Carrara and OSX Yosemite
BrianP21361
Posts: 791
I got a copy of the beta of OSX Yosemite up and running on an external drive and installed Carrara 8.5. I used DIM to install a bunch of content, but I haven't figured out how to get the CMS running so I can't access any new content. I was able to open a bunch of scenesI I had created earlier under Mavericks and they seem to render Ok. There have been a few crashes, but I'm not sure if it's Yosemite or Carrara. Overall Yosemite seems very buggy. I can't log in to my Daz account in Safari for instance.
Has any one else tried Carrara and Yosemite?
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Sorry. This turnip doesn't have enough blood for bleeding edge. ;-)
Good luck getting it going. Hopefully it will work for you. Also, hopefully it isn't on a mission critical drive.
:-S Agree. I never want to test a beta again. lol
From what I've read, the beta is too buggy. Going to wait till the official release this fall.
I agree that the beta is very rough and buggy. I just wanted to see if there was a chance that Carrara would work with it after the Lion fiasco. (It took more than a year fro Daz to create a version that didn't crash every few minutes.) I'd rather have 6 months to find a Carrara replacement then try to react when it's released. I love Carrara and have been using it since before it was Carrara, but Daz's lack of support and information is disturbing. I'm nervous about investing more $$ and time working with it. We were supposed to get Carrara 9 first quarter of this year. They haven't even fixed any of the bugs in 8.5 yet. My two cents.
I've read the beta is pretty buggy, so I will stay away from it for a while.
Hope render node works under Yosemite; Mavericks broke it. Having it work again would really make life easier. I sure wish Daz would push out a fix for it (the other apps I have that distribute tasks work fine, just Carrara).
I did one of the iOS betas one time, and vowed never again. I'll wait till the Autumn. No, I'll probably wait for the inevitable patch update...
First, Yosemite is early developer beta, it's supposed to not work I haven't even install mine yet). Second Carrara 8.5 needs the Valentina CMS, the one you have an installer for in the DIM directory in /Applications as Carrara hasn't been fixed to talk to postgres yet.
Thanks Totte,
That's the info I was looking for. I'll try to install the Valentina CMS and see if that works.
I'm expecting Yosemite to work perfectly. I just installed it to see if Carrara might work. Things went well with Mountain Lion and Maverick's.
Update: I have had the public beta for a week now and Carrara is working on it with few problems, but I haven't really pushed it. Even got render node working for a while, but this has happened before and gotten my hopes up only to be dashed again. Another day or two and I can relocated the Yosemite machine and use it more frequently (I only do beta testing on an old machine; this one is idle because of the bug that prevents the render node from working under Mavericks)
I agree with a comment above that the lack attention from Daz is more than disturbing, so much so that I have started testing other apps just in case something gets broken or Carrara is dropped. Actually downloaded one just yesterday...
Yosemite isn't the same kind of rewrite as Lion so I'm expecting it to work. What kind of issues are you experiencing. I'd like to try and reproduce them.
I was mainly looking at render nodes... At first things didn't work... then everything worked great then tapered off.
Similar to how it was before once with Mavericks. I really, really want render nodes to work so I got a little excited , buut when things started acting up again...
Give me some more time to just play with it.
The grapevine from my friend who works at Apple is there has been extreme displeasure inside the company at the way some changes have been handled in the last year or two... But I think that's well after Lion. I know that last time I asked, inside they had still not upgraded to the same versions as had been shipped to the public, and he was starting to see docs from 'corporate' pass around the office in 'Microsoft Word' format...
My suspicion is this will mean Yosimete will NOT repeat some of the recent fiascos seen... But that also means beta would be rougher so that post beta is smoother.
Any thoughts from the community now that Yosemite is out? I have it installed on my laptop with Carrara 8.5 and things seem to be alright but I do most of my 3D work on one of my iMacs. I don't really want to upgrade that until I see more feedback from fellow users.
At the current speed, it's going to be 3 days before it's finished downloading!
I've had the Yosemite beta and Carrara works great (I am not a pro user though...).
Now have updated all my machines to Yosemite and am trying to get the render node sorted out. It stopped working under Mavericks and is basically functioning under Yosemite, with some oddities. I updated my ticket with Daz just now and will see what they suggest.
If I can get this sorted out, I have 14 cores waiting to render!
I don't like some of the Yosemite UI elements (most of the main ones like transparency drive me crazy) and probably would not have updated but it seems to have gotten render nodes functioning again, so I updated... for Carrara!
Have been playing around for a while with mixed results. I can eventually get a render network running, but it sometimes requires relaunching and such, which is a pain.
Will try to get a routine figured out and post back here.
I upgraded my iMac, but not my MacBook.
Are there any licensing issues with installing Carrara on both machines (assuming I'm only using one at a time)? Its on the MacBook at present - and before I upgrade that and the rest of the family's Macs... I'm planning to test my primary applications on the other machine.
I'm personally not too worried about render nodes since I don't really use them anymore. I'm more or less concerned whether Carrara itself works "normally".
