Digital Art Zone

Oops! I meant to post some general tips on getting better Assembly Room and Carrara performance.

The Interactive Renderer (the up arrow within a circle) is very helpful. You can use software or OpenGL for the Assembly Room renderer. Unless you have driver issues with your graphics card, OpenGL would be the way to go. The Interactive Renderer has nothing to do with the Render Room. These settings are scene specific, so every scene you start you will have to set the renderer. Some people make and save a default scene with their preferred settings.

There are some settings you can tweak or turn off to ease the load on your card if it becomes an issue. The default texture size is pretty large, to speed things up, and reduce the overhead on your graphic card’s memory, lower it’s value. You can also turn off transparencies, etc.

To help with Carrara’s memory handling, you can go to the file menu and open the preferences menu. From under the imaging and scratch disk section, try lowering the texture spooling. The initial value is based on how much RAM you have installed. The more RAM the higher the value. The slider defaults to about the halfway point. I have mine at around 70 MB. As far as I know there is no hard and fast rule, just that lower can be better. This is a global setting and will stay the same until you change it. You will also need to restart Carrara after making any changes.

This has been mentioned in many threads by many different people, but makes sure you clean out your temp. file. If you don’t know the path, or want to change the location, you can refer back to the image and scratch disk section of the preferences.

That is pretty darn helpful. A quick question, how do you set the default scene? I know how to do it in Daz, it’s a preference you just tell it what scene to use as a default but I looked through the Cararra preferences and didn’t see a way to do it.

Riggswolfe - 06 December 2012 08:02 PM

The reason I didn’t do it that way is because it’s a “character” I created complete with specific morphs and stuff that I didn’t know if I’d be able to reliably replicate so I wanted to import him and do a fun render in Cararra with him.

And I posted the render I wanted this scene for over in the A New Hope render thread.

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewthread/221/P405/

That’s very nice. Sorry I missed it!

I think it depends on the morphs used to create the character. Some people have had issues, but so far I have not, but then again, I create my own in Carrara using morphs++. I have DLed a couple characters others have made. I had one for Summer Glau and the girl that played the Vulcan in ST:Enterprise and both worked fine in Carrara. I have a couple others I’ve DLed and haven’t tried, but so far, so good. There are many people here that have transferred characters over from D/S and I’m sure that they could give more specific advice.

Can you use your method to bring just the character from D/S into Carrara 8 (non-beta)? You could then save him to your Objects Browser for later Carrara use. I’ve found that the figures also seem to load a bit faster after they’ve been saved as a Carrara file, but this could just be my perception.

The character is just some standard morphs. A bit of M4 aged mixed with a few other dial spins. The problem is I don’t remember which ones so it seemed easier just to export him. I also haven’t really figured out how to do injects and other morphs in Cararra yet. I’ve seen some morphs here and there on various clothing pieces and stuff but haven’t figured out how to do an inject on a figure yet.

Your idea sounds smart. I’m a roleplayer when I’m not doing rendering and/or writing short stories and I like to do renders of game characters. I’d love to do as you suggest and make a figure library in the objects browser though to be honest, I don’t have the first clue how to do it. Any tips would be greatly appreciated. Do I just strip everything that isn’t the figure out of the scene and then save it as a .car? Is it as simple as that?

You would just create a scene with the settings you like and save it with a name like “default scene,” or something. I created a folder called “My Scenes” and saved a couple scenes in there. I then selected the Scene tab of the browser, clicked the little black icon on the far right and chose Add Folder. When the dialogue opened, I navigated to my folder and selected it.

This can be useful for many things that are scene specific, from render settings, to the default light, etc.

Riggswolfe - 06 December 2012 08:22 PM

The character is just some standard morphs. A bit of M4 aged mixed with a few other dial spins. The problem is I don’t remember which ones so it seemed easier just to export him. I also haven’t really figured out how to do injects and other morphs in Cararra yet. I’ve seen some morphs here and there on various clothing pieces and stuff but haven’t figured out how to do an inject on a figure yet.

