Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Many of us have upgraded OS since C7. Carrara 8 Pro rocks and the latest beta is even better.
Since this IS a Carrara Cafe thread, I'm looking through the pages of the latest C3DE mag, wondering what excuses they could have made to NOT use Carrara? I have no intentions of disrespect. Truly. Carrara has its quirks. Tell me that Mac OS doesn't have any. Or Windows. I bought Carrara 8 immediately, as I wanted to go 64 bit - I was buying the Pro version anyways. I actually bought in before it came out - and I've never felt anything but glad regarding that decision.
Can't wait to see what you accomplish, Holly. Rock on!
Dartanbeck, I am doing about 24 images using only Carrara as the 3D Tool of choice. Started the project 18 months ago. Hope to have it completed in 5 months time. Its for a major exhibition I'm doing. Might bring out a book also at the same time. You will see fireworks hopefully when its done. I will be posting Test Renders here at Daz to get members feedback so I can improve the quality of my work. Your views are always welcome and appreciated
I Just came back from the new CarraraCafe.
.
I'm having a hard time navigating it, finding what has been posted, and even uploading an avatar. Categories are not well defined.
I hate to say, but the old forum seemed better. I almost think I need a tutorial to use it.
Is it still being worked on?
I appreciate all the hard work Holly and others put in, but I'm trying to figure out how to use the site.
Anybody else having trouble?
Comments?
There aren't any categories, just a freepository and Carrara/general discussion (and a Cafe feedback forum for discussions like this).
Before there were 30 categories which no one ever used - everyone just posted in the Carrara or General categories, so let's start there and wait to see if other categories are even necessary... I would have thought fewer categories are LESS confusing, but I guess I was wrong...?
I will try to put together a "social" tutorial for the new forums, groups , profiles, etc.... It would help me if you can say where you get tripped up or what you are looking for that you can't find....
Hello Holly.
I tried a different browser (I was logging in from IE and it looked horrid, BUT I logged in in Chrome and the tripping up has stopped. LOL!
No, you were right, fewer categories makes more sense and is less cluttered. I would send you a screen shot, but I'm not at that other machine (where I have no choice but to use IE).
I had trouble loading up my avatar, but I will try from this machine, which might make a difference.
Again thanks for your work Holly.
Setting IE to view the page in Compatibility Mode may help. Many web sites are set to use certain "hacks" with different browsers - the newest IEs fix a lot of these so the hacks end up breaking the page.
I put up a tutorial for how to configure your profile and sharing settings on My CAFE.
(...Unfortunately Youtube cannot be embedded here anymore...)
http://carraracafe.com/forum-3/?cid=24&show=249#cid=24,tid=249
Or just straight to the video:
http://youtu.be/pF5vNVRdoRo
Thank you for sticking with me while I learned how to configure the website and got a few fixes from the developer. I will still be rolling out new features and tidying up navigation (and pleading with the developers for my wishlist, lol), but I think My CAFE is ready for customers.
Thank you, Holly.
I for one really appreciate all of the hard work and time and wisdom you've been pouring into our java/render/scene set-up/etc hang-out joint. Such a cool spot deserved some love - I'm glad you brought some! ;-)
Now we just have to use it! I intend to try!
thanks Holly it looks good from here ;)
ditto, good job Holly, thanks
Thanks guys!
It's all still a work in progress, but I'm starting to understand the code a bit better :P (code nerd) and have been able to hack some of the settings to make it clearer... I think the plugin developers do not speak "Americanese", lol. Some of their word choices were confusing (even alarming! lol)...
Basically there are only two privacy settings. One for your PROFILE INFO and one for your ACTIVITY FEED....
Around 60 people have logged in yesterday to accept my friend requests! :cheese: Lots of new Carrara Friends! YAY!
Oh... Was that "Cafe Mom" friend request from you? Didn't know.
What's the purpose of the "friends" thing on Carrara Cafe?
