Is Carrara right for me?

davedawriter

Hi everyone,

I've only been playing around with 3d modeling for a few months. I'm using Daz3d for characters and foreground elements, Bryce for backgrounds, and Photoshop for composition and postwork. I'm learning Blender for modeling. I'd like to be able to build entire scenes and create my own models in a single piece of software so I don't have to fiddle around so much with depth of field and lighting between programs. Is Carrara able to do all of that? I'm not really sure how Carrara differs from Daz.

Thanks!

Dave

bigh

davedawriter said:

Hi everyone,

I've only been playing around with 3d modeling for a few months. I'm using Daz3d for characters and foreground elements, Bryce for backgrounds, and Photoshop for composition and postwork. I'm learning Blender for modeling. I'd like to be able to build entire scenes and create my own models in a single piece of software so I don't have to fiddle around so much with depth of field and lighting between programs. Is Carrara able to do all of that? I'm not really sure how Carrara differs from Daz.

Thanks!

Dave

Blender does it all - but if you are looking for all in one using Daz models
then Carrara works well . More info here -

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/15970/

davedawriter

Thank you for the assist. Much appreciated!

Steve K

davedawriter said:

Hi everyone,

... I'd like to be able to build entire scenes and create my own models in a single piece of software so I don't have to fiddle around so much with depth of field and lighting between programs. Is Carrara able to do all of that? I'm not really sure how Carrara differs from Daz.
Dave

I'm not a modeler, but I think you'll be happy with Carrara. I switched from Poser years ago when I realized that Carrara can handle Poser format content seamlessly, and offers much better features for lighting, animation, etc. Certainly it can handle depth of field and many more effects. The price recently has been VERY affordable, so you're not taking a huge risk. I'd also recommend the Carrara training videos from Infinite Skills (by PhilW), sold here at DAZ.

davedawriter

Yes, that's definitely a compelling bonus -- seems like it goes on sale at least once a month and is available for about $65, which is very reasonable.

When you say you're not a modeler, do you mean that you buy the models and create scenes? That's what I've done so far. The Daz models are great, in my opinion. But I'd like to create my own eventually

Again, thanks for commenting.

Steve K

davedawriter said:

... When you say you're not a modeler, do you mean that you buy the models and create scenes? That's what I've done so far. The Daz models are great, in my opinion. But I'd like to create my own eventually. Again, thanks for commenting.

Yes, I like to create short animations, ~5minutes, using purchased Poser format content. Generally I use Gen4 characters, e.g. M4, V4, K4, since I have a lot of add-ons - morphs, hair, clothes, etc. I have tried modelling but find it too complex and time consuming, especially with available models that are much higher quality than I will ever have the patience to create, and very affordable, $5 - $10 when on sale. There are a handful of vendors here at DAZ and the same at Renderosity that I particularly like, plus some at other smaller websites.

Here are a couple of recent animations done in Carrara with Poser content:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqBOpiF24nc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dxcbh71VUlg

evilproducer

Carrara has a vertex modeler, a spline modeler and a metaball modeler. In addition, Carrara has it's own rigging system. You can rig single mesh objects or groups of objects.

There are some that don't like Carrara's vertex modeler for various reasons, but for what I've wanted it for, it does just fine.

In addition to the different modelers, there's also the plant editor, the terrain generator and volumetric cloud editor and an atmosphere/Realistic Sky editor. If you have the Pro version, there is also an Ocean primitive which can be animated.

Carrara also has two replicators. A standard replicator and a surface replicator. These are very powerful and you can actually nest replicators within other replicators should the need arise.

Here are some examples of models made and rendered in Carrara.

The Martian war machine was modeled and rigged in Carrara. The heat ray is Carrara's particle emitter. The road, landscape and some of the trees are from a HowieFarkes Carrara scene that you can buy here at DAZ. Howie makes heavy use of Carrara's replicators and shaders. The truck is from ShareCG.

