Thank Carrara for Content!!!
Dartanbeck
Posts: 21,326
Carrara is an excellent piece of software. What is it that sets it apart from the rest of the pack? Lot's of things! Carrara is a "Jack of All Trades" that does most of what it does do very, very well. I bought Carrara because of the fact that it has modeling capabilities combined with easy "content" use. By content use, I'm talking about what some refer to as 'dollies' - 3d figure models for which many conforming support addons are made and are readily available. By modeling, I was talking about the ability to edit an existing mesh - more specifically - to correct what is called 'poke-through' from the parent model to its child, conformed addons.
Carrara stands pretty close to being all by itself in that regard. Just 'out-of-the-box', Carrara can simply open nearly anything sold at this store, and many others. No perusing through endless plugin sites, reading up on what steps must be taken before and after... no having to perform some special export. Things that are sold specifically for Bryce, Vue, or as a 'feature' of the other software (ei: Not a model - or set of models), as one would expect, generally only work for those targeted apps. But nearly all models and sets just open within Carrara.
Genesis has played a new role in all of this as it is actually developed for Daz Studio. Carrara 8.5 is a special release of the software aimed specifically towards bringing Genesis compatibility into Carrara. Although still in beta form as of this writing, it works really well, too. I also understand that Poser has set out to become less compatible with some of their new features, too. But I don't immediately recognize an issue with content sold on the market.
I was unaware of how truly amazing Carrara is when I first bought it. I was stunned by the promotional pages, pouring through the features in my mind as I anticipate the day when I could finally buy it - which didn't take to long since, unlike most of it's competition (?), Carrara wears a very comfortable price tag - even when it's not on sale. But what I really wanted is what I mentioned earlier. Content compatibility, and a means to change and/or fix it. I didn't know that I was getting a full blown materials workshop, or one of the fastest ray tracing render engines on the planet. I wasn't quite expecting the effort of lighting to be so much like how we would do it in the real world. Place, aim, adjust, etc., nor was I in the know of how powerful if is towards animations. I mean, everything in Carrara is set up to be easily, if not automatically, animated!
I bought Carrara for Content compatibility and the ability to make changes and corrections along the way. For what it's worth, I really like Poser and Daz Studio. I really like 3ds Max, and could really see getting used to the controls of Maya. I've never actually tried LightWave, but after reviewing a lot of the information about it, I know I would like that one too. But Carrara seems to stand nearly all alone in its ability to work with that main goal that I state at the beginning of this paragraph, so easily and effortlessly. I've heard that Cinema 4D has this capability as well. I doubt I'll ever find out. Why? because I've taken the plunge and stepped into the suite that is Carrara Pro! It will be a strange day, indeed, where I'll go looking for something else now! I like the idea of making my own movies in CG. Full CG. In my efforts to prepare for such a thing, I've been finding out that Carrara will let me composite stock footage directly within the friendly interface. If I wasn't planning on doing everything in 3d CG, I could go out with a movie camera or even a smart phone nowadays, and shoot some video. Bring it back and import it into Carrara and render an animation over it. Pretty slick. No. Very slick!
With other modeler/render applications I could build my own models to meet my needs. If not, I'd have to really search and make sure that what I buy or download can be easily (or otherwise) brought in - and then there's that matter of scaling. Sure, for the 3d professional, this sort of thing is a walk in the park. A close friend of mine has moved his way up the ladder to becoming one of the chief people in charge of 3d at Sony Entertainment. I've seen him work on his AlienWare portable workstation in Maya Ultimate Extreme, or whatever it's called. He's amazing, and will never, ever consider buying in any content. To him, it would probably take longer to search out and find what he's looking for than it would take him to model it!
For me, I like building in 3d. I do. But I really liked what I saw when I first began walking down the virtual aisles of the DAZ3D store. I saw an image of Victoria 3 and came here to buy her. DAZ gave her to me for free - simply for creating a user account. Hair, clothing, tools and weapons. And then I found animals, monsters, environments, plants and furniture. This is really good stuff and very reasonable on the pocketbook - even for this manual laborer. By the time my wife, my wonderful wife, told me that our account was ready for me to buy Carrara, she had known that I was eying up a lot of other stuff too. She gave me enough funds to get a yearly platinum club membership, Carrara Pro, and another hundred dollars to boot. Little did she know that the PC membership brought all of my prices low, and that Carrara 8 Pro was soon to be released - so I could get special savings by getting.... okay, you get the point.
