Using Carrara to make for sale trees
mcorr
Posts: 1,084
In one of his posts, AlphaTango says, "all the trees in my DS environments were exported from Carrara."
I am assuming he means his commercial, for-sale environments, but would like to confirm that trees made in Carrara can be formed in the tree model room and then exported to an environment that is part of a for-sale product.
Is that right? Maybe one of the mods can help out.
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You can export Carrara plant models to obj or whatever and use them for whatever you want, not sure if that was the jist of your question...
@TangoAlpha, @Dartanbeck, @HowieFarkes
I believe the answer is yes, but of course I am not an official Daz person. I @ the above people because I know they have offered products for sale using trees modeled in Carrara. Any one of them may know the ifs, ands, and buts. The @ may alert them to the thread.
I would suggest that you make sure you are modeling the tree yourself in the Carrara plant modeler and applying your own textures or textures you have the right to use (merhcant resource, for example). I bring this up because there could be issues if you were to use the default trees and textures that come with Carrara Native Content instead of your own. I have modeled and shared several plants I modeled myself and whose leaves I modeled myself and whose bark I textured myself. I haven't tried to charge for them which is the key piece of information you need. Hopefully, one of the above will check in with an answer, or a Mod.
Here are two of my freebie trees, one converted to Daz Studio format and one in Carrara format.
https://sharecg.com/v/95879/gallery/21/DAZ-Studio/Tree-Prop-Daz-Studio-Unrealistic
https://sharecg.com/v/92793/gallery/5/3D-Model/Xmas-Tree-with-Tinsel-Carrara-Format
Thus far, no one has raised any rights issues, but I suggest you get confirmation from Daz or a Daz vendor with experience.
Here are a couple walk throughs back when I was first learning Daz Studio.
This is how I converted a basic tree from Carrara to obj to Daz Studio prop. https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/2414461/#Comment_2414461
And here is a tomato plant. https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/2450541/#Comment_2450541
I have a series of posts related to modeling trees using Carrara and converting them for export and use in other programs. TangoAlpha offers some advice along the way. Perhaps that will be helpful.
Start here and scroll down. https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/2413676/#Comment_2413676
Thanks for all your generous and helpful pointers. All very useful information. Thanks also for trying to bring in outside help. Still waiting for an answer from TangoAlpha, to whom I‘ve also sent a private message days ago.
Yes, it was. Thanks! Can I ask why you are sure of the answer you gave me? Where did you read proof positive that we can do this? A link would be great! I am being cautious until I get more direct confirmation.
Here is an example of a product for sale which includes Carrara trees.
https://www.daz3d.com/country-lane
Here is another example by another vendor (PhilW). This set includes his oak tree.
https://www.daz3d.com/an-english-village
those are for Carrara though, we certainly can redistribute .car files of our own trees.
The question is more over duf and obj files and I myself am very unsure about it even though I have modelled plants using the plant editor and my own leaves and shared them ( have a couple on sharecg heavily modified after converting to mesh but nonetheless started as Carrara tree generated).
Nobody has really given a definitive answer to this or using the terrain editor in Carrara or Bryce to make terrains either,
I don't know if it is considered a modelling operation or not.
I mean Xfrog trees made by users not their content packs can be sold, most of Lisa Botanicals were made in Xfrog.
Yet Vue/Cornucopia and it's Plant factory are very clear theirs cannot be without very costly licensing.
Likewise the Speedtrees.
DAZ doesn't give us any guidance whatsoever even on using Hexagon or the Carrara vertex room to model stuff as to how distributable it is, we just assume because they are modelling programs.
Are things made using Bryce booleans redistributable as objects? the DAZ studio primitives have even raised some questions if not redistributed as duf scenes.
It's been a while since I used Carrara - it doesn't run on my Mac any more. It's Common sense to a large extent: if it's your own work, you can sell it, if it's someone else's (or includes someone else's), you can't.
You can't use built-in leaves or textures if you're exporting the tree (to use in DS for example), as those assets would get included in the model. Create your own leaf models. The tree itself is fine, as that's mesh you've created, albeit procedurally. Use/create your own textures wherever you can; merchant resources can be a rights minefield.
Hope that helps. (sorry, I didn't see your pm)
...and if you choose to use procedural shaders for the leaves or the trees - even using the procedural presets that come with Carrara, you CAN include the resulting map exports for use with your 'For Sale' product.
It's actually very flexible: Don't use any other artist's work, beit mesh or texture map, and you're good to go.
Selling a Carrara shader as it comes with the product is theft, but selling the results of maps created by a shader that doesn't use someone else's maps is totally okay.
I say that because Carrara has some great shader presets to help get going in a certain direction, and the shader settings themselves are quite powerful and can produce some really nice materials - and when we export an OBJ that uses them, the OBJ will be mapped to the result of the Texture maps exported from the procedural shaders. These (Now Original - by the artist who exported the model) maps can now be brought into an image editor and worked on further.
"Merchant Resource" products contain their own license as to how they can be used. Any Merchant Resource I've seen at Daz 3d (I don't have a whole lot, but some) have the standard Daz 3d license for such things and can be used within products sold by the customer who bought them, but selling the images themselves as standalone is against the law.
Daz 3d has firm 'laws' against artists selling any portion of anther artist's mesh. aka - no loading in someone else's model, changing it in some way - even chopping it to bits and calling it your own, because it's not. 3D Mesh products must be made by the artist.
That said, Carrara has amazing tools that let an artist be free, create, and sell their work.
Plants and Terrains are wonderful modelers that work procedurally, while maps can be used to create new shaders - and can even be used in the terrain editor as an elevation map, for example. Even using the presets provided for the plant editor (simply applying an example from the presets) can be exported and called your own, because it is just that - a model you've just "Created yourself". Using a preset from another artist, like Howie Farkes or Tango Alpha, for example, would need to be cahnged at least a bit, and maps (in the shaders) must be replaced in order to become 'your own'.
Carrara's procedural modelers like this also include "Shuffle" buttons for some parameters, so we can use these to make vast changed to the resulting mesh quickly, while leaving the main parameters set the same. A shuffled model is yours. You just made a mesh of your very own.
Carrara's procedural shaders are like that as well - where some things can simply be shuffled to make an entirely new result. The artists that contributed to the vast collection of Carrara's preset shaders put some clever shader building techniques into them. Some are very basic, some get pretty wild. Carrara's vast shader settings can make it a real treat to make surface materials. To me, this is especially true with plants and terrains, who have their own set of presets that open up texturing possibilities created especially for the models made from Carrara's tools. But then we discover that they can be used on many more things as well!!!
Ooops. I'm babbling now.
Yes, and thanks for answering and giving us your expert insights/advice.
Not sure that conforms with intellectual property law, and copyright law in particular. I suggest people read up on derivative works and who those belong to. Things are far too often (and scarily) not as cut and dried as one might hope, wish for or think.
BTW--Carrara didn't run on my Mac either, until I tried the 32-bit version ... runs like a charm!