Fresh Carrara 8 Pro install

Roygee

Hi all :)

As luck would have it, just as my renders for the monthly challenge were safely tucked away, my trusty old PC went on the blink for the last time :(

It will take a while for a new one to be built, so, to keep gainfully employed, I want to try installing my minimum requirements - Hexagon, Carrara, Gimp and possibly Studio on a spare laptop. Not much of a machine, but it will do for a while. Trouble is it only has a 20 Gig HD, with 10 Gig spare, so i need to install as little as possible on the C drive. Fortunately I have an empty 500 Gig external drive.

This is a bit of a blessing in disguise - it will force me to get content decently organised.

First question is would it work to install Carrara and Studio on the external drive? Hexagon seems happy there, but Gimp gave me no option - it went to C:/Program files.

Secondly, I see that in my Product Library, M4, V4 and all the gang are part of native content - which has to be installed in the same directory as Carrara? - or do these still go into Runtimes?

I don't know if it still works that way, but way back we had to open these in Studio at least once for the Morphs ++ to work in Carrara. So, if I do install Studio, I''ll get a bunch of content, which will include these figures and I believe it's not a good idea to have duplicate figures. I remember the hassle I went through to amalgamate duplicate figures into the Studio My Library, so want to avoid that.

Should I now already prepare a Studio Runtime, install the figures I get with Carrara there and let them be overwritten when and if I install Studio?

Thirdly, can DIM handle this method of installation?

Any advice much appreciated.

Cheers :)