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just to clarify,. I am one of those Carrara users in the complaint thread,. who also uses premade content, and has a long list of purchases,. most of which work in carrara. :)
The availability of a well made human model which is ready to animate, and has a selection of skin textures, clothing, and hair options, is an obvious timesaver.
I'm not saying that Carrara users ONLY make their own stuff,. and never buy. ..or that buying content is somehow a bad thing.
the ability to load and animate a ready made human figure was one of the main reasons I purchased Carrara,.
I was just trying to explain the difference between products, and the relationship to the different quantities of product available.
Yes,.technically speaking you can "create" content in DS,.
A pack of different poses,. or a pack of different lighting set's can be sold as "Content" and those are made in studio, for studio....but ,. that's really not what i meant by "create".
I'm also not sure that your assumption that DO's equate to investment in, and supporting the future of, a product,. or, are just the normal activities of a retailer seeking to maximise profit.
Whether users like us start threads complaining about how much content we buy,. or how we perceive the progress of development,. these seem to have no measurable impact on anything.
I'm also not sure how carrara could be made more "friendly" to DS users,. nothing else can work with their existing DS /Poser content in the same way that they're already used to.
Carrara has plug-ins for Luxrender, and OctaneRender,. and a new plugin (VWD cloth and hair) for simulating dynamic cloth and hair,. as long as developers and users are working with carrara, it's still alive and kicking,. waiting for any major development from the owners.
If there were no further developments,. Carrara would remain usable as long as you have a system, and power to run it.
Sorry Stezza ,..the derailment wasn't intentional,.. My bad :(
OMG!!! I have to own this!!!
Dominator is a technical civilization machine.
Once upon a time there was a tragedy, the machine went out of control. Since then, the machine began to evolve in his development and fight for living space.
The factory produced new machines. Dominator scouts have one goal to land on the planet and release swarms of crabs and mechanical elements. Crabs and elements need to find new resources and to prepare for the arrival of the automated mechanical factory in the second wave of colonization.
The Dominator virus, which cruelly affects everything in its path destruction awaits the one who will be in their way.
Dimension Theory's HDRI are done very well. He prides himself in doing it right - very right. Not only in his HDR images, but every product I've bought from him is just Top Notch stuff.
So, Unified Brain, all side-topics aside, are you enjoying the use of the PC+ sale along with your experience with Carrara?
Do you have any questions on using any of these new items in Carrara?
You and I have also had some fun "petipet" fandom talks. That in mind, I'd like to add something here:
Okay, one of the main 'tweaks' that we need to make in Carrara using Poser or Daz Studio content is the shaders. True, any light setups that might come along with them won't work properly, and pehaps some other trinkets like that, but all in all, it's the shaders we need to work with.
All of the petipet products that I can think of come with wonderful maps that work beautifully in Carrara, but we have to add some of them ourselves:
For things like lights and/or flames which don't have a special "i" or "Illum" map, simply copy the Color map into the Glow channel
This advice works with most any Poser or Daz Studio content.
I've noticed that some shaders will have texure maps multiplied by white or some other color. More often than not, I drag the texture map itself directly onto the channel it's in. Like if the color map is multiplied by something else, I'll left-click the texture map and drag it onto the Color channel.
Sometimes the Alpha map is Added in some special way. In almost every case I've seen, this is not at all necessary - so I drag the texture map onto the Alpha channel to let the map work as the artist intended it to.
Finally, sometimes the name of the map in the folder doesn't make it obvious as to what it's for - which channel it should go into. In these situations I look at the image itself - often by opening it in an image viewer - and take a good look at it compared to the other maps which match its main map name. Is this for glow or alpha? Is it for the metalic shininess?
When I mentioned above that I remove multipliers by dragging the texture map onto the main channel it works in, I'll also do the opposite sometimes - and actually multiply a map by a color or value to change it in some way. Sometimes I'll lower the brightness slider under the map. Sometimes I'll multiply two maps together if I want to darken the effect, or add them together to brighten the effect. I don't want to get confusing, but I also want to invite you to play with these shaders and see for yourself how easily we can create custom looks in very simple ways! ;)
Again... if your playing with any of your new items and aren't sure how to make them work the way you need them to, ask.
