It Had to Happen Sooner or Later...
GumpOtaku
Posts: 106
I have bought C8.5 today. Surprise circumstances in fiance has prompted me to do this, although I would have not in any other case, Judging what I have already learned in Carrara, this would be a piece of red, white and blue layer cake right? If I am wrong, tell me so. No feelings would be hurt...
:D
~GO
Comments
Welcome aboard!
You like it a lot better, don't you?
Yeah... welcome aboard!
Some of the highlights that I really like with having 8.5 so far, though I still have not checked out the new features in the graph editor:
New light avatars - I know... this seems to be a small thing. But being able to quickly identify the different light types by sight has been becoming a great advantage in my work flow. But now that I've been doing a bit of studying from Jeremy Birn's Digital Lighting & Rendering, I've been getting into using shape lights, which are vastly more useful than I have ever realized. And seeing those shapes is most beneficial! In short, Spot and Bulb lights emit from a single point in space. Shape lights are more special than that.
New Zeroing functions located now in the 'Animation' tab - This new set of functions is an excellent addition, in my opinion. Zero selected, Zero selected - Pose, Zero selected and Children, Zero selected and Children - Pose, etc., I use these more than I've ever expected to - whereas I never really used the "Zero Figure" button before 8.5, when it was located in the General section in the instances tray.
New Parameters Tab - A new necessity for getting Genesis to work properly in Carrara, but it is much better, again... my opinion, for earlier generation morph organization as well.
Triax compatibility - Genesis is really cool, and this compatibility also allows us to load in the new Horse and Dragon as well. Cool stuff. With the new DAZ Studio tools for making models for this whole new rigging system, we actually have a lot more flexibility towards making stuff to work with our figures using just Carrara and DS now. But even if we don't take advantage of that, just being able to use Genesis is an amazing amount of new fun. Genesis 1 being omnisexual is a huge boon. We can fit clothes to Genesis and make it a plethora of different shapes. This is no small advantage. I can totally understand and am totally behind the new Genesis 2 idea. Having the Male and Female base figures separate made the males better than they were and the females better than they were... I feel. But to me, this doesn't take away the need to keep and use Genesis 1 for all of the incredible benefits that it offers. The monsters and other shapes are just too cool!
I know there's more. But I've been using 8.5 since a fairly early beta, so a lot of it was already ingrained in me for quite some time. To me, better is better, and I always like to use the better stuff :)
Maybe one day I'll get C8.5. Not in any rush for it.
By buying C8.5 you agree'd not to moan about any bugs you find, its in the Carrara 8.5 EULA :D
:-)
:-):ahhh:
the FBX import rocks
you can grab all those3rd party Autodesk etc rigged figures that people put into FBX format and load em rigged animated into carrara!
or if you wish to buy iClone pipeline bundle use their figures too
So... if I bought the whole pipeline bundle, could I use the animation tools in iClone on V4, M4, etc., and then somehow (easily) export the iClone animations for use in Carrara? Or would I have to export the whole figure with the animations tied to it?
iClone looks like it has some cool animation tools, but I don't want to use it to render with... so the Pipeline price tag keep turning my head from looking at it further. There are free trials, but it appears that I would need the complete pipeline before I would know whether I would benefit even a little from it.
re iClone
unless you were gonna render in it I seriously would not suggest buying it.
that is where the advantage is for quick rendering to make movie length animations
Carrara is definitely the way to go for high quality animations rather than iClone but it comes at a huge time cost.
I would always suggest get the trial version and play with it
it stays functional after without import options and has a small watermark but can still be used for lots of fun and logos can be obscured in video editors too
I use carrara rendered spherical backgrounds in it often myself,
it does have a 360 sky with a shadowcatch function and video textures including on the sky
I have found that Genesis 1 lags C8.5 on my computer. Remembering the question I posed a while back, I went to Studio and posed my character there and exported as an OBJ to C8.5 so I can go some the magic and rendering that. That is now my workflow, since I cannot pose G1 in Carrara due to excessive lag. When DAZ adds stuff like the Smoothing Modifier into C8.6 or C9 is will I reconsider my stance and edit G1 directly.
~GO