To 8.5.204 or not to 8.5.204
Box8068_31c338ee4b
Posts: 292
I'm a happy Carrara 8.1 user. I am surprised by so few 8.5.204 comments.
How is it? I assume no news is good news?
In any event I use Carrara for Technical animations so I don't use Human figures, Hair, Cloth or Genesis.
Just objects I model myself. 8.1 is stable for me. Any features in 8.5 I am missing that are not genesis related, that make
Carrara more enjoyable?
Thanks
8068
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Comments
Hmm. I have been mostly using 8.5.204 for figures, including Genesis, so I can't really answer the question. My understanding is that the only new features in 8.5 are Genesis-related. [EDIT: My understanding was wrong. See 3DAGE's helpful post below].
What I can say is that 8.5 is a lot more stable than previous betas. In my experience, it's also more stable than 8.1 (I'm on a Mac). I had one crash trying to render an outsize (3200 x 2400) scene, and I've had a few "An error occurred" messages. However, the error messages are now survivable: you can click 'OK' and move on, whereas in earlier versions they would lock the whole UI, making it impossible to do anything.
If you're happy with 8.1 and you don't need Genesis, you should probably stick with it. However, anyone who has tried earlier 8.5 betas and been disappointed should give 8.5.204 a try; it's definitely moving in the right direction.
some new additions to the C8.5 beta which you wont find in C8.1
Multi-layer material,. and multilayer element
these are two new shader options, which allow you to create a layered shader by using blending modes between layers like photoshop
A new "default" filter type for texture maps (fast mip-map)
this will give you reduced resolution textures in far away objects, and higher quality textures on objects close to the camera.
the drawback of this is that it's the "default", so bringing in a scene from C8 (where the default filter is "sampling") will mean that you'll need to adjust the filter method in 8.5 to allow the textures to show up.
There's a new feature in the Graph editor,.
you can click drag, an area to select key-frames, which creates a dashed line area around the selection.
then you can grab the rectangle area, and stretch or squash it to scale the key values, or grab a corner and pull/push to change the length of the keys,. You can also drag it across to Flip the entire selection, or drag the keys further along the time-line.
New light icons.
There are probably more differences, but I can't remember them all, but,. the point is that not ALL additions to 8.5 are purely for Genesis.
Each Beta release thread should summarise the changes from the last version.
:)
"Each Beta release thread should summarise the changes from the last version." 3DAGE
Agree.
Also the bullet physics has been updated. You can now use it to "soft cloth" clothes. Good for draping, not dynamic cloth though.
With all of the changes and fixes, I simply enjoy 8.5 beta over 8.1 hands down. Although I still think that 8.1 Pro, and 7 Pro, for that matter - even 6 Pro lol are excellent... but I just always feel cut short when I'm not using the beta now - as I've really come to like working in it. And I barely use Genesis at the moment - except for my orcs. But Genesis works really good in it - and will soon become my main masses of background folks inter mingling with Predatron's low rez folks...
At first I thought it was Genesis, but now it seems to be so with any figure: As I load a second model of the same type, it loads faster. I am overly pleased with how well Carrara can handle multitudes of animated figures with complex shaders in a single scene.
Also, with several requests for render engine changes and such, I really hope that they don't get rid of what we have. Enhance? Sure... if they feel that they must. But this is, hands down, my favorite render engine. There seem to be plugins that can get it up to snuff for what the requests are for... and I haven't even tried a render-enhancing plugin yet. I just can't see what anyone could find wrong with this engine. I love its speed and beautiful output.
I know that Carrara beta 8.5 has also been tweaked on OpenGL for making your scene building experience a bit smoother. It's still Carrara, in that respect. It's lack of real-time feedback doesn't really bother me. I think it keeps getting better... but I was fine with it all along. I guess it's because I like Carrara so much better than anything else. But I also get excited when the devs start messing with it. Aside from a few fairly botched releases (beta), (actually, I can only think of one really bad one, off hand) Carrara always seems to get better and better in the capable hands of Spooky's team. They do take Carrara's output and working experience very seriously, and this pleases me to no end. Heck I liked version 6 Pro! But 7 was better. Then 8 blew that away, and now the 8.5 beta is a clear improvement for a working environment, in my opinion. And Carrara is nearly the only thing I use a computer for - except for other stuff to enhance my Carrara endeavors.
