3D Coat and Daz (Was: Carrara as a Modelling Program)
ghastlycomic
Posts: 2,531
How is Carrara as a modelling program? Can it do things like cloth simulation?
Post edited by ghastlycomic on
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Yup...lol
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV9BCy5BNAE
I googled cloth simulation in Carrara and got lots of hits, some with videos.
Better video here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hg1bg2ZebcU
I have versions 5, 6, and 7 and while i really like the program, i am used to the UI in 3DSMax, so i never really got used to the modeling aspect in carrara, but love the terrains, the ease of setting up shaders and the lighting. I still think they need to combine DS and carrara, both have some great features the other lacks.
I'm in agreement with that...lol And yes a better video. (psst...only did a quickie search...lol)
not terribly good at animated sims on boned figures, static drapes ok
good with object interaction
does not seem to recognize mesh movement by morphing or bones
This one looks promising, but I could not find the thread on Daz3D forums about it.
Dynamic Cloth Demo in Carrara 8 Pro http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8J330vCj1io
I'm not too worried about animating cloth, I just want to be able to make a clothing mesh and run a cloth simulation on it and then export the result as an obj to use as clothing in DAZ Studio.
Although I'm kinda liking the look of 3D coat too, even though it doesn't do cloth simulation I can just sculpt the cloth exactly the way I want it and it has auto retopo too. Decisions decisions.....
In my opinion, of the two choices in DAZ modeling programs, Carrara is superior to Hexagon in terms of the tools available and stability. As with most tools, the more powerful / flexible a tool is, the higher the learning curve to get started. But if I were starting out with modeling and was choosing between the two, Carrara would be the way to go.
Just downloading the trial version of 3D coat now, I'm going to give that a try first since the hobby license is only $100.
Does the fact that Carrara is a full feature 3D suit cause any resource bloat if you use it as only a modeller or is it more modular and only loads what it's using at the time?
All the tools load when Carrara is started - but software "bloat" really isn't an issue with Carrara. On my system, Carrara takes 84,420K when started, in comparison, Daz Studio eats up 649,620K with a blank scene (I do have a few plugins that add to the memory consumed by DS). Overall, Carrara is very easy on resources.
It really depends on what you want to do. 3D Coat is a great at sculpting and organic modeling (and I think it has some polygon modeling tools now), For a modeling, uv mapping, and texture painting, focused application, 3D Coat is hard to beat for the price, especially organic shapes (it's on my short list of software I'd like to get). But, it doesn't have all the other features that Carrara has. If you really only want a modeler, 3D Coat would be a good choice. If your looking for an all round 3D software, for the price (especially at the PC price) Carrara 8.5 is pretty hard to beat. The spline modeler in Carrara is very good, and the vertex modeler works very well too.
There are a few people that do all their modeling in Carrara. Kixum - a long time Carrara user does all his work in Carrara, you can see some of his work here: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/browse.php?username=Kixum
Zikeo uses a combination of Amapi (no longer available,) and Carrara, his stuff can bee seen at rendo here: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/browse.php?username=ZIKEO
A thread on modeling on Carrara can be found here: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/28716/
You also might try asking some questions over in the Carrara forum (http://www.daz3d.com/forums/categories/66/) - A lot of the regulars there don't visit the other forums very much.
Hope this helps!
Talking strictly about modeling Carrara is nearly awful. I got 5 and 6 and then forsweared using it ever again. Better model in Hexagon or Silo though I am currently using modo.
I am indeed jealous of those who can model in Hexagon
apparently it is very good, and I have certainly seen the evidence
if it plays nice on your computer
it never has for me :long:
Hexagon has to be one of the most simple and elegant modelling programs out there. If it wasn't for it's dated features and lack of stability on modern machines it would be a first class modelling app. I'm fortunate in that it works with reasonable predictability on my machine (as in I know what makes it crash so I just don't do that).
I gotta say I'm loving this 3D coat. Did the Rat from Scratch tutorial yesterday and it did a pretty good job of familiarizing me with the software. It also has cloth simulation too so that's a plus. $100 for a hobbyist license seems completely reasonable too.
Well I've familiarized myself with the 3D coat software enough that I can start to make things with it. The "Rat From Scratch" tutorial was quite helpful.
Right now it's looking like the modeller I'm going to get. The $100 hobbyist license and the ease of use and features seem like a good buy. Haven't played with the cloth simulation yet but just knowing it has the ability it a plus. Maybe it's not so bad that Marvelous Designer priced themselves out of the hobby market with MD3 because 3D coat will definitely be a lot more versatile (granted at the expense of ease of use).
Anyone else here using 3D coat with Daz Studio? What are your impressions of the software. So far all I've done is sculpt a simple outfit and made a Genesis morph with it. I've played a bit with the autoretopo but I'm not quite getting the results I want from that yet, but I'm sure I will have it figured out before long. All in all it looks like it might be a good asset for Daz Studio.
Freaked me out the first time I loaded a Genesis figure into the Voxel sculpt and it turned into some sort of undead shambling creature. :lol:
Here's my first outfit attempt.
I only play in 3D-Coat once in a while, but have been doing so for a number of years demoing new version releases, and testing out new features. It's on my list of programs to purchase, but the funding just isn't there yet.
I have not seen any evidence of cloth simulation in it, and as far as I can see from reading the development beta builds threads, he hasn't added one yet.
Voxels; Check... Dynamic Clay; Check... UV Mapping; Check... Auto-Retopo; Check... Manual Retopo; Check... Pixel Painting; Check... Vertex Painting; Check... Ptex Painting; Check...
