Digital Art Zone

Kodiak3D - 28 November 2012 06:45 PM

I’d also reccommend PhilW’s tutorials available here at DAZ:

http://www.daz3d.com/shop/carrara-8-training-instant-digital-download
http://www.daz3d.com/shop/advanced-carrara-techniques

I haven’t seen them myself, but Phil is really an expert at Carrara.  I’ll probably pick up Advanced Techniques myself before long.

Echo that! I always give a thumbs-up for Phil’s training. Great stuff there.

It’s also easy—as this thread shows—to get focused on just one way to solve a problem. I would have done the same…pounded my head over Anything Glows… Then 3DAGE comes along and shows a completely different (and easier IMO) way to acheive an equally cool effect. Sometimes you need to take a break, clear your mind and try to approach from a different angle.

Kodiak3D - 28 November 2012 06:45 PM

Trust me, learn the program first.  You will be amazed at how much easier things become and what you are capable of doing once you do.

More echoing. Start small…work upwards from there.

I found that it helped if I focused on one thing, such as shaders, lights, etc. for awhile. Some things like shaders and lighting go hand in hand, so sometimes it’s difficult to do just one or the other. You can also work on an element of the program or a concept. For lighting for instance, I concentrated for awhile on faking GI and with the shader room I focused for awhile on using procedural functions, such as mixers, multipliers, noise functions etc. When I got stuck, I either followed a thread or asked here at the forum.

I would also say, that the advice to start small is good, it’s also important to keep the creative juices flowing and not to get bored and lose interest in what you’re doing, so also be prepared to just experiment once in awhile and see where that takes you. Speaking for myself, when I do a tutorial, sometimes if I get bored with the scene the tutorial covers, I’ll create my own scene or scene element and use the steps and principles in the tutorial to apply to my own scene or scene elements. Sometimes I go down in flames, sometimes the idea that’s being taught sticks with me better.

Here were a couple of video walk through doing some fixes

Exercise 04 - Fixing Poser content shaders part 1 and 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7ViS7YW1KI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jD7yHQOblE

Riggswolfe - 29 November 2012 12:21 PM

Oh, that large preview button helps a ton! I’m no longer looking at something smaller than a postage stamp! Thank you for the scene and the answers. I’m going to check out that thread as well.

What I’ve been doing for Daz/Poser content (since so far Cararra ‘content’ is relatively organized) is going into Daz and going to the item I am looking for then doing “Browse to file location”. This usually gives me what I need to look for it in Cararra. Generally what name its folder is under.

Sometimes I have to do it multiple times, once for say, a clothing item, then another time for a prop or mat save for the clothing item as well.

P3dO Explorer Pro http://www.senosoft.com/softp3dopro.php  has been mentioned a few times through the forums. I haven’t used it myself, but maybe some others have and can comment on how useful it is with Carrara, since it supports Carrara’s CAR and CBR formats.

There has been a lot of helpful information in this thread. I’m sort of scattershot playing with various things in Cararra right now, sort of acting like that Dog in Up. I’ll be looking at something and playing with it then see something new and go “oh! What’s that?” And go look at it next.

Eventually I need to play with modeling terrain, skies, and space scenes IE stars, nebula, and planets. That is in fact what I’m playing with currently though I feel utterly lost. Wish me luck!

Terrain is one of the things that I enjoy most. The terrain editor is Carrara is terrible though.

I build a heightmap in Daylon Graphics’ Leveller. I then tweak that in Photoshop (save it as JPG since Leveller does PNG) and then use Photoshop layers to make distribution maps for trees/grass/etc. I then import the heightmap into the Carrara terrain.

Leveller does export to “Carrara MSH” format—I haven’t tried it and I suspect that this is a format from Carrara’s bygone days. 

I’m still experimenting with the terrain shader to get it looking good.