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I have Carrara 8.5 Pro and use the latest 64bit release. I can work on a project all day and even overnight without crashing. I can get it to crash by trying to load Genesis 3. I was having a problem with ArchiTools from DAZ but after getting the latest update from inagoni, 1.3, no longer have a problem using it that plug-in. What are you doing before it crashes? Have you opened a help ticket/request about the problem? Or posted the problem in the main Carrara discussion or Official Release of Carrara 8.5 **Update - 8.5.1.19**? ...folks all three places are eager to help but you can often get quicker help in the last two mentioned.
I do save my WIP files incrementaly, .01 .02 etc, mainly so I can fall back to an earler one should I make unwanted changes to one. It's always wise IMO to save before introducing or trying something new/untried... just in case.
Hi wdgjohn ,so the 64bit pro version is better -I will look into upgrading -I dont know what I am doing when it crashes-I never really ask for help with things, The renders i did manage where very quick and impressive.Thanks for your help.
I can't gaurantee it's better but 8.5 Pro version does work fine for me. I don't hesitate to pester help or ask in the forums... better than banging my head on the wall. :)
Thanks wgdjohn my head is seriously injured by now lol- I should just ask for help!
A concise (and effective) summary of what Carrara can do for a character and story driven animator.
Why Carrara beat Blender (with 10X more functionalities) for small-time animators = Intuitive interface. You can give me a NASA grade chef oven but I prefer a compact multipurpsoe toaster oven that I can bake/grill/toast edible meals everyday.
Case in point...within a few months of Carrara learning I squeezed usable water out of Carrara. Easily made nicely animating long hair from dynamic hair system. (see my video link in sig)
Blender is not free btw. Time is money. Addons = money. Research energy = money. In any case I'm not willing to spend the most precious = time.
I will recommend Carrara for anyone looking a cheap and "guided" entry to character animation. Evidently the small but passionate user base is the best and most helpful in this "prosumer" CG sphere, that alone is gold.
For small character driven scenes, I still prefer using Daz Studio for mostly subjective reasons: 3Dconnexion, unbeatable UI customization, interactive viewport render. Rigging and skinning system is just the best, lots of dev love no doubt.
To me, it's not either or. Even Maya users need more than Maya to make animations. Blender has GoZ to ZBrush too. I can port my entire Daz scene to Carrara if I ever need more advance physics and particles. I wish I could do the converse.
I'm in favor for further integration between these two very attractive Daz3D programs, in particular the ability to port baked Carrara outputs - generated terrain/clouds, particles, isosurface as a scene into Daz Studio.
It is odd that, after adding Poser Pro to my "indie" gears in 2016, I discovered that I could load Poser scenes and animations in DS directly, but not Carrara scenes. I think making a "Go Daz Studio" (GoDaz) applink in Carrara will make Carrara 10X more attractive for beginner animators!
Hello Daz3D dev, you have a good family of products don't let them go stale from lack of innovative thinking and productivity plus plus actions! Harness the sibling rivalry for good synergy and some extra cash! Enough marketing buzzwords??? lol
So, to the Carrara VERSUS Daz Studio debate, my attitude = it's not either or. A shopping mall with many shops and services beats a single department store in traffic and turnover!
To any beginner CG animators, I'd just say, Carrara or Daz Studio combined are the cheapest (and funnest) CG schooling. And the plugin developers and pro users among us, to me they're more than vendors or "snobbish critics", they are the community college professors!
Interesting stuff. And thank you so much for answering my questions! It so happens most of my collection is Genesis 2 based anyway, so the lack of G3 isn't a huge deal.
I feel like I just joined some kind of cult. A happy fun one.
It will be a few days before I can really try it out. But I was wondering. A lot of my stuff is optimized for Iray, and obviously Carrara lacks Iray. How much of an adjustment typically needs to made if I import these items from Daz?
Another question is how hardware intensive is Carrara's renderer? I understand it is only CPU. I have an i5-4690 and 16 gig of ram. I don't have Octane. I did pick up Luxrender some time back, but I couldn't get it to use my GTX 670.
outrider, From what I understand Iray will load into Carrara but 1?? channel will not be used. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong about that. I simply use Carrara's procedural textures... there are plenty to choose from. I also have a bunch of 3rd party procedural textures/Shaders. I don't speak from experience loading Iray textures since I don't even bother with them since they are so large. Carrara also supports using texture maps which is what DS uses.
