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Comments
It probably means that 'they' do really intend for V7 to work in Carrara, they just forgot to implement it yet....
Perhaps, but since it is Smart Content I really would have expected them to have a "Carrara Ready" flag that would cause it to not show up in Carrara until it was ready and was updated. I don't think there should ever be an option shown inside a software package that will immediately crash it.
Boojum
sorry I was being facetious. Your observations are perfectly correct.
The interesting thing is her clothes do not crash carrara
you can load the full set of the Dark Storm outfit no probs and conform/fit it to itself.
clothes maketh the woman, so maybe she is there in spirit...?
I get the impression (but I could be wrong) that it would not be a huge amount of work to fix G3F / V7 in Carrara, but I suspect that DAZ are reluctant to make promises given how much work was needed for Genesis. But I am sure they are aware that it doesn't work and is being requested. It is for them to decide whether fixing it is likely to bring in sufficient in extra product and program sales.
I look forward to seeing an empty outfit dancing around in one of your inimitable videos!
Singularity...I like that word...transhumanism or Daz3D products.
I haven't checked out G3 topology or its new joint weight type. Truth, I'm not interested in another human model/rig tech that I can't use outside of DS. Because? DS still cannot deliver many necessary animation features found in LightWave or Blender (both I have considered and still I chose Carrara)
I'm a modeler who wants to animate character to tell stories set in cities and nature. To date, this is the bottomline to me:
DS is only good for high resolution human still picture renders. It sucks at pro-level animation, full stop.
For toon-resolution animation videos, IClone is way better and faster and FUN than DS at churning out 3D toons with realistic clothing movement.
Even if IClone/ Blender/ Max/ Modo/ LW could import Genesis 1/2/3 *models+morphs*, to me it is quite pointless. Genesis's beauty is not its topology but joint bending accuracy.
So which other app could handle Genesis joints inside or outside Daz3D universe?
Carrara.
Carrara could handle DS rig. This means Carrara is the only OTHER CG tool that can help sell Daz3D products.
DS is built as a highly-involved 3D photo studio for good business reasons. But times has changed: 3D art still renders are no longer that interesting (to prosumers or investors) these YouTube days. Content store market needs to grow and expand - logically ANIMATION sector is next.
Carrara can deliver high (enough) resolution human / animal/ vegetation/ nature/ replication/ building/ cityscape/ flappy clothing + strand hair.
Carrara has LightWave quality plugins AND plugin developers. Swarms. Basic fluid. Cloth physics. Explosions.
Until DS can do ALL OF THE ABOVE AMAZING CARRARA THINGS, Daz3D NEEDS to keep Carrara as a Genesis 1/2/3 animation showcase.
But if DS5.0 suddenly pulls all of the above amazing Carrara stunts, I will celebrate DS as the new star of my CG apps cluster. I'm just unsentimental that way.
But, does that sound plausible?
Until then, Daz3D still needs Carrara - Daz3D's Most Underestimated Character Animation Rendering Almost-Singularity Suite - just to keep its flagship Genesis 1/2/3/4/5 relevant and current and YouTube-friendly and investor-enticing.
IMO...of course...
Keep talking...
I think Carrara is potentialy great but tend to revert back to DAZ Studio due to ease of use. What would really attract me to Cararra is if someone designed an animation plugin that would make the whole process easier in Carrara. Carrara has a lot more features for animation than DS but I found it very difficult to learn them whereas DS seems a whole lot more straight forward but is not as flexible as Carrara. Maybe the kind of plugin I'm after is not feasible but that kind of ease of use is what less skilled animators like me are looking for in 3D software. I think that's why so many people go with DS because it's less of a learning curve and they don't have to spend a long time troubleshooting why something didn't work correctly first time.
Companies like NewTek and Reallusion are introducing these addons that simplify complex tasks which seems the way to go development wise. Carrara can rest on its laurels that it's fully featured and highly versatile but if getting into it is like cracking Fort Knox then this puts many of us off. So could those PA's who've worked on plugins, shaders, hair and other content for Carrara put their heads together and create plugins that simplify complex tasks like animation? If that happens I think Carrara will have renewed interest for many of us DS users.
