I've generally had better success using an obj export plugin in SketchUp than I've had using Collada files in DS...

http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/

Has anyone had any success importing Collada DAE files from Google's 3D Warehouse?

cool isolinear chips - saw a pair on sketchup and tried to covert them a while back but they didnt convert well

here is page 5 of my graphic sorta novella

Done for Turbulence1973 Star Trek - Gamma Fleet Operations GFO. - http://turbulence1973.deviantart.com/journal/Star-Trek-Gamma-Fleet-Operations-269989115
Note: this is just me having fun - in no means done as any story or timeline created by Turbulence1973 and may or may not actually continue on another page LOL

the grammar again is probably horrible also lol

A larger easier readable version can be found at my DeviantArt page

I like the Idea of this thread.
I'm new to Carrara. I do motion graphics and technical animations for educational video's.
I had a background in Sketchup, Alibre, a little Solidworks, and Autocad.
I work professionally as a recording engineer, but wish to sell some video's online.
I don't expect large sales from these video's so hiring out an animator is not possible.
I first played around with something called sketchers studio, which was intended to be an animation program for Sketchup.
It was very simple and was never developed, but it got me started.
I looked through 3d graphics magazines to see what programs could do this type of work. The magazines often showed character renders, or renders of elaborate scenes. Maybe a still high res image of a beautiful car, but I was hard to tell if any of these software packages would do what I wanted.
I tried Blender, but the interface was just too much for me. I think if you understood the concepts to begin with, Blender might be excellent, but I had a lot of learning to do.
I tried Carrara demo then bought the book that contained Carrara 6 Pro. So I got in cheap. At first I imported objects from Sketchup, and Alibre. The conversion process had a few issues ( mainly having to convert file types), so I started modeling simple objects in Carrara.
When I was stumpted, I found excellent tutorials on youtube. The manual is over 700 pages and covers a lot of territory. If the manual and youtube don't cover it there are some very helpful people on this user group. Which is HUGE!
( thank you 3Dage, Holly, evilproducer, Joemama2000, etc)
At this point I model almost everything I need in Carrara. I like the fact that I can make changes on the fly as my skills improve, without going back to my modeling program and reload. FOR MY NEEDS, I have found almost nothing I can't do as far as modeling and animation.
This program amazes me constantly. I have no desire to be a professional graphics artist or animator. I do have a desire to be a one man band as far a a small film producer, and Carrara fits the bill. I edit the video's in Sony Vegas, and between these two programs I'm amazed at what can be done. Will a pro look at my work and see how it could be improved? Of course. but everybody I've shown clips to literally says "wow who did the animation"? I have since upgraded to 8 pro.In part because I wanted to support Daz, in part because I wanted to take full advantage of the 64bit version 8. and I got it cheap on sale.
I'm rendering full HD movie clips at 29.97 FPS, the quality of the render looks sharp and crisp.
You will see comments on this group about needs for updates, and I believe at the level these people are working they are legitimate issues, but with the type of work I am doing there are almost none. If someone is starting out doing simple animations I think it could be a very long time before they hit the limits or shortcomings of this program.

At my level Carrara is affordable, powerful, and a reasonable interface. Though I don't think you could call any Modeling, rendering, or animating software " easy". Before starting my project I did ask a pro how he did a technical animation for the New York Times web site. He even did a small clip for me to start this project. The answer was vague and long. Maya, Final Cut, adobe after effects. Once I started doing this work I began to understand his answer. He did use a good 12 grand worth of software. I used Carrara Pro, Sony Vegas Pro, Corel Suite, maybe under a grand's worth of software. ( I may add Apple Motion for $50.00) But with out doubt Carrara covers a lot of that territory. I could have gotten by for much less if I didn't buy the Pro versions as well or stuck with Carrara 6Pro. Let me state one last Time. I am not a Professional Graphics artist or animator. I have no desire to work in that field as a professional, where I think you would need to know the standard software packages. The software I use does have limits compared to the " Pro" packages like Maya. I just don't think for the work I am doing I am hitting those limits.
Though I have wondered if you can't afford to go to school to learn the big packages is Carrara a good place to learn the concepts?
I've learned a heck of a lot these past few months.
I'm almost done with the second chapter of my project which has almost 15 minutes of HD animation.
I'm going to post some samples on Youtube soon .
I'll post a link here.
8068

