I Samuel said:

Carrara  ...  will last as long as Microsoft Windows last.

Good to know, I'm hoping to use it for many years to come.  Others here have said no problems with Win 11 (which I'm not using yet).

msdhack -

Impressive images.  This Carrara program looks prety good.  

Yes that is the default Carrara 'cast iron' texture with a little Anything Goos...

I believe the plant generator is sorely underused.  Unfortunately the defaults are terrible which puts people off, but I put in just a little work and got something almost acceptable...

Head made in make-human.  Baked a noise texture for the skin using inagoni plugin and then painted some texture and bump using 3DPaint utility.  Complete with Carrara hair moustache...

Steve K said:

Okay, now I'm seeing it, pretty scary alright.  

Ha Ha, I just try these simple, quick animations for fun, as nothing can beat the super prototyping speed of Carrara. That is why I have no plan for leaving DAZ's Carrara 3D, as it runs pretty well on Intel i9 and Windows 11. Carrara is written in native C++  and uses COM (Component Object Model), which will last as long as Microsoft Windows last.

I have a z620 with a pair of e5-2690 xeons which gives me 32 threads of rendering (32 render buckets in Carrara).  It is way way faster to render than my main gaming computer, which has a pretty nice i7.  It's true that the clock speed is slower, but the number of render cores is more important for Carrara rendering (at least with the native render engine, which is what I prefer; if you're thinking of using Octane for Carrara, then that's dependant on your GPU instead).   You can think of it as a high clock speed meaning that each individual 'render bucket' renders faster, but having tons of render buckets which might each be slightly slower individually still overall eclipses the render speed of a much lower thread count.

So yes, I think your idea of a z640 is a FANTASTIC idea for Carrara rendering, in fact I'm very glad I stumbled on this thread because back when I got the z620 (has it already been 5+ years?) the z640's were still out of reach for me price wise.  Now a quick glance at ebay tells me I can likely get one for less than $200.  Moreover it blows my mind to find out that the xeon e5 2699 v4's which were originally listed at over $4000 each, can now be had on ebay for around $200 each.  And after some checking it looks to me like the z640's chipset can use them (more investigation needed to confirm...)   

Whoa.  I'm thinking it's time for me to do an upgrade, as the thought of having 88 render cores at my command is... well very very cool.

I could use this to get a larger solid state hard drive (again looks like I could quadruple my current 1TB to 4TB for around $200 by hunting on ebay), and I'd finally have more than enough room to put in my entire library of DAZ content and still have plenty left over for other things if I wanted. I could even (slightly) upgrade my GPU from a 1070 to a 1080 ti for less than $200, and all told I'd be spending what... around $1k for a new render monster?  

I too was looking with envy at the new threadrippers (and who knows? in 4 or 5 years they too might fall into a reasonable price range) but hey with 88 render cores at such a reasonable price point, who needs to wait on threadrippers?  :)

well Sagan by TheMysteryIsThePoint exports obj series nicely and they are not heavy in Carrara as the Digital Carvers Guild importer loads only one each frame

just a big folder of objs to find room for

WendyLuvsCatz said:

Bunyip02 said:

WendyLuvsCatz said:

Bunyip02 said:

WendyLuvsCatz said:

well it seems my Win7 machine has died 

Oh-no - not good ....

yeah no more VWD, won't work on Win10

Carrara throws an error if I even stick the extension in 

guess I needed the new drive I got the other day for all the DAZ studio obj series exports of Dforce sims for DCG obj series importer

With VWD is that the original version or the updated version ?

Sounds like the new drive was a blessing !

original but it's Philemo's bridge that is the issue

the extension 

and I gain 2 4TB external drives from my Win7 I guess

Hmmm, VWD was on my wishlist - might need to reconsider ....

Anyone else running VWD on Win 10 without any problems ?

Bunyip02 said:

WendyLuvsCatz said:

Bunyip02 said:

WendyLuvsCatz said:

well it seems my Win7 machine has died 

Oh-no - not good ....

yeah no more VWD, won't work on Win10

Carrara throws an error if I even stick the extension in 

guess I needed the new drive I got the other day for all the DAZ studio obj series exports of Dforce sims for DCG obj series importer

With VWD is that the original version or the updated version ?

Sounds like the new drive was a blessing !

original but it's Philemo's bridge that is the issue

the extension 

and I gain 2 4TB external drives from my Win7 I guess

WendyLuvsCatz said:

Bunyip02 said:

WendyLuvsCatz said:

well it seems my Win7 machine has died 

Oh-no - not good ....

yeah no more VWD, won't work on Win10

Carrara throws an error if I even stick the extension in 

guess I needed the new drive I got the other day for all the DAZ studio obj series exports of Dforce sims for DCG obj series importer

With VWD is that the original version or the updated version ?

Sounds like the new drive was a blessing !

Bunyip02 said:

WendyLuvsCatz said:

well it seems my Win7 machine has died 

Oh-no - not good ....

yeah no more VWD, won't work on Win10

Carrara throws an error if I even stick the extension in 

guess I needed the new drive I got the other day for all the DAZ studio obj series exports of Dforce sims for DCG obj series importer

ShawnDriscoll said:

Windows 11 treats legacy apps (ca. 2005) with respect, as though written for Windows 11. My Carrara Pro 5.1 has 32 buckets being thrown at it for rendering.

Very interesting.  Carrara 5 is 32 bit I believe.  So does running on Windows 11 mean that Carrara 5 (and other 32 bit software) is now free from the RAM limitations of being merely 32 bit ?

