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Carrara doesn't have the scope of Blender, but it is impressive. The manual is downloadable for free, so consider checking it out.
While we're singing praises:
Carrara's "working box" is an extremely useful tool. You know the grid DS shows by default as the floor plane? The working box is like three of those, one for each axis, touching to form the corner of a box. And the sides of the box don't just sit there like DS's floorplane; they are actively useful. When you select an object, its orthographic projection appears like a shadow on each of the three planes, and you can work with the object's shadows to pose or place it. It's like having the benefit of a four-viewport screen all at once: perspective + front/side + left/right + top/bottom, all at once, filling the screen. And it works better than DS's orthographic viewports because you can still orbit around your subject and see it from any angle. And you can control the whether and how the working box's planes are drawn so they don't get in your way. And you can move it wherever you need it to be and choose whether it aligns with world coordinates or your object's local geometry.
I like having the ability to drag-and-drop to create shader presets. This works for individual surfaces and for the complete shader setup for the entire model.
I haven't actually tried animation yet--still learning how to port characters from DS--but I believe you can create real keyframes, to enable pose-to-pose animation; and you can set up your render settings to render animation very quickly; and if you don't like the timing of actions in the resulting clip, Carrara makes it easy to adjust the timing by stretching out or compressing a selected group of keyframes.
DAZ studio is very good at what it does, loading and rendering DAZ content.
for those just wanting to do that.
For more you need other programs and Carrara has more tools than anything else that can load DAZ and Poser content natively.
Other softwares require FBX import or other exported formats be it 3Dstudio MAX or Blender though they are now making a duf importer but whether one can load clothes poses etc on figures from your library like in Carrara I doubt.
The exported content loses a lot of native functionality .
As much as I love iClone this too suffers this limitation .
DAZ content needs to be exported set up clothed morphed etc.
Carrara I can load bits from the library like DAZ studio and change it as well as tweaking in the vertex room adding my effects, dynamic hair, arranging my replicated rustling trees on my created terrain, moving my volumetric clouds around running my physics sims and using my full keyframe editor to shift, stretch , oscillate, reverse keyframes.
For me there is just nothing else like it, while not caring if it cannot be open sourced even if DAZ wanted to, I care very much if it was no longer supported and is one reason my buying of content has ground to a sudden halt after spending well over 12K in the past (was 12K in fact 3 years ago too afraid to add it up now).
I am now working on re inventing what I have and am trying to learn Blender and Zbrush but believe me one stuff gets out of DAZ studio which for me is mostly a way to convert DAZ content, it rarely returns even for iray.
Eevee may eliminate that totally once I get a handle on it meanwhile I have Octane render and also the Carrara plugin which I primarily use.
Not gonna happen. At least for Studio.
And the reason is this:
DAZ would lose control over whether it supports DAZ's new content, which means if they develop a G9, there may not be any software out there that supports it. And nobody would buy G9. Not good.
Diomede,
Okay, that's fair. There's a list of things Carrara does that Studio doesn't.
But on the other hand, given the choice for Studio users between going to Carrara or Blender, I can't imagine that, given the vast difference in quality of those features in Blender vs. Carrara, that many people would choose Carrara. I mean, plants and particles and replicators and so on. There's really no contest, IMO. For plants alone just look at the stuff that blenderguru provides compared to what you get in Carrara. Certainly no expert, but from what I've seen it's a world of difference.
Blender has posing, rigging, and rendering. Daz should fire its Studio programmers. No reason to spend resources to compete with free. Everyone should just go use Blender.
As for the quality of carrara's plants, terrains and outdoor sets, check out Daz's stuff by Howie Farkes, MMoir, Dartanbeck, and TangoAlpha. Daz sells these. Daz gets no revenue from Blender guru.
(Edit: and Carrara has the tools to make these yourself, rather than just buy them)
https://www.daz3d.com/howiefarkes
https://www.daz3d.com/mmoir
https://www.daz3d.com/tangoalpha
1) Several of Carrara's technology may be proprietary Daz IP, say in the way it (and Studio) "handles" the Genesis X characters. Giving out that information in the public domain, lets just say, won't be in Daz's best interest.
