Somebody sell me on Carrara - Sold
DaWaterRat
Posts: 2,885
Due to an interesting confluence of events, Carrara 8.5 Pro is something I can purchase today and am very tempted to do so.
The question is... should I?
That is, will the advantages of Carrara (and I'm not fully clear on what advantages are actually going to be advantages for me, since I don't care about photoreal) outweigh needing to learn a new shader/light system in addition to a whole new program.
So try to sell me on it. If I come back with a "but no" it's not because I don't agree that what you're saying is a feature of Carrara, but because I don't see how it helps what I want to do. For reference, some 75% of my renders are just character reference sketches to help me visualize a character and maybe get a sense of their personality.
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2026 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Someday I plan on picking it up, if only just to export carrara specific items as obj to import into DS ;) Which I've already done with Country Lane by picking up the demo for Carrara.
I won't try to sell you on Carrara, but I have been an avid Carrara person for several years. Before I list some positives, let me refer to a few negatives. Everything Carrara does, some other program does better. Landscapes? Bryce and Vue are better. Vertex modeling? Hexagon is better. Sculpting modeling? ZBrush is better. Painting directly on models? 3DCoat is better. Photorealistic rendering of human skin at default settings? Daz Studio is better. UVMapping? Ultimate unwrap is better. Likelihood of being updated for evolving operating systems? Stuff not owned by Daz is better.
Carrara is an all-in-one suite. If I have a vision in my head of stylized toon stick-figures dancing around a maypole in an otherwise realistic garden, except underneath an alien purple sky with wispy orange clouds, Carrara can do it all. I can model and uvmap the stick figures in Carrara. I can paint directly on the stick figure models. I can rig them for posing and animation in Carrara. I can give them long flowing dynamc hair that reacts to wind and gravity. I can model the terrain in Carrara, with hills and valleys where I want. I can create custom trees and plants. I can replicate the trees and plants on the terrain, and control where there is an empty clearing for the maypole. I can model the maypole. I can create and save an animation of the dancing stick figures in Carrara. I can edit the purple sky, and insert and edit volumetric clouds, and have global illumination with the clouds casting shadows.
I can do all of this from scratch, by myself, without purchase of any other software or assets.
Even though Carrara is an all-in-one suite, you can use it how you like.
Carrara can load and pose/animate Poser figures through Poser 8, and Daz figures through Genesis 2. In addition, there is a plugin by Fenric for later Poser figures and a character set by Misty for Daz Genesis 3 and 8. So, you can load a daz figure, conform clothing, and model the set specific to that scene. It also makes it very easy to use Carrara as a base for making content for Genesis to be used in Studio because you can load and pose the figures as a reference guide and for joint-control morphs. Not that big of deal as you can export as an obj for use in any program, but is a concrete example.
Daz Studio currently is perfectly meeting my needs. But I'm also open to adding new tools - provided that they actually give me some advantage over what I currently have access to (DS, Hex 2.5, Blacksmith 6, GIMP, Bryce 7). Carrara is big enough that even at super cheap, I want to be sure that I want to learn a new program for more than just a couple of minor things.
Character reference sketches are just that - I assemble a character from assets I already have (morphs, skins, clothes, hair) mess around with poses until one says "this suits the character" and then render either a head shot, waist shot, or full body (sometimes all three) against a simple background.
Buying into Carrara is kind of like buying a new Blackberry or Windows phone... If you don't already have all the content that comes with it it might be a good deal, but it's been years since DAZ has shown any interest in it.
I do use Carrara for its physics engine. That it does well. It does offer some terrain tools similar to Bryce. Its an all in one suite, and one sale you're getting quite a bit of functionality for the reduced price. I will say, I like carrara for the how it renders Howie Farkes dedicated wilderness scenes. Those are probably the real shiny examples of Carrara in action. Character figures can be imported yes, and they offer some shaders to iprove skin results, but the results are not better than DS. It also as a great text tool, for logos and such. Now there's a whole bunch of older content that comes with a carrara purchase. Generations old. That mght be worth the money and get put to good use depending on what you expect to do. But there's a reason very little new carrara content gets made anymore.
depends what you want to render
if photorealistic human figures in various still poses stick to DAZ studio
if animations more your thing and not so photorealistic Carrara is excellent
I don't use it very much but love having it :-) Came with lots of goodies and yes, over the years it has been very handy in exporting out .obj files to use in D/S.
There is only one thing that can beat Carrara, and that of course is Bryce.
Seriously Carrara and Bryce are both very powerful at what they do, and yes they do do things intrinsically that DS or Poser can't.
