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Thanks! But Wendy, That's not Rosie... it's Ysabeau 6 (by Thorne) wearing Rosie's awesome hair!!! ;)
Also... I really love the Carrara render engine! Especially after PhilW got me into using GC=2.2, which I was very reluctant to adopt - but time took my hand and has shown me the light! ;)
well you go to sleep for 8 hours and look what happens
really enjoying the different approaches, the underlying messages @Sad - nicely done !
and @Dartanbeck, fantastic image, must go through your explantion with toothcomb! so long since i used partciles, must give them a try.
@MistyMist, the usual joy in your work :)
Here's a play with Plant generator. It's a kind of homage to "Blue Poles" by Jackson Pollack
I pinched one of Dart's trees from his excellent packs and changed the leaves a little. From http://www.daz3d.com/carrara-environkit-woodlands
PhilW Bench is in there as well but covered over. f rom http://www.daz3d.com/an-english-village - terrific set!
And Dimension theory's ultra fast ecomantics fills in the background.http://www.daz3d.com/ecomantics-efficient-ecosystems
Method: the leaves are PNGs - PNG is good because it brings in its own alphas!! So you don't have to use an extra masking texture in the alpha channel.
Render is with Gamma set on 2 in the render room.
Head Wax - very original approach, but you should know by now that Carrara 9 doesn't grow on trees!
...perhaps he envisions it really branching out? ;)
I love the take! :)
Plant modeler is quite the thing, eh? Get in too deep and... well... all manner of things can happen! I love all of those kits you've mentioned. The English Village is truly a work of art (and Love?). Talk about getting lost... that set is absolutely HUGE! So we can set scenes in many different parts of the village. DT's EcoSystems was a big thing for me, getting used to using actual Carrara scenes from my previous attachments to the Millennium Environment (which I liked a lot due to it's 360 degree capabilities), I made some absolutely gigantic scenes with that that left an extremely tiny footprint on my (then) under-powered laptop! I combined that with X-Frog's billboards. Woodlands? I think a user has to be somewhat grown up to use something like that... maybe some day ;) Truly, though... I use that thing almost every time I load in Carrara in some way or form.
One thing I completely left out of my big WIP post is my use of Fenric's tools!
For one, I cannot even think of working with Genesis (1 or 2) or any other Triax figures without using that Change Bone Visibility plugin. So I had to perform that action on both Ysabeau 6 and the big Dragon 3.
Also in my efforts to try various swords, one that I was looking at is actually a rigged figure instead of a prop. It was kind of clunky to try and treat it like a prop, parenting it to the hand, and using it the way it was meant to be used - by conforming it - was also a bit of a pain. I tried to use Animate > Detach Skeleton, but that was grayed out. So I performed the good ol' Edit > Fenric > Unlock Figure, then I could detach the skeleton, remove the model from the rig, delete the rig and use the model as a prop! Whew! It worked beautifully.
There was one situation recently where: when I performed the Unlock Figure/detach skeleton thing the model left behind was locked in place - I couldn't move it no matter what I tried with constraints, which were off to begin with.
So if you have this issue, I've found the super-fast-and-simple trick to get it unstuck!
Simply duplicate the stuck model, and use the duplicate (delete the original), which works as one would expect ;)
thanks tee hee modifiers lotsa fun
thats about what it feels like in this heatwave >.<
Fenric's Tools
I am putting some of these tools to Constant use, while others I still need to explore more - as with many things in Carrara, both things that are included in Carrara Pro as well as after-market supplements. All in all, however, when I was going from laptop to desktop to my home-built workstation I ended up reinstalling Carrara a few times and, each time, if I tried messing around in Carrara before installing my Fenric tools, Carrara just didn't feel right. Fenric has certainly played a huge role in helping me to achieve my goals.
I use the Advanced Shader Tweaker quite often, but really have to spend some time to get to know and use the others in this pack. They're all very helpful, useful utilities - it just takes me breaking away from old habits and looking at new/different ways of looking at shaders.
Pose Helper for Carrara - Again, unfortunately this doesn't work on Genesis or other Triax figures - but I LOVE this tool! So nice to be able to swap pose directions > send left to right, right to left, along with everything else that it does. Being that I still enjoy using Generation 4 and other Poser Format figures (also works with native figures, primitives, etc.,) I find myself using this handy device quite a lot.
This tool is best explained by the creator himself:
This is one of those that I really need to practice using more! This thing is awesome!
This thing adds Tree Duplicate to the list of "Edit > Fenric" commands, which allows us to essentially duplicate things which cannot be duplicated! Instead of actual duplication, these Tree Duplicates are their own instances or separate figures, not the memory-saving instances we get from duplicated props and simple objects. But it makes it so we can get exact copies of - yes - Figures!!! So useful for vehicles, rigged building figures, even character figures. It basically (and quickly) pretends to add whatever is selected into the browser (without adding it to the browser) and drags it back into the scene - really fast! But wait... there's a lot more!
This also adds the aforementioned Unlock Figure and Restore Figure! Wanna add a custom morph zone into a locked figure? Unlock it - change it - Restore it! Yup!
We also get the Set Figure Visibility command which, as I've started this tool's description with, allows us to hide entire chains of hierarchy within a figure with a single click! I gotta tell John and Misty!!!
It also adds Change Rotation, which is a command which will go through the whole figure and change ALL of the joint rotations from Carrara's default Quaternion to Angles! So if you've ever loaded in a figure that ends up looking like it's tied in a knot as soon as you start working with it, you now know how to fix it! :)
If you're wondering about any of these, please ask! I may know what you need to know - if not, I might be able to find out ;)
EDIT: Hmmmm... this looks pretty useful, now that I see it. I'm going to copy this over to my Learning thread as well as the Carrara Information Manual thread ;)
Here are a few ideas which I am not going to use... going in a different direction.