2) Besides, Daz may not have full control on all the internal dependencies. Some of the libraries may have been developed by 3rd parties. Their agreement may prevent them from releasing those dependencies in the public domain. That would be a breach of contract.
3) Who would support the Carrara's code base? Without good documentation of the internal code structures and community support from original authors how would one navigate through the codebase without getting frustrated. Moreover can you imagine the stink from a codebase that has not been actively maintained for several years?
4) Even assuming that it somehow gets open sourced, what would be the business model that would keep it alive? Would it be able to compete with Blender in terms of its features and the ecosystem? How would it attract developers?
Honestly, with sufficient development skills, one may have better chances at finding/implementing a functionality on top of Blender than asking for Carrara to be open sourced. And without sufficient development skills...
I haven't used Carrara, probably never will. Give me a good reason why a new artist should pick up Carrara given the choices available today. May be its the way Carrara does certain things that folks have been comfortable with - the nostalgia factor. Or may be its the paranoia of losing existing investment in Daz/Carrara related products due to lack of sufficient interoperability with other tools. This is the era of specialization and choice when it comes to tools. Given the right amount of interoperability across tools, anything that could be done in Carrara (or Daz Studio for that matter) can also be done in more specialized tools. The question is how far would Daz allow that?
I have edited this several times trying to prevent my responses from reading as hostile. In the following, I do not mean to sound hostile.
Not sure you read my original post. I was asking them to think about what harm it would do to let Carrara fans add support for later-generation unencrypted content and maybe thereby make DAZ content attractive to a wider audience. Nobody asked them to update it for Genesis 8 and then give us all the code. Of course the product contains DAZ IP, and the original question was, if they can't monetize that IP with proprietary Carrara, why not release it so as to open a new market for the sale of content.
You seem to be suggesting that library vendors don't want DAZ to publicly say "we link with library x." How often have you bought from software companies who absolutely positively don't want any new customers ever?
Of course, like I already said, if vital parts of Carrara's actual source code aren't owned by DAZ, it could be game over for the open-source idea.
Yep. And because maybe it might not work out, a great product should be left to die?
There is no business model keeping Carrara alive. That's the entire problem.
Carrara will never compete with Blender, and nobody is suggesting it should. It's not an either/or situation.
The thing is, it doesn't look like Blender or other programs will ever easily, natively support DAZ content. I had my credit card out and was ready to fork over $500 - $700 to Reallusion for iClone in order to animate DAZ characters, but the import program they charge actual cash money for doesn't do much of anything for you, and it cannot read the native DAZ files; instead it relies on a crappy FBX export of the model. And still I would've bought it, except I tested my first human character and found the clothing sank right into the character's body. DAZ content doesn't "just work" in iClone. In Carrara, it either works or the tools to adjust it are right there in the program, and in fact Carrara is one of the programs you can use to create morphs to fix clothing in iClone. But if step 1 is "pay over half a grand for iClone" and step 3 is "go to Blender or Carrara and..." then it seems to me the smart thing to do is skip step 1.
So now I'm working to learn both Carrara and Blender at the same time. I love Blender. I adore it and cannot wait for Eevee! But Carrara has great features and ideas, and its separation of activities into focused "rooms" makes it more approachable for learners. And—this cannot be overemphasized—alone among affordable 3D content-creation apps, it can load and use all this DAZ content we've purchased. Therefore I'd rather cast about for some way to save it rather than searching for speculative reasons not to.
Carrara totally competes with Blender and I'd suggest anyone frustrated by Blender's interface to spend the rather minimal $60 when Carrara is on sale to get it.
It's not nostalgia, it does a lot of good stuff cheap with a very approachable UI.
If anything, one of its biggest problems is that it's -perceived- as dead.
Genesis 3/8 may not be that different from earlier generations of Daz characters. A good portion of the technology is still common with earlier generations. Giving that information out would mean giving out a portion of Genesis 8 IP to the public that could be possibly be beyond what is restricted through the official API. Daz IP is not just limited to the software part of Carrara but also in the Genesis X character system (such as the way it approaches morphs).
