Supersuit for Genesis in Carrara

Supersuit for Genesis, if you don't already know, is an amazing resource of a suit that can become nearly any sort of attire that you need for your Genesis characters. Vicky and Mike 1 and 2 had their incredible morphing fantasy costumes, well Supersuit is a very powerful answer to those whom really like that sort of thing - but for Genesis. The thing is, it was created before the new file service 'duf' was created for better communications between DS and Carrara. Being that the material presets were made specifically for DAZ Studio, it is a common belief that the Supersuit simply doesn't work in Carrara.

The suit loads in fine, as you'll see in the first image below. Now we want to see what this suit can do,so we start looking further into the content resources for the suit.

The Basic Suit Controls show up in the Carrara browser, and work when applied to the suit. To apply files to the suit, select the second line down of SuperSuit, as shown by the top of the yellow highlight on the right side of the first image below, and then double-click the file you'd like to add to the suit. Aside from the Basic Controls, very little from the library shows up. This is because everything is still in dsf, the format used for DS files before being adapted for use in Carrara 8.5. In the Material Presets category Simple Color and Simple Hero files show up and work in Carrara, but the shaders, as to be expected, will need optimization.

So this brings us to where I am so far, in an answer to the question: "How can I get the Supersuit working in Carrara?"

The second image below shows what I've done in DAZ Studio 4.6 Pro. The resulting image is that I've applied the "Adventurer" from the Fantasy Complete Presets to the suit and I've captured the scene during the 'save as' process to show how I've saved it - as a 'Character Preset' in the duf format. This brings up a dialog for shapes and materials and such. I left everything checked as it is by default, and the navigated to the same folder where I've found the preset: Public Documents > My DAZ 3D Library > People > Genesis > Clothing > Supersuit > Supersuit Presets > 4 Complete Presets > Prestes Fantasy, where I've saved it under the same name with " - New" applied as a suffix, since I never like two files of the same name in the same folder. It's just asking for trouble, doing that. Since dsf and duf are different extensions, it will let you save as the same, exact name. I strongly recommend against that.

Now that I've saved this as a duf character preset file, I tried double-clicking on it in Carrara, with the SuperSuit line selected, as I explained above, and it worked, hence the third image. The shaders actually turned out better than what I was expecting, but does still need optimization for decent results.

This is where I have to leave off for now, but I'd like to mention this first:

Since the Supersuit makes great use of what you can achieve with material settings within DAZ Studio, we may make quick and simple replacements for some of them using procedural shader presets made for Carrara, either from the native content, or from any others ou may have collected from others. Carrara comes with some fantastic metal shaders, Subsurface Scattering shaders, etc., that could be really fun to drag onto the various bits of the suit.

Another problem that I don't really care for right now is that the Support Files presets don't show up in Carrara. I'm certain that we'll be able to simply load them to the suit in DS and then save them as the correct type of support file in the duf extension - which will get them to work in Carrara.

There are texture maps in some of the add on products, which seem to load in correctly in Carrara, once the duf file is made via DS. I have yet to look deep enough into the resulting Carrara shaders vs the DS materials to see if they make use of specular maps, etc., that are not making the transition. But I will look into all of this. Perhaps I'll even make a Supersuit Shaders product for Carrara users.