Digital Art Zone

Hi all

I’m running Carrara 8.1.151 64-bit on an iMac using Lion.

All was fine until a few days ago when I found I could not load texture maps in the shader editor.

Pre-set shaders with texture maps are fine.

If I attempt to replace a texture map in a pre-set shader, or load a texture map into, say, the colour channel of a basic shader, I get the dreaded “An error has occurred. Cancel/OK” message (surely the least helpful error message ever - neither button does anything), and have to force quit and reopen Carrara to continue.

This is all a bit puzzling and annoying, as I have used texture maps with no problems until recently. I’ve tried deleting and reinstalling Carrara and Basic Content, but it didn’t help.

Any suggestions? Thanks for any help.

Here peter! I run the mac as well. 

1) First off! WE have to make SURE your MAPS are in a format CARRARA LIKES! I always have my MAPS saved as a PNG or at least a JPG or tiff. but have found Carrara loves PNGs.. ALSO even if you are SURE you have your maps in theses format go back and check, in photoshop is best, to see if they are LAYERED. IF THEY HAVE ANY LAYERS FLATTEN THEM and re-save them! I have made this mistake a million times with the same results you get..

2) For whatever reason MAC love to make to keep municipal copies in your TEMP FOLDER. When carrara is shut down there should be NOTHING in that folder. TRASH everything in that folder!

Heres the typical route (USERS DISK)/Documents/DAZ3D/CARRARA 8/ DAZ TEMPS

I hope this helps.

ALso if you have a TEXTURE map loaded and have updated that map outside carrara even when you hit the second button or the reload map button its hit or miss if it will updated that map! I usually have to restart carrara for carrara to update the maps.

Look at the bright side at least you didid spend 6 grand on MAYA! so you can use the money you saved for meds that keep you from going completely insane working in carrara!

Thanks Richard (of the Carrara Rapid Response Unit).

Well, this gets stranger. Regarding your first point, I had wondered whether Carrara was choking on some aspect of the texture map I tried to feed it, so as a check, I copied one of the pre-set texture maps from the contents of the Carrara.app. This didn’t load either - same useless error message (henceforth UEM).

I tried trashing all the tmp files (don’t they build up), restarted Carrara, and had another go with the test pre-set jpg. And amazingly it worked.

Once. After which, it was back to the UEM. And I also find that if I load a preset texture with a texture map in, if I press the reload button, I get the UEM.

Anyway, thanks for your comments, which gave me a laugh - if you have any further ideas, please let me know.

But for now, it’s medication time.

ah, that is what we need! a Carrara Rapid Answer Plugin!
that way whenever an error has occured we can quickly find out crap!

AS far as TEMP FILES they are suppose to NOT build up but they do. AS far as I know if you shut down Carrara there should be NOTHING in the temp file.

ASk you this.. WHAT IS the OBJECT you want to lay a texture map on ? What is it? have you UV MAPPED it in the Vertex room?

Did you make the object? Maybe there is a POLY issue?

If its a premade is it made up of tris or quads?

If you haven’t done this, make sure that the file has the file extension, that it’s the correct file extension and that it’s lower case. We Mac users sometimes get complacent with this and fail to realize we live in a Windows world.

My most common error usually happens when I’m tired. I’ll go into photoshop and edit an existing image map say, myoriginalfile.jpg and create a new layer or something and Save As so that I don’t overwrite the original. To save time typing I’ll click on the original file’s name in the Save As dialogue (originalfile.jpg) and add my version number to it (myoriginalfile02.jpg) without actually selecting the .jpg file format from the Save As dialogue’s pulldown menu. So, basically what I’ve done is created a layered Photoshop document that through my own fault has a bad file extension. Even though it’s a Photoshop document with .jpg on the end, Carrara only sees the .jpg and hangs up on me trying to open it.

Thanks to everyone for your comments.

In the end I installed the new 8.5 beta, and lo and behold all the problems with loading maps seem to have vanished.

Not sure why they appeared in 8.1 - my only theory is that it was an incompatibility with Lion (an occasionally fussy beast in my experience).

Bye for now…