Working Around Carrara Import Bug

thoromyr

There's a bug in Carrara that causes some figures to import incorrectly and prevents them from working correctly. For example, 3D Universe Toon Goat the horns do not work correctly and, in the modeling room, editing cannot fix them. Daz has acknowledged this bug (apparently it has something to do with some points being out of bounds) and decided that it does not warrant fixing with an identified work around of load the figure in DazStudio, export it and then use it in Carrara.

Except that this does not work. It almost does, but there are several issues.

1) all constraints are lost
2) the model mesh is separated from the skeleton, but because the skeleton is attached the two cannot be grouped
3) conforming figures cannot conform to the imported figure
4) all morphs are lost

I can live with 1, but 2 is a problem because it cannot be moved into any hierarchy in the assembly room and 3 & 4 makes it basically unusable.

So, since Daz won't support Carrara, I'm hoping someone here has a better work around.

WendyLuvsCatz

well I have actually gotten him in
I forgot how, but have a feeling it either involved DSON import, Poser and Fenrics weight map plugin or maybe collada export
I use him in iClone but know I have in carrara too but there was a trick, damned if I can remember

WendyLuvsCatz

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/8692/

yes did then after could not
a change in carrara build perhaps?
maybe used C7
it was something else I DSON fixed

thoromyr

well, thanks for the input. I'll see if I can get C7 running.

Stezza

I got my goat horny again by doing this:

thoromyr

Stezza said:

I got my goat horny again by doing this:

An amusing image but...

Exporting as Collada doesn't work (and the results appear to be effectively identical no matter the options). Doing "save as" of the scene subset seems to almost work. ERC stuff is broken and constraints are all gone from nearly all the morphs. This makes using morphs tedious at best. It appears to be an annoyance only, but the group is also sized at ~35 feet which is annoying when using '0' to zoom to the figure.

But so far everything else seems to work.

This method also does not work for all figures, only the ones that DazStudio is able to load. Although its support for poser content is superior to Carrara's it isn't perfect either. Sigh.

WendyLuvsCatz

I fixed the goat
select horns
go to animation
select IK restraints
turn off for selection and children
go to animation again
zero tree selection
go to animation IK restraints again
add ball joint to selection and children
do same with ears

thoromyr

Thanks for sharing! That procedure certainly fixed the toon goat. A shame it didn't do anything for chip or cookie :(

But I can at least get better use from the Toon Goat now, and that is much appreciated!

WendyLuvsCatz

YW, I did a silly video then too

thoromyr

The forum helpfully lost my first attempt to reply here so please pardon brevity, hope I didn't miss a step.

What I settled on for Chip & Cookie was:

1. Open figure in Daz Studio
2. Save as scene subset
3. Open duf in Carrara
4. Fix head (& children) morphs (set range 0..1)
5. Save as Carrara object
6. Open in model room
7. Select skin shading domain
8. Deselect by name, head polygons
9. Hide selection
10. Toggle hide/unhide torso to get Carrara to update display
11. Save as Carrara object named "... Head"
12. Open figure body (no head) in Carrara
13. Parent head to body
14. Group, name as figure
15. Save as Carrara object named for figure

Repeat 12..15 for centaur bodies. This results in a grouped figure even for the base figures, but preserves the full body morphs that going through Daz Studio loses.

Caveat: sometimes for reasons unknown, the head figure will lose its morphs. They are still listed, but instead of limited ranges they are completely open. Setting one slider sets all of them to the same value, but there is no effect (no morphs are activated). When this happens the scene file is a loss, I have found no way to recover (deleting the figure, removing unused objects, restarting carrara, loading figure fresh, parented or not does no good). This only appears to affect the head morphs.