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Yes I have tried that. The problem is not so much loading the character .. which does load ... it's the 'wearables' preset that isn't working. So things like his hair, gens, eyebrows, wings, horns etc .. aren't loading .. either it crashes .. or it doesn't load properly .. or both :P Obviously there's no point in having just the raw character if all the other bits aren't there too.
Could even be the the Gens UV map is causing the problem .. since that doesn't seem to load properly. Even when I load a character from scratch. So yeah, I can load the basic character .. but I need to find out how to load the rest of him.
OK, some progress in identifying the problem.
You should now be able to identify the specific list of items that will and will not load. Is there a pattern? For example, is it all HD morph items? Is it just items associated with a particular body part? Is it only items from a particular vendor? Is it only items installed in a particular way? Maybe there is something that can be fixed, maybe not. Just have to keep narrowing down the list of potential obstacles.
Sad to say, at some point you do have to make a decision about recreating the character. You have to balance the time and expense it would take to recreate or load a similar character against the time and expense it would take to do your animations in another program. In carrara, you can make just about anything so that option is there, but whether it is worth it is up to you.
honestly for just loading premade bought DAZ figures etc
then render
Daz studio is the program for you
Carrara is only if you wish to be more creative and original and prepared to put some work in
just my opinion
the fact is nothing will work out the box with Daz content in any other program but Daz studio
other programs including Poser need some work on behalf of the user and with Poser forget importing all your Daz scenes, carrara at least sometimes works.
That is why they have Poser companion files most if not triax figures are best used in Carrara too.
At the moment I don't have any choice but to use DAZ. That's okay though. It is capable of doing what I need it to.
My worry of Carrara is that one had to create everything from scratch .. In which case, is that easy? If I decided to make a hair piece, is that something that takes months to end up with something simple? The Carrara page does say it can handle most DAZ content and my plays with it show that it can handle most of the set pieces I need to use. At the end of the day if I couldn't handle premade content that'd be like buying a sports car with no wheels .. To find out that you have to make your own for it.
I'm sold on Carrara being able to do what I need it to, but I hope it doesn't take months to create something like a new shader for the genesis gens (because the one that came with sure as hell isn't working), and I want it to fit precisely with the body skin tone. If a simple pair of premade horns won't load up then my confidence in being able to make my own is low at best. If a chair, or a living room scene can load then why not some other simple stuff?
Anyways, I will do the most difficult thing any make can bring himself to do .. And read the manual!
No. You won't have to make everything from scratch. You could, if you wanted to, but you don't have to. You don't even have to make anything from scratch at all if you don't want to.
It is a complex piece of software, so there will be a learning curve that may be frustrating sometimes, but look at it this way: We're here to help.
My suggestion would be to critically look at what you produce in D/S and determine your weaker areas. Then determine what you want to improve on first. It could be lighting, it could be shading/texturing or it could be animation. Once you determine those areas you want to concentrate on, then those are the areas that you work on in Carrara and even Studio. The nomenclature can be a bit different, but you'll find that many of the 3D principles are transferable between programs.
Right now Carrara may seem to be causing you fits with Genesis, but then again, if you want to do animations, Carrara's native renderer is much faster than Studio's, plus there are many more animation tools in Carrara. Some similar functionality can be purchased in the form of plugins for Studio, and some cannot be had at all.
Indeed .. and fur sure it's Carrara's rendering and animating abilities I'm very interested in it for.
Good to know that scratch building isn't a necessity. I'm not afraid to learn such a thing, and hopefully while I'm rendering scenes I'll be also be watching, reading and learning how to use Carrara in greater detail. I guess I'm just dying to get to work on my film project and there's all the terrific ready made stuff waiting to be used so naturally I want to dive into those.
Now for my second film (yeah I'm thinking ahead), I expect I'll want to scratch build things of my own design for that one. But I gotta make film number 1 a success first.
And you can be sure I'll be hitting up this forum with questions pretty often. I hope to have my teaser film done by the ned of next month .. I have two more shots to render .. the last shot being the most intensive one. Those of you who don't mind a naked smokin'-hot demon guy might even enjoy a look. So far it REALLY looks good (not just him) as the camera pans, lighting shifts, even the camera focus depth is animated .. and it's a couple of shots that really romance his lines. This is when 4K mastering really comes into it's own because when you see this .. even at lesser resolutions the film just looks gorgeous.