I never said that. If Daz distributed the dependent libraries freely in the public domain then the original vendors (assuming they still exist) of those libraries would not be able to resell them or renegotiate with potential clients. Also Daz may not want to disclose the associated libraries due to several factors (such as fear of criticism for using obsolete technology, or fear of users leveraging shortcomings/known hacks for that library etc.) One possible approach might be to sanitize the codebase by removing such dependencies before releasing in public domain but how much of original functionality would remain usable is anybody's guess.
Oh, greater products have gone down that path. Nothing new for those who are familiar how some M&A goes. Sometimes, we just need to accept the inevitable. Assuming Daz has a limited development capacity, I would expect them to focus on a single core product rather than spare resources on multiple overlapping products. Rememeber, Daz is NOT a pure software development house whose core revenue source is software licensing.
See what I mean by right amount of interoperabilty? The problem is, even if you spend thousands of dollars in other software you may not be able to get the same level of functionality using the Genesis X character system outside Studio and othe Daz products. Whether its by deliberate design or business strategy or both is a topic for another discussion.
As far as I understand, the focus of Daz is to drive consumer interest into Daz Studio and not get that interest diluted across multiple products which provide overlapping functionalities. When it comes to maintenance and growth, overlapping functionality is a huge burden. Imagine implementing the same new features on two different codebases. Daz development team would have its own roadmap and priorities based on their capacity and business goals (the later being more important). Again, the revenue from Carrara licensing doesn't seem substantial, so I doubt if they would bother to spare any further resources on it given the challenges it would involve in open-sourcing it. However, it might continue its forseable future in the store as deal fodder.
I mean, here's workflow for doing a Daz morph:
Open Daz, load figure, switch it to Base resolution, make any scaling adjustments (like scaling) you want to build from. You can add in other morphs if they are merchant resources or if you are only doing this for personal use.
You don't have to, but sometimes it's useful to go into geometry editor and group compatible surfaces, so that fingernails and arms are in the same surface. Depends -- for morphs you might want stuff broken out more so you have finer control, but for painting consolidation is better.
Export as obj (switch on Collapse UV for G3 and G8)
Open Carrara, create new doc, import obj with auto position and scaling off.
Select obj, click wrench (modeling) tab at top.
Drag select some vertices, turn on symmetry.
Upper left has fairly understandable basic tools with pop ups telling you what they are. The camera is a little fiddly but it's visually communicative.
Most adjustments have numerical options, so you can move or scale by typing in an absolute number or percent. You can change whether move is world coordinate or by selection (great for moving stuff out or in).
There's also an incredibly useful soft selection control in upper right pane that lets your adjustments 'spread' from your selection.
Then there's the usual grow/shrink/loop/between control, also in upper right, which are clearly labeled.
Also most of these things have key commands if you like that.
When done, export, and you have a morph target.
modo has posing, rigging, and rendering but I still use DS - it's a dedicated tool that makes the tools for the tasks it performs readily available, while modo is a (fairly) full 3D suite with multiple tools competing for UI "space". The same would be true of Blender. It isn't always true, but often having a set of dedicated tools is more efficient in use than having a single do-it-all tool.
When I look at the About Carrara, it's a list of developers, QAs, program managers, and so on that's a pretty big team of people they hired to update Carrara to 8.5. i don't think that could is in that bad a shape as far as begin ready to update the Genesis 3 and Genesis 8 compatibility. I think also that it would be nice if the DAZ API for DAZ Studio functionality were properly bundled up and packaged in an API so that Carrara, Hexagon, and Bryce could be updated to be DAZ Studio API compliant and the program specific things to those programs simply maintained and updated with newer tech to do those things when their staff or some open source person or group come up with better techniques or more efficient techniques, like parallelizing and and such. When you use DIM and and install both the DAZ Studio Release and the DAZ Studio Public Beta you can see that they maintain multiple code bases and multiple dynamic libraries for linking both DAZ Studio and all the pluglins. I would not be surprised, if DAZ 3D has any interest in salvaging their investment in Hexagon, Bryce, and Carrara, that they are updating those code bases also to be similarly linked against some DAZ 3D API.