If needed, start a new thread (or just ask in here, too - I think?) But if you buy something that just doesn't seem to work at all in Carrara, I'd suggest posting in the following:
Buy Something That Doesn't Work in Carrara? Post your Questions and Workarounds here. (please)
But I'd Really like to know how your getting on with Carrara and this wonderful PC+ sale that's been going on. Lots of really excellent Free stuff as well as some incredible sales!!!
At the risk of having a boomerang whiz by my head...
That's not what I meant, either. The creation tools in Studio are more robust than that. Here is a product tutorial which addresses the issue:
http://www.daz3d.com/creating-content-for-daz-studio
I'm not sure either. But at least we are now on the same page when arguing our positions.
I completely agree, which is why I propose going in a different direction.
Here is where that being a newbie is perhaps an advantage, as I can see several ways that the transition could have been easier "for me." The trick is to know if what is easier "for me" is representative of the needs of a wide newbie population. Only time will tell, but that kind of determination just happens to fit my skill set.
I totally get your point. And as an aside, I am very eager to learn more about these options.
Of course. And there are still die-hard Amiga users out there as well. But part of me not only wants to help keep Carrara alive, but alive and growing. Call it simple enthusiasm. I can't design new plugins. Any help I can give must come from a different direction, a different way of seeing things.
Love the new warning in the thread title. I guess all threads wander after a while.
Back to the PC plus sale. As per previous discussion of Carrara's ability to load and use Poser and Studio props (with shader adjustments), any PC item of that ilk is good to go. The exception might be some very recent Stonemason sets in which each individual item has to have the uvwrap box unchecked. It is still compatible but the cost of shader adjustment just increased very much for recent Stonemason. That has not been my general experience for new sets and props (eg. Ironman13 has worked for me fine). As for figures, anything for V/M 1-4 and Genesis and genesi 2 has worked for me, except things that need geografting and things where the HD morphs are what set it apart. This includes animals, with the additional caveat that some animals now rely on LAMH hair systems. Can replace with Carrara hair. Very new animals might use the same rigging system as Genesis 3 so would be unusable - we will all have to keep a watch out for that.
Bottom line - if a product says it is also compatible with Poser, I get it without even considering compatibiliy. I also get props and sets without too much consideration, unless it is by Stonemason because of the uvwrap issue - purely vendor specific as far as I know.
Just my experience.
Thanks for asking. Yes, the sale has been amazing. Yet the truth is, I haven't had time for playing with any of my new toys. There are other things in my life that demand attention, and similar to chickenman, it may be years before I actually open every product.
When I do have time for 3D, Phil has placed a ball and chain around my leg, LOL. I am determined to get deeply into his tutorials. I'm tired of looking at threads talking about stuff of which I am totally ignorant.
Thanks for the general tips on making petipet stuff come alive. Really something to look forward to!
In the meantime, I need to go try and use primitives to replicate a brick wall. I could use shaders, but that would be cheating.
There are always products that I buy either 'just because', like it's on sale or free, or 'I might want that in the future' which I may never get around to opening. There are even a few of my petipet products that have yet to meet Carrara.
Here is an initial optimization of a more recent petipet, the Sci-Fi Cockpit Interior - meant to be the interior cockpit of his Antares Starship
A real benefit to my optimizing these things right away, and saving them to my browser, is that I have them at a whim - at moments notice.
For example, I've had Stonemason's The Core for a long time (never loaded it). Recently I've run across an item: Space Relic, which is a texture expansion for The Core. I really liked it so I bought it and installed it right away.
Hmmm... what should I do with this?
I loaded up a Woodlands preset scene, added a nice mountain side for the left edge and brought in The Core and optimized it with Space Relic textures in the shaders.
I've already had petipet's Pirahna starship optimized in my browser, as with the other space ship up in the atmosphere. Just bringing these into the scene makes the image really come aive, I think. As opposed to the above shot of the Cockpit interior, which remains lifeless. But not that cockpit is much more ready to become the scene that I grab when I want to shoot a picture of some characters or run an animation onboard any sort of sci-fi vessel or whatever ;) So I keep on doing that. It's how I relax!