Hardest part I've come to right now is figuring out what to call my movie :P .. still haven't quite got a name for it yet. But I'll have to think of one because I need to animate that title flying into view at the end of the teaser. Actually was thinking of using Carrara to do the 3D text .. since it can do that .. and I can have some practical experience learning how to animate, and light and render the text.
Actually .. here's' a thing. I'm thinking for my final shot of having my characters wings appear in a fiery effect. Does any one know how I might go about having the wings look like they're burning into view. So here's the shot breakdown:
Character in front .. camera moving slowly towards his face .. which is in dark so you can see it.
Light flares behind character who is slowly stepping forward into light so we finally get a reveal of his face, horns etc. At the same time it'd be sweet if I could get his wings (already a fire colour effect .. epic wings with fire texture), so look like they're burning into existence .. from his back to the very tips.
I can of course do this with a vignette mask to do a slow reveal from left to right but if I can get the edges to shimmer and burn as they appear that would look cool. Or perhaps they could appear with a fiery flash .. that might be simpler .. but a creeping fiery reveal from stem to wing tips would be icing on cake.
I plan to render this shot in 3 parts. Background. Character. And wings. So all three elements can be blended later in Final Cut.
Any suggestions. And please be gentle .. I'm not all that familiar with bump maps, UV and other such things.
Yeah.
I use Project Dogwaffle Pro: Howler for this sort of thing, but you could use anything that can treat animations like image files.
Take an animated fire effect and tweak it to run the appropriate amount of time and at the right frame rate. For Howler, and being a super-long animation with no breaks, the 120 fps likely wouldn't work. But anyways...
In Howler, I would turn the flames animation into an animated brush
Open the texture map for the wings
set up the animated brush in the correct direction angle and scale for one wing and store the brush
Repeat for the second wing, if they're mapped individually
Set Black as the primary color and turn the original texture into the appropriate length of animation
Instead of having it auto-repeat the image on each frame, have it fill with the primary (black)
Use the first frame (still owning the original texture map) to line up the animated brush of flames effect and paint it accross the whole animation using the animated brush key framer
Repeat for the second wing, if they're individually mapped.
Animation > Save Sequence > Save the new animation as a sequence of images for use in the Color channel.
I would go with further steps to deselect the black (selecting only the flames) and save as png w/alpha sequence. But instead you can:
Run a saturation filter on the sequence to turn it to gray scale for use in the alpha channel.
This gray scale might also work well as a multiplier in the glow channel with the color sequence if more brightness is needed.
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Attach a particle emitter to each wing in a good, central location
Choose "Facing Camera" as the particle type
set the particle shader to use a gray scale "cloud" image to control a color gradient - initially as the colors of the flames (left side of the gradient) and ending in greys and perhaps a bit of brown (right side of gradient)
Still in the particle shader, use the life of particle to control the gradient as well
Now go into the emitter and set it up to start emitting sparks just before the animated texture starts flaming, having the particles use negative gravity so that they rise as the shader turns them from fire to smoke.
Duplicate the emitter as many times as you want for other parts of the wing, the other wing, etc., and make one that has positive gravity which starts later and spews hot coals from the wings to the ground. Make people scared to come near this guy!
Something like that is where I would start.
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If you don't have the right flames animation sequence, you could make one in Carrara using either the Carrara Fire or particles or both.
Know that you may render in alpha in Carrara. So you could actually create the new texture directly in Carrara and avoid the need for using additional software, like Howler or Final Cut, After Effects... whatever....
Using the same methods, you can also create an animated backdrop which only flames up after a certain period of time.
Use a few spot lights grouped together which glow red, orange, yellow, etc., and spin the group under him. Carrara will let you change the rpm as well as direction throughout the animation. Once you get a cool (or HOT, rather! LOL) effect going, simply duplicate that and move it to come from behind a wing, lighting up only after the flames kick on, then duplicate that setup for the other wing, and another that goes along with whatever background flames you might add.
This stuff can get REALLY fun! Changing spin modifiers can take a lot of practice to get just the right effect. Well... all of this stuff takes practice, no matter what software you run. But I love how Carrara just begs us to do everything inside itself!
