Carrara 8.5 - Environments for Daz Studio & Poser Figures (Commercial)

Dartanbeck

In response to the excellent DAZ3D.COM Home Page, I made a new one, based on Carrara.
DAZ3D is where you get the stuff. Any kind of stuff and All kinds of stuff.
Carrara is the place where you keep your stuff and then let them out so you can share their presence with the world.
Once optimized within Carrara, simply setting a check in a box or typing in a number or two will transform whatever sort of scenery you've set up into a living, moving, world.

Wizard will guide your first scene enabling you to select the sort of terrain you have in your world. But you also set up its atmospheric conditions, lighting and the appearance of the sky and clouds. Now you can enter your new scene and set up wind, more, closer, clouds of volumetric realism, sharpness, and how they affect the light. Design your own plants and trees or select them from the library and then tweak them to the way you need them to look. Set two numbers and a dial and you've just made them rustle and sway with the wind. The clouds are also easily animated by typing in a time range. Further settings are very easily set up thanks to how clearly labeled everything is within the settings tools.

Carrara is designed from the ground up to put your imagination into motion with as little effort from you, the designer, as possible. If that makes it sound limited, allow me to say that you control how limited or complex you make your scenes. From simple automation settings found throughout nearly everything within Carrara, to designing your own anything and deciding and creating what happens when you turn the dials that you invent! Further those functions by adding manipulative magnets, dynamic hair, endless possibilities being blown from particle emitters that have many realistic controls that allow you to alter reality. create your own methods of movement. Change the particles depending upon how long they've lived, or several other dependencies! Carrara makes particle emitters and physics amazingly simple to set up - but you'll see how valuable experience and experimentation can be towards becoming a true FX master!

Dartanbeck

Story board animation techniques are made available in the story board room - where you can see frames in front of you depending upon what you want to see. This allows you to see the affect that a movement in one frame has on the next - or another frame.

The Realistic Sky Editor gives you a lot of power towards many things towards setting the mood of your scene: Time of day - Carrara does not limit you to realism here. In other words, if you want West to be directly behind your character during sunset hours, there's no need to turn the scene. Instead, move the sun. Setting where the sun is, is as simple as:
A - Rotate the "Sun Light" within the scene. While it is selected, if you point it directly toward the camera within several degrees, you'll see an 'ghost-line' outline of where the sun will become visible within the scene - or you can manually aim it in the same manner to illuminate the scene to your liking.
B - Enter the Realistic Sky Editor and move the sun around in the sky dome. Test the results in the preview window.
NOTE: The color of the scene illumination automatically changes depending upon the time of day! :)

The Terrain Editor, The Ocean Primitive, Fire Primitive, Fog, Clouds, Trees & Plants, Forces and Physics simulations, Particles, Multiple methods for 3d modeling including editing existing content, Powerful Animation Tools, Method implementation and effects, Complex - yet easy to use Shader editor/builder/manipulator allows you to even animate your shaders! Several render engines and lux render capabilities via the Luxor plugin (sold separately) and Carrara's native photo-realistic render engine is my favorite render engine of anything I've tried for use in my animations.

Content friendly
Carrara is amazingly adept at allowing the user to use Poser and Daz Studio figures, along with nearly anything else made to work along those lines. Carrara 8.5 was painstakingly developed to make DSON Daz Studio files native to Carrara! There are still some known issues that follow this - but with care and understanding, we have Genesis, Genesis 2, Horse 2 and all of the new, never-before seen content that is on its way to us through the innovative minds of DAZ 3D!!!

Dartanbeck

It is not easy to find a modeler that fully supports Daz Studio and/or Poser figures. Carrara is incredibly rare in that field. Version 8.5 takes us into the light of the latest and greatest from DAZ 3D by giving us Native Support for DSON, including Genesis and all of its supporting products, Genesis 2, the new Daz Horse 2, along with what I'm guessing will be followed up with an exciting array of new Triax Rigged models for us to direct, pose, and render!

To help illustrate how easy this can be, I've created a few "Dartanbeck Babble Sessions", where we can look at some of this stuff together, as I play in Carrara.

Carrara 8.5 -First Look - I introduce the new interface by adding M5 and making a complete render - even going into Phil W's Gamma Correction - linear workflow method, just using what comes with C8.5 out of the box.

Carrara 8.5 - First Look 2 - where I continue on showing the new zeroing features, how to use NLA features to transfer one character to a newer version of Genesis, saving multi-shaders, and an introduction to modeling clothes or whatever for Genesis or any other figure right in the assembly room.

Genesis in Carrara - is something I did when I first discovered Genesis in the 8.5 beta - back in the beginning of all of this.

Just a Bit of Fun - is still my personal favorite, even though it was made from throw-away test render clips.

If you have an hour to kill, I have a Babble Session on video Performing a Full Install Using the DIM. First I uninstalled everything - but I left my Poser Runtimes alone for now - since there's a lot of non-DAZ 3D stuff in some of them. But I was absolutely certain to get rid of anything that had to do with Genesis. The installed everything, including new runtime locations using the DIM on that video.

Carrara comes with a lot more than that! Full landscapes of vast terrains, examples of special effects, modeling, subsurface scattering, volumetrics, reflections and enhancing them using caustics, so many example shaders to get you on a good path towards creating your own looks for 2d and 3d objects within Carrara. I'll cover more soon - it can take a long time, indeed, to show off the excellence that is Carrara!
So I'll be back!
Dartanbeck