Digital Art Zone

          I know that DAZ is working on a 8.5. And we all know its been a struggle to get Genesis to play nice. but eventually Genesis will get into C 8.5 and with a bunch of bug fixes and a few tweaks here and there we will have a upgrade to pay for and for some undetermined amount (At least as of now undetermined) .

          For me , I never found 8.12 that buggy on windows at least and have not been waiting or wanting to get Genesis models into Cararra. In fact I wish the whole Genesis thing was a plugin development as I would pass on it completely. But this is just me.

          So assuming DAZ does complete the eternally developed 8.5 . And still wants to develop Carrara. What kind of things are folks wishing for.

          But——- please remember lets keep this in the reality of DAZ development possibilities. Its obviously a small development team with limited resources of both time given to develop and maybe in some ares of the application technical knowledge.

          That said——we can at least put out some ideas even if most of the time it seems they go by the wayside for various reasons. Its a wish list——so wish on….......

          Some of mine:

Work on the vertex modeler (I know lots want to integrate hex into it but I think technical issues are stopping that -however some of the tools from Hexagon would be nice adds)

Improve the realistic skies.

A tweaking of the rigging tools would be helpful. And a few posing improvements would be nice.

Any work on the renderer would be totally so worth paying for an upgrade .

So that’s my shortlist ..........what yours?

Rich

mine are just tweaks

in assembly room

1) improved search tool in the tree thingy on the right hand side - so eg a wildcard character, or find next instance of eg ‘foot’

2)  a shortcut key which jumps to the next instance/bone/vertex model in the tree

3) an inverse selection key - so I could select only one thing and hide everything else when I render - great for fixing up where you screwed up one thing in a billion hour render

all the above are becoming more important as Carrara and computers get more powerful and we can cram our scenes with many more objects

in the shader room:

an option to change one parameter in all shaders in a global shader
example: so when I bring in a massive poser model where all shaders are set to 25percent shine, I can change them all to zero.

vertex room

a KNIFE tool for us box modellers especially (gee you think a knife tool would be simple to stick in…)

There must be some way of improving posing figures as well.
Do we have a keep feet on floor parameter?

PS Yes, and I don’t care about Genesis support

Trying not to think too much about things that will only benefit me

I think it’s pretty clear that DAZ artists have a fairly common “look” at which they arrive.

My suggestion to DAZ would be to begin new feature planning by dissecting the current look, figuring out what makes it look outdated, and finding a new look that DAZ artists would LOVE to create, and adding new features that help achieve that.

I personally have zero interest in posing an ideally-proportioned figure to make him/her look cool, or doing anything in the Fantasy genre, but I do have a lot of interest in making compelling imagery. That’s where I see my path potentially crossing DAZ’s path.

So, DAZ: Add features that make the old DAZ artwork look REALLY old and I think everyone wins.

I am still learning Carrara ^^ though, skimming through all sorts of tutorials I never found certain things….
So please bear with me if Carrara already has something of my list… I might not have found it yet.

GPU Rendering
I would love to choose if I want to torture my CPU or my Graphicscard when I render a scene

Dynamic Cloth/Water:
I know this feature from Blender (probably used wrong name). There you can turn objects into cloth or water… and make them react physcially correct when they hit another object or container.
The particle effects are nice, but they still never really look the real thing on static images. And Soft Body still looks a bit stiff when you try to turn a plane into a drape :D

Growth Map (Painter):
Somehow I find it a bit annoying to create a Black/White growth map in Photohop, where I only have the flat texture map of the landscape.

I would love being able to paint/mark the areas on the 3D modell where I want to grow plants or place the surface replicator.
You can do such a thing already in the hair-room… why not for landscapes as well?

More realistic Skies & Light Effects:
Just can name Vue again…  those skies and light effects take my breath away…

Trying to achieve the same effects (like real outdoor sun light, with soft progessive shadows)... eats up so much more render time in Carrara as it does in Vue. (I have that free “learning” version of Vue)

Before someone tells me to move over to Vue. I don’t like the GUI… and also Vue is rather inflexible when it comes to content of other programs. It can’t export, unless you spend huge piles of money on all the modules or the unlimited version…

That’s why I love Carrara so much. It’s versatile, it allows me to use Poser and DS3 Content, it has a great slender GUI… . (I don’t like the GUI of DS, Poser, Bryce and Vue ).

Better light preview:
Right now, I never can tell from the preview, if the light is bright enough or too bright… or the shadows too stark…

Embedded Mesh Baker (or whatever that is called):
Baking “displaced” meshes into static meshes…

Turn many Objects into one Object:
Sometimes, an imported object consist of many smaller pieces - even if the whole object looks just like one.
At the moment, I have to copy/paste each single piece and drag it over to the assembly room… time-devourer.
Would be great if I could mark all pieces and drag them all into one assembly room and weld them together in there.

Global Shader Control:
Importing Characters/Objects with their own texture maps can result in ugly flat looking, overly shiny surfaces. You usually always have to adjust bump, highlight and and and…

For me it’s a huge pain, if you have an object that consists of many many shaders and you have to adjust in the rinse & repeat style every single shader, even if it is always the same thing and value you change.

