If Daz would finally bring out Carrara 9...
Chris Fox Art
Posts: 380
... what updates/improvements would you like to see?
I would like to see a few improvements with animations, like some kind of real time animation option. Puppeteer mode is a great tool for animation but with clothes, dynamic hair and so it can be very laggy, so a bit harder to control a natural animation.
I would also like to be able to scroll all libaries with the cursor keys like you can do in daz studio.
Another improvement i would like to see is in the shader room, the option to use 32 bit textures, hdr, exr, tiff and so.
An update on dynamic hair for a better workflow would also be nice too and at least i would like to see a much better compabilitie to DazStudio, that means to be able to load any daz content without issues in carrara and also the option that Daz Studio itself is able to load carrara files.
On Daz Studio there are so many options i've still not discovered yet, about texturing, and so on so it would be nice if some of Daz Studio options could be implied on Carrara, maybe some more advanced options that would give other people a reason to use Carrara aswell.
And it would be interesting to see Nvidia Iray rendering in Carrara too as build in render engine.
I know there is Luxrender and Octane but i think that there still are Carrara users who just work with the Carrara render engine.
So that would be my wishlist for Carrara 9 :)
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Comments
One of Carrara's big attractions for me is the seamless support of Poser format content, i.e. loading directly from Carrara's browser which links to Poser runtimes. the major deficiency is lighting, meaning I have to set up the lighting from scratch. Converting Poser lighting to Carrara lighting would be a great timesaver. Another one would be converting Poser ERC to Carrara ERC, since some Poser models come with very clever ERC features.
I don't know if these are feasible, and I seriously doubt that DAZ has the desire or personnel to do it. But as long as we're making a list ...
I think the idea is making Carrara as a generel more interesting software than it is right now, for us carrara users, for other software users and even for the daz3d team.
I think one of the main reasons could be that carrara didn't bringt enough money to cover the development costs, so if it's gonna get a bit more popular, things could change their minds.
One great reason to still not give up Carrara is that there is still development from third party, plugins, render engines, and so on and as long as there is any development and carrara users, Carrara will go on :)
That is i think one great thing of some other softwares, the developers working together with the community and try to apply the wishes.
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/110486/carrara-challenge-27-carrara-9-give-us-a-sign-entry-thread#latest
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/106046/carrara-challenge-27-carrara-9-give-us-a-sign-wip-thread/p1
If Daz would finally bring out Carrara 9 and it loaded up all the genesis' models
then I would buy stuff for them
Support for DS Instances, and geografts, and HD morphs, and dForce, and PBR shaders and . . . .
My usual request:
Fix longstanding bugs that have survived multiple versions.
I think GoZ plugin could be better. Poser GoZ is simply beautiful.
Genesis 3 and 8 compatibility.
DazStudio allow to save and load "character presets" in matter of seconds, that's a big time saver. It would be nice to see it in Carrara.
DForce
While improvements would always be nice you can avoid this by doing the animation on the character without the clothing or hair. I usually do this in another project altogether, with no background or props, just the bare character you're using. Create the animation, tweak it till you're happy with the movement and then save it as an NLA clip. Now you can open the project with clothing and hair and all the stuff and just add the NLA clip to your character.
Agreed, NLA clips are a great feature of Carrara. I've built up a good sized library with various imported mocaps, a big timesaver.
In all honestly, there aren't a lot of improvements I want in Carrara. The main thing I want to see is some sign from Daz that they are still supporting Carrara, are still going to fix bugs as they come up, are still going to make sure it can run on newer hardware / OS combinations, etc.
I really don't care whether it supports newer content or not. I don't use a lot of the newer content anyway since I can't afford to buy into the money pit that is Genesis and new versions of Genesis coming out every year or so. Almost all of my work uses older content. And that older content still works fine for me. In some ways, I consider the fact that Carrara doesn't support newer content to be a benefit since this way I'm not tempted to sink hundreds or even thousands of dollars a year into new content because I feel like I need to have the latest and greatest Genesis figures.