HINT: you can layer renders in Carrara - render something and then load it into the backdrop. Anything in the scene automatically appears in front of the backdrop. Add to the scene, render again. Add that render to the backdrop, and stuff, render again... and again...
Sequenced Image animation work great for this. And remember that you may render with alpha - so you can actually use atmosphere and/or background channels to add something 'behind' the backdrop, if it is using an alpha! Can we say... "Ouch!"?
Yeah... I think we can! ;)
Thanks for the detailed explanation. I have no idea how to do any of that :P .. but at least I know it's possible. I just have to figure out what a brush is, what alpha is and does, and .. well everything else you said too :D But I'm gonna paste your comments here into a pad and try to figure it out.
My latest ramblings with Carrara are no better than earlier. For some reason Carrara hates Fisty's Sun hair .. specifically the eye bores which cause Carrara to crash, but if I don't open the 'objects' tab I can use it without the app crashing.
Gens on genesis simply won't work at all ... does nobody else ever need a naked character? I sure hope so cos Genesis 1 and 2 gens come out all graffitied with white spots and a part of a number?? It's very disappointing so far .. Carrara is more about what I can't do than what I can. I see that it has potential but it seems to me that this program is incapable of giving me a simple naked character .. and it's making me real sad :(
I realize I've still got a lot of manual reading to do but I so wish this would just load up what I've got properly. You'd think if a body texture loads then surely a gens texture would too right? I can almost load everything I need to. Managed to get his horns loaded and attached .. though the material didn't work so I used the 'basalt' shader on them which looks pretty close.
If anyone know's just what the hell the gens thing is about please tell me.
Again thanks for the above explanation .. obviously lots for me to figure out.
Sorry I cannot help (directly) with the Gens thing. I think that the gens for Genesis figures is 'geo-grafted', a function of Genesis that does not yet work in Carrara. If that is the case, I'm sorry about the loss. Yeah... I just never really had the need for them (genitals models) so I never even tried them. I do know, however, that the genitalia for M4, V4, etc., work very well in Carrara, as does that whole fourth generation of figure. Fourth generation being Michael 4 and all of his variants like Freak 4, Hiro 4, etc., and Victoria 4 and all of her variants, like theGirl 4, Aiko 4, Stephanie 4, etc.,
Up until the new Genesis figures, DAZ 3D's magnificent 3D human figures have been specially designed to work in Poser. DAZ Studio was made to work with Poser content.
Carrara 5 Pro came with a plugin called Trans-Poser (get it? Transfer Poser? LOL) which allowed pro users to import Poser content and then work with it as if you were using Poser: conforming clothing and hair, etc., smart props (props that snap into the correct position upon a figure, like weapons, etc.,), Poses, Face Expressions, and Materials (MAT Pose files) and Morph injections (INJ Pose files) all worked as expected in Carrara 5 Pro after importing via TransPoser.
As of Carrara 6, Poser content could be added to the browser's Content Tab, and used just like in Poser, without the need for a plugin. Some folks miss some of the import options that TransPoser offered, but most of us are happy to have the content behave as if it was Carrara native content.
With Genesis, DAZ 3D broke new ground using SubD Cage modeling, so that we can use a fairly high (yet not that high) resolution figure, and use the SubD (polygon subdivision) technology to manipulate the mesh in vast ways, because the creating artist can actually subdivide the mesh to the point they need to in order to get the specific shape, and make a whole new shape using the same mesh - except that it has multitudes higher resolution due to the subdivision process. Subdividing once converts each polygon (little square of the wire frame) into four. Subdivide twice and each of those four turns to four. Genesis HD can go to SubD 5 and I think even higher... getting absolutely insane resolution, where bump and displacement maps become obsolete since we can just sculpt the detail into the actual mesh itself.
So then the artist can set the standard Genesis "Cage" to the appropriate level of smoothing - the number of times they subdivided to perform their sculpt - and then import their sculpt as a morph. DAZ Studio's Genesis SubD Cage technology then takes over and applies the shape at the resolution set by the artist. Save that as a Shape dial, and now Genesis can have that shape even at lower smoothing (DS's term for SubD), and the higher detail will become apparent as the user cranks up the smoothing level. For animators, this can also work backwards for speedier usability within the software - turn the smoothing level way down, like 1 or even 0. Less polygons to calculate makes everything faster, even renders.