I have not encountered ANY difference from the last 2 betas... except that I can now paste the temporary serial number into the registration field. :-P
However I'm on Mac osX.8 so I'll take whatever working version DAZ sees fit to allow me to use.... Lots of issues on C8.1 for Mac so I couldn't have stayed there even if Apple didn't update their os TWICE since the last new version of Carrara...
look whats coming -
http://poser.smithmicro.com/poser10-poserpro2014/?hq_e=el&hq_m=1042890&hq_l=4&hq_v=25513e7160
Sounds like a great plugin for Carrara! ;-P
Sounds like a great plugin for Carrara! ;-P
I think I only ever launched Poser 9 pro or whatever once to enter the serial number... :/
Sounds like a great plugin for Carrara! ;-P
Hmm, I watched some of the videos: the bullet softbody sim is quite impressive (needs tweaking; nothing more than Sparrowhawk's jiggle plugin), but painting weight maps so easily in the program itself? I'm not up to the latest improvements of Carrara Beta, but is there anything compareable in C 8.5?
Regarding Dynamic Clothing with Bullett: Smith Micro doesn't have to reinvent the wheel. So they could concentrate on stuff they had not. (Not to say that Poser dynamics is top notch; I have not enough experience on this and prefer Marveleous Designer.)
As I'm not into "realistic" renders: the new Poser realtime toon render doesn't look so bad, time and pictures will tell if it's better than the plugins for C or postwork.
So: "great plugin for Carrara" > no. Maybe something more. (I'll still wait for a better deal, 20%-off for an update is a joke.)
Hmm, I watched some of the videos: the bullet softbody sim is quite impressive (needs tweaking; nothing more than Sparrowhawk's jiggle plugin), but painting weight maps so easily in the program itself? I'm not up to the latest improvements of Carrara Beta, but is there anything compareable in C 8.5?
Can't speak to the rest of your post, but I've been rigging and weight painting in Carrara since I first bought Carrara at version 5. Admittedly I haven't rigged or weight painted in other programs, but what I've done with the different versions of Carrara has seemed intuitive and pretty stable.
Everybody
Thanks for the feedback. I'm pretty happy with 8.1 on a quad core win 7 Pro machine.
( though I do like some of the animation tweeks).
Thanks
8068
Hmm, I watched some of the videos: the bullet softbody sim is quite impressive (needs tweaking; nothing more than Sparrowhawk's jiggle plugin), but painting weight maps so easily in the program itself? I'm not up to the latest improvements of Carrara Beta, but is there anything compareable in C 8.5?
Regarding Dynamic Clothing with Bullett: Smith Micro doesn't have to reinvent the wheel. So they could concentrate on stuff they had not. (Not to say that Poser dynamics is top notch; I have not enough experience on this and prefer Marveleous Designer.)
As I'm not into "realistic" renders: the new Poser realtime toon render doesn't look so bad, time and pictures will tell if it's better than the plugins for C or postwork.
So: "great plugin for Carrara" > no. Maybe something more. (I'll still wait for a better deal, 20%-off for an update is a joke.)Carrara comes with a decent toon render option without a plugin - the plugins for toon look cool too. I just got the new YAToon plugin via Carrara Cafe, which is free. You can also render in several other artistic modes. The issue that some people have a hard time getting through are the many parameters neessary to provide a toon render that can encompass all of the various ways that you can make things look in Carrara - simply through shaders and lights. Remember that if realism is not what you're after, don't forget to get a bit less realistic with your lighting - forget what looks perfectly real, and just strive for what you think will look cool. You'll find that you can use non natural lighting techniques with good over saturated blasts from front and back, you can get a good artistic toon look using the photorealistic render setting. Use the Toon render option fulfilling its entire list of features once. Look it up in the excellent Carrara User's Manual that it comes with - and amaze at how powerul you are when you control its settings. You can create groups and difine their toon settings appropriate to other groups within the scene. This way you can use your lights techniques on the main characters, using very little toon effect, with the full, line drawings in the background - or the other way around - or another way entirely. It's incredibly powerful and fun to tweak with. you can even set it to omit the background entirely.
YaToon (free) looksfun and powerful too - and I've noticed that it spreads out throughout groups with separation options just like the two or three toon engines that Carrara comes with.