So here we have this wannabe movie director with a fresh bit of 3d modeling training under his belt, a brand new copy of Carrara 8 Pro beta (since it ran 64 bit, I only ran 7 Pro for a couple of days along side 8 Pro beta - then decided to just run that instead), and a huge pile of content to play with. Wanna know what's really cool? All of the content is scaled to work together! Sounds strange to appreciate such a thing - but I come from a world where such a thing just isn't so. A good example would be to load in an example model from Carrara's browser. Now load in another - and then something from DAZ. See what I mean?
I was just made gung ho to write about this (again) after finally getting a chance to load up and play with for the first time, my new copy of Space Blocks by TheAntFarm. How freaking exciting it is when you get a product like this that's just made to be super-user-friendly. Built from the ground up to allow for any sort of custom creation the director (that's me), needs for whatever he or she is doing at the time. It's not just this amazing product either. DAZ is filled with them. The other week I bought some of the Easy Environments series by Flipmode. "Why on earth would you buy Sky Box products for Carrara?", you might ask. Here's why: Because they're so freaking cool, is why! Being a PC Member, probably for the rest of my life, I am a collector of items from petipet and Jack Tomalin. Since I like to animate, and so need to keep my scene's footprint size optimized as possible, I've also been collecting lorez figures by Predatron. Okay... I could go on listing artists all day and through the rest of the week. But I cannot say enough about how great it is to be able to put up a small allowance every week or so, to get amazing assets for my endeavors!
There is still a small bit of work that often has to accompany some of this content for optimal use in Carrara. It was this fact that helped to introduce me to many of what have become my favorite features of Carrara. So the main reason for this thread, aside from shouting from the mountaintops how much I love using Carrara, is to talk about some of the things I do to get the best use of Content in Carrara - and anything that may pop up as a related issue or subject.
For example: In order to use Sky Boxes or Sky Domes - or any other sort of surrounding image places upon geometry, we need to get these things to stop blocking the light to the center of our scenes! "Why are my renders black?" - well it's because your light has shadows turned on - as it should - and the dome is creating one ginormous shadow onto your scene! So rather that doing anything special with lights, I always select the dome, or box, or whatever... Millennium Environment too, and I remove the checks from the boxes at the top: "Cast Shadows" and "Receive Shadows". Now, instead of 'lighting' it, I enter the texture room and copy the image from the color channel into the glow channel. While I'm at it, I set Highlight, Shininess, Reflection, etc., to "None". For proper results, we may need to adjust the brightness setting on the image in the glow channel. But that's it. An illuminated backdrop geometry. The cool thing about these things are, well... besides being so freaking cool... is that they can be rotated and scaled, etc., to your liking, whereas background spherical images - you get what you got. Wendy maps her spherical background images onto a sphere and then flattens the arse of the sphere - does the same tricks I've just mentioned regarding cast/receive shadows and glow channel illumination. Kakman has a whole method for using Flipmodes Skyboxes that I'll fill you all in on later.
Another example is the fact that Daz Studio Pro, I believe, is still free. If you haven't 'bought' it yet... do it now. If you don't think you'll use it - then just don't download it yet. But get it while it's free - it's an amazing tool - and, together with Carrara forms a beautiful suite of kit for creating your own content when you need it. I watch Phil's Advanced Training enough to know what not to say to diminish or steal what he says - but I can still show you how you can use these two powerhouse tools to get amazing results - Fast!
If we have anyone who might know a bit about Bryce, I'd love to hear ways that we can use it to create beautiful background or HDR Images for use in Carrara as well - or any other way it might fit in to the Carrara workflow. I own Hexagon as well, and used to use it for it's bridge from and back to Daz Studio for making morphs. But the new Daz Studio Pro makes it so easy to do, I prefer to use Carrara and a simple Export/Import method for making custom content. We'll get deeper into it as time permits.
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So an exciting bit of news, slightly off the beaten path of this thread:
Project Dogwaffle is releasing a new Pro version: "Howler" forecasted to be coming in September!
The huge news in the headlines is the beautiful new Ray Trace render engine, called: "Puppy Ray"! Philip Staigerman takes you on a brief tour here.
