Howie Farkes Carrera content in Daz Studio
Fauvist
Posts: 2,219
in The Commons
Is there any way to use the HowieFarkes Carrera content in Daz Studio or Poser? http://www.daz3d.com/secret-lake-bundle http://www.daz3d.com/world-gardens-japan-bundle
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No, they don't work in DS.
You could export them from Carrara as an OBJ you may have to remove the trees if they use replicators.
Some things work well others dont.
or If you are platnum club and can afford it Carrara is normally about $65 then you can use it natively.
Yes, AFAIK replicator is used for plants and trees.
There is a DAZ Studio version of Harpsburg. I've only had time for a quick look at this but it looks most impressive although it's slow to navigate around with my Nividia 730.
Cheers,
Alex.
You can convert Carrara's trees to polygon models (in Carrara), which you can then export as obj files. You'd need to spend some time massaging them down to a manageable size - they can be several millions of polys, depending on how the tree is set up - and that requires getting to know Carrara's plant editor (which is documented to the degree and standard that we've all come to know and "love" (not)).
One tree in DS doesn't amount to much, and at (say) 300K+ polys, you're not going to have many before the system grinds to a halt. Step in DS Instances. Not as powerful as Carrara's replicators, but they work on similar principles: each "instance" is just a reference to the original model. It has a certain amount of metadata - position, rotation and scale, but not the memory overhead. Nor does it have options for displaying a bounding box, cross, point etc instead of rendering the full object in the previewer. So it's still going to grind your scene to a halt. What it DOES have, for each instance is an Instance Preview property. This will hide the instance in the previewer, while still rendering it. (see the recent Stonemason lake and forest scenes for examples of that in action)
If you want to reproduce Howie's exact scene, you'll have to figure out the position, rotation and scale of each replicated item, do whatever units & local/global conversions that might be needed, set up the instance and turn off preview. Rinse and repeat.
Just a quick check of Secret lake: there are 650 maple trees, 109 larch & spruce, 900 "background" trees, 20,000 assorted grasses & flowers, 600 pond reeds . . . That's a lot of rinsing and repeating,
DS doesn't have good tools for placing instances. There's a product in the store - http://www.daz3d.com/instances-plus-for-daz-studio - which is somewhat limited and kinda clunky, but it'll place up to 250 instances at a time into a defined rectangle, and it can "drop" them onto sloping terrains. It'll certainly get you further, faster than trying to hand place everything. But you'll end up with something similar although not identical. It's still an awful lot of work though.
And when you've done all that, there's the shaders . . .
To me, the time required to do all that (even with some "expert shortcuts" that I didn't mention, is worth a lot more than $65 (and you'd need to buy a copy of Carrara anyway, to perform the exports), so unless you're intending it as a learning experience, it might just be simpler to render it in Carrara. Carrara can still directly use Genesis and Genesis 2 figures, and open DUF scenes (ironically, so long as they don't contain instances!), and it does have a pretty good render engine.
BTW, as I understand it, Poser doesn't have any instancing support at all, so there's probably no way to get it into that program.
Look at my Hair can place instances using a Carrara like map (DensityMap). LAMH can also randomize several different items into the area.
Kendall
...I wish I could get my characters into Carrara. I remember being able to import back in ver 6.1, but now when I do so it either crashes during the import or surfaces are all messed up and some morphs don't come through properly (using 3DL not Iray suirfaces).
Spent a small bundle on a number of his sets a few years ago that would work in my story, but because I cannot get the characters to import properly, haven't really been able to them.
Thank you for all the information! You've given me good perspective on what's required. When I look at the files of the objects that are in a scene, how would I know if there are replicators associated with a particular object?
Thanks!
This thread may help you with the characters into Carrara.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/45361/best-practices-using-genesis-and-genesis-2-content-in-carrara#latest
..thanks, I'll take a read through.
If I remember correctly, KK, you had some specific characters that were already optimized for DS and you were trying to get the exact same results in another program (in this case, Carrara). If you already have a workflow that works for you, I would say don't "fix" something that is not broken. However, if you want additional features and capabilities, such as placing your characters in a Howie Farkes scene, then I recommend taking another look at Carrara. Even with instances, DS is still behind Carrara's replicators (but remember the bridge to Bryce which has environments superior to Carrara in my opinion).
You can load a figure/character in DS and then save/export it in a form for another program. For example, you can take a Daz character and use File : Export commands to save a Poser .cr2 file. However, the texture and shader system of Poser is a little different from DS, so one would want to tweak the appropriate materials in Poser if rendering there. Also, Poser has a strand-based hair system that is different from DS's LAMH and fibermesh systems. Therefore, one has to decide which hair system to use and accept the inevitable trade-offs that come from bypassing the options avalable in the other programs.
Same thing with Carrara. You can load your character in DS and then save it as a character preset or a support asset, each of which can be loaded as a .duf file directly in Carrara. However, analogous to Poser, the shader/texture system in Carrara is slightly different from DS. As a result, you will want to tweak the materials and save them for easy future reload. Also, Carrara has a true strand-based hair system. You will have to choose whether to use Carrara's dynamic hair (and therefore render there) or whether to use DS's LAMH or fibermesh.
These are trade-offs. Carrara offers an easy to use integrated 3D figure rigging/posing/modeling/environment/animation system in a single program. The DS bridges to Hexagon and Bryce offer sbstitutes for the modeling and environment functions.
I am at the point now where I use Genesis 2 figures in Carrara for most things that I do and chuckle when people write that Carraa doesn't support genesis or genesis 2. Yes it does but shaders have to be adjusted. EDIT: HD does not work in C8.5. (it does not support genesis 3). I have a set of skin shaders that I have optimized and saved in Carrara. So, for me, I can load a Genesis figure and with 1 click load an optimized Carrara shader for it. But simply loading the G2F or G2M figures as default .duf files will typically load them without bump maps and without specular maps. Those maps are available but they don't load by default. Annoying! Skin shaders have to be optimized and saved once to be satisfactory in Carrara (for those that don't want to do this themselves, Ringomonfort has some skin shaders available for sale in the store).
I have tried to be evenhanded, but in the interest of full disclosure, I am a Carrara fan. I know others see it differently.
...I do not use HD textures or morphs as they take up too much in processor resources. I generally use standard Daz/Poser transmapped hair content rather than dynamic, strand, or fibremesh based hair (I have Garibaldi but it really is a bugger to work with as I don't have very steady hands and it has no morphs so you basically need to "restyle" it every time you adjust a pose).
I know there are separate Carrara skin presets available for various figure/character textures, but don't have them for budgetary reasons.