Concerning G3, I've bought the base figure but I'm not seeing great improvement over G2. I still don't think it will appeal to 3rd party 3D software users because it's still a pig to import and use in virtually all the mid to high end applications. DAZ should update Carrara to use it but what extra it will bring to the table over G2 I'm not clear yet.
Superdog - I am planning to do a training title around Animation in Carrara, maybe that will help?
PhileW
I would love that as I have loved all the rest of your Video Series.
That sounds great Phil! I'll definitely buy it because I'd really love to learn and understand all the possibilities of Carrara animation. I've tried to understand how it works but need structured guidance like an animation tutorial. I use a lot of aniblocks in DAZ atm but if there's an easier and more accurate way to work then I want to learn. I've also tried using BHV's but they often need a lot of adjusting with DAZ figures. Any of these shortcuts seem to add further layers of editing to correct problems they introduce.
I'd still love a plugin that made the whole process in Carrara simpler.
If you have a number of Aniblocks, o you have the Aniblock Carrara Importer? You can then use Aniblocks directly in Carrara, in the same way that you can use NLA Clips.
So that this good information on content purchases by Carrara users doesn't get lost, I thought I'd spend a few minutes and try to compile some of the results in case DAZ doesn't want to take the effort to analyze what's been posted.
So far there have been just under 60 responses by Carrara users. And those users claim a total of 2,525 pages of content. And as PhilW pointed out, there are 40 products per page, for a total of about 100,000 products.
Now I think it's clear that many of those products for most users are freebies from DAZ, correct? So they don't count in content purchases. But I don't know what percentage of products are purchased content and what percentage are freebies.
So all we need to do is make an assumption of what percentage of the 100k products are purchased, and then guesstimate the average cost per product, and we can ballpark how much revenue those Carrara users have provided over the years to DAZ.
So let's say that 60% of the 100k products are actually purchased, which means a total of 60,000 purchased products from the 60 respondents. So just to get a ballpark number, let's also assume the average cost per product is, say, $10. That means that the total revenues provided to DAZ over a period of years from those respondents is somewhere around $600,000. Though it's not clear how many years it took to purchase those products. Let's guesstimate and average of 5 years of buying content for those 60 respondents.
So if those 60,000 products were bought at an average price of $10 per product over a 5 year period, then we're talking somewhere around $120k per year in revenues ($600k divided by 5 years).
Heck, let's just say that instead of only $600k it's a cool $1 million in revenues over a 5 year period, which makes it $200k per year.
Now that's only the revenues, not the profit. They have to pay a percentage to the content makers, expenses, etc. So their net profit from the 60 respondents over those 5 years is something less than $200k per year.
So that's a guesstimate on what this all means. Granted it's just a ballpark based on some guesses and assumptions, and you can make your own guesses and assumptions if you dont' agree. But I think it's safe to say it puts us at least in the right ballpark.
Is less than $200k per year from 60 respondents a lot of money?
Hope this helps...
I guess this is where I will sound like a cranky curmudgeon in this conversation. It is not my intention.
The reason Studio's animation capabilities seem easier and Carrara's seems more complicated is simple. Quite frankly, Studio's are dumbed down and Carrara's are not.
As Phil mentioned, there is an Aniblock importer plugin that allows a user to use Aniblocks, which is great and all, but they are canned movements, so they are limited, and that limits the animator. Short cuts in animation have been around since animation has been around, so there is nothing inherently wrong with them. It is important to realize that a learning curve is not a bad thing either, particularly if the software has the ability to automate some tedious tasks through a plugin. The first word in the phrase, learning curve, is learning after all.
and the 60 respondants could only be 10% of the Carrara user base..
Joe - thanks for that. If we are making assumptions, then I think there is one missing from your calculations. Not everyone who uses Carrara and buys content frequents these forums, and even if they do, they may not have responded to this thread (judging by views vs. comments, there are a lot of lurkers!). So I reckon that you can probably multiply your totals by anywhere between 2x and 10x the revenues for DAZ. And that looks to me like a figure that deserves a little support.
Edit - Wonga put it more succinctly!
And that was my point from the beginning....
A thread like this seems a bit irrelevant, since only a fraction of the Carrara users and content purchasers will be represented. And we as users have no clue what that fraction is. Only DAZ knows, by seeing how many Carrara owners are active in downloading updates and purchasing content. They have all that data. We don't.