What really catches my eye out of all of that cool stuff is this: Animation is near and dear to our hearts, so we've been making improvements there as well. You could always load an AVI file to perform further manipulation of its frames, but now you can load in a specific section of frames from the AVI file. You can also load an animation to use as a selection
Okay... that's cool... I have t say it again: "You can also load an animation to use as a selection". Oh......
...and it's just barely mentioned amongst all of the great things they've got going on.
Howler is incredible with what you can do to artistically edit not just images, but keyframing post work onto animation, whether sequenced images or avi. This is huge! But what's much bigger, is that the new Howler 9 will let us load a second animation into the Alpha layer for use as selection? Now that's what I want, right there! No I can make a special render, if I want, that will use white against black and create animated files specifically for use as post work selection masks - an what's more is that Dogwaffle reads degrees of gray as selection as well. It's not just Black, white, off, on.
Puppy ray is very cool. You should check out Philip's fun (as always) Alpha Intro videos on it.
Genesis 2:
As I'm sure you've all see and, perhaps, felt: There are very mixed emotions circling DAZ's release of their new base model, Genesis to an all new separate Female and soon, Male versions.
When you consider the idea that DAZ has been a leader in making some of the finest Human figures available on the planet, this is really a no-brainer, once you see their explanation into the "why" of it. I couldn't even hope to do that in as good a job as B Howell and the developmental folks at DAZ3D. But in a nutshell, they've taken into account all of the reports, requests and situations, and come to the conclusion that for a really super, high quality female, you need a female base. And the same goes for the opposite sex as well. I can hardly wait to see the looks on your faces when you see Michael 6. What a Man! Victoria 6, Gia, Girl 6 are just hot. The hottest female figure to date-period.
Playing around with Genesis 2 Female with V6 and Gia installed, plus the morph packs, and I also have the new Smiles and Belly kits as well as Thorne's face morph merchant resource, is such a dream. Victoria's face is just gorgeous - immediately as is. Gia add not just a lot of warrior muscularity to the package, but she does so in such a feminine way that it simply adds a lot of womanly options in the shapes we get to use. Very cool.
What else is super amazing is that, by starting here and following links to get through the whole process, it is amazingly fun to create your own conforming models for use with Genesis and/or Genesis 2 doing all of the modeling in Carrara. I begin by loading the base - either Genesis or Genesis 2 - and then Insert > Vertex object. I like doing it that way if I plan to model symmetrically - as dragging into the work space can often set it somewhere other than at 0,0,0. So if I really want to use the dragging method, I drag to the word Scene in the tab on the right - rather than into the work space.
So now I'm in the vertex modeler. I just Construct > 3d > Cube (or whatever you wish to start with), set the size and section parameters and okay it. As soon as that's done, I close the modeler and head into the Assembly room, where I select the vertex object, give it a name right away, and then enter into 'modeling in the assembly room' function by clicking the wrench icon on the upper left.
Turn on symmetry and let the mesh creation process begin! What a blast when you can sculpt the new model straight onto the actual figure like that! So cool!
Don't forget that you will want to texture this thing, eventually. So before you export this into an obj, remember to go in and set up your UV mapping the way you're comfortable with. Some people may even use a separate utility for that. just be sure to do it before you go to far into the process - it's just good practice.
When done, export to OBJ, using whatever scaling method you decide to use. I usually follow Phil's advice on universally scaling the obj within Carrara, to the magic Poser scale of 1.042, and then export using Poser preset settings. Then I can bring it into Daz Studio using the Poser preset options and all is well. Follow the instructions that DAZ lays out in the link above and the links to all instructions within, and you've got a fully conforming model!
It's all explained in those instructions, but you can then make custom shapes for specific morphs and load those into the model as well - rather than relying too heavily on the auto-follow algorithms. Even JCM's can be made in this way! Very cool!
Gotta go for now - but I'll be back! ;)
Surely you realize all of that is mere poffery without The Millennium Cow, right?
If I send you postage would you send me some of what ever you're drinking? ;-P
Now to argue a point, I have seen figures that were better then what DAZ had available at the time, die on the vine due to lack of support. The Maya doll was out at the time of mil2, and was much better, yet receive little to no support. I thought she was cute, and easy to work with. What about Apollo? Excellent figure, I worked with him for a bit, was easy to work with, great vin diesel morph. But didn't receive the support he deserved. And lets not forget Sixus's series of figures. Some of the best stylized and inhuman figures I've worked with.
