Looking for DAZ/Carrara content advice...
mschack
Posts: 337
I have never been a content person, but now that I have a few shekels to the DAZ store I am looking for some advice on what is the best bang for the buck for use in Carrara.
Mainly looking for stuff that has a good reuse value. My main avoidance for buying stuff (from any content market) is that I see myself using it once and never again, this is probably my misconception.
This thread may also be useful to others, especially given Carrara's dwindling product offering, it woud be nice to find out others experiences of certain products...
Thanks!
Post edited by mschack on
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the Dforce2Morph script in DAZ studio works on Genesis 1&2 clothing too
it can be usefull for adding sit and pose drapes to use in Carrara
There is no reason to focus on 'made for Carrara' items because so much Poser and Daz Studio content works in Carrara. However, if you are looking for carrara-specific items, you might look through the older store items of PhilW. https://www.daz3d.com/philw It includes carrara dynamic hair, realistic seas made with replicated terrains, cloud domes, large complex sets like the city and the fantasy village. There is quite a variety. TangoAlpha has several sets in which he includes a Carrara-optimized file (shaders, etc don't have to be tweaked). https://www.daz3d.com/tangoalpha I believe that some of Howie farkes large sets specific to Carrara have survived as well. https://www.daz3d.com/howiefarkes For each of these vendors, newer items are made for Studio. Make sure older items you look at have Carrara files. Other venders have sold their store to Daz and are listed as daz originals. See the DP shader products by Ringo for example. Here is one. https://www.daz3d.com/dp-genesis-2-male-s-shader-bundle-vol-i
You can also filter the store by software and check the box for Carrara.
My personal spending habit is to pick up any good fantasy or sci-fi scenes, as well as a few contemporary ones. I prefer older sets over newer; I'm going to be working on textures anyway, and they often are just as good or better than the newer stuff in every way that matters when working within Carrara.
Clothing and Characters: I buy up massive amounts of V4/M4, Genesis1, and some Genesis2 stuff. Nothing above Genesis2 for me, thanks, at least if I can help it. The older stuff is often humungously discounted, very high quality, and the new stuff has nothing to offer me. Occasionally DAZ will bribe me to buy some crappy V8/M8 stuff with a package deal (buy 1 new release, get $40k worth of Genesis1 stuff for just 1 penny!). But I don't have much use for the newer, pricier "emperor's new clothes" at all.
I have quite a few opinions on the main question of this thread, so I'll try and spread my thoughts out as to not make too long of posts, like I often do.
My first recommendation is in regards to Daz Figures - where to me, investing in options for Genesis 1 has been an enomously sound investment - named because it it the fully compatible version of Genesis for Carrara.
Carrara 8.5 Update development as far as we know it never quite completed the task of making Carrara compatible with more than one version (generation) of Genesis - so if we try to Auto-Fit something from one generation of Genesis to another, Carrara's auto-fit dialog will not be triggered, so it just thinks the what we're fitting is made for what we're fitting it to, and it doesn't work.
However, with a few of my articles, I explain how we can get a whole lot of newer generations of Genesis shapes, other morphs, clothing, etc., to be compatible with Genesis 1 - making it also compatible with Carrara in many cases.
Genesis 1 Rocks!!! is the main article that goes through many of the (most of them inexpensive for PC+ members) support products that I use to make this all happen.
Content Generation Conversion is the article explaining how I am now fairly confident in buying clothing for newer generations, and making Genesis 1 versions of the same items, and then adding them to my Daz Library, this time under the Genesis category instead of the original.
Before getting fully emerged into experiments that led to the Content Generation Conversion article, I was already incredibly impressed with how well Genesis 1 works with previous generations of clothing, using the clones addons from the Genesis 1 Rocks!!! article.
I started an article on collecting clothing using a PC+ membership: PC+ Cloth Frenzy to help illustrate how absolutely 'out-of-the-box' we can think when creating clothing for our Genesis characters, no matter who or what we have them become!
The images below begin showing a product for Hiro 3, the final image (right) being the shirt of that product used on my Genesis 1 character
Speaking of PC+, when I decided to set out into all of this I was really in quite the opposite mindset as to the original post - I wanted to use mostly content, making only what I felt I absolutely had to, in order to spend less time manipulating vertices and more time animating, texturing and rendering, which is what I really want to do.
My PC+ Experience page is only just begun, but still conveys the idea of how much content I was able to acquire with very little - even no budget.
That article in itself will grow as I get time, but it's mainly a landing page for even more articles like the PC+ Cloth Frenzy article I mention above, which are all intended to help show how I've been using the membership to get not only what I'm looking for, but collecting other things as well to build up a collection - a library that comes in handy when time is short and we have a scene to construct!
