Digital Art Zone

Well, since Stanley isn’t here I think we should all do our part to fill in and assume some of his duties. Which means complaints.

Well, not really, maybe some discussion of “I wish Carrara had…” or “I wish Carrara wasn’t so screwed up in this area…”. Y’know, stuff like that…

Okay, I’ll start…

If you’re gonna use any 3D app real seriously, you need to be able to sort thru and hide all the stuff you’re not using. Otherwise it makes your work (wait, make that “workflow”, cuz I know everyone here likes to use that term) very tedious and frustrating.

For example, when your character has a list of 3,586 morphs, and you’re only interested in 4 of them, there’s really no need to have to scroll thru all 3,586 of them just to find the one you’re using (ie, the one that’s set to something other than 0.0). Carrara now has a “filter” function that allows you to filter out some morphs, but that only gets you down to 1,263 morphs to scroll thru. You should be able to filter out/hide the morphs set at 0.0. Simple fix, infinite benefit, so the bang for the buck is astronomical. 

Another example: keyframes. There’s a filter in the Sequencer that sounds like it should filter out/hide all tracks that have no keyframes, but it doesn’t seem to do anything. Or anything useful. In any case, you should be able to show only those channels you’re actively working on, and get rid of/hide all the rest. Otherwise it’s just way too frustrating to even consider any serious animation work. If I’m only working on the Y rotation for the leg bones, why should I have to scroll thru 325,678 channels for all the bones and settings in the character? I shouldn’t. It’s just crazy.

Now, different subject. Forever it seems, I rarely/occasionally get a error when saving a scene, that says something useless like “Error on executing Save As”. Typical lazy programmer error message that tells the user absolutely nothing. AT LEAST give me some clues about where it scarfed. Maybe something like, “Error on executing Save As. It had something to do with textures, but that’s all I’m saying”. 

Okay, who’s next?

JoeMamma2000 - 26 August 2012 12:01 AM

I rarely/occasionally get a error when saving a scene, that says something useless like “Error on executing Save As”. Typical lazy programmer error message that tells the user absolutely nothing. AT LEAST give me some clues about where it scarfed. Maybe something like, “Error on executing Save As. It had something to do with textures, but that’s all I’m saying”.

Yeah, I have serious issues with that too. It rarely happens to me but damn do I get steamed when I see a useless error message. It is, as you describe, lazy programming.

Of course, my background in SQL Server has me spoiled. If a worker thread in SQL crashes, you usually get a helluva lot of information about exactly why it happened (admittedly, you may need Microsoft Support for some of it…but the data is there at least).

You raise a good point about about filtering morphs too.

I guess we can start hoping that Carrara 9 will have these improvements (due out some time just before I retire).

the single most annoying thing for me is not being able to see a 360 background image
even a pixellated version would help, having to spot render to line stuff up constantly gets old very quickly.
ok you can stick a huge sphere in with the image on in the glow channel instead but that does not work with shadowcatch.

otherwise, I’m cool

wendy♥catz - 27 August 2012 08:37 AM

the single most annoying thing for me is not being able to see a 360 background image
even a pixellated version would help, having to spot render to line stuff up constantly gets old very quickly.
ok you can stick a huge sphere in with the image on in the glow channel instead but that does not work with shadowcatch.

otherwise, I’m cool

Yeah, I’ll second that one.  I usually just do a quick render, but that seems like a poor workaround.

JOE MANN Is MANNLY giving you some payola to keep up the BEACHING for him in his absentee

Okay guys, looks like Stanley is back, so as they say in the military:  “at ease” everyone. Thanks everyone for standing in for our buddy, and thank you for your service.