I don't find Carrara's renderer to be at all intensive anything I normally ask it to do. I've no problem rendering anything. I have 8 gig mem on an AMD FX 8120 eight cores... so your machine is much faster than mine. I've never had Carrara crash during a render and most take less than a minute to finish... occasionally a very complicated one will take 2 minutes or more depending on what you have loaded in a scene to render. I've not encounter a *very* long render but some other folks have.
...The only time I had Carrara crash was importing Daz scenes in .duf format. I've seen it "sit and think" for a few moments from time to time, but other than that never had ir randomly crash on me.
My system is several years old , built on a 1st generation 2.8 GHz i7 with 12 GB DDR3 memory in Tri Channl mode. Carrara renders fairly quick compared to Iray in CPU mode even at super high quality settings.
Imported shaders will generally need some degree of tweaking, whether they come from Iray, 3Delight or Poser even (that's true for any renderer). Often it's a matter of suck it and see. Bump strength quite often needs tweaking, and Stonemason's sets often suffer from texture streaking which requires a box to be unticked in the UV editor. One factor common in Iray shaders (and to a certain extent in newer 3Delight shaders) is normal maps. The Carrara .duf reader ignores them, which means you'll need to reassign them by hand. Procedural and layered shaders might not translate.
Fenric's Shader Doctor in this pack http://www.daz3d.com/shader-power-tools-for-carrara is a one-click fix for many of the common shader issues on imported files. It'll probably be in the PA sale at some point, so worth keeping an eye out.
While Carrara supports instances and has two very powerful replicator engines, it doesn't handle DS instances -- they'll just be ignored (they show as empty nodes in the instances tree).
I've been very disenchanted with DAZ's treatment of Carrara for many years. I got version 5, and really got excited for a time. But I've never seen a written manual for any version of Carrara. Then DAZ dragged their feet when it came to handling a new Mac version. I think it was a year, or more, before they had a version of Carrara that worked properly for the Mac. Then, most likely, Apple released yet another version of OSX.
I understand DAZ or anyone else wanting to charge for major version updates. But it's hard to justify spending more money for expensive software that really wasn't supported by DAZ.
Ron, Check these out... while DAZ does not have books there are earlier ones which apply to everything in Carrara that hasn't changed or been added.
CARRARA4 - REFERENCE GUIDE from Amazon - 628 pages.
the same book at only one offer and less $$ is CARRARA 4 - Reference Guide
Carrara 5 Pro Handbook: 1st (first) Edition By Mike de la Flor
The one for Carrara 4 came with it when I bought Carrara 4 Pro from Eovia. I recently got the Carrara 5 Pro Handbook from Ebay for less $ than Amazon... it has plenty of example projects/instructions/tips.
Any version from DAZ... Carrara 6 Pro to 8.5 Pro only came with a PDF file/book found under Help menu. Note that the PDF for Carrara 8 - 8.5 Pro is still the PDF for Carrara 7 Pro. There is a Carrara 8.5 PDF, not from DAZ, but I can't find at the moment. :(
A very good video tutorial for Carrara 8.5 is Carrara 8.5 Tutorial Video - Instant Digital Download or Learning Carrara 8.5 Tutorial Videos - New Features - Instant Digital Download which costs less... there are other videos by Phil Wilkes listed under Infinite Skills at DAZ.. they are all excellent.
Unfortunately DAZ sells Content and supports DAZ Studio 1st... Carrara is being further developed but lacks DAZ's full attention.
There is also the Carrara 8 Basic Users Guide PDF which should give you 95-99% of everything found in Carrara 8.5.
...If you could find that other 8.5 PDF it would be extremely appreciated as videos are of no help for me.
I bought the Carrara 5 book. It did NOT help. It was not the same version that I owned. The PDF stuff does not work for me. Video tutorials don't help. And let's not forget the way DAZ mishandled their customers in regards to the Mac version. We went around a year with no useable version of Carrara.
