ProPose said:

Took the plunge and updated my oldest computer to Win 11.  Not a clean install but opted for the update which allowed me to keep all my apps data etc.  So far so good.  Carrara 8.1 works as expected.  Carrara 8.5 works,  Octane for Carrara works but I had to sing in to my Octane acct. and it works. Hex works, and the bridge to daz.  Zip and Rar files crash the explorer window.  did some research, uninstalled CS4, zip rar files are now ok.  DS4.10 and DS4.21 work.

Thanks fo the report.  I am still running Win10 on a 12 core/24 thread AMD CPU with a middling nVidia GPU.  Very fast Carrara frame renders (a few seconds) and wildly various DS iRay renders (minutes to hours).  So ... the iRays become great backgrounds for fast animation foregrounds in Carrara.  

I am thinking about a new machine with Win11, a fast AMD CPU and an nVidia 4090 card or similar which some say gives good iRay render times.  

Took the plunge and updated my oldest computer to Win 11.  Not a clean install but opted for the update which allowed me to keep all my apps data etc.  So far so good.  Carrara 8.1 works as expected.  Carrara 8.5 works,  Octane for Carrara works but I had to sing in to my Octane acct. and it works. Hex works, and the bridge to daz.  Zip and Rar files crash the explorer window.  did some research, uninstalled CS4, zip rar files are now ok.  DS4.10 and DS4.21 work.

Diomede said:

Bad news.  Carrara is behaving inconsistently with catastrophic failures.  Most recently I was rendering a scene that was 896x1152, only 1 Genesis 2 character, 1 hair, 1 clothing item, and 1 prop.  The background was just the backdrop with a solid white color.  The surface shader for the Genesis 2 figure did not have any SSS.  The diffuse maps and bump maps were standard.  I did not have any global illumination such as sky light or indirect light.  Well, actually I did have a fake sky dome made with distant lights replicated on a half sphere.  Only one other light.  Carrara crashed mid render.  My computer system simply shut down and rebooted automatically.

Sad state of affairs.

Did you try turning multithreading off? Is it an Intel or AMD CPU? You can try checking Windows Log files.

it's unfortunate Carrara doesn't have a log file

not that that is always helpful in DAZ studio when it frequently crashes 

Diomede said:

Bad news.  ...  Carrara crashed mid render.  My computer system simply shut down and rebooted automatically.

Sad state of affairs.

My sympathies.  It's been a while, but I recall when I start my machine from "Sleep" (which is usually how I leave it), Carrara will crash pretty quick.  I either just restart Carrara or reboot the machine, and all seems OK.  Does not sound like your situation, though.

Bad news.  Carrara is behaving inconsistently with catastrophic failures.  Most recently I was rendering a scene that was 896x1152, only 1 Genesis 2 character, 1 hair, 1 clothing item, and 1 prop.  The background was just the backdrop with a solid white color.  The surface shader for the Genesis 2 figure did not have any SSS.  The diffuse maps and bump maps were standard.  I did not have any global illumination such as sky light or indirect light.  Well, actually I did have a fake sky dome made with distant lights replicated on a half sphere.  Only one other light.  Carrara crashed mid render.  My computer system simply shut down and rebooted automatically.

Sad state of affairs.

https://www.daz3d.com/esha - normal clothing and jewerly

https://www.daz3d.com/martinjfrost - incredible foliage

https://www.daz3d.com/predatron - a little bit of everything, and everything wonderful

https://www.daz3d.com/howiefarkes - the creator of UltraScenery Landscape System and UltraSceneryTwo. Be careful, he also creates products for Carrara.

https://www.daz3d.com/censored - started with props, has now expanded to characters for FilaToon. All excellent.

https://www.daz3d.com/stonemason - environments, he is the master of them.

https://www.daz3d.com/sloshwerks - while he is gone, his store is open and his work is excellent and stands the test of time.

https://www.daz3d.com/the-antfarm - unique items, many in a series and with a wicked sense of humor.

https://www.daz3d.com/alessandroam - animals, real or imagined. Domestic or wild.

Are you mostly interested in renders of characters? Do you want realistic environments or sets for photo shoots? Do you want more sexy clothes or a mix of realistic, average clothes, some realistic historic, science fiction, or some fantasy? Different PAs have different specialties. 

The PAs I listed are only a few I love and rely on. They are not all of them. I would go to the listing of PAs and become familiar with them. Their content, do you like it or not, is it something others talked about in the forums? What is their speciality? I had to stop listing, I have so many I consider immediate purchases on day one due to quality and they fit my interests.

If you are new to DAZ, I recommend signing up for the DAZ-Deals Browser Add-On which can help save you money. When you look at a promo with it, you can see forum posts where people may have posted about that item, good or bad, or just problems on the day of the sale, or links to posts like this where someone asked for recommendations. That is invaluable. Also you can see price history. Well advertised price, but if someone is using their tokens, DAZ coupons if they are a DAZ+ member or Premiere member, they may have bought the item at a deeper discount.