Try it and see.
I think you might get a better and more comprehensive answer to this in the actual Carrara forum.
You asked what features Carrara had that you might be interested in given what you currently do and most of what you are getting is comparisons to other software from people who have already decided that they personally don't like Carrara (except Diomede, who I know has been a regular Carrara user for a long time). If you just want to know what Carrara can do so that you can decide if it interests you, you shold probably ask the people who do use it. :)
I'll agree with the others above that other programs do all the things Carrara does, often (but not always) better than Carrara does, and that DAZ shows no signs of ever continuing to develop it, but that's not necessarily the end of the story. For example, while VUE is better at natural looking terrains and ecosystems than Carrara, at the entry level ($199) it is not actually all that much better and is harder to learn and use. To get really amazing results, unlike anything Carrara can do, you need to spend a lot more.
Since photorealism is not your goal, Carrara is at least as good a renderer as any other program out there despite its age and it comes with a couple of toon options, plus there are a number of other renderers (including a couple comparable to Iray) available for it.
For me the primary advantage of Carrara is being able to do everything in my scene without having to jump into other programs. I do most of my modeling in Blender and most of my texturing in Substance Painter, but I like being able to:
and do all that without having to leave the program that I posed and clothed my character in.
I can render with true distance fog/volumetrics for larger scenes, have incredible control over my lights and can render out more than a dozen useful passes (color, shadows, ambient occlusion, normal, depth, etc.), plus an toon outline to combine in my final image. Some of that you can do in Iray too (I only recently learned about canvasses and they are a seriously amazing feature, though Carrara's passes are easier to set up, if simpler).
Personally, I don't do much IN Carrara, but I find it to be a decent application for modeling or manipulating figures to use in morphs or freestanding new figures. Part of that is that I enjoy the UI and it 'makes sense' to me to a degree most other apps don't.
For that ALONE it's worth sale price, IMO
That said, 'a good UI' is an incredibly personal reaction, so...
Plus, the Genesis M5 and V5 Pro Bundles come with it, so if you don't already have the Genesis figures and add-ons and anatomical elements, right now it's more than worth the price even if you never actually use Carrara.
I did pull the trigger and buy it, but ... I have all the M5 and V5 stuff. (I'd hazard I have almost everything that came with a character bundle for Genesis 1... when it was new, I was an ardent supporter of Genesis. Now I don't need to be.)
Oh, if you do stuff with modeling, two key things: Symmetry (select part of mesh and turn it on), and soft selection (gives a weighted zone of effect).
I don't really do character sketches, so I can't specifically speak to that, but there are lots of things that are easy to do in Carrara that you'd have to buy a set to do in DS. Smoke and fog for instance. Volumetric effects and true volumetric clouds can easily turn your scene moody and atmospheric. God rays are built in to every spotlight.
Plus there's a spherical camera, so you can easily render skydomes and backdrops to use in other projects.
Physics can make flags wave, trees bend, leaves rustle & blow about in the wind. Combine metaballs with physics and an emitter, and you have instant streams or waterfalls or fountains, and all animatable.
Replicators can scatter rocks or plants etc across a landscape, and coupled with terrain generators you can make detailed landscapes in a matter of minutes (it takes a bit longer to make a Howie Farkes scene, especially if you're building all the props & plants from scratch, but it's all perfectly doable.)
There's a range of background and sky effects built in, and the Realistic Sky has sun, moon and clouds that automatically appear in renders (and just like Iray, you can set specific dates, times & locations for your sky), plus you don't need a mega-GPU to render it. Carrara will use all the CPU cores you can throw at it, including up to 20 networked PCs/Macs.
Most of my sets for DS were built in Carrara. I include the Carrara versions too, cos it costs me almost nothing in terms of time to "finish" them. At the worst case you can consider them as "source code" for easy kitbashing & modification, but they're also fully usable and ready to render in Carrara too.
Oh and one more thing. Terrains don't necessarily need to be terrains. You can plug displacement & height maps into them and make all sorts of things. This image (shamelessly nicked from the Carrara forum) is basically a terrain with a couple of props added.
(click the image to see the original thread)
I'm not sure if you're yet getting the types of answers that you need. Here is how I'd sell you on Carrara.
1. Carrara's native render engine is not as widely known as renderman compliant 3DL, but it is in my opinion more capable out of the box than 3DL. When compared to Iray however, Carrara's native biased engine will have certain limitations
2. Carrara has robust lighting tools, capable of plausible SSS as well as indirect light transport. Magaremoto demonstrates that it can achieve render looks that rival Iray and Octane.
