Cararra noob - trying to make it work
crashworship
Posts: 216
In a different thread I got a great deal of help trying to make content not included with the Cararra installation to load and not crash the app. Thanks to a lot of input from the responders I was able to figure out what the problem was and how to correct it.
Unfortunately I'm still having issues. I can get Genesis 2 figures to load properly into Cararra without crashing now but I can't seem to make adjustments to them in Cararra without ruining the figure. I've read that others have this problem too and have resorted to setting up their scenes in Studio and then opening the completed scenes in Cararra. This too I've tried and it's not working not great because I'm having shader/texture and pose issues. Ideally I'd like to load and pose the character I want to use in Cararra and apply textures/shaders and props there and avoid the cumbersome task of moving back and forth between Studio and Cararra.
For the record I'm very new to Cararra. I don't use Studio very often because I've got a great deal more experience using Poser and while I think that Poser's content library is a cluttered Byzantine mess compared to Studio and Cararra I like the interface and some of the options it offers better than Studio.
I've watched Phil Wilkes Cararra tutorial series and have gained a great deal of useful info from it but unfortunately nothing I've seen in there has given me an answer to the problems I'm having. I've attached some screen shot to illustrate the problems I'm experiencing.
I have the Lilith 6 Genesis 2 http://www.daz3d.com/lilith-6 character because I like the dark evil queen/mistress vibe that some of her makeup and eye options give her. Her skin texture tends to be a little bit paler than other Gen 2 characters and when combined with the makeup and golden eyes and some of the clothing items included with her pro bundle, it gives her a very striking look. She loads into studio with her basic skin textures and applying the changes I want in Studio works quite well. When I load the same figure into Cararra, she loads with the same textures and they initially are accepted and look fine by Cararra but the face and eyes don't have the makeup and eyes that I want. When I try to apply those materials in Cararra, the eyes are gray orbs and her face and genitals turn black. Also, importing the completed figure from Studio the genital material patch is read differently by Cararra and doesn't match the rest of her skin texture. This is clearly visible in a render produced in Cararra but does not show in a render done in Studio. The lighting differences seen below in the side by side comparison can probably be tweaked with some adjustments in Cararra's light pane but the texture problems and the pose problems for her hands grasping the sword and knife are what's keeping me from getting a successful render in Cararra. I set this scene up to get an idea of how Studio and Cararra handle the same content but it doesn't seem to be working well for me.
The side by side below shows the Cararra render which is clearly inferior on the left and the much better Studio render on the right. The only thing Cararra did but was render the metal blades much more realistically but the rest... not happy to say the least.
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
224 S 200 W, Suite #250
Salt Lake City, UT 84101
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Saw this thread this morning but didn't have much time online today. A little surprised there haven't been many answers yet (guess many of the forum regulars were just involved in real life today, like me). So I'll take a quick stab at it.
Carrara reads materials differently than Poser and differently than Studio. So Studio textures aren't going to look great in Carrara, at best it will be 'meh' and still inferior to how the same settings will look in Studio. So you're about to enter the wild fun realm of the texture room to address this :)
First though a quick note on the pose deformation you mention... I'm not seeing it in the pics provided (very possibly simple because of the angle of the shot though). I don't have Lilith myself so can't test if there's something going weird that's particular to that figure/morph, but I don't have troubles posing my Gen2F characters directly in Carrara, in fact I find it easier to pose there than in other apps. If this is a preset pose, don't see why that would be any different in Carrara either.
Mostly it looks like the swords aren't in the right place in relation to the hands (just judging from the shot). Looks like if they were a little higher on the z axis the hilts would be in the palms and the pose would be the same, but again perhaps I'm missing a deformation in the hands that you're referring to, so please correct me if I'm wrong.
Now back to texturing skin (and other things, like you'll want to texture the clothing to look it's best too).
But before we start texturing, might want to setup a good scene with clean lighting so that you can actually see clearly what you're doing as you're retexturing stuff. Personally opinions on this will vary, but I prefer to set gamma correction to 2.2. It's suspected that to enable linear workflow in Carrara's renderer, gamma correction should be enabled (PhilW was the first to post on this, at least that I'm aware of). This does not mean that every scene setup benefits or is superior for having Gamma Correction enabled to 2.2 (which you can find in the render room on the render tab), in fact there are many forum members who do tremendous and excellent renders with no gamma correction at all, but I'm of the opinion that if you want to be able to see and refine skin details that having gamma correction will allow more realistic light calculations in the linear workflow of the renderer. I have used 3 different unbiased render engines (Lux, Octane, TheaRender) and I can report that all 3 have gamma correction enabled and set at 2.2 by default (and I can get renders from Carrara native that are very very close to what I can get in Octane/Luxus plugins when I have the GC 2.2 enabled, which sways my opinion a bit).