And as I said at the beginning, they probably know with some certainty what the Carrara contribution is to content sales. And giving them the benefit of the doubt, they wouldn't choose to abandon Carrara unless they had data to back it up.
My point in posting this summary was to drive home the point that the results of this survey are somewhat irrelevant.
DAZ will do what DAZ will do, I just see this as part of a lobbying process, and as such, I think it is a worthwhile exercise.
It is a less than a scientific survey to be sure, but sometimes anecdotal evidence sways the emotions a bit.
Also, have you noticed that numbers, even small ones can influence people without them realizing it? Look at how gas prices are advertised here in the U.S. Gas can be $2.739. What's with the extra .009?!? It's because it looks like $2.73 instead of $2.74, even though it is rounded up. It's the same thing if you buy a living room set for $999.99 instead of an even $1000.00.
And if DAZ is swayed by emotions rather than a rational consideration of the facts and numbers, it won't last very long.
I see this "lobbying" effort as a bit more of the "irrational optimism" approach. It's great to be optimistic, and hope that a thread in the forum will help, but I think it would be more useful to use a more rational approach. By telling them some very incomplete numbers, when clearly they have far better numbers, I don't see that it can do much.
But maybe it's the best that can be done in this case...
It may at least get their attention.
Besides, who says you can't run a major organization on emotion and knee-jerk reactionism? The U.S. House of Representatives (and now the Senate) does it all the time. Facts? They just get in the way of the lobbyists.
Will that make you feel better?
Cuz attention to a lost cause doesn't seem like it really matters...but anyway...
I bet most of the models were free or less then $2
and some people like to fib about what they have .
I can't speak for other people, but the percentage of freebies I've "bought" compared to priced stock is quite low. I get the monthly freebie from PC and that's about it. The regular "Daz freebies" section very rarely has anything I'm interested in. And while it's true I'm not spending much money in the store right now, that's more a function of cash flow than anything else, and one day I'll be rich again (grits teeth, One Day . . .)
I don't think that the roughly-calculated figure of over $3k per customer per year is a poor amount of income. Of course, while it would be good for a dentist or chiropracter, it has a different meaning for a company like DAZ.
But surely not peanuts to any business.
I do have the aniblock importer which is great but working with aniblocks is not ideal in either DS or Carrara because when joining them together there are often problems making the animation flow realistically from one block to another. That takes huge amounts of tweaking using keyframes to solve. I want to know how to do this as easy as possible. What I'd like is a tutorial about all these little problems that never seem to get addressed in other tutorials about animation using DAZ figures. A lot of the animation tutorials seem to skim the surface and don't address rigging and other problems when using different figures with aniblocks and BVH files or even when trying to create realistic movement from scratch.
I really would like a tutorial that goes in-depth not just about how to create a walk cycle even though that's important for beginners too but one that shows us how to solve sliding feet, twitching and various other anomolies that completely ruin an animation. The problem is that just one moment of these glitches in an animation utterly destroys the illusion of realistic movement so I want to prevent them happening at all. That might seem a tall order but I believe it's possible, especially if I knew how to harness all the features in Carrara, and I want to learn how to reach this level of ability with as many tips and tricks as possible.
I'm not asking for much am I?
just possibly in the wrong thread
there are lots of people like Mark Moir as well as Phil who know heaps about animation, maybe start a dedicated thread on your concerns etc
I agree, most of my content is bought and freebies have been very few and far between.
It's always worthwhile complaining about the lack of Carrara support because it keeps these issues alive. There's only one sure fire outcome if we remain quiet and don't make a fuss - our needs will be ignored. Whether or not DAZ needs to make a profit is irrelevant to it properly supporting Carrara which many of us have invested in. DAZ only continues to exist because of what past and present customers have invested in it so show us some respect rather than chasing prospective new markets that have contributed nothing to the growth of DAZ so far. Don't dump regular customers to go chasing after rainbows because the pot of gold might not materialise and when that rainbow fades we might have moved on. Chasing new markets without looking after the ones you already have is a risky strategy.
It's probably better attention to say, hey, I buy DAZ products than to bash Carrara.