Within the PC+ Experience is my "Thanks Daz 3d" series, which again is still incomplete. I started it in the forum here, but the web update recently (again) wrecked a large portion of it. So I've started rewriting it here, but instead of trying to go all the way back to the beginning, I began with some recent events that were fresh o my memory, and then I was blessed with a Semi-Annual PC+ Sale Event, which I wrote about as the month-long sale progressed. That's a much larger collection of goodie than I'd imagined it would be - I Really Scored Big!!! And I really have no budget!
Thanks Daz 3d
June 2021 PC+ Sale Event
May 2021 Consolidation
Febrauary 2021
I hope that some of these pictoral guides with footnotes help to inspire folks to use low-cost goodies and turn them into gems within the amazing tool that is Carrara!
Many legacy Daz 3d store items come with some basic colors instead of textures. Sometimes they'll have a Textures expansion pack. Those expansion packs can be very worthwile, since we can then use those texure maps to use toward making our own custom creations.
But those legacy products might not look so great as the newer products - often because of the above mentioned lack of texture maps, but also because the tools, tastes and entire industry were different back then. Open these things up and we often find painstakingly made morphs and details galore - a product that really works well - we just need to give it some textures.
Being a texture artist was my very first step into the whole world of 3D. So it never bothers me when I have to make textures, since I often do so anyway. But even if texture art design isn't your thing, Ringo Monfort's Shader packs (Digital Painters) and those from folks like MatCreator and others can go a long way toward turning these older, excellent models into something truly worthy of rendering!
Okay, I need to update my Genesis 1 Rocks page. Until then, here is some important information regarding "Fit Control" mentioned in the article:
This is a small workaround considering how powerful this tool is to the whole workflow.
Fit Control - What is it?
Once installed, when we look in our Daz Library under People > Genesis > Cloting, Fit Control will be one of the categories. Within it we have options to add morphs to our clothing, reset all Fit Control morphs on the selected clothing, remove unused Fit Control morphs from clothing, and remove the Fit Control morphs entirely.
So here's how it works:
In Daz Studio (remember - this product does Not work directly within Carrara at all)
"Fit Control Morphs Have Been Added" will apear.
So select the clothing you want to customize and look in the parameters tab under Actor > Fir Control. You'll find a whole bunch of shape tweaking morphs that have no limits, so we can really change everything about the look and shape of the garment.
For use in Carrara, I would recommend performing Fit Control to clothing on the figure you want to use in Carrara and save the scene, then open that scene DUF in Carrara. Optionally (what I've done) we can save the clothing to the library. I'm fairly certain that the changes that Fit Control added to the shape of the garment will remain, but the dials won't actually do anything more in Carrara.
I have a good plan that may just get those dials working in Carrara, but I need to test it before saying another word about it.
Even more, I would recommend running the "Remove Unused Fit Control Morphs" button before saving - unless you'd like to keep them for further manipulation within DS at another time.
In this case, I hadn't even purchased any of them until this story started evolving in my head, so then I started collecting the series.
There is still So Much that I have to include, so there will be subpages added onto this to accomodate.
Pretty much everything listed here has been brought into Carrara, optimized for Carrara, and got saved to my custom browser to be used again and again and again. These kits never get old, load well, are fun to light and use. Big fan of all of this!!!
I've always been the same way - even going back to generation 3.
Lately I've started grabbing some of the Genesis 3 and 8 stuff and converting it, but a lot of my favorites come from legacy content - truth be told. Some of the new stuff is undeniably awesome though!
Let's take a look at my Genesis 1 Rosie 5.2
Her outfit consists of:
Hair
Textures
Eye Replacements
Wondering About Compatibility
For the longest time, I tried to stick with buying things that came with Poser formats as an option, as the CR2 and PP2, etc., are often very compatible with Carrara - the one big exception being Original Figures (rigged animals/people) as the newer Poser CR2 figures might be using weight mapping that Carrrara does not support.
Modern DUF scenes will often use the Daz Studio "Instancing" feature, in which case we won't see the instances in Carrara, just the original prop object that was used as the master. Keep that in mind when looking at scenes that have a lot of plants, grass, stones, etc.,
All of the Daz Original DUF scene kits I've bought over the past few years work beautifully in Carrara. Things like Medieval Inn Corridor, Fantasy Castle Corridor, Castle Turret, Castle Hallway along with Old Industrial Interior, Old Industrial Hallway, Old Industrail Office Room all work as if they were almost made for Carrara. Even the shaders work out of the box as a simple starting point that looks decent.
I've also recently collected nearly the entire store from The DigiVault - all of which are very comfortable to work with in Carrara. Although the newer ones have all of the maps for PBR shaders, they're also all numbered to match the correct maps, making it super easy to build up really nice shaders for - and most of his kits wrap all the way around the area - making for a quick movie set solution.
But these DigiVault scenes are also those that I'll use over and over again.
Another bonus is that they all seem to be of that highly-efficient method, like the way Stonemason presents his work. So instead of having instances, we have clever use of fairly low-poly models and planes that load and render very quickly, yet really, really well.