Carrara's shaders are still more powerful than Daz Studio shaders in my opinion. I find Carrara shaders much easier to work with. I find it much easier to combine multiple shaders, use fractal noise effects, and so on, to generate very realistic looking textures.
Dynamic / Strand based hair? Carrara is still way more powerful than Daz Studio. Yes, I've messed with the Look At My Hair plugin for Studio. But given how buggy it was and how often it crashed Daz Studio and caused me to lose work? I gave up on it a long time ago. And AFAIK, Look At My Hair doesn't work with Iray anyway.
As far as Iray? I'm not a fan of Iray at all. I find it very hard to get good results with Iray. And the fact that I have an AMD video card means Iray performs like crap. Carrara's native rendering engine is already more powerful than Iray as far as I am concerned. If I want full indirect lighting? I can get it with Carrara. And it renders very fast. But I don't always want full indirect lighting. For more stylistic or dramatic renders, having full control over how light behaves in my scene is far more important than lighting accuracy. Often times, I don't want bounce lighting. Because it lights up parts of the scene I don't want to be lit.
So yeah, I find Carrara's rendering engine to be far more powerful than Iray. It gives me a lot more control over what my render looks like. Since you mentioned Luxrender and Octane? Yeah, neither one serves my purpose. They both have the same problems that Iray does. They don't give me enough control over how light behaves in my scene. Carrara's built in rendering engine is the best rendering engine I have ever worked with, at least for my purposes.
In the end, my real question is this: Why is Carrara languishing to begin with? It is by far the best value in 3D art creation today. Where else are you going to get modeling, animation, terrain generation, atmosphere generation, strand based hair, and many other features for less than $50? It's far more powerful than Studio, it's far more powerful than Poser, and a lot cheaper. For landscape work, it's easier to work with than Vue or Terragen and a LOT cheaper than either. Seems to me that with some good marketing, Carrara should be a lot more popular than it is. Instead, it seems to be the best kept secret in 3D. Most people don't even know it exists. If they did know it exists, they would probably agree with me that it is the best value in 3D art creation today.
A while back, someone with more knowledge of the business than me gave an opinion that DAZ bought Carrara to keep the Poser company (whoever it was at the time) from getting it. Apparently they never intended to promote it much, just a defensive move.
I suppose that's plausible, although it's hard for me to see a good reason for it. DAZ gives most of their software away for free and makes almost all of their revenue off selling content. And IIRC, their content formats are an open standard. Any company can implement them and support them. For example, there's nothing at all stopping Poser from natively supporting Genesis 3 content other than the fact that apparently Smith Micro just has no interest in doing so.
So yeah, the idea that DAZ would be a afraid of software competition from other companies doesn't make a lot of sense to me. After all, when you make almost all of your money off selling content, it seems like it can only be a positive thing if more companies produce software that is compatible with your content.
well I am always looking at alternatives
Unreal Engine 4 has been making pull my hair out these last 24 hours so not likely to be going there any time soon
video click to play
I get OK previews as you see here but the cooked "game" that is fullscreen for capture turns out black
don't get me started on Blender!!!
I want my Carrara
ANY update would do !
Fortunately there are talented people
who create plugins fo Carrara so the suggestions here might be useful to them
but experience says certainly of no intererest to DAZ.
unreal the engine from witcher 3? skyrim?
no, they have their own in house engines
many big gaming companies do
Unreal is used by a wide range of people including beginners like us and a lot of government agencies too
most of the merit for a software to stay alive is due to recurring reels made by (or thanks to) its community; if you don't show what it is capable of doing you can't expect to persuade a software house to further develop it or attract others; YT or vimeo or even an effective gallery constantly updated can make the difference between a software life or death
i wouldnt go back to poser fer sure
they could skip to Carrara X !!
C-X
with Cortana voice to tell you an error has occurred
She's listening.
hope she doesn't go sociopathic like the Resident Evil ai.
I would like:
That would be enough to get my interest, but if they wanted to add:
I'd be happier still.