EDIT to ADD:
This is actually two copies of the Space Relic - I duplicated the model and used the landing platform as a roof for the first copy, extending the whole thing toward the camera off screne to the left. Worked really nicely, I think. If I remember correctly, I also did some simple overall scaling to the duplicated copy.
More petipet fun!
This one (below) uses his Moon lander 2 as several escape pods that launched before the crash - One seen here in the right foreground
Sometimes I don't get around to optimizing for Carrara until the time comes when I use it in a render or animation. Most of the time, this is only true for one, possibly two elements in the scene, while everything else was simply dragged in from my browser, already setup with lights, shaders, and cameras.
For vehicles and other items that have lights as part of their model, I try to save them to my browser with those lights already set up. I also like to save them to the browser with their own camera, named after the saved file. Like in the case above, the Moon Lander 2 was saved to the browser as "Escape Pod" with its own Escape Pod Cam camera saved with it. Although it does have glowing light elements, I didn't give it actual lights since I doubt I'll use any of these as actual scene lighting. If that time comes, I can easily make it happen.
The image above that, the Star Fighter Vampire's outer yellow glowing lights don't have any Carrara lights saved with it (the glow and aura effect do enough for that) the interior dash panel does have lights added - and I've saved it with a Predatron LowRez MU Worker as a pilot.
These vehicles are almost always saved with specific lighting rigs for their exterior as well - three distant lights: Strong Rim light aimed forward from behind, Soft Key light casting shadow fro one side and an even softer Fill light coming in from the other side.
In almost all situations, these lights work along with my main scenes that I've saved, with their lighting setups. It did take me a lot of practice, however, to get all of these light rigs set up to work like that. To do so, I saved the light rigs to my browser as well as to special Setup template scenes I use for optimizing.
If I'm going to be optimizing an environmental product, like something like Alphabase (Kibaretto), for example, I'll use my Base Day template - as it is an outdoor setup, with lights that I've been tweaking over the years to work with other elements that I might bring into such a scene.
If I'm making a new Character, like a hero or villain, I use my Character template - where just background folks don't get such individual treatment and get saved with no lighting. For vehicles and other individual prop elements, I start with the three light template I mentioned above.
It all works pretty slick! Keep in mind that I don't ever just rely on these things working perfectly, and spend plenty of time test rendering and optimizing for each individual scene. But I've found this system to be a wonderful time saver ;)
Really awesome renders, Dart. It's great to see what this program can really do in the hands of a master.
For my afternoon's tutorial work, here are two brick walls joined to form an arch.
LOL!!!
Edit - added a more cosmic version.
Don't mind me. Just fooling around.
New PC+ stuff today, and for petipet fans, he is seemingly everywhere.
In the pay bundle - an odd mix of SF and Genesis 3 clothing and hair - vintage petipet appears:
http://www.daz3d.com/robot-mars
http://www.daz3d.com/new-colony-props
It also includes the Marcoor Medbay from Ranvheart - very petipet-like.
http://www.daz3d.com/ss-marcoor-medbay
Unfortunately the 6 Genesis 3 products also included are a deal-killer for me.
In the free bundle, there is a lot of Native American stuff (should go well with Darts Badlands), yet petipet gets included again:
http://www.daz3d.com/atlantida-temple
In BYOB, in addition to items mentioned in earlier posts, there is the Bus Maxis. This has probably been there a while, unnoticed by me, because I already own it and my filter was on.
http://www.daz3d.com/bus-maxis
And if you haven't pulled the trigger yet, his Dominator is in the Still New releases. It won't be there much longer.
http://www.daz3d.com/dominator
For those of you who don't care for petipet, or already own all these products, you just wasted 30 seconds.
And many thanks for that perspective! I have a question about a non-Poser product that I will post in another thread.
Cool!!! Ooops... Kibaretto's cool ship just hit the brick wall! That'll leave a mark! LOL
Hey, fooling around is how we learn! Wonderful job!
Yes, I am collecting all of that set as well. I really like the Marcoor and its interior parts!
I was so happy when I saw this bundle - I was just about to buy most of it at a very low price - but Free is even easier on my empty wallet! ;)
I love Bus Maxis! Bought that upon its release.