As with any "which software is better" discussion, there really isn't a right answer. I think it comes down to what people need, and more importantly, what they like. One software may have a lot more and better features, but not everyone NEEDS those features. So the additional features become irrelevent. LIke with me and ZBrush. Yeah, it's got some incredible strengths, but I don't really need those features, and I'm also unwilling to figure out the poor UI.
And what we're used to and comfortable with can be vastly more important than a feature list, even if we actually need those additional features. I've had cases where I like some particular software, but never felt the need to investigate others. And in some cases, when I actually do investigate the others I'll get blown away with "WOW, why didn't I do this sooner?". Like with the Comic Life app I just found out about. Saved me a ton of time banging my head in Photoshop.
And yeah, sometimes I'll consider some software as kind of a perfect child who can do no wrong, so don't even try to convince me otherwise
Although I'm not quite there yet with Blender. Still a love-hate because all the times I have to run off and find videos of how to do simple things. Although when we finally get an awesome and solid GoB interface between Studio and Blender it will be love-love
I think, if you are good in software development, why not to change the blender interface to mimic the Carrara one?
I believe that source code for blender is publically, easily available.
That's a good point Artini. Actually you can do a lot with the Python scripting which can be very quick and easy, and you don't even need to know much Python. I use that a lot. Not necessarily to match Carrara, but to make it more intuitive for me, and automate some counter-intuitive tasks.
Dual Quaternion skinning isn't unique to DAZ Studio; it's also implemented in Unity and several other game engines, plus other applications.
Nobody said anything about DAZ releasing any other company's IP in source code form; in fact, except in the case of Open Source applications, someone that licenses IP does not get the source to the library itself. They generally are given header files with function calls into the library that can then be linked when compiling the application.
Yeah, this wasn't meant to be a "which software is better" discussion. I just hope that Carrara will be actively maintained as a choice for those people for whom is is the best fit.
@timmins.william, thanks for the checklist of steps to create a morph. I'm sure that will be helpful in the future.
For my part I just wanted to let people know that Carrara isn't some archaic barely functional old program.
I am really glad that someone's getting close to my point. When it comes to something like DQS, maybe the core algorithm is in public domain in different flavors of implementation. But Daz may not be comfortable with sharing their own optimizations (assuming any) to it. Do you honestly believe that the full rigging capabilities of Genesis X and Studio are fully available through their APIs or any of the export formats it supports? There is a certain level of implementation that daz has chosen to retain proprietary that could possibly leak along with source codes. Last I checked, they were trying to create an entire business segment around their character system. With API based approach they have greater control (at a technical level) on how much functionality they are willing to expose. By releasing source code, they lose much of that advantage.
EDIT: On second thoughts, if you are hoping that open sourcing Carrara would allow independent developers to incorporate DQS in Carrara to support Genesis 3 and higher, then it would counter Daz's goal of driving user interest towards Studio - something they may not appreciate. Think of all those ambitious business plans they have/had with Connect.
That would be the case for dynamically linked libraries. What if there are static linkings? What if Daz had licensed the source code for those libraries to make modifications/optimizations of their own? What if Daz does not have the authority to "re-distribute" those 3rd Party header files in their own capacity? We do not know the licensing terms that Daz has/had for those libraries. Again, without actually knowing what those dependencies are in the first place, the arguements we throw here are only going to sound speculative.
Hi, I hardly ever use Studio unless I absolutely have to, and I user Carrara all the time, but fascinated with this process and may be able to use it to solve geografting issues in Carrara, can you tell the next step of what to do when you've got the morph you want in place? I'm assuming you export it from Carrara as an obj and then re import into Studio, but not sure how you turn it into a morph on the original figure (I'm not familiar with what to do with morph targets... or even what a morph target is, if I'm being honest :) ).
Accidental double post, pls ignore.
@Jonstark - you can find a walkthrough here.