Face it, the reason DAZ figures do well isn't because they are state of the art; Mil 4 and Genesis, but because they have the DAZ content machine to back them up.
Yes, they all worked in carrara, :-P
Even the Maya doll? I had thought about trying it, but assumed you needed Maya.
Dart - you gotta be on something! But you're right. Daz do some amazing programs and content, and Carrara can access and work with almost all of it. Some people may want to do their own thing, and that's great, but it's good to know you have a whole catalogue of reasonably priced, quality content to fall back on as and when the need arises. It's good to sometimes count your blessings!
Ever tried to animate a Perfect V4? Ever tried to even load a Perfect V4 with some other morphs (i.e. Zev's bend morphs) into Carrara? It's a PITA to get it for a still picture, but sometimes it works. And then you animate a cycle and try to make a NLA clip. Woosh, everything wrong.
Carrara obviously cannot cope with massive amounts of morphs. So; no thank to Carrara for content which is unuseable for something more than what some forumists think is an animation.
(Yes, I'm pissed, because I spent three years on Carrara to understand how it works and now, the first time I want to do a more realistic animation, I'm thrown back to Studio with it's almost unusable animation capabilities (say: key-framing) and a slow-slow-slow, but out-of-the-box better renderer and a shader setup, which give me nothing back regarding what I learned on Carrara shaders. At least the morphs work :) )
Hey, I understand your frustration, and you're entitled to it, but do you really think the section I bolded where you take a dig at other forum members is justified? I've seen some very nice animations from people that post here. I even recall one of them had some animations in film festivals. You're pissed off? That's fine. Take it out on someone else. Not people that have nothing to do with your scenes and failed renders.
I take it, since you capitalized Perfect V4, that it's a morph package, and then you're loading another one on top of it. I'd be curious to see:
1) How they do in Carrara Vs. D/S and...
2) How well they perform in Carrara on their own as individual packages.
And if there is an issue, then perhaps you should maybe file a bug report with your reproducible bugs with DAZ and the product developers.
Why not? You guys do it all the time, right? At least he didn't get personal like you guys do....and he didn't stoop to stuff like "poopy pants". I mean, you yourself just took digs at some unnamed third party, though we all know who you were referring to, a few posts ago.
I wish you'd explain the rules....some people can take digs, but not others? This is so confusing....
Carrara obviously cannot cope with massive amounts of morphs. So; no thank to Carrara for content which is unuseable for something more than what some forumists think is an animation.
(Yes, I'm pissed, because I spent three years on Carrara to understand how it works and now, the first time I want to do a more realistic animation, I'm thrown back to Studio with it's almost unusable animation capabilities (say: key-framing) and a slow-slow-slow, but out-of-the-box better renderer and a shader setup, which give me nothing back regarding what I learned on Carrara shaders. At least the morphs work :) )Fenric got to the bottom of this one. These morphs were not made by DAZ3D. Why does everyone blame DAZ?
Anyways... I guess that there were certain 'standards' that are supposed to be adhered to when distributing morph injectors, or some such, that wasn't. Not sure if Fenric finished hi fix - but it was free. I don't use those.
I am not at all upset at what some of you seem to be saying, or at least implying. But I am just a bit bewildered. Here's my questions back:
Did you not know that DAZ purchases are never made without the buyers consent? Never! And then there's a 30 day guarantee. Why keep what you don't like - or rather... why buy it? There must have been something you liked.
Oh... and I'm not talking at Frank - I'm actually just generalizing.
Okay, so you don't like DAZ content. I do. Always have.
I don't have near this issues with DAZ content as I do with DAZ.
He whom controls the education controls the masses.
Maya doll is a Poser figure. Still around.
On second thought I wont put up that link. Some one might; parish the thought, go there and buy something. :long:
How much yen do you have? ;-)
. . . . if the pants fit %-P
Okay, I'd like to back up just a bit.
Sometimes we can see how, since Carrara has the ability to create a good many things, or rather, give you the tools to do so yourself, that perhaps some folks might not want content in their work flow. I can totally respect that. Perhaps I'll start a thread about that sometime when I jump on to that page. But I am a very content using person. Petipet is an excellent modeler and has some highly optimized models regarding the polygon numbers vs beautiful appearance. He is not alone in that, here at DAZ. A really impressive example of using maps and clever polygon optimization is Stonemason. Again... not alone. Going through a list of artists at DAZ... some excellent talent there.