Where, praytell, did you see cloth simulation?
It's not that I don't believe you, it's I can't seem to find it, and as far as I know trial versions include everything to be purchased. You download the trial, play, and then pay for a license not to expire past 30 days opening up all aspects of saving, and layer usage.
The cloth simulation is one of the object tools in the voxel sculpt room. You can either use a default sheet of cloth or you can import a mesh and clothize it, or use your retopo mesh as cloth. But it will only interact with voxel sculpting, not surface sculpting. I haven't played with it much. The simulation runs pretty slow on my machine. Marvelous Designer definitely has a better cloth simulation
Well I've done the retopo and baking and have now made my first fully functional clothing item with 3D Coat. Barring some unforeseen calamity of compatibility I think it's won the "Time to move on from Sculptris and Hexagon" competition.
This body suit has a lot of flaws in it that I would fix if I were making it again but as a learning experience it served its purpose quite well.
Now to try something a little more ambitious.
That was quick, and well done! It must be fairly intuitive. What is the texture size limit for the educational version? I think it used to be 2048x2048, but I haven't had any luck finding it. I might be able to afford the edu version. Been drooling over it for years.
I think it's still 2048.
The Rat From Scratch tutorial and the Pirate tutorial are both really good for familiarizing yourself with the basics. The rest starts falling into place through experimentation. For such an inexpensive program it really is remarkably powerful. Even the professional version isn't that expensive. I hear it's not as powerful as Zbrush but after having used nothing but Hexagon and Sculptris for the last year it seems plenty powerful enough for me. I have to watch the memory usage on it though. If I start to get below 2gb of free memory the performance becomes unstable on my 4 year old laptop.
So far there's not anything that disappoints me with the software. I love the way I can paint textures on models with overlapping UVs like Genesis.
Thank you, Ghastly.
I had no idea a cloth sim was added to the voxel room.
I only tried voxels once following a tutorial a few years ago when he implemented them. It was only a destructed pilar to test voxel to OBJ mesh export. The simple pilar ended up over 100 MB of data.
Just got done testing the simple cloth plane draped onto a default voxel character. Did a X2 subdivide before start, and it took forever to drape. Added a couple more sub-d's after completion to smooth out result.
Not that impressed with it from initial testing (been studying cloth sims for several years now. Not just Poser, Size8 Clothify module, but all aspects from white papers, research studies, MBA thesis', and demos to some of the commerical players out there). Andrew's is a limited sim with only two variables. It seems he implemented a pick-n-drag of sorts, but I could not get it to work during simulation. Also, not sure if he coded a Mass/Spring, or a Particle engine, but I suspect it might be particle based for use with voxels. Though, the default cloth did not seem to have shear springs implemented to affect stretching.
I found some cloth tuts for 3D-Coat via google, and I am going to digest them, and give it another go.
Thanks again for the heads up. I hope Andrew continues to develop the cloth sim further, and maybe we would end up with something that can truly rival Marvelous Designer. For now, MD will remain my cloth sim of choice.
I'd still use Marvelous Designer too if it had a hobbyist license for under $200.
I think the cloth sim in 3D Coat is just an experiment right now, but it's a promising new direction.
Nice having a pinch tool that actually works. I could never get the pinch to work well in Sculptris, it was more of a smooth than a pinch.
WIP of my second outfit sculpt in 3D Coat.
Nice work :)
Did you go from voxel to retopo in this case? I am still hoping to be able to spend more time in learning 3D-Coat, so not sure what the best route would be as for more flowing clothes. Retopo purely seems to be ideal for "cling-wrapped" clothing, but didn't spend that much time on it sadly.
I am thinking of getting 3D coat possibly too, must try it out first
I still love my carrara though, it would only be an extra tool.
The second one I haven't retopoed yet because I haven't finished it. If you make your retopo mesh high poly you can still capture the individual folds quite nicely but you get just as good a result going for a low poly mesh and using a displacement map and a normal map to capture the detail when the mesh is subdivided in Daz Studio.
The one nice thing is while Marvelous desiger did a great job simulating cloth folds and wrinkles on loose fitting, flowing clothing, it did a very poor job simulating the wringles and bunches on tight fitting, clingy clothing. That's where being able to manually sculpt the folds in really pays off. When they've perfected the cloth simulation in MD it will really create a best of both worlds scenario.
Also if I were making these as clothes to be released I wouldn't be doing the fold sculpting with symmetry on because I'd want the folds on each side of the body to be unique so it looks more realistic. I'm just using symmetry right now to speed things up since these are simply study exercises in creating a workflow to make genesis clothing.
I think when I get home today I'm going to go ahead and buy 3D coat even though I've still got most of a month left to go in my free trial. I'm really impressed with the software and think it will be a great addition to my Daz setup.
When I'm sculpting in folds in Blender, I use symmetry to do the 'gross' folds, then shut it off and tweak them/add small wrinkles/etc...you get the speed of symmetry and also the uniqueness that way.
Something else I often do...especially for loose, flowing things. Before I do any 'detail' work, I run a cloth sim/drape. That gets the item to 'hang'/be influenced by gravity.
Doing a little bit more on my 2nd clothing sculpt. Finding it really hard to be motivated to work today. Too much idle internet browsing.
In the past they have sent a discount code a couple of weeks into the trial period, so you may want to wait.
In the past they have sent a discount code a couple of weeks into the trial period, so you may want to wait.
Ooh! Thanks for the heads up!
I am still in process of lazy and slow study of 3d-coat tools but even now I could say that the re-topology toolset is awesome.