talking about lack of communication here, where it will already be lost in a multi-page thread they won't read, why not send them an e-mail or snail mail letter. I would, but I don't care that badly as I can't afford to upgrade for a few weeks at the earliest and more likely a few months.
The thing is——-with a few well targeted improvements——-alot of folks would be happy. At its price point it does not have to “compete” or be equal with the high price 3d packages but it does have to maintain its ease of use and speed of use over cheaper alternatives. You got that right, Rich. So many people who have purchased Carrara are not here at the forums. Maybe they saw and left, or never actually signed up in the first place. I own several software packs to which I've never joined their forum.
This is the only forum I am signed up to. But I came to help - not to hinder. So if I start getting too passionate about my love for Daz3d as a company, the excellent Artists they publish, or the wonderful Software they share (at prices like this, who can argue...), please understand that I'm not argumentative by nature. I get that from my big bully brother. :shut:
At this point I don't know if I prefer a sale to an eager software house rather than wait 2 years or more for a release...