Nimos Old Barns to Carrara

paulg625

I am wondering if it is possible to get this product, Nimos Old Barns, to open in Carrara? I know it is a Bryce product but it comes with Obj files. I am a Noob to Carrara. So not sure if I can open Obj or if I can convert it some how to something Carrara can read?

bigh

paulg625 said:

I am wondering if it is possible to get this product, Nimos Old Barns, to open in Carrara? I know it is a Bryce product but it comes with Obj files. I am a Noob to Carrara. So not sure if I can open Obj or if I can convert it some how to something Carrara can read?

check your import formats !

paulg625

bigh said:

paulg625 said:

I am wondering if it is possible to get this product, Nimos Old Barns, to open in Carrara? I know it is a Bryce product but it comes with Obj files. I am a Noob to Carrara. So not sure if I can open Obj or if I can convert it some how to something Carrara can read?

check your import formats !

Ok, remember the part in my post about being a Noob to Carrara. How do I check import formats? Are you refering to a setting or are you refering to documentation ? if setting I looked at preferences didn't see anything about import file settings?

Diomede

In the upper left, click
File -> Import
and you will see a dialogue. The second box is labeled "files of type". A whole bunch of file extensions will be listed. You can get a better view of them by clicking the drop down menu button on the right side of that box.

Many common file types are supported. I'm sure Bryce can export in wavefront obj, so you are covered there. However, someone else who uses Bryce more than I do will have to chime in on what formats are best for transferring from Bryce to Carrara.

paulg625

diomede64 said:

In the upper left, click
File -> Import
and you will see a dialogue. The second box is labeled "files of type". A whole bunch of file extensions will be listed. You can get a better view of them by clicking the drop down menu button on the right side of that box.

Many common file types are supported. I'm sure Bryce can export in wavefront obj, so you are covered there. However, someone else who uses Bryce more than I do will have to chime in on what formats are best for transferring from Bryce to Carrara.

thank you,

Wow you know when you look at the forest and don't see the trees. I caught myself looking for import under file and didn't see it. When I looked after you info. I saw it was there but grayed out. I had to have a scene open to get it to not be active. I will try to see if I can get it to import. I haven't messed with this file on my Mac so might have to reinstall it. But I believe it has the wavefront obj files already. I was using it in Iclone5. I believe that was a file type it would read as well. I should be able to use that. I will try it ans see. Thanks again.

Chohole

I don't have this particular model, but checking others from Nimos, they have an OBJ with MTL, and the textures for it should be in a folder called MaxNimos/model name afaik Carrara can import OBJ

paulg625

Ok, Worked on this last night I had a few problems but got it worked out. I found a strange glitch in the Carrara 8.5. After importing the .obj file. The Carrara screen was white on the border, none of the border icon tools were visible. When you scrolled over them some would reappear on the left side bar, none on the top would. I used the keyboard command to render this caused the program to go to the render page and then I could see everything again. Beyond that everything went back to normal so as I said a minor glitch.(note using mac64 bit)

Now after importing the .obj and figuring out how to import it with the settings I wanted, it took a bit to figure out the shader part of it. Initially it appeared only some of the Jpegs textures were picked up. ( after it imports the object it asks where the texture files are one at a time until it has them all.) It was looking like it didn’t get them all because parts of the object where strange colors purple, green, and blue ect.

This turned out to be in the shaders, under the color tab it was given two source tabs. One was assigned the texture map the other had a color assigned ( the purple, green, or blue ect.). I set this to none and the texture map showed as I wanted.

A cool thing was that one of the shaders had white as an extra color and it actually mad the output better. So I played with this ability as well adding different extra colors and blending a few.( so bonus I learned a little extra on this one).
After I go it in the ball park i wanted I pulled the barn into my Objects tab opened a new scene and put it into the scene just fine.

Thank you everyone for your help!

evilproducer

Glad you got it working!

What was probably happening with the shaders, is that Carrara was interpreting the shader with a muliplier. When you added a color, it multiplied the color of the image map with the color you had selected. Once you start to get a handle on the shader room, you'll have lots of fun!

Kudos on using the browser to save your barn after you tweaked it. If you want to know another neat trick, you can download this scene file I made available to the Carrara community as gift:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7370483/Fantasy-terrain1.7.zip

It uses a series of simple shapes on a terrain for proxy buildings. Drag and drop your barn from your objects browser onto one of the proxy buildings and it will load the building in that spot. Then just open the group and delete the simple shapes. There are instructions included in the manual I provide.

The scene also uses some other nifty Carrara features such as replicators, spline objects, rigging, etc. that you can look at, and also uses a lot of procedural shaders, shaders with image maps, and hybrid procedural/image map shaders to pick apart and experiment with.

paulg625

evilproducer said:

Glad you got it working!

What was probably happening with the shaders, is that Carrara was interpreting the shader with a muliplier. When you added a color, it multiplied the color of the image map with the color you had selected. Once you start to get a handle on the shader room, you'll have lots of fun!

Kudos on using the browser to save your barn after you tweaked it. If you want to know another neat trick, you can download this scene file I made available to the Carrara community as gift:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7370483/Fantasy-terrain1.7.zip

It uses a series of simple shapes on a terrain for proxy buildings. Drag and drop your barn from your objects browser onto one of the proxy buildings and it will load the building in that spot. Then just open the group and delete the simple shapes. There are instructions included in the manual I provide.

The scene also uses some other nifty Carrara features such as replicators, spline objects, rigging, etc. that you can look at, and also uses a lot of procedural shaders, shaders with image maps, and hybrid procedural/image map shaders to pick apart and experiment with.

Thank you EvilProducer for the feedback and the instructional help. I will download the file and work with it. THANK YOU!!!