Hi there all, Created a little room in sketchup for importing into bryce. Now I know it's a high standard but it works really well with light and materials in Bryce, heres a few images to know what your getting. Enjoy!

p.s, the reason i created the room was to create an image of a dark room with shards of light bending around the stairs.

File type : OBJ

http://speedy.sh/AvN4W/stairs-in-room.obj

A row of hearts, all done in slightly different ways.
The only "cheat" being that the one on the far right was drawn up in Sketchup, extruded and then saved as a Collada .dae file.

The other three were variously done using 16 bit tiff files imported into the terrain editor (with two of those then being turned in to symmetrical lattices.

Cherokee said:

betsy662 said:

there is a 64 Galaxy done up in sections for sketchup, I converted and built it in DS, but boy was that a chore, and it also didn't come out looking too good!

I tried that one too because I've wanted a 1964 Galaxie in 3d like forever and I was rather disappointed that it didn't look to good when converted.

The really sad thing was, it didn't look bad while putting it together, it was when I started shading it that all the flaws showed up!

betsy662 said:

there is a 64 Galaxy done up in sections for sketchup, I converted and built it in DS, but boy was that a chore, and it also didn't come out looking too good!

I tried that one too because I've wanted a 1964 Galaxie in 3d like forever and I was rather disappointed that it didn't look to good when converted.

There are a lot of cars I would love to see done, I know that Dan Palatnik has made some real beauties, but they aren't available to those of us who use DAZ and Poser very much, while there are some that can be converted from the gta websites, there is a 64 Galaxy done up in sections for sketchup, I converted and built it in DS, but boy was that a chore, and it also didn't come out looking too good!

betsy662 said:

Yep, seems the good folks that redo these cars for gta make many improvements to them!

Many of the models we see the GTA sites were originally converted to NFS by the original artist. They are then converted from NFS to GTA by someone else. The cars on Sketchup and orther sites are not from the originals but conversions from either GTA or NFS.

Dan Palatnik over at Rendo creates his own car models. He also has a forum section on one the NFS sites where he converts his cars to NFS. Someone else will rip that car from NFS and convert it to GTA. I've chatted with MindFuck at gta-worldmods.de and GTA Classics and he said DAn Palanik has given him permission to do those conversion from NFS or the origiinal models to GTA.

The Sketchup cars and the 1964 Mercury (and many others on these free sites) are not from the originals but are conversion from NFS or GTA cars.

If you look closely at the cars many of the cars on animium, you'll notice many of them are from the DMI site.

JoeMamma2000 said:

And back to the 3D printers discussion....

Someone said that the software used by 3D printers is free. It's not. Someone, somewhere, pays for it. And it's probably the people who buy the 3D printer. Nothing whatsoever to do with free and/or "open source" software. If you sell a 3D printer, you need to have control over the software that runs it, so that the software integrates with your printer. Specifically. And continues to work with it as you make changes to the hardware. That is NOT the place for "open source" software.

The software that comes with a 3D printer can be considered to be an advanced "driver" for the printer. So, yes, the cost is included in the hardware. You can't buy it separately.

However, MeshLab, Sketchup, 123D Design, 3D Via Shape, MakeHuman.org, MeshMixer, Sculptris, Paint.net and several other programs are available without cost to the user. I am happy to report that I did not pay a cent for any of these programs. Some are open source, some are abandoned projects. Some are watered down versions of the commercial versions - but none of this detracts from the fact that they are available to people for use without charge.