Regardless of that though, when trying to refine settings to make a 'good skin', I recommend you set up a scene with good lighting so you can clearly see the details. I like to use PhilW's Portrait Studio product for this, though lately I have modified it using Rashad's fake GI method, though I tend to use full GI, it's just a matter of using several other bulb lights replicated along the surface of the mesh light to give better and more realistic specular effect... eh, there's a whole thread on this elsewhere, and probably more info than you're asking right now :) Anyway, once you've got a good scene setup with clear views to your character, then it's time to refine your textures to something that looks much better in Carrara than trying to use the Studio textures at the defaults (Poser texture defaults give even worse results in Carrara, can make your character look shiny plastic instead of skin. This is ironic because in most other ways Carrara and Poser get along great).
First in the assembly room, click on the 'Actor' of your V6/G2F/Lilith/whatever character in the tree of your character in the instance tray (see pic 1). Next, at the top right of the main assembly room screen there are a set of 5 icons The 2nd from the right looks a bit like a paintbrush and if you hover your mouse over it, will show 'Texture' (pic2). Click on that and it will bring you into Carrara's texture room so you can see all the different shaders that compose your character.
At the top right screen of the texture room you see a multi-colored ball, this is actually the 'master shader' of your character. Beneath it you'll see a specific shader for each shading domain of your character (head, arms, hands, iris, face, etc etc). Now many of these will rely on the same settings (for example, hands, feet, legs, arms, forearms, are all going to rely on the 'limbs' texture map of your character, and so they are all going to need essentially the exact same shader). In the assembly room you can use the 'Consolidate duplicate shaders' function to make it so all of these shaders with the same setting just turn into one shader that all the separate shading domains are using (see pic 4).
There's a previous post I made not too terribly long ago about what settings I generally use for skin for most characters. Here's a link to that:
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/52555/P45/#765155
Once you made your alterations and your happy with how your character's skin looks, then grab the multi-colored ball at the top right (this is the master shader) and drag it down into your shaders tab (pic 5) so you can save it for future use (it will give a pop up asking you to name it). Now you've got a master shader for that character that you can apply to any other V6 in any other scene at any other time; simply load your Genesis2F character, then click on the actor to go into the texture room, and then drag and drop the master shader you built onto the multi-colored ball and you're ready to render.
Hopefully some of this helps...
Thanks. I watched PhilW's tutorial video on this. I watched the whole series in fact without really having Cararra open or fiddling with the various controls because I wanted to just see all of what Cararra can do. I planned to go back and refer to specific videos as needed as I become more familiar with Cararra and start using the way I intended when I bought it. But this is a good rundown of what I need to do in the texture room not just for skin but for everything. I use the Reality plug in in Poser to export my scenes to Luxrender and will be doing the same in Cararra once I get these constant crashes solved. Takes longer but it's worth it.
Regarding the hand poses on the sword and knife, this is a fantasy weapons set I got from DAZ, http://www.daz3d.com/fantasy-weapons-collection-2. It includes hand poses for each weapon, left and right. I applied those weapons and hand poses in Sfudio and the were applied correctly. When I first encountered this import discrepancy from Studio to Cararra I tried to parent each weapon to the appropriate hand. It didn't work probably because each weapon had already been parented properly in studio. So I just dragged each weapon a little higher into the proper hand position and of course, the fingers weren't wrapped around the grips properly. The rest of the pose for Lilith was imported into Cararra correctly but not the hands. So, in reading the Cararra manual regarding posing figures with premade poses from the content library, I dragged on of the hand poses from the content pane onto Lilith as instructed and Cararra crashes instantly. So once I've got Cararra reopened and the scene reloaded and have made the adjustments to the sword and knife positions, I attempted to save the scene in Cararra before trying to apply the hand poses again so I don't have to start all over again. Using the Save As option, Cararra will freeze and I get an unresponsive app message from OSX. I have to force quit Cararra. So I'm stuck. I can't make this work in Cararra at all.
