WendyLuvsCatz said:

we have a geograft UV issue in Carrara, I wonder if how you solve it could be applied there too

Hi Wendy,

I sincerely hope not; in retrospect I think the bug can be placed firmly in the "stupid mistake" area...

With both Alembic and USD, you encode faces by defining the vertices of its corners by an index into a long tables of all the vertices in the mesh. That's efficient because unless a vertex is a UV seam, it only needs to be in the table once, even if more than one face refers to it.

UVs are different. They're not indexed because there should not be any dupes and the same optimization for vertices would not save you anything. So, you just encode the actual U and V values in the same order as you're encoding the faces that make up the mesh.

Now, when there is a geograft or geoshell which can remove faces, that creates unused vertices that have to be removed or else you end up with loose vertices in Edit Mode in Blender. So you encode only the faces that are still used in the mesh, and create new indices that refer to a shorter list of vertices that are actually referenced by a face. It is not necessary to do this for UVs because, as I said above, UVs are not indexed.

The bug was that I was redoing the UVs as well, in a way analogous to what I had to do for the vertices, which creates a UV array of a shorter length than it should be because it is removing the "duplicates" that it falsely believed existed when the corresponding face's vertex was a duplicate. Blender's Alembic importer doesn't report the error, it just silently discards the bad UV map. I found it when I used the same code for Hitchens, which uses USD, and the Blender USD importer gave a meaningful error message saying the length of the UV map was off. At that point it was just a matter of staring at that section of the code long enough until the error jumped out at me.

So the problem was Alembic and USD specific (they both encode geometry is pretty much exactly the same way), and I must assume that the Carara guys are better at this than me, or at least they should be :)

RuudL said:

Have you tried copy and paste from one scene to the other?

you can have more than one scene file open in Carrara

no, not copy/paste I admit,

I have tried import, load from browser, drag into scene from browser to scene not anything selected, drag onto head etc

right now am rendering her with a DAZ polygon hair as gave up

can try later 

Have you tried copy and paste from one scene to the other?

you can have more than one scene file open in Carrara

we have a geograft UV issue in Carrara, I wonder if how you solve it could be applied there too

the thing is it used to work on Win10 but Microsoft updates ended that years ago

I wish I knew how to fix it

UPDATE

I can load the Carrara Beta with it added to extensions and am running it but will see if it crashes sending to Carrara

well it didn't, it just never loaded after importing and VWD closed

so it might be an extension clash, didn't show that error though, a quite different one

or it could be python 2.7

I updated that

am frustrated

it stops responding or simulating so no closer other than the Carrara beta opening and loading it

I was in the middle of making a fun new video working in Carrara, but no VWD kind of puts a horrible twist on how I work in Carrara, unfortunately. So I had to put the video on hold for now while I create a whole new workflow

WendyLuvsCatz said:

Bunyip02 said:

WendyLuvsCatz said:

I only use it when forced to for things like Shrinkwrapping and as an intermediatry  importing certain models prior to Carrara

I do however use it daily as my video editor

does 8K or more mp4 videos and loads exr etc no other free options for that 

exr - Picturenaut ?

oh lots of things open exr but not many render exr image series into mp4 

Ah-ha talking about vids !!!

Bunyip02 said:

WendyLuvsCatz said:

I only use it when forced to for things like Shrinkwrapping and as an intermediatry  importing certain models prior to Carrara

I do however use it daily as my video editor

does 8K or more mp4 videos and loads exr etc no other free options for that 

exr - Picturenaut ?

oh lots of things open exr but not many render exr image series into mp4 

WendyLuvsCatz said:

I only use it when forced to for things like Shrinkwrapping and as an intermediatry  importing certain models prior to Carrara

I do however use it daily as my video editor

does 8K or more mp4 videos and loads exr etc no other free options for that 

exr - Picturenaut ?

Headwax said:

Vwd still works? 

only on my Win7 PC

Carrara throws an error if I add the bridge extension to it on Win10

I believe VWD itself works

Philemo is MIA so cannot solve it sadly 

I use it for sculpting exported objs from carrara to add more detail, and fir adding displacement on a mesh. Meshmixer is good for sculpting but crashes . Cloth sim in blender after one play seems worth exploring eventually as carrara cloth sim plugin  no longer works 

Thanks for shrink-wrapped heads up Wendy.

hell, I even got VWD on my Win7 with only 8GB RAM to work on the skirt

(not the braids sadly but that was pushing it )

and my wifi network let me send it back to my Win10 for rendering which is fortunate as cannot use Google Drive anymore as my Browsers won't work on Win7

Opera does but was too lazy to sign into Google on it

one of a series, I mostly render png series of people even if I add them as planes to Carrara scenes later

I only use it when forced to for things like Shrinkwrapping and as an intermediatry  importing certain models prior to Carrara

I do however use it daily as my video editor

does 8K or more mp4 videos and loads exr etc no other free options for that 

Yep, some things in Blender are just more wacky then Carrara, probably why Carrara is still my number one program !!!