3. Carrara has good atmospheric effects though Bryce does have better volumetric clouds and terrains, Carrara still looks good enough in those regards. Excellent sun/sky system that allows for fundamental inputs like latitude, and time of year.
4. Carrara's native renderer is quite fast for a fully CPU engine, which is why Carrara actually can be taken seriously as an animator. So if you are a person who still works with mostly CPU processing in DS, then Carrara is ideal for you. Carrara can use all threads as far as I know, even if you have 24 of them.
5. Carrara has a full modeling suite. That means that when one encounters poke thru they can take the clothing item into the Model room and literally soft select and grab the vertices you need to move. So much easier than trying to solve poke thru in Daz Studio. No need for X-away and the like.
6. Carrara has a fantastic instancing system. Very well thought out. Years ahead of its time which means its still quite relevant today. Great for when you want to create a fully 3d scene without resorting to 2d backdrops and hdris.
7. Carrara's vegetation is on par with some of the best vegetation modeling apps available today. With enough skill almost any type of plant is possible and will look good. This is another area where Carrara can be used to create cotnet for DS.
8. Carrara allows you to model clothes from scratch within Carrara itself. DS has no modeling tools and therefore do not encourage users to create their own content as Carrara does. You can pose it and rig it and everything from within Carrara.
9. Carrara has brilliant Dynamic Hair. As good or better than any offering availble in DS today. This feature alone is worth the admission price.
10 Carrara can now export its dynamic hair as obj files thanks to Philemo which can then be used in DS. Yet another avenue for Carrara to provide content for DS users.
11. Virtual World Dynamics VWD now works with Carrara such that fabrics simulation is as easy in Carrara as it is in Ds, actually its much easier in Carrara than Optitex is to use in DS.
12. All content up to and including Genesis 1 and 2 work natively within Carrara just as well as they do in DS.
13. Carrara has a robust physics system. As stated, this is most relevant to those who want to aniumate...whcih deep downh most of us would like to do if we could. Carrara could at least teach one the basics of animation and keyframing. DS might not be so useful in that regard.
14. Sure, Carrara may not have had any "official" updates from Daz3d in a few years, the sdk is available and dedicated users have writen scripts to perform powerful tasks such as exporting hair as obj and cloth simulation. so really, Carrara isn't at all behind the current stagnatn curve of grownt in the industry in general.
Best of luck.
Oh, and Carrara also supports HDRI, so any HDRI backdrops/skyscapes you might have for Iray etc, will be usable in Carrara too.
Hello,
Take a look at some of the magazines showcasing some very awesome Carrara artists to see if that would inspire you at Carrara Cafe.
http://carraracafe.com/c3de/ if the viewer on Cafe doesn;t work here is alternative link https://issuu.com/search?q=C3DE
If it is cheap on sale, then it might be a diamond in your software collection. When it comes to 3D graphics software, Carrara just has this something special, once you learn it, it makes you wish other software had some workflows Carrara offers. But as it stands now, it is a vintage software with no known information whether it will see a new and updated version. But even while being old, it is kicking.
This bit caught my eye. When you use Genesis figures within Carrara, do they react to extreme movement (automatically applying JCM's) in the same way they do in Daz Studio?
Can't speak to whether genesis 1&2 bends are EXACTLY the same as Daz Studio, but JCMs work and weightmapping/rigging works. In fact, you can use Carrara to make JCMs for conforming clothing. Examples of things for Genesis 1&2 that work in Studio but not Carrara are geografts and HD morphs. People have done a number of stuff to try to have a workaround for geografts, but I think HD morphs simply won't apply as is.
Gee that's a good terrain example thanks Tim :)
I had a play with Studio - not sure how anyone could do work for print as it does really take an amazing amount of time to do a simple render - compared to Carrara.
So one of Carrara's many strengths is rendering time.
This is hugely important because the quicker you can render the quicker you can make mistakes, and the more mistakes you make the quicker you get better at doing good stuff.
So if you are wanting to render a few character sketches at more than 800 by 600 dpi it would be a big improvment on Studio.
EDIT: just read that you are perfectly happy with Studio doing your character sketches - so maybe the devil that you know will be better...
Anyone know of people making full length or short animated film in Carrara
with genesis figures immersed in full carrara environments??
I am only able to find short thirty to fifty second animation "tests" on youtube.
Also how are the clothING dynamics??
Could you use your own Dynamic clothing meshes and have them
work on walking genesis figures??