For the record, i created this scene not to produce some great final render but just to help me learn how to use Studio and Cararra together. If I really wanted to create a finished render for a scene of this scale, I would do it Poser Pro and render it with Luxrender. What I have in mind to use Cararra for are scenes that are much broader in scope because of the terrain and sky options that don't exist in Poser. Skydomes are too limiting for larger props et al.
Carrara can take so long to save a file that it seems like the app has frozen, but it hasn't. Try to be patient if you can. If you can't, you can speed up saves by turning off the compression option for saved files -but you will want to take into account file space and any other issues uncompressed saves might present.
Note that Luxus for Carrara and the Luxus for Carrara resource pack (including shaders, I believe) are part of today's fast grab, which my screen says is 70% off.
http://www.daz3d.com/march-madness-fast-grab
My mistake on the hands posing, from your 2nd render I do see that it's not just a matter of the swords not in the right spot, but the hand poses themselves are too 'clenched' tight to hold the swords right. Not sure why the pose is misapplying in Carrara, haven't run into this myself (possibly you are right it's endemic to Lilith as I don't have her, but that doesn't make much sense to me as she's just a variant of G2F and so any G2F pose should work right).
Diomede beat me to it, but since you are going to be rendering in Lux for the final, there is not a Reality plugin for Carrara but there is a Luxus plugin that works pretty great, as well as a Luxcore beta that's free to test in beta version (there's a thread here on the forums) that you might want to test out. If you end up going with Luxus, I have a whole different thread somewhere for Luxus skin settings (it uses the Carrara shader system, but adds a luxus shader to the mix). I'll try to dig it up...
Too bad the Octane for Carrara plugin isn't sold through Daz, if so and it were included in the current 70% off sale, today would definitely be the day to pick it up :)
Fenric's Shader Doctor is also part of today's 70% off deal. This is a 1-click fixup for the shaders on imported models and figures, plus a whole lot more. I paid full price for it a couple of weeks back and it's paid for itself several times over just in time saved faffing about in shaders. http://www.daz3d.com/shader-power-tools-for-carrara
I notice there's also a Carrara skin shader for Lilith in the promo (I don't have Lilith, so can't comment on it)
Geografts (ie genitals, tails etc) on Gen2 are one of the items listed as "known issues" in C8.5, but since I haven't used them, I can't say the extent of the issue.
Sometimes when I change a texture things turn grey or black in the 3d view, it just takes a little while for it to load. If you haven't seen already Lilith 6 carrara shaders are on sale for $4.49
Just as general rule I wouldn't expect products for Daz Studio to work perfectly in Carrara. Some things do, some things work but require some adjustment.
Thanks for the heads up on those discounts. I was going to wait until I've got Gararra working and stable but at those prices, might as well grab them while they're discounted. Regarding the save process, I was wondering about that. At some point I was just going to try to save again and walk away, do something else, and come back to see if the file ever got saved. I haven't done so yet because I'm trying to correct the hand pose problem and want to save the changes first before I apply the pose. That way i don't have to start all over again.
Thanks for the heads up on that too. I'll throw down on it. Regarding the genital mat, normally I wouldn't need to apply it because clothes cover it up but with this costume, there isn't enough to overlap the entire genital area. As I've previously said, this is merely a test scene thrown together quickly just to try things out in Studio vs Cararra so it's not a huge issue. And, most likely in any scene that I would need the genital mat to match the rest of the skin I would be creating in Poser Pro and rendering in Luxrender. Since I've already rendered Lilith via that process I know the skin textures look really great through Luxrender.
It's the autografted genitals that have problems in Carrara, but if you don't use them and just have the character texture map instead, shouldn't have any issues in that region (since you said it will be covered anyway it's just a matter of seeing the edges of the mat) so might want to leave the autografted genitals out of the equasion if so.
Indeed they are. Awesome. I just got home from work so I haven't had a chance to scroll through the sale stuff year but already I've got a pretty full cart.
HA! Thanks for all the heads up on those discounts. I would have probably missed them. You guys just saved me 165 bucks. I added PhilW's advanced course which was also on sale. It should give me more incite into this mysterious Cararra shader quagmire which has been quite daunting.
Yeah, I kinda back dated realized that. For this scene, why would I need to apply the genital mat? DUH! That's how you learn stuff. Make a mistake and then figure out why it was a mistake.