I never noticed much difference with the number of threads

not that my computers are anything to boast about

but when I upgraded my Win7 intel5 to i7 years ago and ended up with 8 tiles instead of 4, it rendered exactly the same speed

my Win10 which is supposedly vastly inferior renders much the same speed too with its 4 tiles  (AMD Ryzen3)

I don't doubt a Threadripper would be a vast improvement though but I think from my experience the clock speed is more likely the reason why rather than number of cores

unless you are doing multiple tasks on it

many Carrara render options like NPR only use one core anyway which is why many of our forumites have been digging out their old laptops 

what I do use is Octane render, that definitely is still an option if you have a nice otherwise unused in Carrara Nvidia card, but sadly now subscription 

my OR4 was a once off payment while big no more than another mediocre PC would cost and considerably less than a Threadripper!

With the high end Threadrippers being so powerful but expensive, other CPUs have generally improved, and older powerful machines of the day have dropped in price.  I would appreciate if users could give their own thoughts.  Are the number of cores more important than the CPU base frequency speeds ?  What sort of rendering times are users experiencing for animations ?  I am thinking of getting a used HP Z640 workstation with 2 x Xeon E5-2699 V4, which is 44 cores/88 threads, but am not totally sure how wise is the choice..

Dartanbeck said:

richardandtracy said:

This is going to sound really convoluted (because it is!), but it's possible to do an autofit of ShadowDancer for Hiro3 (or A3) on V3 if you turn V3 into a TriAx character and load the Hiro3 (or A3) default figure obj file as an autofit clone in the way described in the tutorial in this thread. The tutorial goes beyond what you'd need to load ShadowDancer on V3, but you could extract only what you need.

Like I said, it's convoluted & would depend on how much you need a Shadow Dancer on V3.

Regards,

Richard

Makes me wonder if something like this would work using Genesis, if we have the Generation 3 shapes for Genesis. We could use the V3 clone of Genesis to shape the costume, then do some Wendy workaround magic to turn it into a V3 item?

Just thinking aloud.

Having GenX2 along with all of the clones, I prefer using Genesis 1, 2 or 3 when I want to use V3 or any of those figures from Generation 3. But that's just me and my workflow.

the advantage is one can batch convert legacy stuff without using DAZ studio or Poser

it creates new cr2 files

I use it to make a lot of stuff fit V4 and M4 to then use Autofit on in D|S and Carrara with Genesis 1 

Creature with animation, made with Carrara very quickly!

Generation3dx said:
My first stop was Octane Render, but after 2 hours of frustration have given up as it doesn't seem to install easily/properly and the textures look a mess. A look at their message boards seem to indicate that the plugin for Daz isn't getting much love either.

I don't use Octane Render much anymore (I've gotten lazy because Iray in DS is just too simple). However before DAZ3d implemented Iray in DS, and DAZ3d quit developing Carrara, I used Octane Render a lot. I can understand your frustration, as Octane isn't  even close to as easy to use as Iray is in DS. Shaders and materials don't translate as well as you would hope. This means that the user will need to do a lot of their own work to fix them. The user interface is complicated and somewhat confusing for a new user.  The original developer of the plugin wanted to implement everything available in Octane to ensure it was all available in the plugin. The unfortunate downside to this is that it is not as easy to use as Iray, the upside is that you can have very fine control over almost all of Octanes functions and capabilities (you can really go crazy making complicated node structures for your shaders).

Unfortunately, unless you have used similar professional level render engines like Octane, two hours simply isn't even close to enough time to come to grips with Octane Render (IIRC it took me about two weeks). DAZ has made using Iray very simple and straight forward. I get the general feeling that most users never even modify and materials or shader settings because they look good enough straight out of the box. This is great for ease of use, but it also creates an expectation that everything should be just as simple it other applications. In my experience, getting the same quality images from another render engine will always need a fair amount of additional work, and a lot of learning along the way.

I'm not trying to convince you to use Octane, in fact, unless Octane Render provides specific features the you really need that aren't available in DS, I would recommend against it. One of the big reasons to use it would be because you don't have enough GPU memory to do what you want with Iray, and you don't want to buy another graphics card. Clearly Octane is ideal for this with it's out of core memory capabilities (you can use system RAM in addition to your GPU memory). It's a great choice for other things as well, like a faster render view port, faster rendering, advanced lighting, etc.

If your still somewhat interested in Octane Render, in addition to the outstanding work done by Sorel, I think most of the work done by Valzheimer (https://www.artstation.com/valzheimer/albums/82201) was done with Octane Render.

IMHO you will have a similar experience with any other possible options. Exporting to Blender might be your best option, though it will have it's own learning curve. Blender also opens up the possibility of using a long list of external render engines (Pixar Renderman can be used for free and it's not just for cartoons, here are movies it has been used on https://renderman.pixar.com/movies). If all you want to do is produce single image renders (not animations), as others have already mentioned, probably your best option is Iray.

tldr;
As far as I know right know, unfortunately your experience with Octane Render will be somewhat similar with any other available options. It's typically a lot of additional work to use any render engine that isn't heavily supported by content creators at DAZ3D.

As for creating a model of different hair-styles in Carrara maybe Stezza might add some knowledge.

Hello Khoe, I added a texture to the hair in the Carrara shader for the obj after I had imported the obj, and got a result.

Hair texture is from Curl Up N' Dye Hair Resource - by ForbiddenWhispers - available at Renderosity

If you played around with a black and white conversion of the hair texture and added it to the Alpha channel in the shader you might get better results.

I bought some hair shapes from Art Station, but unfortunately they don't have any textures.
I tried to do some crafting in Carrara but the results aren't good.
I read everywhere that most people work with hair carts. I have to admit I have absolutely no idea. What I found as a tutorial is completely incomprehensible to me (not just because of the language, unfortunately I don't speak English that well)
Is there maybe something you can work with in Carrara or whatever.
at mall an object that I have loaded. How would you do that.
Thanks :)