For V4 add-ons, the Bast and Ishtar bundles look like $4 (or $3) deals
http://www.daz3d.com/bundle-bast-for-v4
http://www.daz3d.com/ishtar-bundle-for-v4
Clothes and hair
--ms
Gorgeous kits! Sale must be over though :(
I think they were mistakes, as they were only there for a couple of hours! Damn darn, I should have grabbed 'em...
--ms
Actually, they were on sale all day yesterday, and probably extended a bit into the early hours of today
Sorry, I should have mentioned them.
Yeah... they're both really cool.
Sci-Fi alert for a new Category sale group of items, This 'n That:
http://www.daz3d.com/this-n-that-category-sale#
Huge amounts of petipet, and nice Ravnheart and steampunk items
I will be hard-pressed to escape with my money this time. But it's still a bargain as all items drop below $2 each when you include a debut or still new release.
Hi :)
it's all cheating,. magic, illusion,. or deception,. whatever you want to call it
using primitives as bricks can be fun,.. if you throw in some physics, and a ball.
Making a shader for a brick wall makes more sense than using hundreds of bricks,. since the more geometry in your scene, the slower things become.
Carrara's shader room has a "Bricks" function,(pattern functions / bricks). ..which is best used as the Blender in a Mixer,. which uses two sources,. to create the Grout (source1), and the Brick (source2). the bricks pattern blends those two sources together.
Modeling a few bricks (3 or 4) and applying different shaders to each,. then adding those into a replicator to create a wall made of hundreds of different "virtual" bricks, randomly generated,. makes a lot of sense too.
Rendering a Flat image of that replicated wall, ...to use as a texture, applied to a simple plane,. also makes sense.
it's all about illusion, or cheating,. :)
smoke and mirrors.
I agree with what Andy (3dage) says (but then I usually do, he talks a lot of sense!). 3D is all about producing an image which is complex enough to fool the eye - you are never going to exactly duplicate the complexity of the real world. It is often a case of adapting to the needs of an image - a distant wall can probably be done with just a map or a texture, bring it a bit closer and you may also need a bump map to make it more believable. Only in a very detailed close-up would I think you need to model the individual bricks. It is a case of where do you draw the line - you could go on, the bricks on close inspection are going to have imperfections and texture to them, the grout between them will be lumpy. The most sensible thing would be to use maps or procedural textures for these, would you still that as "cheating"?
As an aside, this is one of the factors that makes creating products for others much harder than doing them for yourself. If you are making something to include in your own image, you know how close to the camera it will be (and therefore how detailed it needs to be, and how detailed the textures should be), how it will be lit, etc. Most products need to be "over-engineered" because you don't know these things and need to cater for many uses and lighting situations.
Ha, I should have said, "that would be cheating, considering that in this particular tutorial I am supposed to be learning how to scale, duplicate, group, and modify primitives."
But all of your techniques (Andy and Phil) made sense to me for using at some point down the road. This hasn't always been the case. Hopefully, I am starting to see the bigger picture.
As usual, I appreciate the context!
OK folks, it appears that we have reached the climax of the PC+ sale - catch-up weekend.
Pretty much everything in the store is back on sale, including Carrara vendors.
The generation 4, 5, and 6 pro bundles are about as low as they will ever be, if you include a still-new item - and some of the still-new items are really cheap as well.
Generation 4 pro bundles - a little over 5 bucks.
Generation 5 pro bundles - a little over 6 bucks.
Generation 6 pro bundles - seven bucks.
For me, this sale has been a new and worthwhile.experience. An embarrassment of riches.
Wow... all the Free stuff! All the great deals!
I can see how these are supposed to be less and less seductive the longer we've been doing it... but I still get all giddy and excited and can't help watching.
Those bundle prices I quoted may have been a temporary glich in the system. Not showing up now. I'll report back if anything changes.
I got 3 Genesis 3 generation7 pro bundles for $7 each not that they work out the box in carrara but with some D|S autofit magic ....
Well, you scored. I suspect that Daz was posting the wrong prices, and fixed it later this morning.
A lot of people got stuck in the changeover, and got charged the full amounts.
But the updated pro bundle prices are still pretty heavily discounted. Generation four and five are 8 bucks and change, Genation six and seven are 11 bucks and change. For someone like me who relatively new to acquiring content....