Howey Farkes stuff on sale
TangoAlpha
Posts: 4,584
As part of the "T party" sale, a lot of Howey Farkes scenes are now just $12 - Stoney Creek, Forest Drive, Country Lane, Secret Lake...
BUT the bundles are not discounted, so if you want to buy the set, you still save, but not by much (so Country Lane only saves you 45p for all 4 over the bundle). If you just want one or two though, it's time to go grabbing! :)
Comments
Bravo!
Even Howie's Arboretum sets are on sale! Great tree presets in those!
Actually, most if not all of his sets come with amazing tree presets and other goodies. His Carrara trees are simply amazing! I love owning the Arboretum set that I have. I hope to grab the other during this sale! But I also use the trees from the Stoney Creek bundle and others quite a lot. I love making my own trees and other Carrara models and seeing what he has done to make these excellent presets has been a great way to learn. I use his pebbles from the creeks, ground clutter and other plants and such as well.
Thanks Howie!
I couldn't afford everything on sale, but even so I spent an ouch amount of money (no more takeouts for me this month!) Looking forward to learning lots from those sets :)
Dartan, I see your environkits and animation kits are on sale too - nice one! :)
It's a pity his sets are for Carrara only; I only have daz and Poser. They do look beautiful, though
Hi Michelle,
Have you looked at Merlin Studios for DAZ?
http://www.daz3d.com/merlin-studios
He has lots of great items. I have his Merlin Oak Props set which is only $8.00 right now and there's a lot in that set, stone wall, grasses, plants, etc in addition to a great tree.
He also has other excellent trees and a tree bundle.
And for scenes there's several by Andrey Pestryakov that are reasonably priced that I own. Some good stuff in there!
http://www.daz3d.com/andrey-pestryakov
But my Carrara heart belongs to Howie and Dart and Mmoir! %-P ...and to some of the Bryce artists who make their art compatible in Carrara, too.
:) Silene
There's an easy solution to this problem. Wait for a Carrara sale. ;-)
There's an easy solution to this problem. Wait for a Carrara sale. ;-)Yeah, there's a good reason that they're for Carrara-only - Poser and DS just don't quite have what it takes ;)
Close... but not quite.
The really nice saving grace is that Carrara is so darned inexpensive for the wondrous tools we get. I started in Poser, and loved it. But the time quickly came when I've discovered that I needed some more tools. I started looking at all of the modelers on the market at the time. Without finding Carrara yet, all of the results were a headache for doing what I wanted to do: Use Poser content in a 3d modeler.
Finding Carrara was the diamond I've been looking for. DAZ 3D does make it easy to get fitted with their software if you want it. They have better sale prices than any company I've seen.
So I've found Carrara and obtained the ability to actually model in the same studio where I performed my posing and animation as well as final rendering. That last bit was a shocker! Finding out how quickly Carrara can render! Sure... we can crank up the setting beyond what's needed to take days for a single frame. But with a whopping ray trace depth of 8 passes, Carrara's default render settings render like lightning!
So now I've got what I wanted. I still used Poser/DS background scenery for the most part over the first couple of years or so. Then I bought some Howie Farkes sets and started looking deeper into using Carrara's tools more and more. That's when I've discovered how easy it is to make surrounding landscapes and scenery. Setting the sky color and environmental lighting by simply dragging around the Sun in a little sky-dome control area... wow! Making trees fundamentally with a complete set of tabs containing parameters to completely design every aspect of a new plant... or simply tweak on a few settings from any one a many presets... Carrara just continued to wow me!
Animating became a true dream for me. Granted, I'm not savvy to the tools in higher priced applications like Maya and 3ds Max or LightWave, but as I work away in Carrara, I find that there doesn't seem to be anything that cannot be done with a bit of imagination.
The modelers all seem to work very pleasantly and effectively, the texturing process is simple to use and fun, we can even 3D Paint directly on our models and use the same type of process to paint displacement and bump maps... displace to the point of sculpting like in Sculptris and other sculpting software...
So part of my reasoning for making Carrara-specific products is to show Poser and DAZ Studio users how easy it can be to use true 3d surroundings in an application that works with such things as easily as using a butter knife for butter. But the biggest reason was an answer to some requests for more presets for Carrara that provided more to the preset's scene.
As for Howie Farkes, the sets that he sells for Carrara take us to a very natural, real place within the three dimensional space of Carrara. Such accuracy and enormity would make Poser and DS cough up bits and bytes! At higher render settings, they can slow a Carrara render to a crawl, but Carrara can still handle it well and complete the render. On my modest PC-class workstation (not truly a workstation at all, just an eight-core personal computer (not server-class) with 16 GB Ram and a lot of cooling for long-term rendering with the cpu cores running wide open the whole time) I can render out Howie's scene in a very timely manner - making it a lot of fun to dicover how he can pull of such reality.
My EnvironKits are made to allow for a very scale-able approach to scene creation that can easily meet the needs of nearly any difficulty of outdoor scene, with a plethora of presets built using the system. A simple-to-use modular lighting setup with preset environmental additions like volumetric clouds, fog, different scenery textures, and animated water, etc.,
This stuff works great in Carrara, but would be enormous in Poser or DS.
I hope that helps to somewhat clear up why some products must remain Carrara-specific.
Indeed
Dartanbeck: Thanks for your posting. It's something I will look into and consider; especially with the faster render times!
Indeed
Dartanbeck: Thanks for your posting. It's something I will look into and consider; especially with the faster render times!
I know my post was a bit flippant, but it's all meant in good humor, and personally, I think Carrara is a really fun and powerful program, despite DAZ's apparent lack of love. ;-)
If you want rabid, go to the Bryce forum. They scare even us old Apple users. :lol:
I love Howie's sets... actually have a render progressing right now. They are very complex scenes and can take a while to render (the current image is pushing fives hours on a 6-core MacPro). How this makes me ache for Daz to fix the render node which is broken under Mac OS 10.9... I would render more scenes with these sets.