I normally don't do the social media thing. --I have a Facebook account just so I can leave messages, but have zero friends (intentionally).--
I'm still having trouble with the Cafe site. It's still too slow, and it's the only site that actually crashes the Safari browser on my iPad when navigating in the new forum. (I use my iPad for almost all of my web browsing.)
I get the feeling that there are a lot of unconventional things going on "under the hood" as compared to most forum web sites. It just looks and feels different, in an uncomfortable sort of way. It's looking better, and I certainly appreciate your efforts to improve it, but it's going to take quite a bit to convert me into an actual Carrara Cafe fan.
If you are only interested in forums then I don't think you will see anything new there. Forums are forums. Rendo also has forums... They are ideal for Aunt Agony "I'm stuck" questions, but deeper information gets lost in the long run so it tends to be a lot of the same questions over and over. The difference at Cafe is the ability to upload and share scene files, the groups for target discussions, and galleries.... No one is begging you to use them or participate.
I am not going to waste time convincing you there is value in connecting with "friends" lol. If you have no interest in other people they will probably have equal interest in you.... *shrug* That's kinda how social websites work (and society in general come to think of it).
Eventually I will make a drive for people to enter their city location and members can look for people in their area.... to organize munches or get togethers - again if you have no interest in other people it is not likely to be a feature you would appreciate.
I will withdraw the friend request. :smirk:
Holly, I think you read way too much negativity into my post!
First, I'm still not sure if Cafe Mom and you are one and the same.
I've since visited my profile page and saw that there were two friend requests there, one from Cafe Mom, and one from holly wetcircuit. I accepted the one from holly wetcircuit. Still not sure about Cafe Mom.
As far as social media goes, maybe I just don't get the difference between participating in a forum and the "friending" thing. Being a member of the over 60 group, maybe it's a generational thing. Which is why I asked what the purpose of friending on Carrara Cafe was. I actually don't know. (I don't Tweet either.) :)
I like the idea of showing a location for members, the old forum had that too and I miss it on DAZ's new one. And local meetups sound like fun also, but I doubt that there are many members (if any) conveniently local to me.
I mentioned the problems that I was having with the site, not to complain, but because I thought you'd want to know.
I admit that I've never been a fan of the Carrara Cafe site, mainly because of its unusually slow performance. But I've had a renewed interest in it since I saw that you were working on it.
Hope we're still "friends". :coolsmile:
Yes absolutely. Real life is not Facebook, as I often say. We are still REAL friends. ;)
The Cafe Mom character is to introduce newbies to the site features. She is not a real person, she is an animated hostess for the site. She has no feelings and doesn't care whether you friend her or not - hence she can always be helpful and encouraging like a stewardess (or like your MOM). As the default "first friend" she introduces you to these new features. It's a pretty standard thing for community websites, but I am animating her in Carrara so there is an extra level of effort involved (at least I *was* animating her until my Mimic broke, LOL). She explains this to new members so I'm not interested in reposting it all over again for you here - that defeats the whole purpose. Honestly who cares if you know how to use the site, you already told me you won't be using it and as I said no one is "selling" anything there. You can participate if you want, at your comfort level, or not. Like most community activities you will likely get out of it what you are willing to contribute. The site is EVOLVING, and as a case in point the video tutorial I posted 2 days ago is now obsolete, LOL, because I feel if something HAS to be explained there is a problem with how it is presented. It's a puzzle. I'm enjoying it.
I plan to still be myself - an artist first: Holly Wetcircuit. I want to present my art and be able to separate that from helping people on a website by answering and explaining the same old questions over and over. That's what the animated hostess is for.... Once people get up to speed, they will likely unfriend the hostess so the nagging mom can go away.... and she won't mind.
I have SOME control under the hood (not the same as knowing what I am doing), and we are all volunteers with different ideas of what would "benefit" the community.... DAZ was generous enough to pay for the server (which is not premium service) and the social software (which is somewhat within my technical skills), so despite my feelings about "meeting in a store" DAZ also recognizes that they sometimes step on Carrara, and they are playing both sides of the fence keeping their store rules here but also sponsoring a real Community User's Group that is essentially commercial-free. It's a best-case scenario, and it is what it is....