I certainly do mean to imply that everybody should get down and dirty with content. I'm not even trying to tell anyone to use content. But as this thread evolves, perhaps folks who do have an interest in this will have a good example of how they can work with it. Some folks might not know what sort of things certain content does - and I'll hopefully give them some pointers - as I'm really jazzed about a lot of the content here.
Speaking of animation. I've mentioned Predatron and his Lorez series of figures. Many people know that these models boast low polygon counts, hence their name: Lorez or something incredibly similar. But unless you own one, you might not know how powerful he makes these things for the animator. He has multitudes of easy pose dials on his figures that makes animating and posing a snap. And I like the way they look. I doubt very much that I'm alone in that. Predatron also has some high resolution figures and a good overall variety to his store.
Every now and again I treat myself to a nice animated pose pack from Posermocap, GoFigure, and now SKAmotion has joined the DAZ team! How I've spent the last few years without knowing Cliff Bowman's store is beyond me. Cliff is an excellent conversation light in the forums, much like the amazingly helpful 3DAGE. It's cool, though, running across stuff like this - it gives me a whole new collection to collect! :)
Cliff and Andy certainly are not alone in the field of having excellent advice to share, either. Blondie9999 has been producing some guides of intelligent advice since Genesis came out - and a lot of Published Artists have learned a great deal from these guides. Again. With a very slight nudge into knowing where to go and what to do within Daz Studio Pro, we can all create new pieces for our favorite figures with a professional set of auto-rigging and set-up tools. People like Blondie and Bobby25 are so good with this tuff, it's really neat that we have this opportunity to soak up what knowledge they share.
Orestes Graphics has some scene sets that I really want. I have a collection started, but I can hardly wait for this to grow. The Necropolis set is totally on my list. I have done so much using scenery set content products that I have often overlooked using some of the really sweet features found right within Carrara at the use of a feature. Orestes Graphics has his Techtonics Vol.s 1, 2, and 3, which work in Bryce, Vue, and Carrara, bringing some beautiful terrain presets to the browser. 3D Celebrity has a cool one too, with the Carrara Vista in the Clouds set. Simply gorgeous. Howie Farkes has some amazing products and are just so in depth with super rich detail, that it can really take a long time to render. The first thing that many of us do, is to put too much faith in the speed and power of our workstations and crank the resolution up to widescreen HD before hitting the render button. Just be warned that Howie's amazing scenes can bring the fastest machines to their knees! Please don't hold this against Howie's work. It is to be commended that someone can recreate reality in such amazing detail. But I bought the Stoney Creek bundle fairly early on in my owning Carrara - and I must say that it got me to shy away for Carrara made scenery - thinking that it was a slow-to-render method. I'm glad that I've proven myself to be a bit incorrect in that department. Mike Moir has some amazing Carrara kits too. Both Howie Farkes and Mike Moir have products that help to teach as well as provide additional landscape. Really looking at how things are made can be as fun as it is educational. The way Mike used sophisticated replication and duplication to build his Mystic Gorge scene just boggles my mind. Another excellent example for detailed settings is "An English Village" by Phil Wilkes, which is a real masterpiece. Ecomantics by Dimension Theory further helps to round out the surrounding environmental techniques by taking a billboard approach to quickly add expanses of scenery that renders at near instantaneous speeds. When I created Woodlands, I did so to help come right in between. I find that it renders quite quickly, while still providing the depth and texture of all three dimensions and Carrara's incredible atmospheric realistic sky.
So it might seem, at first, that I'm just being a big commercial for my friends who sell their skills at DAZ. Well... yeah. That's what I'm doing. But only because I find that sometimes I just need to know that something exists. Daz Dell took me by the hand when I first came to Daz3d and has shown me all sorts of products. It was a lot of fun. He's the one who shown me the Figures, Characters and Avatars: The Official Guide to Using DAZ Studio to Create Beautiful Art which was then sold at DAZ, and includes a copy of Carrara 6 Pro and Hexagon plus a nice pile of content on the DVD. Fun book too. So my path included that book, a PC Yearly Membership, and upgrade to Carrara 7 Pro, which, at the time included a free upgrade to the soon to be officially released Carrara 8 Pro! Plus another big pile of content.