Some of the Genesis technology, namely Genesis 2 and HD, came after Carrara 8.5 development closed, so 8.5 simply doesn't work with some things of the Genesis nature as well as DAZ Studio does, which is still under intense, active development.
Even still, we can use Carrara and DAZ Studio together to get the best from both worlds.
"Alpha" is an area of an image file that is set to remain transparent. "PNG" files are a popular format for saving alpha within an image, as it is incredibly compatible with most software that works with images.
In Carrara, you can render over an empty scene and anything in the scene that contains nothing will appear transparent if rendered with alpha. Add a skybox style surrounding and you'll lose the ability to get alpha information in a render, as the box surrounds the camera.
In Project Dogwaffle Pro: Howler, I can use Carrara renders with alpha as a brush - an actual paint brush. It also accepts animated image sequences as an animated brush. f I'd use such a thing as a normal paint brush, the brush image will change as I paint, according to the sequence. I can set the rate of the animated brush as well. What I was talking about earlier is a special "Animated Brush Key Framer", which allows me to place the animated brush image in the scene, and keyframe changes to it. Like making it small in the beginning and to the left, and then larger and to the right at the end to make a simple walk cycle animation move from far away to right up close, etc.,
But that's just me and Howler... I'm a bit of a Howler geek! ;)
I think that Final Cut Pro, After Effects and other software that works with animation sequences could produce an animated image for use as an animated texture map for your wings.
Carrara allows us to add avi and sequenced images as images pretty much anywhere an image is allowed to be used - like for textures, backdrops, backgrounds, etc., but not for height maps! :( I wanted to make an animated height map for the terrain editor! LOL
But for that, I could just use a simple plane and the animated height map as displacement. Okay, now I'm babbling!
BTW, Love the new avatar! Is that he? The Demon in Question?
Either way, he looks freaking COOL!!!
That's terrific, thanks for the explanation. Yes the help desk people have said there's a fair few issues to work out .. I guess I'll just need to hang on until they're sorted out before I can really use Carrara the way I want to. Last night I was making an animated 3D text logo using Carrara that was a nice simple process. Though I've only got a simple text thing going on with some lights I had fun moving the lights around as the camera zooms out of the text block.
Now I realise that the alpha thing actually would be helpful so that the text animation could be layered over other film. I rendered this initially without a background so I'm not sure if it can be "added" as an alpha layer in final cut but I'll find that out soon. Even so, now I know where to look to enable that setting.
And yes my avatar is from a screenie of my super awesome demon boy .. His name is Aerial
To be upfront, I use Carrara 7.2 Pro, so I can't use Genesis and I haven't used the V4 and M4 genetalia, so I don't know issues with those as well.
Now for a link I found that provides a tutorial on how to make a completely procedural skin texture. This tutorial uses no image maps, so it may help with what you are trying to do. It may also be a good introduction to the texture room. Warning: Tutorial contains nudity!
http://www.shonner.com/drafts/procedural_skin_texture.htm
I haven't tried the tutorial myself, but I am going to for this month's Carrara challenge.
These videos I did make heavy use of alpha channels to layer different elements together. All done with Carrara and FCP.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iS-sNje4k0o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fyKOSUTsg
Here's a nice pic of Aerial and Gabriel (Gabriel is about a foot smaller than Aerial, and he's got smaller horns .. So you know who's the top out of these two :P )
This was an earlier DAZ render before I bought the AOA lighting and effects stuff which is rather adding a lot to my renders these days. Also this was before I discovered the depth of field setting in the camera. But it's a nice pose.
You'd be surprised but the sun hair eyebrows really cause Carrara to have fits. Both models are based on M5 (though Aerial is M5 Heroic). The demon morphs are based on Rael (about 25% morphed) and the Demonics demon morph to get the body shape .. Which you can't really see here because that's more about the legs and arms. Horns are by Demonics (Faunus) and wings (not shown here) are Epic wings. There's a few subtle morphs of different character types as well but I can't remember what I used off hand. And hair is sun hair by fisty.
Friggin' COOL, scott!