Too many rules around here are based on the sales of DAZ products and that is the equivalent of meeting your friends at a mall or a shopping center. Sooner or later you are expected to buy something, and conversations tend to revolve around store purchases. Valuable developers like Fenric have had their posts removed because it goes against DAZ's profit motive.... Oh well.
There is a stage of using Carrara that comes AFTER the tutorials, AFTER you've bought all the plugins, AFTER the March Madness sales, where you need some deeper support with real people who are doing their projects and dealing with life and work and all the real things that effect real artists. If you ever find this forum mentally limiting, or 1-note -- Someone posted this week that we are such a small group that we all seem like friends here and they didn't want to intrude (!).... So CAFE is the opportunity for a clean slate, a tabula rasa. People I have not met are there posting now about their projects and renders and work - ironically Cafe Mom is the only one really seeing it happen because most people are like you: suspicious and jaded, so they keep their profiles locked up like virgin daughters. LOL.... It will take time to get people to warm up. I've been banned here, and banned from the beta group, yet I decided I still love Carrara and this community and I still want to help build it bigger. I'm in it for the long road.
Maybe you remember a discussion of a group movie project here?? There is absolutely NO WAY a longterm project like that could ever be completed here at these forums. The attention span is just way too short.... And for me that was the last straw. I decided to volunteer at the biggest alternate community for Carrara. Since I can see user ID numbers I know that there have been near 10,000 unique users at Cafe. Let me say that again TEN THOUSAND USERS of Carrara signed up at Cafe. Of course they are not current, but doesn't that tell you the (missed?) potential - or maybe the NEED of a community alternative...?
I'm sorry you had a disappointing experience with CAFE before. You are not alone.... The reason I got involved is to try to move the community in a NEW direction, hopefully with a more grown up attitude and an eye for longer, more difficult projects. I'm not trying to compete against DAZ - or even fight them (I'll just get banned again), and honestly who cares, they are a business and they have every right to run their site as a business - whether those attitudes hurt some aspects of Carrara is not really their problem, it's ours.
So please, If you just want to get this basic site info like "what is a friend for" you can refriend the animated hostess and given enough time she will explain it all to you (again she is not selling anything, and I am not apologizing for taking my own approach that helps me in the long run to streamline my animation workflow. If you are offended by animated hostesses I really don't care and neither does she)....
If you want to talk about Carrara or art or business you can refriend me.... Or don't. *Most* of my posts will be for all members to see, and I currently only have one gallery that is "just for friends" because it contains nudity and we can do that there. I intend to keep grown up stuff among a smaller group of people I know and trust - that's essentially what the "friend thing" is for at the moment, and as the site gets bigger I am hoping we can share grown up stuff without any fear of getting banned or getting heaped with negativity by forum trolls.
Sorry this was long, but I have to get to work now...
By the way, saying something doesn't work but you won't be back is basically letting me off the hook. I don't need to fix it if you won't be using it anyway. Hahahaha. There are issues with the mobile version of the site - and I suspect it is the cheif delay even for non-mobile users, but it's not worth discussing here and not a priority for me at the moment. I'm building a community, not tweaking code. I'll get to it when I get to it. Come back later if you expect instant fixes just because you said "it crashed".... I'll put it on the list. LOL ;)
I finally took some time from my busy schedule (:titter) to poke around over there and it seems to be shaping up quite nicely. The forum may be a bit odd but it's usable nonetheless, and personal galleries are definitely a big plus.
when I get my landline broadband next week I might check out CarraraCafe more again.
been a bit absent as my 3G wireless is dropping every minute now browsing making navigating anything impossibe
even browsing this forum a nightmare.