...where I find Carrara better than either Vue or Bryce (apologies Cho) is character integration into scenes. You can pose and even morph characters in Carrara which is difficult if not impossible to do in either Vue or Bryce. While yes Hexagon is a superior modeller, Carrara is far more stable and thus less prone to crash in the middle of what you are doing as well as being 64 (Pro version) instead of 32 bit which allows full use of your system's avaialble memory resoruces.
If you get to know the materials tab really well you can make some very convicng looking surfaces, and yes, it's render engine is fast (even on my old i7 930) as well as can prodfuce some very lifelike results. True, not absolutely photo real but it can get pretty darn close if you know how to push it.
Another nice feature, it can natively import .3ds and .lwo files (and there are lots of really nice high quality freebies available in these two formats).
hi there are one or two top classanimations floating around - I'll dig them up
you need VWD cloth plugin for Carrara and the clothing dynamics are spot on - once you learn to use it.
VWD is so good that it continually gets supressed on some forums.
So yes, you could use dynamic clothing meshes on any figure - with the plugin
Trailer from an award winning film https://vimeo.com/ondemand/dinnerforfew
and a full lenth feature from same chap https://vimeo.com/90195549
thread about it https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/34802/new-short-film-dinner-for-few/p1
this one doesnt look too bad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1gPIhyxOSQ
here's the 2010 promo reel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iw67NrdrDug
the backgrounds in this are amazing https://vimeo.com/17631561 (carrara )
this man is on a mission https://www.youtube.com/user/SciFiFunk
bit of a soothing job by Mec4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lin_C9hmg54
and if you take the jump PhilW has an excellent set of tutorials https://www.daz3d.com/animation-in-carrara-video-tutorials
Headwax, you beat me to the punch, I immediately thought of Sci-fi Funk and his ongoing Opus (he's also done a ton of very useful tutorials on youtube about the various elements and things he's learned while animating and rendering each episode).
And somehow I forgot the title for 'Modern Times', but that was another one that sprang immediately to mind, especially because it's of motion picture quality, although it's Carrara rendering merged with live filming of actors (but it should be pointed out that they also used daz figures in some of the theatre seats on some of the scenes too).
After all this time, I finally got to see the whole version of Nassos' 'Human Nature'. It seemed like it was in various film festivals forever, and all we could watch was the trailer. Pretty great stuff, made me chuckle.
Argus1000 has made several short films in Carrara, pretty impressive stuff. I've got to try to dig up the links.
Another that I immediately thought of was Faba's 'Frog Prince':
'Mars In Springtime' is hilarious:
I think this one is very cool although it's just a snippet:
You mentioned PhilW already; I just picked up his animation course a week ago in the PA sale:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=105&v=j8dSRpxlj3s
He also had that preview for the short film about the kids in halloween costumes and the haunted house, but I can't seem to find the link and I think it's still locked up in film festivals and can't be shown.
...love the Mars in Springime.
Thanks for the samples very nice indeed.
I tried VWD ..hated it!!!!
too slow and very ,very crash prone ..(is it even 64 bit??)
Alas with no native Dynamic cloth options I cant see any use for Cararra ,at any price, for my
animation needs as I need to be able to use my own meshes as I am doing Now
in Daz studio.
Well there is a method of using Carrara's native softbody physics to generate dynamic clothing, but honestly it's a lot more work than it's worth. The problem is that the cloth collides with itself and static objects, but once an object is animated/moving, the cloth tends to fall through the moving object. The workaround was to create an invisible 'undersuit' of soft body clothing that's parented to the figure that the visible cloth could collide with and move against. We figured out a method to make it work, but it takes a while to set up. And then when VWD came out, it was just better in every way, and wasn't worth refining or exploring the old technique any further.
You're the 2nd person I've seen mention that VWD was unstable and prone to crashing. I'm wondering if that's a function of the Studio plugin version? Because in Carrara the VWD plugin it's rock solid, no crashes for me ever, the simulations are super fast and easy. I think it is 64 bit, and I know that it uses all my render cores (my main pc is a dual-xeon with 32 cores, so I'm sure this helps my simulation speed).
On the other hand, I'm not trying to sell anybody on Carrara (even though it's my personal go-to program of choice); I see you've got C4D, and would have thought that would meet all your needs already :)
Here's a clip I made a long while back of the Carrara native softbody workaround. You'll notice the 'cloth' is a bit too jiggly, and I never bothered to try to do the work to refine the parameters to make it more physically correct, because VWD came out it was simply a better/faster solution.
BTW, as an aside when it comes to dynamics, Carrara dynamic hair is superb, either in animation or in still shots.