The jungle temple was modeled by me, and is a bit simple because it was for a challenge and time was limited. The vines growing on the temple are vertex objects extruded along a path with shading domains driving a surface replicator to place Carrara plants for the branches. The jungle trees are some of Carrara's included trees with modifications by me. The terrain was created by using the terrain editor and the misty clouds are Carrara's volumetric clouds. The atmosphere was created using the Realistic Sky editor. The shaders on the temple, ground, boulders and trees are all procedural shaders- no image maps.

The space picture uses a simple sphere with Dystopian City blocks replicated on the surface. I customized the shaders to generate randomly lit windows on the buildings. The clouds are volumetric and the background is an image from the Hubble telescope and used a background.

davedawriter

Wow, thanks, SteveK and evilproducer -- for your insights and for sharing your work with me. Pretty amazing stuff. I really appreciate you taking the time to explain what you use the software for in detail. It definitely helps me make a better buying decision. And your work is great! Thanks!

Jonstark

Personally, I think you'll be very happy with Carrara once you start to see how tremendously much more it can do than Studio. At some point I think most people 'outgrow' Studio and Poser and just want to do bigger and more complex scenes (at least that was the case for me, no disrespect intended to Studio/Poser users). I've managed to obtain a lot of different software in support of this crazy hobby of mine, and Carrara is by far my favorite to use and the most feature rich capable program for using Studio/Poser content I've found.

I do all my modeling in Carrara. It's my primary application anyway, so it's nice that I don't have to export/import/export/import etc etc to get something I want into the scene I'm going to render. I am no master modeler by any stretch of the imagination :) however I'm getting better and things are getting easier/faster to do. I've heard that there are some modelling tools in Carrara that could be streamlined or whatever, but the truth of it is it has so many tools just in the Vertex modeling room alone that I could never hope to memorize them all anyway, and so far I really haven't bumped into any limitations that have prevented me from doing what I want to do. That's not even touching on the fact that Carrara also has:

- full featured vertex modeler
- vertex modeling in the assembly room (can model around posed figures in the scene if needed)
- spline modeler
- meta ball modeler
- plant/tree modeler
- dynamic hair modeler (and excellent hair physics simulation, to get the most realistic hair possible imo, much better than prop hair)
- text modeler
- cloud modeler
- fire modeler
- fog modeler
- fountain modeler
- ocean modeler
- landscape/terrain modeler
- particles modeler with multiple different particle emitter types
- realistic skies creator/modeler that also can animate cloud/sun/moon movement
- building/house modeler (I have Architools)

... and the list goes on.

All of this is only touching on the creation/modeling tools, which says nothing of the fact Carrara also has:

- a full suite of excellent animation tools (puppeteer, graph animation, keyframe animation, NLA/BVH use, aniblock use, etc etc)
- 2 different sets of physics engines including hardbody and softbody Bullet physics as well as dynamic hair physics simulations (and the ability to do softbody cloth simulation too for dynamic cloth effect)
- multiple scene forces (easily creating 'gravity' 'wind' etc)
- superb instancing support with both replicators and suface replicators (making it possible to create vast and varied realistic landscapes
- rigging tools (and not just for characters, but for anything in the scene can be rigged to move, bend, twist etc)
- texturing/shader tools (including 3Dpaint, which means you can paint textures, spec, bump, alpha, etc directly on your 3d figure/character/whatever directly in Carrara)
- UVmapping tools
- weight painting
- tools to add morphs (again not just for characters, but for anything)
- modifiers (giving vast capabilities, make a character shatter into glass shards if you need, point at, tons of others)
- multipass rendering
- advanced lighting (IES, 'barndoor' spotlighting, gels, negative lights, mesh light emitters)
- 10 render nodes so you can have your own render farm
- caustics
- blurred reflections
- normal map support
- godrays
- full global illumination
- ambient occlusion

etc, etc, etc and can easily handle very large and complex scenes that other apps would choke on. Oh and of course there is Luxus, Octane and Luxcore plugins for unbiased support.

Frankly I'm astonished on a weekly basis on all the things Carrara can do as I uncover more and more capabilities... There's a *lot* to this little app, it's a real steal honestly, and that's not counting the tremendous amount of bundled content it includes, like the V5/M5 pro bundles that can be used in Studio even if you decide never to use Carrara :)