Thanks for updating this thread. I'm still at 10.6.8 and have been afraid to upgrade to Mavricks and beyond for fear of breaking Carrara and other apps. I don't use render nodes, but it's good to know if C8.5 works.
Carrara works fine under Mavericks... except for render nodes and the occasional bug.
So far, it works fine under Yosemite, and the render nodes work again, but not without some stress.
I played with render nodes today for a while and figured out a few things and ran into some problems.
The good: I found a workflow that works well for two machines. Open Render Node on the render machine. Click the start up image. Open Carrara on the main machine. Switch to the Render Room and set up the file to be rendered. Click the Manage Render Nodes tab. Both machines will have a pop-up message asking for permission to allow incoming data. Click ALLOW on the render node machine first, then the main machine. Double check wit the Manager that the node machine is connected. Start the render.
The bad: I can get my main machine (iMac) to render with one other machine (Mac Pro), but when I throw a third (Mac mini) into the mix, either as a second or third machine, nodes does not work at all. The message asking for permission does not come up on the mini.
Have a good look at Yosemite before you update. As I said, I don't like much of the feel of the design and would not have updated except for regaining the ability to use render nodes.
Honestly, today is the first full day in front of Yosemite (during the beta I would spend bits of time with it here and there) and my eyes are feeling really, really tired. No other change to my regular Saturday routine.
Got render nodes working as desired: iMac (Carrara) + MacPro (node) + mini (node)
The key is in the order in which the apps are launched and the ALLOW incoming data button is pushed.
I use screen sharing to access the mini and Mac Pro form the iMac.
Launch node on mini.
Launch node on MacPro.
Launch Carrara on iMac, set up in batch render.
Press Manage Render Nodes.
Click ALLOW on the mini.
Click ALLOW on the MacPro.
Click ALLOW on the iMac.
Worked 9 out of 10 times.
What do you need to have installed on the node machines? I've got a 17" i7 Macbook Pro lying around not doing much (it's for sale if anyone in the UK is interested), & quite fancy giving it a go, just for the sake of it
If you have any sets such as Howie Farkes scenes or other scenes that use custom leaf shapes, those will need to be installed on a node machine. Also any plugins will need to be installed.
If fonts differ on the node machine, text primitives will need to be converted to vertex objects. if the font used in the primitive is there, then it should be fine as it is.
I'm still working out the install myself; I had only started to use it a year ago when I updated to Mavericks and broke it, so I never figured out how to properly install.
If I am correct, you do not need the main Carrara app on the 2nd machine, just the node app.
Evilproducer: That would mean that the plugins would need to be installed into the render app, just like for the regular?
Does content also need to be installed? Just a normal DIM install? I tried a Howie scene and got almost ten requests for leaves and ignored them for now...
Howie's stuff gets installed inside the .app (really just a specialised folder), as do things like Ringo's shaders. So on that basis, I think you'd need the .app for the content if nothing else. And the content won't install from DIM without the app.
On the main machine, they are installed in the Carrara app.
But on the node machine wouldn't they be installed inside the render node app if the main app isn't needed? (there is a render node app: Carrara RenderNode 8.5 which is used on the node machine)
Or is it OK to just full install everything on the node machine and then just use the node app?
Yes. the stuff would indeed go into the C8.5 Node app package in the same way they would go into the main Carrara app package. No need for the main Carrara app, Content or anything like that on the Node machine, that data is transferred over as part of he load process. The only things you need are the things like leaves, brushes, plugins, etc. You don't need the preset scene files or the native content on the Nodes.
I used to think that I need to save my scene internally for stuff like the Poser/DAZ content, but I discovered that I did not need to do that, which was a happy day.
If you're using an irradiance map, you may want to manually move that over to the Node's temp file or it may not see it or use it on the Node. had assumed that the Node would get the map from the saved location on the host machine, and it does- maybe 70% of the time. The rest it seems to be ignored. I have gotten in the habit of copying it over manually before the render as I mentioned above.
Thanks for the tip!
I'm still at the level where I don't know what an irradiance map is (and don't think anything I do has one), so I should/might/could be OK! I think. Maybe! Hopefully!
Will start cleaning up my installations today. My MacPro only has a small HD on it and I want to keep it as lean as possible.
My render farm is basically the iMac and the MacPro. The mini actually starts whirring like a UFO under any real load (Howie's scenes are out). Pretty much the same for the MBP. They can handle some of my simpler animations, so I may bring them online for those, but I am happy just having the two main machines working together. Everything now finished in half the time with no worries about heat or Mac minis lifting off!
The mini and the MBP were used during Yosemite beta testing to see if things worked, and they did a good job. Now if I could afford a new iMac 5K...
Figured some things out about Render Nodes. (after everything stopped working tonight)
The machines serving as nodes should not be directly connected to the control machine. This means via Thunderbolt (Target Display Mode) or via Screen Sharing.
If one of the nodes has screen sharing connected to another node, no problem.
Quite a bit of trial and error here and a bit of frustration but I think I got it. Hope it helps. [Now I need a better display for my node machines...)