using carrara files in daz
alan bard newcomer
Posts: 2,130
"your search did not return any results"
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there are bridges between Daz and bryce and hexagon.
carrara can use daz stuff
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is their any simple way to move stuff from carrara to daz?
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I ask this because there are a number of nice carrara items on sale this weekend in the $5 grab bag... but I have my hands full working with Daz and 3dsMax and don't need to add another learning curve to amount of time I have available.
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Comments
Not the scenes in the grab bag as all use replicators which are Carrara only.
Carrara objects could be exported like any program but the scenes you see for sale pretty much all use Carrara only features.
I was afraid of that... will let them pass for now.
But thanks for the feedback.
I'm picturing trying to put one of Howie's scenes (and I'm guessing that's what the goal would be) into Studio, no replicators, all the trees as their own objects with all the branches and leaves... Only if you've got a renderfarm at your disposal could I see that working :)
I did try exporting one object as a dae file (a plane) it worked although a little discombobulated.
But the attempt to import one of the country scenes after exporting as a dae... used all 21 gigs of available memory before windows decided that daz could not import it at least with the memory available.
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the dae file was only 95 megabytes....
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also exported as an object file... and tried to read into Max... same thing... ran out of ram...
wonder how much I would need to read one in....
Just the trees as real instances alone is too much for DAZ
I got Harpsburg in ok though.
I have gotten the structures in World Gardens into iClone no plants and in tbe grab bag set tried the Fantasy Gorge no plants, doable but textures meh even with inagoni baker and the replicated spires and balls etc were a PITA, missed some.
when I can do what I want in daz and 3ds then I'll work with this some more...
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I do appreciate the feed back...
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technically with a thousand things to play with, it's not as if I really need the Carrara stuff until I need to use it.
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having worked real construction and theater I find it much easier to build in daz and then work on converting to meshes etc else where.
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If i start working with people I'll probably have to learn some other formats.
I've been trying to convert one of my own scenes to Studio (cos I'm an idiot), and it's a leading cause of me being the hairless gibbering wreck you see before you. (the gibbering translates to "too many polys! too many polys!" if you listen hard enough...)
Buildings - relatively simple. Just export as obj and you can bring them straight in to Studio or Poser (assuming they're not replicated & don't have replicated parts).
Terrain - convert to a vertex object then export. ALWAYS turn off smoothing before exporting, or you'll get 4 times more polys than you expect. Turn down the resolution too before converting (much neater than decimating afterward). I got a 500ftx500ft hill with a rutted trackway down to about 20k.
Trees - yeah right. I'm on about attempt 10. If you just convert to a vertex object, you'll get - for a 60ft oak - about 2 million polys. That'll blow the obj export out of the water, so don't even think it. That nice vertex modelled leaf you built cos "transparency is bad"? Forget about that. You need leaves in clusters. Big clusters. As a single poly. If you can get your vertex tree down to, say, 40,000 polys and still looking good, you're in with a chance. 10,000 would be much better, especially if you need any quantity.
Start thinking seriously about rendering the trees out to placards. (2 placards in an X will look reasonable at a distance from almost any angle) You definitely want to do this for replicated grasses, undergrowth etc.
You can take your Carrara replicators and create real instances, which you can export as a single obj. But don't replicate a thousand 1000 poly plants and export that, cos Studio *will* grind to a halt (ask me how I know!).
Studio does have a thing called "Instances" This is a very simple and primitive replicator (they're not really instances in a technical sense - they are actually references to a single master object, but in a wrapper that allows you to set individual x,y,z,rot & scale) . There's no finesse to it, all you can really do is tell it how many "instances" you want, and it'll plonk them somewhere in a grid. It's then up to you to move them into position. Tedious if you've got more than a dozen or two replicants to place. Hundreds or thousands & forget it.
And that's before you start on the textures! (Supposedly Studio has procedural shaders, but I've been unable to find it - I've seen pictures of an editor, but there's not a single mention in the manual, and searching the forums here has proved fruitless. There are almost no "how do I make a..." questions on the forum, and those there are are answered with "buy a flooflam shader pack from the store" or similar!)
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As for the instances in Daz... there is a little script called Send in the Clones that let's you specify where and how it places them...
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I have it, just have to re-install and re-register because every time daz updates it throws away all those links...
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....And that's why I like Carrara. If it's not a plugin, then it just got a lot harder to do. If it is a plugin and D|S is updated, you'd better hope the plugin is to.
Just had a look at it in the store. From the blurb, it creates real instances rather than references, so it isn't memory efficient, and it has a limit of 250 clones. So I think you're still better off converting the CA replicator output, since you have all the extra benefit of distribution masks etc..