Some of the programs I use are listed above. With those programs I can create a 3D model, export the model to .STL and correct the model so that the "driver" software of my 3D printer can produce an error free plastic model. Without the design software (free), conversion software (free) and correction software (free), my 3D printer would be about as useful as a small end table, and much more expensive.

Would I try to make a living with a "hobby level" 3D printer? Only if I were delusional.

I got a few new Sketchup 8 cars converted to .obj. Not the best meshes, but great for backgraound cars. The 59 Cadillac is pretty cool though. Fairly nice mesh. Others are low poly and small files, load real quick. Here are some renders.

:-)

So, I got Sketchup 8 Pro trial. 8 hours of time for free. Got a bunch of cool SKP8 cars, then saved them in SKP7 format. Then exported in .3ds, took into Poseray and converted to .obj files. Even when the trial runs out, I can still open SKP8 files, then resave in SKP7 foremat, open them in it and export them.

I found it earlier. There are a bunch of old cars made for Sketchup 8 that you can't get for Sketchup 7 or earlier. Gonna have to get version 8 and see what they look like.

:-)

music2u4u said:

betsy662 said:

You can get the car complete, its a sketchup model, you can also get the frame, engine and stuff separate as well.

Link?

:-)

I simply do a search for 1932, but heres a link!

http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=d8ad08d9ce0698a1ba784271b617106d&prevstart=0

betsy662 said:

You can get the car complete, its a sketchup model, you can also get the frame, engine and stuff separate as well.

Link?

:-)

You can get the car complete, its a sketchup model, you can also get the frame, engine and stuff separate as well.

music2u4u said:

Sketchup conversion. They also have it on the DMI site in .lwo format. Poseray will convert it. It was stock, I did the hot rod version myself.

http://www.dmi-3d.net/modelscar9.html

next to last row down...on right end.

:-)

Okay, I remember it now, I never could get that one smoothed out, too bad, since it would have made a perfect teachers car for some of the scenes I was making at the time!

Sketchup conversion. They also have it on the DMI site in .lwo format. Poseray will convert it. It was stock, I did the hot rod version myself.

http://www.dmi-3d.net/modelscar9.html

next to last row down...on right end.

:-)

Well, it seems I have also placed an order for a new computer. But not the one I had intended to get.

Chatting with the wife, she persuaded me to get a mobile graphics workstation. I should get it in about 8 days.

The system will have:

Intel Mobile Core i7-3840QM 2.80 GHz (up to 3.80 ) 4 Cores /8 Threads
8GB DDR3-1600
4GB GDDR5 NVIDIA GTX 675MX 256-bit GPU/VRAM Clock 600MHz/1800MHz
Seagate Momentus 750GB 7200rpm SATA 3Gb/s 16MB cache
17.3-inch 1920x1080 Non-Glare LCD

According to the CPU performance charts, the i7 3930K scores 12060 @ 3.5GHz.
The i7 3840 scores 8839 @ 2.8GHZ. Overclocking it to 3.4GHz would result in a score of 10773.
My current i7, overclocked to 3.5GHz, scores 6661.

I know I can OC the CPU to 3.4GHz without an issue so it will give me a good performance boost compared to current system. Won't be quite as fast as the i7 3730K, but it will be a portable computer which is what I will need if I am going to do the work I plan on doing. Based on the baseline renders, my current system took 7 min 6 secs. Frodi's render took 4 min 32 secs. I would estimate that the new laptop should do the baseline render in 5 minutes 5 seconds.

The graphics card in the notebook will certainly do OpenGL renders fast, so spot renders will be a breeze!

The sad part is that I probably won't have D|S installed until AFTER the new year. Well, D|S, Maya, 3ds Max, Sculptris, 123D, Sketchup, Autocad, Adobe CS 6, and a few other graphic design programs and utilities also need to be installed. Might put World of Warcraft on it too, if I have room!

We should keep this thread going, so other people will have a good idea of relative performance levels of computers.