I actually had two serious tries at learning Blender before I finally clicked with it on my third attempt. Still using 4.2 and 4.3 on the desktop and 2.93 on the laptop.

Blender has some great updated features, no doubt.  And its TexTools add-on for UVMapping is far more predictable and has more options than Carrara's UV mapping.  But, but, BUT...., this sort of crap drives me nuts.  I just downloaded the most recent Blender, version 4.4.3.  And so i forgot some basic starting things.  Get this...

- In edit mode (like modeling objects), by default, Blender's 'Undo' function does not keep action history globally, so if you move a face/plane and hit 'Undo,' it might not remember that you moved the face/plane and will instead 'Undo' an action you took earlier.  Oh, sure, it is an 'easy fix,' right?  One can change the default setting, right?  OK, sure.  But who the (explitive deleted) is running that asylum, and what else have they set up with insane defaults? -

This is a simple illustration of why I end up returning to Carrara for many simple 3D tasks.

https://www.daz3d.com/vidal-braids-for-genesis-2-female-s

Vidal braids locks Carrara up fitting to Genesis 2 female

doesn't even go into not responding, just becomes unclickable with weird mouse pointer variations

UPDATE

10 hours later it works, not sure how well will reload

the size of the save after running Alberto's Morph Eraser on everything including that hair says a lot

COMIXIANT said:

Dartanbeck said:

Sorry. I'm very busy. Didn't even think I'd have time to try it but couldn't help myself. Why don't you try it ?!!! :)

Do you have Pose Architect? Idle animations can be really fun and easy using those!

I didn't mean for you to do another video, I just meant it's unfortunate it wasn't part of the video you already did.  Haven't bought it yet (due to the issue you mentioned in the video), but if it gets an update I'll defnitely buy it.
I do have the full paid version of AniMate, and yes, I do have Pose Architect too and I know where you're going with that.  The AniBlocks wouldn't work with Genesis 9 last time I tried, although granted, I suppose it could be fixed by now.
 

Pose Architect really blew my mind! So I ended up getting the whole ball of wax - it's so fun. The fact that they're actually animated dials is really powerful for folks who like to put things in motion.

More on that, I was nervous that that might be very similar to the custom dials that I'm always urging folks to create. As soon as I tried them, that fear was completely lifted. Pose Architect dials are more advanced than anything I'm talking about, and work in a somewhat different approach - so it all works together very well.

Since switching from Carrara to Daz Studio for my animation/Character Creation work, I've become more and more a fan of 3DU's tools! This Walk Designer is definitely no exception!

Which issue are you talking about needing an update?

therixx said:

Moreover, with RuudL's rebuild version installed, I do not need to remove Fenric's one. They may co-exist, Carrara does not complain (for the moment, at least)

That was not my intention. There can only be one active as they both have the same IDs (FamilyID, ClassID, GUIDs and CommandIDs). Which one will be active depends on the order in which the plugins are initialized during Carrara's launch phase. If the rebuild version is initilialized after the original one than the rebuild will supersede the original in memory.

In my development setup I can control the initialization order by placing the plugin in a specific named folder which contents will be processed last. On Windows the foldername have to start with a '0' (zero). On Mac with a 'z'.

How can you tell which version is active? Well, you can make a small change in the <plugin>.txt file with a plain text editor (like Notepad++) just to make a menu-option appear in a different submenu and/or give it a different menu-title.

As an example I changed the submenu string into "Fenric-rebuild' of the scenecommand 'Add ERC Modifier'. It will now appear in Edit>Fenric-rebuild submenu whenever the rebuild version is active.

Thank you RuudL, your version seems to work. I never used ERC, but my Carrara does not crash anymore with your ERC rebuild.
Still, my configuration may be strange: days ago I saw this Humble Bundle
https://www.humblebundle.com/books/learn-to-program-2025-pearson-books
even for 1 $ you get interesting things, so for the C++ book I installed Visual Studio 2015 and...
I thought this was the reason why, for some days, my Carrara worked properly with Fenric's original ERC.
I was going to tell you about this, but I noticed that now, after several proper launches and days, Carrara crashes again.
So  I installed RuudL version and Carrara starts properly.
Moreover, with RuudL's rebuild version installed, I do not need to remove Fenric's one. They may co-exist, Carrara does not complain (for the moment, at least)

 

Houstan - we no longer have a problem !!! Working fine so far, using Win64-rebuild version.

 

Great to hear that Carrara is working fine again. Even with the Win64-rebuild version of ERCModifier.

I'm curious whether others are having the same experience. Do they?