Digital Art Zone

Simple question. Is the rigging and weight painting better (more advanced) in Daz Studio 4.x or Carrara 8.

Complicated answer. It depends…

And keep in mind I don’t even have the slightest veneer of knowledge on this, so take it with a grain of salt….

IF you want to rig an object and save it in the standard .cr2 format, I don’t think you can even do that in Carrara, but you can in D|S (or Poser). Carrara has its own format for rigged stuff that doesn’t work anywhere else. Though with this new file format thing they’re working on that might change, making it able to send at least do D|S, but still not to other apps that take .cr2’s.

Now as I recall there are some really cool features in D|S (used to be plugins, not sure if they’re now in the pro version) that makes rigging quick and easy. Kind of like an autorigging. Nothing like that in Carrara as far as I don’t know.

Regarding features in general, I think D|S is ahead of Carrara in many areas.

As far as weight painting, I have no clue.

Thanks.
File format is not an issue. As I can import the rigged figure from DS to Carrara no problem. I can then animate it and export to FBX for game use. Or even animate it in DS (however I don’t think much of DS animation tools) and export to FBX from there.
I suppose I will have to experiment unless someone comes up with a definitive answer

Richard Szydelko - 24 July 2012 05:35 AM

Simple question. Is the rigging and weight painting better (more advanced) in Daz Studio 4.x or Carrara 8.

lol be carefull what you ask for it may turn into WWII.

you can certainly export Carrara rigging as an FBX into other apps or even as .dae to Blender
I do it all the time to iClone
just does not work in Daz studio or Poser.
dunno if it is better or not but certainly easier!
well put it this way, I can do it

Richard Szydelko - 24 July 2012 06:34 AM

I suppose I will have to experiment unless someone comes up with a definitive answer

Yeah, that’s probably the best, since you aren’t going to get a definitive answer until you ask a definitive question. “Better” and “more advanced” are pretty meaningless, unless you define what you really want. Like I said, there are autorigging tools, if that’s what you call “better” and “more advanced”. The meaning of “really good weight painting tools” also varies depending upon what you need to do with them. If you have high poly characters and are very concerned with fine detail mesh bending, etc., then that’s different than if you’re using low poly game characters and don’t really care about that fine detail stuff.

Now, if you don’t know enough about rigging and weight painting to know what to ask about those specifics, just tell us what exactly you’re doing and maybe we can help you out. 

BTW, thanks Wendy for the info on Carrara rigging in other apps. I had no idea you could transport it like that. I always kept hearing it’s Carrara only, but never really tried it.

And you do like that iClone, don’t you? 

iClone renders very quickly
Great for animation, just does not support vertex morph animation, only boned and transforms
not fancy lighting wise etc but for speed and ease of use, great
you need 3Dxchange pro too for import
I keep telling Carraraites about it but it gets lost in the forum
if they get facial animation for Daz characters as promised, I will be using it a lot more.

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewthread/4563/
one Carrara rigging iClone convert!