Kewl WIPs Folks!
Monolith made in modelling room with a basic cube, text and booleans
heh, very funny you two :)
thanks for the Fenric run down Dart!
@wdgjohn, I like the second choice!
@stezza, one of my favourite books! (and movies) :)
Thanks to Dart for the rundown on Fenric's wonderful plugins. Just one thing to add - if you really want to understand and get the best out of ERC, have a look at FabaOne's tutorials on ShareCG, they are terrific.
thanks to PhilW's advice, managed to drape a vertex mexh over text mesh using VWD plugin.
I used a glass shader on the result to give it a plastiv wrap appearence.
Then used anything glows as the light source - applied to the text mesh.
Different variations in the text glow channel - including Fenric's toward away shader (2nd image)
And caustics :)
LOL! I mention that in my opening (ERC) sentence, and a little later too! Guess I write too long and boring!
Fantastic!
Just playing with an idea . . . it's a sign!
Took my existing finger sign and changed the text on the finger board and finneal. Still need to add people and "stuff"
Very nice!
That reminds me of a sculpture on the MIT campus
Dart - never boring (but possibly a bit long!).
I know. And it's strange - most of those long-winded posts I make could be said in much fewer words! One day, perhaps, I'll have to learn the English language! LOL
I cannot type either, so it takes me f o r e v e r to make those posts! LOL
Faba so totally ROCKS! Doesn't she? Her Vimeo channel has had some really cool stuff using her Carrara-original figure walking up and down stairs, running.... I really need to sit down and practice my ERC. I never really had problems trying to think up how to work my animations - so the automated behavior never really took hold on me yet. But seeing what Faba has done with it really does help to show its potential, importance, and cool-factor!
Faba's The Frog Prince video Little Bear video Both done in Carrara
Here's her ShareCG gallery, which is all about using the wonderful ERC plugin! fabaone (must login to a Free account to download)
trying to focus on one idea. thinking something carrara cafe-ish.
and something like Stark tower or the Daily Planet, Metropolis
researching the idea

Dart - thanks for the Faba links, I'd not seen those before - I am now following her so I don't miss anything else!
Here's the start of entry #2 (I will return to entry #1 later to play some more).
The "Carrara" and the "Nine" were both made in Carrara's Text editor. I converted both to facets and add some boxes, cylinders and extrusions to the nine, then exported them both as OBJ. The Carrara was imported to Blender where I used the sculpting tools to rough it up a bit. Then I took both into Subtance Painter to create textures. Neither set of textures is working ideally in Carrara yet - getting Substance Painter output to work well in Carrara is still a trial and error process for me, with more error than I'd like. :)
Trees are from HowieFarke's Arboreteum Vol 1, grass and stones from Mike Moir's replicator pack. The nearby ground around the the pond is a vertex grid that I just used soft select to move around and the water is just a plane.
Test render straight from Carrara with no post-work:
Also attached are my scene setup and a screeshot of the nine in Substance Painter so you can see the shape and textures a little better. :)
toying with a concept.
@TangoAlpha - sits very nicely, I like the subtlety :)
@cdordoni wow yes that looks so similar! Is that RMIT Melbourne?
@chickenman and @MDO210 great start, and they are nearlly finished :) the concept is looking good Mark
CONCEPT VOTING RULES PLEASE FEEL FREE TO COMMENT
I was thinking maybe because we are having up to three images an entrant we could judge the winner by their scores combined. ie if their image 1 gets 24 votes, their image 2 gets 12 votes, and their image 3 gets 12 votes then they score 48.
2nd and third and HM would be as per usual - ie based on votes for one image.
Fine with me.
im good with that
Mee too.
Yo, Misty... wonderful thinking you've got going on!
Mark, Wow... I love that image!
Chickenman... Looks very inviting! It's still waaaaay too hot and humid where I live - where it's usually air conditioned outside in the summer due to our wonderful Lake Michigan. Not this year - though it's still not as hot as anywhere that surrounds us... so I should quit complaining! ;)
cdordoni - that's a really neat sculpture! Are you in MIT? Student? Professor?
PhilW, glad you enjoyed those! I've been a Faba fan ever since I've first joined the Carrara discussion forum. She helped me out quite a bit along with many others. She used to have videos up in her Vimeo gallery with her cool Carrara-original (but modeled in Hex) character, who looked really, really nice - like Aiko's boyfriend or brother. I still (embarrassingly) have some difficulty figuring out her wonderful tutorial graphic for ERC though. I think what it is, is that I need to actually come up with a specific goal and just start connecting it up. It's pretty straight-forward - as incredibly thorough its design is. It's truly a work of art all to itself - he's put so much into it... again, with Faba testing it and making highly educated suggestions on what all is needed. She really is genius!
Oh... and PhilW,
I was working with your Instant City object files today - messing around with ideas for my nex run. Wow! That's one amazing kit! I've loaded and rendered the preset scenes before, but never played with the bits separately!
I took the city blocks' base into the vertex modeler and made it thicker, so I could use various heights along with my Woodlands kit. Then I took a duplicate of that and removed the SubD and extruded the inner portion inwards, then moved that down and scaled it - to make it into street for the traffic presets! Worked perfectly! So then I parented that to the traffic preset, and I can now have streets at various elevations as well! So now I'm thinking of putting some cylinders under that whole thing, with that base being not quite as thick as it is now, to have overpasses and such.
Very fun, indeed!