Your idea sounds smart. I’m a roleplayer when I’m not doing rendering and/or writing short stories and I like to do renders of game characters. I’d love to do as you suggest and make a figure library in the objects browser though to be honest, I don’t have the first clue how to do it. Any tips would be greatly appreciated. Do I just strip everything that isn’t the figure out of the scene and then save it as a .car? Is it as simple as that?

It’s pretty simple. I made a folder called People Objects, went into Carrara and loaded the folder into the Object Browser using the method I outlined in my above post for scenes, except in this case I had selected the Objects tab.

Whenever I create a figure I wish to save, I select it’s name in my instances tab (top level of the character) and with my People Objects directory selected in the Browser, I drag and drop the character to the browser. It doesn’t matter what else is in the scene or if the figure is clothed, but the clothes are not grouped, it will only save the figure. This can take a minute because Carrara will automatically save a scene preview. Carrara will also ask you to name the file and has a space for notes as well.

If you wish to save a character with it’s clothing, all you have to do is group the character and the clothing. To do this, select the character, and the clothing, go to either the Edit Menu and select the Group command, or go to the Animation menu and select Create Animation Group. You may have to re-conform the clothing after this step. Once either type of group is created, you can change the name of the group by selecting it, and changing the name in the text box in the group’s General tab at the top of the screen. Grab the Group name in the instances Tab and drag it your directory in the Object Browser and it will save the figure and whatever else is included in the group.

Using the Animation Group Option will create the group with an NLA track. Think of something like Aniblocks. You can still animate a regular group, but you won’t have the NLA track.

I forgot to add that if I recall correctly, when saving a scene to the browser, you can’t drag and drop it as you would an object or shader. You will need to save it directly to the directory where you want it to appear. If you want the scene preview, then make sure that option is selected when you save it.

It’s also a good idea once the scene is loaded from the browser, to Save As with a different name, so as not to overwrite the original file.

HI Riggswolfe

The first thing to grasp with Carrara, is that it’s been able to “Load” content from Daz3D and POSER for several versions.
Directly from the Carrara Browser,.

The newest 8.5 “Beta” also supports the New DUF format.  which allows you to save the SCENE, as DUF, from DS 4.5,
and then load that into Carrara,

You can also save DUF ““Character pre-sets”  or Material pre-sets, or Animation pre-sets ...etc,..

What that basically means is that the Collada format isn’t needed to get your “custom figures” (characters) into Carrara

this potentially saves you hitting any issues with different formats, and Exporting / Importing models,.. since Duff is a small list of the items used,.(No “textures exported,. and No Models exported) ..So,.. when you load it into Carrara,. the data in that DUF will load the items into Carrara with all the morphs , materials, animation etc.

Lastly,..

If there’s a way to get a model into a program which doesn’t involve “Exporting / importing” the model,...
You should use that first

If you’re going to use Carrara to create your scene,...  Don’t start in DS  

Hope it helps ,,, and isn’t too harsh.

I also haven’t really figured out how to do injects and other morphs in Cararra yet. I’ve seen some morphs here and there on various clothing pieces and stuff but haven’t figured out how to do an inject on a figure yet.

You would browse to the Poses section,. find the Morphs for your Figure,. and then Double click to inject (or remove) them See pic.

Once you’ve injected the morphs into a figure, you’ll see a set of sliders where you can adjust the individual; settings,. just like you would on Poser or DS.

For the Default scene,... carrara has Three “Default” scenes,...

Small ,, Medium, and Large,. depending what you want to do.

Thanks very much to both of you. I should clarify that the scene/character in question is an old Daz 3 scene. I guess I could’ve loaded it into DS4.5 and saved it as a DUF scene but since it wasn’t Genesis I was using 8.1 because I figured it’d be more stable than the beta. Ironic that it was the beta that let me load up the scene and finally render it!