Digital Art Zone

3dage I was reading a post about mosty Joemmama,  Stanly and MYSELF complaining and reading your responses about how long the releases of C 8.5 is taking THEN logged in to respond and now can’t find it!

But anyways.

I for one like any other smart consumer am more worried about QUALITY than speedy product releases to a point. I would and will be happy if what finally comes out from behind the curtain is all you and others say it’s gunna be, BUT it’s been my experiences that most carrara version upgrades are little more than YAWNERS. and mostly to work with OS system upgrades 1-2-3 version higher than the carrara versions being worked on, A few toys added/ Maybe a few more pervasive bugs squashed maybe better integration with other consumer programs.

I am willing to give you and DAZ the benefit of the doubt on this….

But when and if Carrara 8.5 is released, it had better be gold plated, has a V-12 hemi engine, wipe my backside, and be able to travel in time because if it’s not. DAZes street creed as well as yern will take a serious nose dive.

No offense

HI Richard

I’m glad you think that way ,.

IMO ,. taking time to make something well, usually works better than making things quickly.
although, it obviously takes longer.

As It’s not my company, or product, and I know as much about the current state of development as anyone else,.. I can’t,.. and wouldn’t make any claims about how well an unreleased product will perform,.. when it’s eventually released.

The point I was making was that it’s better to spend time and effort in developing a product,...
than quickly releasing it due to a marketing deadline. or customer pressure.

Nothing is ever completely flawless. and all computer programs have flaws and errors.
I expect we’ll find bug’s or issues in carrara 8.5 when it’s released too.

The fact that one OS manufacturer changed the way that their OS would work with existing software, and hardware,.. . produced many problems for many software developers,.

It’s not an issue that’s endemic to Carrara, or was caused by Daz3D or Carrara developers.

Getting Carrara working on again under that new OS, is still a work in progress, ...as far as I know. (I don’t use that platform)

I don’t think there will be many big surprises with 8.5,. since we;re able to see it as it’s being developed, and it’s a slow development process,..

The NEW things,. like the light icons, and Camera icons, and the changes to the Parameters section of the UI are no longer “new”
since we’ve been using them for a while, .. but there are some changes , like the mew Multi-layer shader, and “Multi-layer element” shaders which give you the ability to layer images with different blending modes,. I think that’s something that will be a “slow burner” and may take people some time to really see the potential for creating animated SFX, or adding make up, without needing to make new image in an image editor.

Autofit in Carrara is a massive advantage if you have a load of content from the previous generations of figures like V3,M3 / V4, M4 etc..
and you also have the clone shapes for those (Iconic shapes for genesis) which allows Autofit to shape those clothes to fit genesis.

So,. there are many new features,. many bug fixes,. and many new options in Carrara 8.5, but most of them won’t be a big surprise.

As for street cred,...  

I’ll print that out and show it to my daughter,..  (she knows I have no street cred)

“like the new Multi-layer shader, and “Multi-layer element” - I don’t remember seeing anything about this, have I missed something? It is entirely possible…

Hi Phil

It’s an easy one to miss

It’s under operators, and allows you to build up a shader using Multiple layers, with some basic blending modes…Normal,Add Multiply, subtract,.

Each Multilayer “element” also has an opacity slider,. so you can adjust it to reveal the other multi layer elements.

here’s a quick “Bad” example, just to show the shader setup.

Although I’m using the Diffuse channel here,.. you could use this Multilayer shader in any of the other channels to build a more complex mix of shaders textures, etc..

Thanks - informative as always!  This could be very useful for adding details to figures.  There is a set of different effects made for the Daz Studio that would probably be usable with this.
http://www.daz3d.com/shop/hybrid-grunge-bundle-for-poser

There are probably others too.

Exactly

Plus,. with Carrara, you could use patterns, natural functions, and fractal noise (set to use the UV’s) to add “random” dirt and scratches or use basic grey-scale texture maps, as a blender,.. along with colours or gradients to create make-up effects.

This is a container I did a few months ago, just as a messing around example / test thing.

The staining and decay on the label is using the Multilayer, on a plain white label with text, ...I think the Lid and container also have some multilayer stuff going on.  I’ll need to dig up the file,. ...If I saved it

perhaps a better example….

using a Black and white map of tears, as a Blend in a Mixer to provide the colour and some colour variations using fractal noise (UV mode)
this is then Multiplied with the base texture layer.

Cool work!

I cant take credit ..

Eye candy is a handy set of tools

“Water drops” , then “drip” to stretch them,.

here’s the map if anyone wants it…