True, one man's meat is another man's poison. I bought the Carrara 5 book and it helped me immensely. My copy is dog-eared and I have yellow sticky notes all over the place for quick reference. Video tutorials by Cripeman and Marcelo Teixeir (free) and by PhilW and MMoir (available here in the Daz store) helped me imensely. But that is just me.
In fairness, Daz is slowly reinventing the Carrara wheel with plugins for Studio. Plugins and program bridges have added functionality to Daz Studio. These are not free, but they do add improved hair, terrains, surface replicators,etc. If you have these and get the results that you want, Studio can be closer to the all around app that Carrara is. Plus, with Studio you get geografts, genesis 3 functionality, and a built in improved render engine (Iray, note that there are paid plugins for carrara that do same function as Iray). Maybe someone knows of animation and physics plugins for Studio that approach Carrara's but I have not looked. Plugins are making improved draped cloth (VWD) available for both Carrara and Studio. But as others have said above, it is not necessarily either or. I use Studio and Carrara together, picking and choosing the functionality that I want. Others do also.
Examples of DAZ Studio Plugins and bridges for which Carrara has similar functionality already built in. These prices reflect current sales as they are for my account. Your prices may vary.
Look at my hair LAMH - 49.95 http://www.daz3d.com/look-at-my-hair
Terradome 3 - 25.18 http://www.daz3d.com/terradome-3-iray
Hexagon - 13.97 http://www.daz3d.com/terradome-3-iray
UltraScatter - 29.95 http://www.daz3d.com/ultrascatter-advanced-instancing-for-daz-studio
Bryce Pro - 19.95 http://www.daz3d.com/bryce-7-pro
That comes close to $140.
In comparison, one could use Carrara Pro for all of those functions, and more
Carrara 8.5 Pro - 45.50 http://www.daz3d.com/carrara-8-5-pro
I don't want to detract from this thread. I've stated my opinions & experience. I've decided to never buy any software apps (programs) from DAZ again. DAZ has made "pay" software free, after I bought it, or ruined it by lack of support. I buy the content, but avoid DIM & Connect.
Now it's time for me to make a graceful exit. I wish everyone the best.
You are definitely adding to the thread, not detracting from it, IMHO. It is important for people to read about a variety of user experiences, positive and negative.
It was probably the one that DustRider pointed out Carrara 8 Basic Users Guide but I will take a look and see if I have the 8.5 one I mentioned... just spent the past hour looking for the website where I'd gotten it... no luck yet.
Regarding videos... I have quite a few free ones from YouTube bookmarked which I've watched and sometimes refer to when I get stuck/forgotten a particular step. I just open the video fullscreen, find the missed step, pause it... and return to do it in Carrara. I do the same for Phil Wilkes' and mmoir's videos. For PDFs or printed Books I just keep them open.
..that one is actually the Carrara 7 one rebranded.
I find I waste much more time having to replay videos to get what I need from them. Makes for extreme slow going which in turn makes me feel I'm not making much headway. If I don't feel I'm making headway, then I feel like I'm learing nothing for all the time I spent and that would be just as well off with taking the "seat of the pants" approach.
Calibrating against Lightwave - and Poser Pro on discount, $285 Carrara is still too cheap.
I bought the same package on a steal at $80, felt so smug, so I threw in another $100-ish GoZ and Mimic Pro since it was too good value!
Now a more stable version is at $45.50? Huh?!!! What!!? May as well be free!!
Wait....
Hmmmmmmm this EXTREME discount is a good sign for the coldbenched Carrara given how things work here. Sell the playground for nothing, come come citizens!
In gamer speak Carrara is being pushed as a delicious Daz Studio expansion pack! For the bigger sexier benefit of selling in game addons!
Perhaps this is the evidence that Daz3D is finally keeping track of Carrara's equally big appetite shoppers! After updating their guestimate store traffic to smarter analytics, they went, hmmm suprprise yum yum okay more people should start using Carrara, a supportive sibling to Daz Studio, not a threat. lol
Yes I know I know I make myths
Thanks for pointing that out... I use the Carrara 7 manual for quick reference probably 1+ times a week, presently.
Yes!! Videos do slow down the workflow a bit... I understand not wanting to stop what you are doing and watching one. I normally watch an unseen one(s) in spare time. After that I normally know where to skip to to find what I want in one.