The thing is, I am hoping that by me rambling on about what I like about this and that, and go on about my methods used to get such and such results, I might just spark some questions that may not have otherwise come up. And, with any luck, we can hopefully answer the question that I somehow indirectly caused the asking of. I really am impressed by the products sold here. You may see that my tastes shift from time to time. One day I'm all about space and fusion powered vehicles. Next I'm buying a horse and a tent. I like it all.
My pants don't fit but I still wear them..... :)
Err what was the question Dart :)
It's a great write up you have done for Carrara Dartanbeck.
You got the job :)
I understand the 'purists' having been one of them for ages.
My cry was:
"What, use content? Hah. What a bunch if sissies (how do you spell that?)"
Then my aim was to learn to model and texture an animate.
Now I'm perfect at all those things (small joke) my aim is to tell stories. If I made everything in my scenes from scratch then I would still be at paragraph 1, scene 1, line 1.
So content, or no content, it's all about what we want to do as "artists."
For me I am happy being the stage director, scene scouter, prop finder, casting agent, lighting director, camera man etc.
Sometimes I am the set carpenter for little things, like signs and wheel barrows and (often) retexturing things.
I'm ghlad I don't have to leave Carrara to do this (except for making textures in PS).
Often I use Carrara to generate the textures that I need to place on objects in Carrara.
It's kind of like, a self replicating device.
Frank_ nice to see you back posting too.
:lol: Dart, if I were a movie studio executive, and asked for a synopsis of your film idea because I wanted to produce it, I have a feeling it would be longer than the script! :lol:
Yeah... I can go on, can't I?
Purism in Carrara is cool. Using the method I've described earlier for modeling for creating conforming figures can also be used for making original figures. Also, I've said conforming 'models', not 'clothing' - because we could actually make whole characters that use an existing figure as the controller. Now you don't need to create all new Morphforms or even weightmapping the figure with the rig, Sure, there may still be some of that - but you can get away with a lot - since it truly is a very powerful system. (Carrara to DS to Carrara workflow)
Bam! Finally getting some Carrara time. Granted only bits of it. But I still haven't had the chance to try Voulette, Primivol... but I got a small sampling of the incredibility of using Replica! You can immediately replicate anything right here and now. The new instance can then be manipulated around, change the shader - whatever you want. It's so cool. The placement array options are going to be fun to play with - and I cannot wait to start trying Primivol to turn anything into a volumetric 3d shader. How freaking fun that sounds!
Baker AND Deeper? Yikes is that Advance Pack by Inagoni the coolest!
My point certainly isn't to NOT use Carrara's killer features - be rather to use them with Content, right? :)
*Content not necessarily required.
yes I'm content to use content
recently I saw a great video by an illustrator who uses poser and he was showing you how to take apart certain characters and put them together to make individual characters seemingly unrelated to the original, so using content doesn't mean that you can't 'make' your own image content's content, if you know what I mean ;0
Ya Dartanbeck I saw what you did there ;-P
One of the things I love about carrara is it can use about anything. When I was experimenting with physics and car chases, I made everything but the cars, and they were lowpoly sketchups.
Content is as necessary as you make it, or want it to be. I like to model and can do basic stuff. But why spend months slowly building a back ally when a far better artiest already has? You know I love the dark creepy stuff, the dusty claustrophobic interiors. I could spend months making the parts, or buy them ready to build. And yes, I do some whimsical stuff, and I love a good out door scene. I could make all my plants in carrara. It would take some fuming and fussing, and many restarts. Or I could use premades, and made quite well, setts of flowers and... errr... wait, that is the other place. Never mind. :cheese:
When I was talking with Head Wax about sponsoring the last contest that was going on I ended up talking a bit about the idea I had that Carrara would be a great pipeline for the content sold here on DAZ were it to be retooled a bit into a content creation suite. This is something I wish I could express to other PAs in a decent way though most of them don't know Carrara enough to understand how strong it's foundation for a such a thing would be. At this point I see a lot of content creators making use of bridges and multiple apps to handle each aspect of their projects, and I noticed that all these things are available in Carrara in it's current state. I hear about people posing Genesis in DAZ Studio then using bridge plugins to send that into Hexagon or ZBrush etc to model then load it back into DS to setup the rest of the figure and produce files ready for the market place, this is done along with other programs for texturing and UV mapping etc (ZBrush has a lot of that stuff but you understand it's all separate steps). Carrara however shows me every bit of potential to do each step, the ability to model clothing and adjust morphing straight onto Genesis before using it's built in procedural texture generation and shaders or painting the textures with 3D Paint after forming your UV maps. Displacement paint your fine details onto a smoothed mesh before making to normal maps and applying to a low poly base, render spheres or whatever else out to normal map shaded assets used as brushes in 3D paint for depth aware decals. All of this is done in one app.