I still do but not an easy task.
anything involving forms and multiple submitting impossible
Thanks for the info about "Cafe Mom". I've now accepted the friend request from it (as well as yours earlier), and will check out what info Mom has to offer.
Don't get me wrong, I'll continue to visit the Carrara Cafe. In fact I went over to participate in Fenric's Forgotten Four challenge and posted an image there in the old forum, but it seems to have died. I wish it could be revitalized in the new forum area, I thought is was a clever idea for a challenge. Guess it would be up to Fenric. (Haven't seen him post for a while.)
Anyway, as the traffic picks up I'm sure I'll be spending more time there.
If you're interested in what makes the new forum crash iPad's Safari (and iCabMobile too) I can give you the repeatable steps, either here or over on the Cafe site. I believe that you mentioned that you had an iPad, so you could try it and see if it crashes for you as well. It seems to be specific to the "posting an image in a thread" topic.
Let me know.
Hmmm That actually narrows it down... I wonder if it is flash-based. Very helpful since it is so specific... Thank you!
Wendy, I want ALL your animations there in the feed! That would be so awesome! Then I want you to host a modeling/rigging challenge (so I can learn how to do it)....
Thank you! <3 I agree about the forum.... I don't think it's so much about the "help me now" threads, but it's the only public freepository for Carrara right now... Also each group has it's own forum, so it's totally possible to start a one-off project (like a community movie) as a group and it can act like a mini site to organize and share common files....</p>
Hmmm That actually narrows it down... I wonder if it is flash-based. Very helpful since it is so specific... Thank you!
The crash occurs when, after entering the "posting an image in a thread" topic, you try to click back to either "Forum Home" or "Carrara and 3D".
Wait, it's one specific thread...? Ok I gotta try...
Strange, it is not crashing for me.... Weird it is so consistent for you. I will keep poking around, must be something IN the thread...?
Yeah, I know what you mean. I think the term "friend", as well has the term "community", have both morphed in recent years (ie, the "social media" generation) into something entirely different from how many in the "older" generation define those terms.
I grew up in an age when "friend" was about commitment and personal interaction and mutual caring and sacrifice and a bunch of other stuff. Nowadays, in the "social media" age I think it has been diluted to an extent to where it means not much more than a member of a clique of people who likely have never met, don't even know each other's names, know absolutely nothing about each other personally, but decide they "like" each other based on some totally superficial criteria.
Same applies to "community". A lot of old timers have a vision of "community" as people working together and sacrificing for the common good. Nowadays "community" is, well, a bunch of the "friends" described above. No more a community than social media "friends" are actual friends. No commitment required, no sacrifice, none of the difficult stuff. It's all about having fun.
Personally, I think all of this social media has actually resulted in people being completely anti-social, sitting at their computers instead of actually interacting with real people and making real friends. It's the ultimate "easy friend". You don't have to do the work required from friends, none of the sacrifice, none of the difficulties. You like 'em, you friend 'em, you don't like 'em you ignore them. Can't be easier. You can't, and more importantly wouldn't want to do that with real friends.
Sorry for the philosophical rant. I'm sure my Friends list will shrink even further as a result. :)
Holly said
agreed whole heartedly
I can't say whether social media has caused considerable degradation in people's social lives as I've been a bit of a hermit for years now, but the words do seem to have lost much of their meaning at least on the internet. Then again some of this may have happened before social media; I seem to remember some talk about loss of community in cities where people don't even know the names of their neighbors.
I hand picked a critique group of illustrators a few years ago,
you can usually judge people by the kindness of their actions
it worked quite well for a while,
each had a different style and media
I;m starting to like Holly more by the kindness of her actions
actions being louder than ....
also she is a good artist , that always helps
Hmmm That actually narrows it down... I wonder if it is flash-based. Very helpful since it is so specific... Thank you!
Wendy, I want ALL your animations there in the feed! That would be so awesome! Then I want you to host a modeling/rigging challenge (so I can learn how to do it)....
you got to be kidding !
wendy :roll: