Export of Carrara scenes for use in Poser
ShaneWSmith
Posts: 636
Hi everyone,
From my research, it seems that some Carrara scenes, but not all, can be exported as obj files for use in DAZ and Poser.
Before I invest a LOT of money, is someone able to confirm whether this export process will work for any or all of the following, please? (Yep, they're all Howie Farkes)
http://www.daz3d.com/country-lane/
http://www.daz3d.com/country-lane-hedgerow
http://www.daz3d.com/country-lane-2/
http://www.daz3d.com/maple-meadows
http://www.daz3d.com/noble-pines
http://www.daz3d.com/valle-alpina
http://www.daz3d.com/stoney-creek
http://www.daz3d.com/stoney-creek-sprucevale
Basically, all I need to know is whether an Obj file exported using one of these scenes can render well in Poser/DAZ. I'm using the sketch render and Firefly render modes in Poser for a graphic novel, so I need to keep the style consistent.
Thank you for your time!
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Comments
Those all make heavy use of replicators. Even the tree generator is a form of replicator. Individual trees may be able to be exported as .obj, but the mesh would be extremely heavy for just one tree and I don't personally have experience doing it. I don't know if the latest Poser has the ability to replicate.
Then there's rebuilding the shaders. The Poser and Carrara shader system is different, some of the textures in his scenes may be procedural, rather than image map based. They can be converted when exporting to .obj. Terrains would also need to be converted to .obj.
So the short answer is maybe, and the long answer is maybe, but it would be a huge task and requires assumptions on what Poser can actually do, and how much it can handle.
My suggestion, assuming you have a copy of Carrara, is that you could render out backdrop images in Carrara, load them in Poser and theoretically the renderer would hopefully apply the filters you need to the background image.
Carrara even has a spherical camera to render a 360º seamless image to wrap around your scene.
Also, if you did want to perform a spherical render for use in such a thing as what you're talking about, you could try going into the Render Room and turn on indirect lighting, but then "Ambient Occlusion Only" and then use multi-pass and get a separate file for the AO pass using that multi-pass feature. I don't know if such a thing - the resulting spherical map added to a sphere, and brought into Poser - would actually show up correctly in the render, or if it would just look like the inside of a giant, sketched sphere.
If it doesn't work as intended in Poser, what you could do is to try doing the whole thing in Carrara as described above, just using the AO output as your sketch. Further sketch-like enhancements could easily be done in Dogwaffle or whatever you like. Here an AO output I did of my EnvironKit - Woodlands set for Carrara:
The same scene otherwise looks more like this:
As the other answers said: no.
I'm also into graphic novel-style and go the opposite setup: Studio to Carrara with obj, render (multipass doesn't help so much), apply customized filters (I use Postworkshop Pro and for final layer stuff Photoshop Elements and Corel Photo Paint). (And I tried your way with all 3Delight comic shaders and cameras and Poser 10s firefly to lesser effect.)
But: Howie's scenes even doesn't work really nice on my recipe; there's simply too much detail in it. I have almost all of Howie's products, but they lack of one simple principle of comics: simplicity. Those scenes are the best you get if you are into photo-realistic renders in Carrara. But they smudge and blur for comics because of their realism.
I will buy them nevertheless, because there's so much to learn from them.