It would be great to have some sort of “global” shader control where I can select via check-box all the shaders I want to adjust at the same time…

That are my 2 cents

Rhiana - 30 August 2012 12:17 AM

I am still learning Carrara ^^ though, skimming through all sorts of tutorials I never found certain things….
So please bear with me if Carrara already has something of my list… I might not have found it yet.

snip

Growth Map (Painter):
Somehow I find it a bit annoying to create a Black/White growth map in Photohop, where I only have the flat texture map of the landscape.

I would love being able to paint/mark the areas on the 3D modell where I want to grow plants or place the surface replicator.
You can do such a thing already in the hair-room… why not for landscapes as well?

snip

Turn many Objects into one Object:
Sometimes, an imported object consist of many smaller pieces - even if the whole object looks just like one.
At the moment, I have to copy/paste each single piece and drag it over to the assembly room… time-devourer.
Would be great if I could mark all pieces and drag them all into one assembly room and weld them together in there.

That are my 2 cents

 

Hi Rhiana you can do that first thing in 3d paint, export the texture and then load it up as the shader in the replicator dialogue/window - to tell Carrara whereto distribute your replications.

For objects you can import objects and make them one by choosing the parameters on the import window

eg from memory it says you can import as one mesh, “necessary for morph targets”

sorry to not have fancy pictures like 3dage to explain more

fluid

There are so many good features in Carrara 8 that can be improved, so, why not finalize, improve, upgrade, eliminate bugs from them?

After that, every new feature is welcome: physics, real liquid flow…

Genesis, for me, is the last “feature” I wish to have, there’s so much one can do with Carrara itself without the need of a new character (new tecnology or not).

head wax - 30 August 2012 12:41 AM

Hi Rhiana you can do that first thing in 3d paint, export the texture and then load it up as the shader in the replicator dialogue/window - to tell Carrara whereto distribute your replications.

For objects you can import objects and make them one by choosing the parameters on the import window

eg from memory it says you can import as one mesh, “necessary for morph targets”

sorry to not have fancy pictures like 3dage to explain more

Thank you Head Wax and no pictures needed for this

As for importing Objects - I don’t have this “import as one mesh” option sometimes.

For example. I exported Rustic Rocks from Bryce into 3DS and also Obj Format and importet these to Carrara.
No chance to import them as one mesh, this option is simply missing ... or I am dead blind O_o
If it is really missing for some reason, the “drag all into vertex room & weld ” would be great

My favourite peeves would be pretty simple to fix

Change the dotted line rigging to solid and make selections stick - implement tri-ax weighting

Real-time animation previews

Implement Puppeteer as it is in Studio

Improve selection in the VM - hide faces to only hide selected and not plus another row

Put an orthographic camera in the VM

Make deformations interactive, not “take a guess - oops, no, undo, try again”

Carrara terrains can produce really stunning results, but the default textures and bump settings are really bad - overhaul them.  This could be farmed out to artists to do for Daz

Implement a decent height-map editor, a la Bryce and allow it to read16-bit

Plus of course, what everyone wants - cloth, rigid bodies, fluid and much improved fire, cloud, atmosphere, particles - come on, this isn’t rocket science - everyone else has it.

Ahh - wishful thinking….

I have but one wish, for DAZ to freaking get it right for once.

I will again ask for NLA clips groups to be STRETCH-and-SLIDE-able, so we can build better walkcycles and etc composed of multiple NLAs.

Sparrowhawke’s JIGGLE built in so it won’t expire (but fix it so it is gravity aware)

Cloth and Fluids (it’ll never happen)

Unity export

video RAM Preview in the storyboard room so OpenGL frames can be viewed/saved as a video (instead of laid out side-by-side)

Dynamic hair fix

VM extrusion improvements (facet, as well as vertice)

Terragen2-like clouds

Development that is not held hostage to D|S or Genesis (I mean yay for compatibility, but COME ON this isn’t working for anybody!)

16bit terrains import/export

HDR renderer, 16bit renderer

Intelligent Animation Grid that shows ONLY the morphs/bones in a specified group or ONLY the tracks with keyframes. Actually overhaul the grid, or help us out with an ANIMATION ROOM where the Grid, Puppeteer, Mimic, and NLAs can be worked on with a lighter faster preview… without the burden of the full Assembly Room

Sparrowhawke’s JIGGLE built in so it won’t expire (but fix it so it is gravity aware)

Is it?  Where’s it hiding?

Terragen 2 everything - especially curved horizon in large scene!

normal map creation

1) Effects would not cancel each other out effects and other attributes such as blurs and transparencies.

3dView - 29 August 2012 05:43 PM

Improve the realistic skies.

Yes, yes, a thousand times, yes.

After “stop it crashing so much on Mac”, this would be the one improvement I really want to see.

holly wetcircuit - 30 August 2012 08:05 AM

16bit terrains import/export

16bit image maps for terrains? Use .raw

I use L3DT for terrain creation and it exports 16bit .raw, which carrara will import into the terrain editor correctly.

wendy♥catz - 30 August 2012 12:50 PM

normal map creation

Inagoni “Baker” works well, and is now half price. http://www.inagoni.com/e107_plugins/content/content.php?content.3

[whats with all these redirect HTTPs (connection attempts) to cloudfront.net while logged into the forums?]