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Carrara - What is New

Carrara 7 Pro augments already impressive animation, landscape, modeling, and rendering capabilities with a strong set of new features. The significant enhancements to Carrara 7 help deliver a professional 3D solution at a price that fits into almost any budget. Carrara 7 will stimulate professional users toward greater creativity and help them to stay competitive, while providing incredible ease-of-use and unbelievable results.
Experience Robust Functionality
Carrara 7 - New Features

ANIMATION

NLA Grouping
Adds flexibility in creating animations, saves screen space, and adds value to the NLA toolset.

For those of you who use Carrara for creating animations, this new merge track tool will provide an improved interface to create groups of tracks then collapse or expand the tracks in those groups. This new tool helps you optimize the screen space so you can focus on your animation.


CONTENT SUPPORT

DAZ Studio Content Support Improvements
Better capabilities in bringing DAZ 3D products into Carrara.

We have enhanced the handling of DAZ scene files being loaded into Carrara 7. This will require an updated version of DAZ Studio (build 2.3.3.146) in order to see the full effect of the updates.
Carrara 7
Figure Content LOD Support
Carrara 7 also includes support for Content Figures that have multiple Levels of Detail (LOD).

You can use lower LOD figures in your viewport to enhance performance and then render with a higher LOD figure for the best quality. If you have multiple figures in the scene you can enhance performance by reducing the mesh resolution on those figures that are further away from the camera and don’t require as much detail. Carrara 7 provides advanced auto-switching capabilities that will automatically switch between higher and lower LOD figures based on distance from the camera. As the figure or the camera is moved within the scene, the system determines which figure to use based on user determined preference settings.



TEXTURES TEXTURE SUPPORT

3D Paint
Adds capabilities for painting directly on the model.

3D Paint

Carrara 7 includes a new 3D Paint Tool that enables textures to be selected, edited and "painted" directly onto an object. The 3D paint tool provides a variety of painting modes including brushing with a variety of brushes, airbrushing, stamping, and support for lines, an eyedropper, and an eraser. Custom brush settings can be saved and later reused.

3D Paint also supports layers, image stamping, and tablet support. We've also added Real-time display of bump maps and specularity.


UV Editing/Unfolding
Create better 3D painting and textures with better UV’s.

UV Mapping

Carrara 7 includes a new UV Editor that shows a 3D view of the polygon mesh, a 2D display of the UV values on the polygon mesh vertices, and a set of tools to manipulate them.

You can choose from four different projection methods to use for custom mapping. The UV editor "Unfold" function allows you to define seams and pinpoints where the UV template will be unfolded and later stitched. The relax seam tool helps you selectively reduce the dense areas of the UV for a more uniform map and gives you a much more accurate display of textures.



VERTEX MODELING

Vertex Modeling


Vertex Modeling in Assembly Room
A huge time saver - user experience is much improved.

The Vertex Modeling capabilities that were previously only available in the "Modeling" room are now available in the "Assembly" room. This enhancement saves time by allowing you to perform modeling functions in the assembly room where other objects can also be seen.



RENDERING

Multi-pass Rendering
Image retouching/editing, without having to re-render. Another huge time saver!

The Multi-pass Rendering tool new in Carrara 7 enables you to render multiple passes and save these off to separate image files. These render passes or layers (multi-pass render layers) can be edited in another application such as Photoshop to increase contrast in the rendered image, change a reflection color, make an edit to a shadow map, or even swap out a background color.

This tool will make it faster to make changes to a rendering, instead of re-rendering for hours and hours. The edits to layers can be changed in minutes.

Multipass Render

Carrara 7

"Multi-pass rendering is a GREAT feature. It lets you tweak specific parts of an image (like lighting, SSS, reflections, or atmospherics) without having to re-render it. This feature, more than anything else, will be the reason I buy Carrara 7."
—Tim Payne, Carrara User


IMPORT/EXPORT

COLLADA Export (WIN OS)
You can now export a figure or scene into COLLADA format.

COLLADA is becoming a new standard for transferring content. In this new release of Carrara, you will be able to export your models in this new format.



GENERAL

Rendering Optimizations for Transparency
Improvements in memory management of the computer/software.

Carrara 7 now provides better and faster results by optimizing previously time consuming and complex transparency rendering operations.

New Open GL Support larger texture sizes in the OGL display
Visual improvements in how textures are viewed in the OpenGL display.

Carrara 7 provides you the ability to increase the texture size that is displayed in the Open Graphics Library (OGL) or viewport. The settings will be based on what texture size your graphics board will support and can be adjusted for performance or quality (up to 4096x4096).


"The already efficient workflow of Carrara has been significantly improved with the addition of modeling in the assembly room and 3D Paint. The greatly improved UV Mapper also enhances workflow, enabling the user to work solely in Carrara and no longer have to use third party applications."
—uvavoo, Carrara User


Special thanks to Patrick Tuten, Mgatch and Akulla for contributing the artwork seen on this page.