Sureit may take a lot of experimenting and discovery to finally create the look that you want. But by then you'll have the settings to use across the board as your own Toon default. Carrara is hands down the best in what it does. It does a lot more than what many people expect it to do - and what it can do directly out of the box is unique only to itself - and it has the variables to tweak into submission pretty much anything you need 3d software to do - with the exception of a few specific aches andpains - like dynamic cloth on figures and such. At least it's working with Optitex dynos vis Daz Studio now - and I've not tried the Poser script for getting dynos from that... but if it can't right now, I'm sure it will some day soon. But I know that the Daz Devs will get theon board Bullet library to work much better with dynamic cloth than what Poser can do. I hope.
Personally though, I still like the control that I get by using custom dynamic-style morphs for how I want the materials to behave.With the nice selection of tweeners that Carrara comes with, you can get some pretty natural (or sub natural) motions happening - with full predictability. The noise tweener using the third (last) control option (can't remember its name off hand) can be tweaked to get some relly subtle differences going on. With Fenrics key randomizer thingy... I just keep getting happier ;-)
Carrara is an aamazing tool in many ways. Add Poser and DS, Bryce, Hex... you've got a great circle of power in the 3d animation world - where someone with a lot less money and a good pile of ambition and imagination can turn out truly professional results. Truly - you've all seen it. Those workigs are from great artists and part time hobbyists alike. And then we get to a huge benefit that should never be under estimated:
The Render Engine
Nothing renders like Carrara. I have now seen how it can fall short on some super realistic options of some of the far more expensive engines - most of which can be added with inexpensive plugins. Animations can have some length to them if you like - because Carrara renders impressively quick - while ray tracing.
I built my own eight core Carrara machine. I've discovered that, while a really great and expensive graphics card might do the trick for the latest and greatest games, Carrara currently relies on the number of cores it can grab to render with. The more the merrier. Building the machine was most fun and even though it has a great motherboard, 16 GB RAM, Fermi class graphics with CUDA so I get great speed from Dogwaffle and a full array of large, silent fans running air in and out, High grade power supply, the whole thing was less thana grand, including Win7 and Sony Home Studio Platinum and a new mouse.
Carrara happily accepted it's new home and performance just deserves applause. I don't know if it's the low price, or that some people have been using Carrara and other thingsso long that some of it gets taken for granted - which is easy to do, since it is fully capable of doing so much... many folks within the industry seem to thumb their nose at Carrara. In truth, what many people refer to as outdated is actually a fully functional well thought out and laid out system. Adjusting shaders to create something that loks decent is super simple. But take a closer look through all f the options each shader channel is capable of. All of them. The many ways of arranging the channels and which channels you get andwhat they do is largely complete and always under utilized. There are several free and store bought recources that include shaders that provide example of other ways to complete a certain look of a material. With Daz3d pricing, you can actually learn a lot from some top notch pros at a very affordable pace.
Oh dear, look at the time....
Deleted
Had I written something about the render engine of Carrara?
I use Carrara primarily because it's fast and I can experiment with different setups of light (and shaders). If it was as slow as 3Delight or Lux (which are in the right hands at least up-to-par with Carrara; no let's say it: which are better) I would have given up 3D.
Animations only can have some length, if you don't use raytraced soft shadows; that's where shadow maps come in.
I never wrote in my post anything which deserves this patronizing. And DAZ got my share in low five-number digits. And I was announcing every new Carrara product - if not someone else did it - in this forum for some time so that everyone could take a look and decide if it's something to buy, to use, to study and to improve his/hers skills. But that's it; I will read posts in the future, but I'm done with posting until this forum is more like it was some time ago.
Well Frank,
I certainly was not attacking you, as it seems that you may have taken it to be.
I'm on pain killers and just babbling Carrara thoughts. I love your posts!
One trick I can think of for Alpha mapas while using toon, of any kind. Perhaps try removing them entirely.
It might mean that some cool shading in the actual texture map, and some experimenting with bumps
but toon shouldn't really require alpha. But that's just me babbling again. In a lot of pain and dizziness.
I think I like Poser. Nothing wrong with that. It seems that it would work nicely along side Carrara. Heck, It doesn't bother me if anyone chooses Poser over Carrara. I wouldn't... but my intents are likely different that everyone else.
Come on Frank... I'd never rip on your words. I was simply trying to add to them. I guess I thought that I got some really great results when I tried the on board Toon variations - and had a quite a bit of fun tweaking on it. Then I just decided to try Tooning with lights in the photorealistic render, which isn'y really toon, but I like the effect a lot.
That goes for everyone. There is nobody in this forum or out that I would ever mean disrespect to. Ever. That's my Brother's job! lol