Miscellaneous Tips & Tricks for Carrara

Dartanbeck

Just a friendly reminder to anyone new to Carrara, or just getting back into it, after this forum launched and we lost practical access to the great threads of the previous forum threads, I made an endeavor upon myself to try and get some of the most basic questions answered in a single, easy to use resource. This all began by asking permission from our local Carrara super hero, Cripeman, if I could post a compiled index of his, most useful, video tutorials and just grew a bunch from there, and so began the
►►► Carrara Information Manual ◄◄◄ stickied to the top of the Carrara discussion forum.

► Some Miscellaneous Tips & Tricks is one of the Table of Contents entries leading to an article I wrote with some nice-to-know and helpful features of Carrara that I have found to be very useful.

► Navigating in Carrara
some good tips on how to get around the work space, go to where you want to be at specific times, and how to send stuff to specific locations within your scene
► Your Carrara Browser
Making great stuff isn’t as cool if you can’t remember where you put it. Let’s get some good habits going right from the start
► Daz Install Manager - Installing Custom Poser Runtimes
Basic walkthrough of designing your own custom runtime structure

are also geared towards helping all Carrara enthusiasts make their journeys less cumbersome and a lot more efficient and enjoyable. These are not individually listed in the main Table of Contents, but rather are under the Carrara Walkthrough heading, which will grow over time.

There are many links within the Table of Contents, some which lead to articles further within the thread, and some from other threads or sites. Since the intention of this whole thing is to become a living "Tome of Help and Knowledge" for Carrara users, I knew that I would end up with a lot of pages within that thread. So to help navigate around, I've also included some other helpful "Link Posts" within the thread pages, like the following:
►►► Back to Table of Contents
and

Quick Links Menu
Just a little tool I decided to add to help navigate this, and other threads

► Carrara Walkthrough Main Index

► Forum Help Links

► Useful Links

► Tutorials Index

► Back to Table of Contents

Walkthrough is currently under heavy construction, please bear with me

For nearly any Carrara subject, Cripeman has been kind enough to provide informative and entertaining videos to show us more about it. It gives me great pleasure to turn you all on to:
► Cripeman's Carrara Video Tutorials Index
Carrara Community's very own Super Hero takes plenty of time from his busy life to
explore many exciting features of this amazing 3d content manipulation, modeling and animation suite

There are many others helping as well, and I have included some of these heroic endeavors here:
► Carrara and related 3d Art Tutorials
and as an added bonus, I occasionally go through the pages of the forum and find threads that relate to commonly asked (and even not-so-common) questions, organize them by subject, and add them to the:
► Forum Help Links post.

Carrara Cafe is a dedicated Carrara site with many tutorials, articles, freebies, galleries, and forum. It is constantly growing and definitely deserves a bookmark in your browser.

Carrara 3D Expo magazine (C3DE) - is a wonderful Carrara-only resource. Each issue is a gem, packed with images and articles to help to inspire you on your way to bigger and better places within Carrara. You can download the issues from ShareCG Here (requires free registration) and ShareCG also has loads of freebies for Carrara. And since Carrara can easily use nearly anything made for Poser, you can browse the thousands of Poser freebies there, too!
And Here is a direct link to the C3DE Issue site where you may read each article online.

And I would also like to introduce a whole new site developed by one of our dedicated forum members towards the endeavors of animating in Carrara:
► CarraraTors - with its own forums, movie theater, contests, and other goodies!

It has certainly become a passion for me to try my best to help other Carrara users along, since this community has helped me when I was new and needed help. So I really hope that you, too, enjoy using Carrara as much as I do. The software really helps to remove the limits of what can truly be achieved on a very small budget - very small. Sure, I buy models, textures, etc., all the time from DAZ 3D, but I am a Platinum Club Member so I really don't spend much at all - even though not all of the items I purchase are Platinum Club products. The time I save by buying these truly beautiful assets for such incredibly reasonable prices is a blessing - truly.

Anyways, have fun!