Genesis uses a rigging system closer to Carrara's rigging than Poser's (maybe not the latest rigging system Poser added I don't know too much about that), Genesis has nearly as much in common with Carrara in that regard as V4 had with Poser far as I can tell. This rigging system was in Carrara long before Genesis was around, I actually understand how Genesis is rigged while I didn't understand V4. I've never really understood Poser's rigging but I've always been perfectly able to rig things in Carrara, hearing that Genesis used a similar system made me happy because it made me feel like I could get into that side of creation. As far as I know Genesis in Carrara is basically a Carrara figure, Carrara native content rigged nearly the same way I rigged that Proto Bot I made 4-5 years ago. Loading Genesis into Carrara you can see Carrara's native bone display being used, that's not the same as what V4 etc used. Of course they had to make some updates so other Genesis features were supported, but the core of it is something Carrara users have had access to a while now.
I personally think it would be awesome if "Content Creator Tools" was just "Carrara". If we had the option to export DAZ Studio content from Carrara it would be an all in one solution for making things to sell on a market place such as this. Each of it's individual tools wouldn't be as good as programs dedicated to these individual things, but it would be a tool set that let you create something from start to finish in one little package. No bridges or separate programs to go through and worry about proper import/export settings etc, just Carrara. That to me sounds like something of great use.
DimansionTheory - it's a great idea, I hope that you got a receptive hearing with Daz. It would attract a lot of users to Carrara, which can only be a good thing for everyone.
Yes, I'm all behind DimensionTheory's philosophy.
It's well thought out and comes from someone who has good working knowledge of what the software can do,
what potential it has,
and also knows
what goes on behind the scenes at Daz.
It could only be good for Carrara, and in the long run that means it's good for Daz.
Now we're talking!! I can only hope that DAZ is listening. Some good insights DT
Grumble
grumble
gripe
and doom.
I'm with ya DimensionTheory. Pretty much the only thing I've used studio for is prepping content. Making morphs, fitting clothes, ect. I'd love to be able to drop it from my tool box. But there in lies the rub.
1. Does DAZ really want carraraests to drop Studio?
2. Does DAZ really want a bunch of people to be able to make all their own content?
2b. Does DAZ really want a bunch of people making content they can sell or give away elsewhere?
Yes, quite a bit can already be done in carrara, the only real hitch is no .DUF export.
yes amen
I have been FORCED to use Hexagon for so many things in regards to modifying Daz figures
and Hex hates me
but
it plays nice with studio sending created morphs back
unlike anything I try in Carrara
modified stuff from carrara just results in a mess using morphloader for me
At the moment, people developing content for DS (and Poser) are using all sorts of apps from all sorts of people - other people. I would have thought that it would be attractive to Daz to have those developers using a Daz product to do this, keeping everything within the family, as it were. Yes they will need to make things play nicer than they do at the moment, but if they can pull this off, it will be good for PAs (and other developers), good for Carrara and good for Daz - what's not to like?!
Dimension Theory totally gets what I'm saying. That's it. My rant has only one exception: We can do all of this now. No need to wait. Just use both Carrara and this brave new Daz Studio Pro together.
Before I started trying this stuff, I was Begging DAZ for this - exactly what DT is proposing. So I know that DAZ heard that at least Once!
Oh... Oh... Yaaaay!!!! I'm a Grampa! My little Olivia Leila was born just now!!!
Gotta go!
I'll be back - um, yeah... we need to get together and have a talk with DAZ3D.
L8r!!!
Oh congrats Dartan, to both you as first time Grandpa and to the parents as first time parents.
You'll love having a grandkid, they are so much more fuin than kds, you can give them back when necessary.
Many congrats on being a grandparent! You beat me to it!! And I always got the impression you were a younger guy - all that energy!
and congratulations Gramps!
Congratulations on being a grandpa! Maybe we should start calling you Dartengeezer! ;-)