I should add that I'd like to see iRay rendering as an option, but not if it came at the cost of maintaining Carrara's own renderer, which has the advantage of being much faster than iRay (at least on machines without an adequate GPU).
Ah, yes. Thank you for bringing that one up. I said in my previous post that there really weren't any improvements that I wanted in Carrara. But now that you bring it up, improved file saving would be nice. The fact that complex scenes take such a long time to save each time you want to save your work tends to discourage regular saving. After all, Ctrl-S, go make yourself a a pot of coffee. If you are lucky, when you get back, the scene will be done saving.
Reminds me of a tense situation once. Although this was with Daz Studio 3, not Carrara (but Daz studio 3 had the same problem of very long save times for complex scenes.) I had an electrical failure. Fortunately, I had a UPS so my computer kept running. I immediately saved my scene and then sat their biting my nails hoping the save would finish before my UPS ran out of juice. Thankfully, it did.
saving with local settings and no scene preview is a bit faster.
or like, save the preview with the 1st save but skip it afterward.
Thanks, Mistara,
I typically do save with no preview. Although I've never been quite sure what "Save with local settings" means. But since it's the default setting, I've always just left it alone.
I'm not too hopeful but just in case:
In the sequencer, it would be nice to be able to apply an action (create, move, delete keyframes, change the tweeners ...) to all that is below an element in the hierarchy tree without having to expand and select everything. It's all the more annoying that there's no way to expand all (nor collapse all, btw) the tree below an element. You have to expand (or collapse) everything one by one.
For example, if you select "Right Collar", the tree below being collapsed, and create a key frame, it applies to this element only, not the whole right arm. If you select and move or delete a keyframe it moves or deletes only the keyframe of "Right Collar" and not the keyframe of "Right Shoulder" or any other keyframes below.
It could be, for example, a checkbox "Apply to selection tree".
A way to indicate there are keyframes in the hierarchy tree below an element (greyed out keyframe ?) would be nice too. Right now, if you have a keyframe on "Right Shoulder" and not on "Right Collar", then if "Right Collar" is collapsed you don't see anything in the sequencer, as if there was nothing below.
I've checked again Carrara's manual, just in case. Unless I've overlooked something, I don't think any of this possible to do this as it is now. But if someone knows a way, I'm all ears ...
If it's not possible and someone wants to create a plugin or something to make it possible, well ... please don't. Not for me anyway. Since it seems that Carrara won't be updated anymore, I'll progressively switch to another software (NOT daz studio !), so I won't really need it.
I think that there is a great deal of truth to your comment. In lieu of a new highlight reel, which nobody seems to have the time to plan and create, I think that our Carrara Challenge is very important for showing the variety of what Carrara can do. I wish that every Carrara artist would enter at least one image every Challenge. Alas, I am probably in the minority here.. :(
People are upset that Daz isn't doing enough. But we can do a lot ourselves, if we have the will.
you are right UB, but I guess that many like me have only a bunch of products to play with, so it's pretty hard to find "inspiration" to contribute to challenges; I prefer to upload to daz gallery when I think there's something to spread the world; in any case we know carrara has features or plugins many softwares could only dream of, so as you pointed out it's only a matter of will and courage
.
That is right, but the "software house", Daz, also has to encourage it's users to do so, offer some support, or at least say something from time to time.
There is absolutely no official information in nearly FIVE years. And even almost none non official. Only thing is what rbtwhiz said about working on a prerequisite for gen 3, and it was 2 years 1/2 ago. Since then, nothing.
They don't even MENTION it ANYWHERE on their website. You go to the presentation of daz studio, they compare it to Poser, Lightwave, 3DS Max, Maya. They speak about Hexagon. But Carrara, nowhere. If you've never heard of Carrara, i's very unlikely you'll find it on their website. And how long since someone, anyone, from Daz posted something in this Carrara forum ?
If Daz never promotes it, never even speaks about it, I'm afraid what we can do won't have much effect.