Questions about Cararra 8.5 pro VS Daz 4.7
michaelolson
Posts: 117
Is Cararra a lot better than Daz? If so How much? I'm only at the intermediate stage with Daz, using it for a basic layout. I will be heading into animation soon though.
Thanks.
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
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
I don't think one of these is better than the other. They both have their own good points.
The big difference is that Carrara is a complete modelling and rendering application. You can start with nothing and create all your figures, props etc in Carrara.
Daz Studio is not a modelling application, you have to use ready made content.
Carrara can use a lot of Daz Studio and Poser content, but there is some Daz Studio content that needs the 3Delight renderer so Carrara can't use it. This is mostly advanced lights and effects. Carrara cannot use Daz Studio dynamic clothes, but it can use conforming clothes. And some materials will look different in Daz Studio and Carrara.
There is some ready made content for Carrara that you can buy here but not nearly as much as for Daz Studio.
I got both when I assumed (stupidly) that there'd be more compatibility -- I've been using Carrara and it's ancestors since the 90s and was happy to see it again. Since I got it on substantial sale, I don't feel completely torn up about it, since Carrara is a great modeler.
Carrara has some _amazing_ particle effects and shader abilities, and if I were going to do animation I'd probably be inclined to do it in Carrara.
Geez, I wrote out a long reply and forgot to hit the 'post' button. Better late than never I guess...
Subjectively, it's totally legit of someone 'likes' one over the other. The User Interface for Carrara is very different in appearance than the layout for Studio. I much prefer Carrara and find it easier to find stuff, pose things, and assemble scenes, but this is a subjective opinion only and be aware that many (many) will very much disagree with me.
If you've started off in Studio, it's going to feel weird at first to find stuff in Carrara, but that's going to be true of any software out there. There are several Carrara forum members who actually prefer to assemble their scenes in Studio and then simply open the saved Studio scene in Carrara to continue improving the scene or rendering or whatever. I don't know the workflow for that, because I prefer to put everything together in Carrara, but there are people in the Carrara forums who could walk you through that (as I understand it, it's dead easy) so even if UI is the most important thing in the universe to you, it might not be a dealbreaker.
You mentioned you will likely be moving towards animation, which Carrara excels at. Nearly everything in Carrara is animatable, from textures and visibility of objects in the scene. Fire, fog, ocean, cloud, plant primitives all have animation features built in. So does the realistic sky editor, and the particles physics emitter... literally everything. Oh yeah, Carrara has several different physics engines, including but not restricted to Bullet, Dynamic hair that moves and sways with scene forces you might apply as you animate, and yes dynamic cloth is very do-able in Carrara (in fact the simulation calculations for both hair and softbody cloth are so fast they are nearly realtime. Ironically I just posted in another thread not too long ago a little animation I put together to demonstrate, I'll repost it below. The dynamic hairstyle I made myself in just about 5 min - I've got a tutorial on youtube showing how if anyone's interested, and I'm making more similar hairstyles for free use of the community. The cloth is simply a simple vertex cylinder I inserted into the scene, deleted the top and the bottom to make it hollow, and made it into a softbody attached at V4's hip and let it drape and move naturally.
The Carrara native renderer is extremely powerful, when you know how to use it but requires some learning curve on how Carrara reads textures and what the best render settings are, but again easy enough to check the carrara forums or ask, and plenty of people there to steer you. I am a fan of unbiased render engines, I have TheaRender, Octane, and Luxus, and was actually thinking of picking up iclone to play around with Indigo. That said, I've done side by sides and Carrara's biased render engine comes closest to the unbiased rendering (easy to do a side-by-side from the same camera viewpoint in the same scene with the Octane or Luxus plugins) and comes closest to unbiased accurate light calculations of any I've seen (again, with the right settings). If I had known the render settings then that I know now, not sure I would have bought all my various unbiased render options, might have just stuck with Carrara's native renderer (but I don't regret my purchases, as I do like to play with the unbiased rendering toys :) )
Carrara has lots of modellers built in. Of course there's Vertex and Spline and Metaball modelers, but also modelers for creating terrains, volumetric clouds, particles, plants (trees and bushes), water/ocean, etc etc.
The only thing I can think of that Studio handles better than Carrara is Genesis2/Genesis content. Carrara will still load and work with Genesis stuff, but it's persnickety in how it loads things, if you try to load something the wrong way then it gives an error. The latest beta may have gone some distance towards resolving that, and it's not like you can't use Genesis2 in Carrara as you certainly can, but have to be careful how you load clothing and clothing textures onto characters. One more thing is the geografting of the genitals for V5/M5/V6/M6 is off, it will attached the genitals but the uvmaps for them are screwy, so if you want to do close up shots of Genesis's privates, Carrara won't work well for that. Not an issue for me, but might be for some, so thought I would mention it.
One side benefit is that currently Carrara8.5pro is only $65.00 and comes with the M5pro and V5pro content bundles included with it for free. It's kind of a steal, so thought I would mention it, and even if someone ends up deciding they don't like Carrara for the long term and want to stick with Studio, the substantial free content might still be worth it.
nice collision :)
I'm very impressed with that skirt animation, Jonstark. I've got Carrara Pro but I haven't taken the time to learn it properly yet, I didn't even know it can do dynamic clothes.
I've had problems with Genesis in Carrara, a lot of things won't load and just give me a message saying there was an error, but not what the error was. On the other hand I am also a Poser user and I was buying Vicky 4 stuff before Genesis was born so I've got plenty of that I can use.
This had shown me that I should put some effort into learning to use Carrara properly, it's obviously capable of great things.
Where Carrara excels is in big scenes with lots of detail. Replicators play a huge part in that (if you've played with instances in Studio, that's a tiny fraction of the capability of Carrara's replicators. Hundreds of highly detailed trees? Acres of waving grass? Vast cities? Not a problem.
Most things you can but in the store here will load, with maybe minor adjustments needed to the shaders. (Fenric's Shader Doctor makes this a 1-click operation), although I have seen some of the robot figures have problems with their rigging. V4/M4/Genesis all work fine, and although it doesn't claim support for G2, I've never encountered a problem. What definitely doesn't work are the HD extensions for G2.
Carrara has a different philosophy too - it's much more make it than buy it. There are Carrara products in the store, and many are astoundingly good. But if you've got time and patience, you can make your own. In the attached scene, you have Lee6 and Gia6. Everything else was scratch-built inside Carrara.