Standardizing a carrara textures folder? simsposium of content,freebie creators
Mistara
Posts: 38,675
for simplicity i created a runtime/textures folder tree in the same folder with my carrara exe.
also dropped in runtime/textures folder tree for my external car content folder, XLibCA
and follow the poser, ds tree by naming subfolders by content creator name?
i used to put them directly in the car folder, but meant duplicating in the cbr shader folder
or embedding textures in the cbr file
or put runtime/textures folder tree under the presets folder?
anyone has ideas?
simsposium of content/freebie creators?
could we agree to agree on a standard for textures folders?!
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and if anyone interested, i see how to manually edit the native content top folder directory
i could make 1 to share if someones has a suggestions of how to order it for maximum happiness.
the folders for the new scene wizard would have to stay. unless ... hmm
a fresh new batch of scene starters would be fun. i been playing with a 500;foot batting cage a few years now, could offer some of those.
preset scenes for portrait modeling studio, with light presets be nice
could put fans in it to blow hair like the real live models do
reserved
very nice
I'm listening :)
Any screenshots? I save custom textures (and I have made almost 500 or so by now) by category on my external drive. I used to put them in the project files that go there that had the car file and all textures. But I use the same texture for other characters/props/scenes in the same project related items or new ones, so it was not sensible to be going to one project's file for other projects, so I made a central one. I keep them as jpg or pngs. If I am hot and heavy into a project, I do drop the shader tree into the Carrara shader tab and give it the file reference as part of its name, but am always tweaking, so if I change it, I go into the shaders folder in Carrara and remove it to keep things tidy and move on. It can get confusing... I have about 20 versions of river water so far and they sort of look alike in the shader tab.
I am intrigued with your system, though and would like to see.
You very quickly zoomed beyond my technical understanding for Carrara, but I am intrigued by what I think I understand.
is anybody re-arranging their carrara native content?
trying... lol.
I'm also trying to reconstruct a previously working genesis1 tree from a life-gone-by without the CMS (per my pm).
I had a pretty neat Carrara native content installation process at one point, once I figured out how it wanted files and folders to sit. I recall having to 'trick' it into seeing things in they way I liked, but it was slick. I'll have to dig out my notes and paste them in with screen-shots as I rebuild this machine.
--ms
@mistara, I don't know if you have watched this YouTube video I was lucky to bump into over at Carrara Cafe (Organizing your Browser) a good while back that really lets you regain control of your sorting schemes in the Carrara Browser.
There's no sound, but good on-screen notes, and while it seems kind of radical at first, it accomplishes two key functions:
- it lets you present your folders/content the way you wish
- it lets you *manage* those folders with your computer's native file browser!
So things like folder renaming and the like (for the Carrara Browser) can be done using any normal file move/rename/copy tools you like outside of Carrara. You can even use scripts. Carrara will simply display the folders as they appear in your file manager!
This also implies that to add new products simply extract and place the folders appropriately to your taste.
I believe I figured out a way to manually edit the Carrara preferences file to avoid most of the steps in the video, once I figured out what it was doing, but I was quite happy at the time to learn about this 'trick'.
You may have to re-watch the video a couple of times to 'get' it (I remember it seemed quite odd at the time), but the freedom to configure your world as you like is priceless to me.
(I had some detailed notes to myself, but have to go find them).
As an ongoing project I have been importing freebies from ShareCG, Renderosity, TurboSquid, cgtrader and others.
Initially I was going to add them to an extras file in the native content folders, ended up making an additional folder in Scenes/misc for each of my categories.
Also have been saving the freebies by the users of the Carrara forums eg Scenes/misc/Stezza folder.
Some of my tree/plant imports eg XFrog I have been saving to my Carrara8.5/Presets/Plants/Basic/Misc folder.
Textures have been saved to a variety of places. First of all I was adding folders to my DAZ Studio folder - My DAZ 3D Library/Runtime/textures. Recently I have been saving PBR textures to my - Carrara8.5/TEXTURES/PBR Lighting folder, was going to add specific Carrara texture sub-folders to the TEXTURES folder. There are also a lot of textures stored in the Carrara8.5/Presets/Textures folder.
As a future project I was also going to import Bryce textures as per the excellent tutorial by Cripeman, was going to save them as Carrara8.5/TEXTURES/Bryce
HDRs and their respective jpg files seem to have been saved in a few different locations, I ended up copying mine to Carrara8.5/HDRI folder so I could find them more easily.
Presets/Textures ?
makes sense. is an extra step tho, extracting zip files
do you mean the actual .jpgs in presets or just the cbr?
as long as a cbr folder is specified as shaders when adding the folder, where ever it is, Carrara should show them in the shader room wizard.
i bought several of the clothes crossfit projections, i wouldnt want smart content hiding outfits for not being specific to a figure.
FYI, when I was trying to figure out what could be moved and what couldn't be moved, I recall that some changes that seem to work fine in the Carrara Browser seemed to break (some of?) the Carrara wizards that would help set up a scene.
It could be argued that anyone who's reworking their content trees probably isn't using the wizards too much anymore, but having the base program 'operate as documented' might be meaningful to folks.
Before my current rebuild, I believe I finally decided to leave my 'Native Content' as it was, and created and relocated a set of master-folders that were prefixed with 'Pro', 'Free', 'My', etc. using the above mentioned content organization tricks/techniques. Under each are my favorite subgroups/folders.
(more to come),
--ms
the wizard is a text file.
theoretically it should be possible to modify the paths.
Most of the people who produce Carrara items tend to put their textures in the Presets/Textures folder, but I have found a few scenes with textures in their scenes file.
Shaders I always put in the Presets/Shaders files, any additional folders I have used "Add Folder" to locate them, the wizard.txt file only has the original folders listed in it. Have found a few jpg's in with the shaders.
Somehow that doesn't surprise me, but I never thought to look. That'd be an easy fix, and you could manage the Native Content as you really prefer! Thanks for that tip.
--ms