Mary

Matronius said:

@WendyLuvsCatz I think you got the answer to your question!!!

sadly I never found Unity very easy to use

pity because the free sets I have do load quite well in Blender, Carrara, Unreal and Twinmotion but getting them into DAZ studio was so much work I have never been tempted to buy any

Diomede said:

I haven't tried Pinokio yet but I see ads for it.  I am fortunate to have enough RAM for my current usage of ComfyUI, but I see trouble on the horizon.  I am going to spend the near term doing a deep dive in Blender.  For many people, the ComfyUI/AI option is a replacement for 3D, but I am finding it more like an extension.  Carrara has been a GREAT partner with my tests, some of the early ones I shared in the Carrara forum.  Blender has the potential to be even better, but I had only used the modeler and the UVMapper until recently.  I have seen a couple videos in which the use of an NVIDIA blueprint puts ComfyUI directly in Blender in a node structure.  Now that is a challenge for my RAM!  In any case, I need to learn more of the basics of Blender, such as cameras, rendering, etc.  Fortunately, the world is full of free Blender tutorials - almost too full because it can be hard to sort through them to find the good ones.

yeah Blender 

I use it a bit and it is less confusing than ComfyUI if I stay away from the nodes

can say that for DAZ studio when it comes to Shadermixer  

I haven't tried Pinokio yet but I see ads for it.  I am fortunate to have enough RAM for my current usage of ComfyUI, but I see trouble on the horizon.  I am going to spend the near term doing a deep dive in Blender.  For many people, the ComfyUI/AI option is a replacement for 3D, but I am finding it more like an extension.  Carrara has been a GREAT partner with my tests, some of the early ones I shared in the Carrara forum.  Blender has the potential to be even better, but I had only used the modeler and the UVMapper until recently.  I have seen a couple videos in which the use of an NVIDIA blueprint puts ComfyUI directly in Blender in a node structure.  Now that is a challenge for my RAM!  In any case, I need to learn more of the basics of Blender, such as cameras, rendering, etc.  Fortunately, the world is full of free Blender tutorials - almost too full because it can be hard to sort through them to find the good ones.

its the shadowplay screen capture overlay, I have never seen it on Carrara though

Greetings.  I recently replaced my computer.  Windows 11.  New computer has an NVIDIA graphics card.  New installation of Carrara. When I start up Carrara I get a pop up window briefly in the upper right of the Assemble room notifying me that NVIDIA overlay is available.

Has anyone seen this before?  What is it?  Do I want that to 'overlay' while I am running Carrara?

Perhaps unrelated, but I have noticed that Carrara now freezes if I do a spot render in the Assemble room.  Everything else seems OK.

Headwax said:

EDIT 2 - Rendo has uploaded the Carrara items - yay !!!

thank you Bunyip02

Still in the process of uploading them, limit of 3 per 24 hours, have updated 2 links so far. Hope to get the rest done this weekend/next week.

EDIT - Rendo links now updated !!!

EDIT 2 - Rendo has uploaded the Carrara items - yay !!!

thank you Bunyip02

Elor said:

Spelling mistakes in Perfect Poses with a missing 'r', so it's written 'Pefect Poses' instead:

https://www.daz3d.com/flashback-and-bundles#perfect_poses

And the $3.99 price with a new release seems to be applied store wide: only New releases are not discounted by it but outlets will and so will products who are not included in today's sale.

As far as I can tell, the Carrara Grid product is not included in any sale currently and yet, once one today's new release is added to the cart, 'Oopsie' like David Weber famously said after dropping his whole incoming novel instead of a couple of chapters as a teaser.

The screenshots were taken in a private window, so no membership, no token:

 Try it now please.

Spelling mistakes in Perfect Poses with a missing 'r', so it's written 'Pefect Poses' instead:

https://www.daz3d.com/flashback-and-bundles#perfect_poses

And the $3.99 price with a new release seems to be applied store wide: only New releases are not discounted by it but outlets will and so will products who are not included in today's sale.

As far as I can tell, the Carrara Grid product is not included in any sale currently and yet, once one today's new release is added to the cart, 'Oopsie' like David Weber famously said after dropping his whole incoming novel instead of a couple of chapters as a teaser.

The screenshots were taken in a private window, so no membership, no token:

Thanks, @Bunyip02, @Dartanbeck, and @WendyLuvsCatz.  Whatever the problem was is a mystery.  No one has replied yet in the Blender Forum.  Bunyip, you were not able to recreate the problem.  I am rebooting and starting over.  Maybe I did something scene specific like inadvertently tap a 'lock constraints' hot key.  We will see when I start with a fresh scene.

As for Blender, Daz Studio, and Carrara, I have gone to an even darker side (gasp!).  I am embracing the AI toolkit of Stable Diffusion, Flux, Wan, etc.  My current interface of choice is ComfyUI.  I just see it all now as a giant tool box.  I am happy to use Carrara for stuff, espcially the depth pass.  Blender for Stuff - mist pass is OK but often needs more fiddling than Carrara's depth pass.  Daz Studio for stuff, same issue as Blender Mist.  And anything else. I let my Substance Painter subscription end, but I could see a limited renewal for the right project in order to make content for which I would create LORAs.  Everything Rocks!

