Real Leaves 1 for Carrara

laverdet_943f1f7da1

Hi!!! I have bought that item, "real leaves in carrara", but unfortunely the link to page about the "how to do", is broken... does anybody knows how to use these "real leaves"... I have to make a forest, and I'm very newbie to the tree builder! thank you for help!

Diomede

Hi. It is a relatively simple process, but we need to find where the files were installed. Carrara should find them automatically in the plant modeler room, but just in case, I will walk through the steps that work for me.

1 - you have bought your product. You have either manually downloaded and installed, or you have had the Download Install manager (DIM) do it. If you used the DIM, you can go to the DIM installed product tab and hover your cursor over the product name and it will tell you which files were downloaded and installed. There is also a link to the information (i) and readmes that were downloaded. See pic.

2 - Open a blank scene in Carrara, and from the top menu choose INSERT : PLANT.

3 - Carrara will open the plant modeler. Choose the "leaf" tab along the top of the plant modeler room. You should see a default leaf. Highlight it and choose "remove."

4 - Try "add" from the leaf menu. A set of leaves pop up. If the DIM did a good job, the leaves will be in the menu, you just need to scroll through. You can see from my screen that I have also bought products from Dartanbeck and PhilW that have leaves in other folders.

5 - If the leaves are not there, try "load" and a file menu will pop up. You will have to navigate through your computer files to wherever you installed the leaves (which would be listed in step 1 above if you used the DIM). Mine are in a folder structure /DAZ3D/Carrara8.5/Data/Plants/Leaves.

6 - Exit the plant modeler and render your tree.

Hope this helps.

laverdet_943f1f7da1

THank you a lot fot your explanations!... I don't use DIM, (because I have 2 hard disk, and I want to install manually), so I'm not sure to understand where to put these leaves, to see them, like in your pop up... but, searching via "add", as you explain, I've done really easily a tree... thanks again!!!

Dartanbeck

If you're not using DIM, it should install by opening the zip file and adding the contents into the folder where Carrara is installed. For example, on a Windows computer with Carrara 8.5 installed to its default location, the folder would be:
Local Disk > Program Files > DAZ 3D > Carrara8.5

So it's that folder "Carrara8.5", where you would unzip the files to.

However, first makes sure that the structure inside the zip is correct. As Diomede illustrates, the files within the "Carrara8.5 > Data" folder should be installed to "Carrara8.5 > Data", and so on.

It's on my list of things to get, but I still don't have them :(
So I'm not sure if he adds them as separate leaf objects or not. If he does, it is customary with Carrara artists to include their own folder somewhere within the installation, and then you must know where that folder is, so that you can go into your objects tan of the browser and "ADD Folder" to select the proper folder to get the objects into the browser.

But as Diomede states, the leaves will be available in the plant editor, even if you don't find and add the new custom objects into the browser.

To find a custom folder that you need to add to your browser manually, open the zip file and explore the folder structure within.
In the image below, I have selected the folder that are not common to the Carrara installation - they've been added via Product Installations. They all belong where they are now to make the products work. Ooops. I should also have selected the folder named "Tutorials" in that list as well. Sorry about that. In the Tutorials folder, you'll find instructions by Mike Moir, and in the Dimension Theory folder, you'll find his tutorials.

When you need to find instructions, sometime the artist has left some inside the installation, that you can open directly from within the zip file.

None of the folders in that image are meant to be added to the browser.

To find folders to add to the browser, imagine what might be included with the product. The "What's Included" portion of the product page in the store should tell you everything that the product contains.

If it might have a 'scene' file, look in the folder named "Scenes". Compare the folders in this folder compared to what you have in your Scenes tab in the browser. The thing is, they don't use the same names as the folder! But they are close, and easy to tell. So if you have any extra folders in here that you don't have in your browser, either open the folder and look inside, or go ahead and add them to the browser and look to see if you can use anything in there.

Leaves meant for use with the Carrara Plant editor must go into a special place: Carrara > Data > Plants. If GKDantas made leaf models that you can load separately as an object in the scene, he'll have put the CAR files for those objects somewhere in the Data > Plants > Leaves folder. Otherwise they'll just be in a custom folder within that plants folder, within Data. These won't show up in the browser unless you add the folder from Data > Plants > "Custom Folder Name" to your Objects browser. But we often don't need to load them in as objects, but they do work nicely for ground cover.

Same as with scenes, Objects have their own special location: Carrara > Presets > Objects. Compare the folders in this installation folder (picture below, but open the Presets folder, and then the Objects folder) with what you have in your browser.

Dimension Theory, Phil W, and others make it fairly easy to spot their folders. It will either have their name on the folder, or the name of the product. Often times, the artist will put all of their object files into the same folder, so that once you add their folder for one product, the next product will automatically show up in your browser, if you've already added their folder to your browser.

Dartanbeck

Adding folders is easy, fun and harmless, because you can remove them even easier than when you added them!

So in this image, you see that I have added a couple of folders to my Scenes tab. Once I locate where they get installed, by opening the zip, or just by browsing the folder structure, Click the icon as shown below. The little dark page-looking icon. this brings up the File/Folder menu, where you may Add Folders, Remove folders, update folders that may have had something new added while Carrara was still running, etc.,

It's a really nice system when you get used to it :)