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/2373941/#Comment_2373941
If you want to do it for later Daz figures (G3 and G8), just use Misty's character conversion.
I started off Daz Stuido.
2 years ago, when I wanted to go deeper, creating my own assets, I had two choices.
One was Carrara. The other was Blender.
The big adventage of Carrara was an easy way to use Daz assets but, even at that time, it was clear to me that Carrara was dead. Not wanting to spend time on learning a seemingly dead application, I ultimately went with Blender.
Since I never really tried hard enough to learn Carrara, I don't know which one is better, but I certainly do not regret learning Blender.
Diomede, that's awesome thanks just what I was looking for :)
While making Carrara Open Source may seem like a way to keep Carrara alive, I have serious doubts that enough people with the proper talent/skills to keep it alive would actually be interested enough to work on it. Blender has been very successful as an Open Source project, but it has had serious developer/user/financial backing, and these key ingredients were quite well established went it went fully open source. Other than users, Carrara has none of the other key factors to keep it alive were it to go open source. If you were interested in developing for a 3D open source project, would you chose Blender or Carrara (if it were open source).
If you really want Carrara to "survive", it might be better to contact DAZ 3D, and see if they would be willing to add G3/G8 support, and a few select enhancements, if there was sufficient outside funding to do so. If they felt that would be an amicable situation (and gave you an approximate $$$ amount needed), then you could start a go fund me campaign to raise the needed capital to improve Carrara. I think though, that it might be easier to find interest and support with a go fund me campaign for someone to develop a utility to use DAZ assets and content libraries directly within Blender, much like you can with Carrara. Blender has a much larger user base, and there may be a significant number of people that would like the convenience of using DAZ content in Blender to speed up their work flow. You would also have the interest of people who use DS, but want to take their 3D "vision" to the next level, but don't want to invest the effort in Carrara because of it's lack of development. You would also have many (most?) Carrara users who are frustrated by DAZ's lack of support and development, and would love to move to a another full featured package without loosing their investment in DAZ content (or the ease of use of that content)
Just a thought, which is probably not worth a whole lot, but thought I might throw it here out anyway.
The prospect of crowdfunding its development seem interesting assuming Daz would be interested in exploring in that direction. Seeing how tight lipped they are with the future of Carrara, I guess it would not be easy to pursuade them merely through that. Its not just the initial development costs, but also about supporting new features across both Studio and Carrara in future. Assuming that neither of these have a significant licensing revenue of their own, I am not sure if their existing revenue streams (say, from content sales) would be able to sustain development teams across two different products in the long run.
If even possible, it would not doubt have to be a recuring event to keep funding flowing for future development. That is why I think the Blender option might be more viable.
Blender grew out of a necessity for a modeling tool that the community could nurture and grow by themselves. It made a promise to the community to release its IP in a free and fair manner which played a crucial role in garnering interest and subsequent investments. How much would Carrara (as open source) appeal without its Genesis component and that too especially in the mature ecosystem of Blender? Because, I seriously doubt if Daz would be willing to relinquish any further control over the Genesis series.
If I were to put my money on crowdfunding a 3D initiative, it would be to develop a Genesis like ecosystem (including a less restrictive character system with compatibilty across the Genesis series) around Blender. That way the community would not be divided as to where they should invest - Carrara or Blender. Plus, with a liberal character system with support for rich diversity of Daz store assets, there could be much better adoption and interest across various fields - VR/AR, gaming, simulation etc.
EDIT: I know MakeHuman already exist. Just feel that it could use a little more acceptability and compatibility with the Genesis X series.
I say this as someone who has ported and used the Geneses in Blender and loves Blender... passionately. No. Just no. There are quite a few DS features that Blender (and other programs as well) doesn't not have that make working with the Genesis ecosystem possible including, but not limited to: the way DS handles morphs such that they require no memory until they are dialed in, auto transfer of morphs to fitted clothing, being able to auto-adjust rigs to morphs and store that information easily with the morph, clothes having a separate rig that follows the main rig, and drivers that are quick and easy to set up. All of these features are necessary for the Geneses to function as they ought.