Rant follows.  This rant will prove this is me like Dart saying some software rocks to prove it is him.

I am embracing many but not all AI tools.  My one caveat is that it is important to me as a person whose office was directly below the US Copyright Office for more than a decade (literally, like I could hear them stomping around up there), it is important to me that I don't profit from anything that does not have clear property rights, nor would it be OK with me if my hobby freebies deprived a rightful owner of potential sales even if I did not profit.  There are many elements to copyright, but unjust enrichment (profiting) and displacing rightful owners (even if no profit) are two of the biggest.  At the moment, because I don't have any profits, nor do any profits seem likely in the near term, nor do I have a big enough audience to crowd out some for-profit creator, I don't have any personal worries about copyright from my current use of AI.  It brings me joy.  But for the moment, my media presence is still just a few minor 3D bits on Youtube, with no AI.  My Youtube channel consists of one animated crystal ball displaying a landscape scene, one toy car race, and one stylized warrior riding a battle ostrich.  And I don't even know how to get to it most of the time.  I don't have a tic toc channel, any Amazon presence, or a Diomede web page - I do have a DeviantArt page called DiomedeLarnin with some of my AI experiments and workflows, but it is the free DA level so I can't post any animation tests (my coffee cup spilling is not ready for prime time anyway). 

But I can dream of being a creator with all that stuff - web page, youtube channel, tic toc, etc..  If I ever do have those things, I would want my creations to all be fully compliant with appropriate legal standards for public domain, or licensed use from rightful owners, or personal creations.  Cue the MakeHuman add-on for Blender (license explicitly stated in asset library so i limit myself to public domain creative commons.  Cue my personal meshes for Brash and Moxie.  Cue any LORAs I make for a claymation style for my silly 3-fingered Rankin/Bass style figures.  For personal reasons, I would want to have full confidence that what I was doing was on the up and up.

But some people think AI is inherently illegal or unethical.  To them no use of it is ever OK.  I disagree.  ETHICS = Property Rights. To the crowd that says 'AI is theft,' or 'AI will destroy all the jobs,' all I can say is that you have a steep burden to persuade me if you are only repeating '...what everyone says.'  Cite some law and some economics. (1) I was valedictorian speaker for my law school class, and (2) I was an expert research economist for the Congressional Research Service.  Sorry, it may be arrogant of me, but I am not persuaded by '...I read it on the internet,' not even if the article was in a newspaper.  In fact, some of the newspapers have become worse than some idiot in the basement.  Theft is theft, wherever it occurs.  Some AI is theft, but that is the user, not inherent in AI.  Using things for which are (1) your property, (2) the property of someone else from whom you got permission, or (3) in the public domain is not theft.  No, no it is not theft.  Sorry, stop saying false equivelance or speaking of people's souls.  That aint law, and theft is a legal concept.  It is true that AI has thrown a lot of the practices and standards upon which the public domain rested up in the air because calculations that were not practical before now are, and we are all waiting for various countries to redraw their lines distinguishing public domain from exclusive property rights.  The big example is sorting out their copyright laws, and then negotiating treaties explaining to what extent they will recognize each other's decisions.  But that had to happen after recording devices were able to pair with radio broadcasts - to what extent did NBC and Bing Crosby own their broadcasts and to what extent could they stop people from recording them, integrating it into their own act, and re-broadcasting?.  And once every speakeasy can have a radio, all live musicians will lose their jobs, right?  Um, no.  We worked it out.  That was a century ago, but we act like law and technology don't adjust.  We will work out AI and the public domain.  Some of the 'working out' will be done through regulatory changes (legally restricting access), but some will be done by changes in technology - physically restricting access.  And Hollywood has already issued some examples - See MoonValley's Marey.

  https://time.com/7300636/ai-hollywood-moonvalley-marey/

WendyLuvsCatz said:

sorry Dart but Blender actually rocks more than DAZ studio, or even gasp! Carrara, I am just to lazy to learn it but it is actually bloody awesome

While I now use Blender, Carrara is still my favourite program !!!

sorry Dart but Blender actually rocks more than DAZ studio, or even gasp! Carrara, I am just to lazy to learn it but it is actually bloody awesome

Stezza said:

what if you put the Bryce and Carrara files in the one zip file.. 

I know you have already said that but it seems the most easiest for Rendo Ross 

Hello Stezza - I was uploading the files the same as ShreCG uploads, but doing Bryce first. There was a little disclaimer on the Rendo upload site of Duplicates Not Allowed, but I thought that while the same model they are for different softwares so not actually duplicates. Anyway when I uploaded the Carrara files they hung for a long time, so I thought they had been given the thumbs down, however they have since been allowed which is good news. After this initial batch of doing them seperately, I will upload the files as a joint Bryce-Carrara file so that should keep everyone happy, apart from those who download the files and only want the one software .....