Has anyone pre-ordered yet? Do you think the Beta version offer is a good incentive to pre-order? Just wondering, Max

The Beta is wonderful. On my system, Global Illumination is now 3-4 times faster. Ray traced soft shadows is totally cool. And the HDRI is killer. The above image is created with the new NPR renderer. Mark

Sounds cool. Glad to hear that GI is 3-4 times faster.

I am no longer six years old so I've learned to wait for Santa Claus. It doesn't make much difference whether I wait two weeks or two months so no, the beta is not much of an incentive for me. However, a business lives on its cash flow. As I have a vested interest in Eovia's continuing existence and Carrara product development I'll be pre-ordering later today. Besides... Carrara is a decent product at a decent price. Such things should be rewarded.

I'm assuming in that the NPR watercolor-style render, you turned off shadows, but that you could render non-photo-realistic shadows if you wanted to do that.

For NPR (non-photorealistic) everything is controllable. Ambient, shadow, highlight, line etc. can each have their own paint/drawing atributes. They can sample from your textures or get a pure color instead. Additionally, from the 20-30 brush and drawing types you can control thickness, direction, length of stroke, transparency and more. Pretty cool. Here is the same image rendered with Raytraced Soft Shadows.

Wow! You've rendered it without GI?? Cool:-)

Some of those diagonal shadows are showing edge jaggies like you would get if the shadow map is set low, like 256 or so. Can you boost shadow resolution? I guess ray-traced shadows wouldn't use a shadow map like less advanced renderers do (e.g. Poser 4).

how is quickly the HDRI render ?

Mateo, The jaggies on the window shadow are because I was using a low resolution gel on the spot light. A higher res gel would fix that problem. You can also adjust shadow resolution and fuzziness to suit your subject. A cool new feature is the ability to adjust the "size" of the emission from a spot-light. It's called Light Radius. A small radius creates crisp shadows behind an object; a large radius creates crip shadows up close to object that diffuse and get soft the further away from the object the shadow gets. Andy, HDRI is as fast as the photorealistic render settings. BUT, it is pretty important to do test renders trying various settings at a smaller resolution before you go for the big one. It's easy to "over adjust" the settings beyond what is really needed for a given image. You can go from a 2 minute render to a 30 minute render simply by moving an adjustment slider a little too far. HDRI is GREAT! The image above was lit with only an HDRI background and one spotlight set at 15%. The ability to realistically create environmental lighting and beleivable, bright reflections is fantastic.

from 2 to 30 min. for one frame ... hmmm thx for info MarkBremmer ;-)

Anyone with the Beta know if trees limbs/leaves can be animated to simulate wind motion?

Thanks.
Dan H.

Dan, All tree paramaters can be animated.

for me looks amazing, did Eovia fix the bugs from the last release?

Isulaelu, Yes. It's a nice step forward.

Direct quote from Yahoo Groups Carrara forum: ------ For this version of the trees they cannot be animated. But adding bones can do the trick. Ringo >>> boblaprime@c... 07/17/03 06:17AM >>> That tree editor looks awesome. Am I overlooking something? Can they be animated? Bob ----- So which is it? Can they or can't they be animated? Confused, -Paul

Apologies, My earlier post was a little confusing. Thanks for the clarification request Paul. To clarify - each part of the trees can be adjusted (trunk, limbs, branches & leaves). However, they cannot be keyframed for animation. Ringo is right - you can use bones to make the tree move in the wind but that won't help if you want the tree to grow out of the ground and sprout leaves instead. Zenstar's Tree Druid can be animated/keyframed but I don't know if they'll be porting it to Carrara since Carrara now has it's own tree generator. I've used Tree Druid - the Carrara plug-in, not the stand alone - for years. I haven't spoken to Mike Pogue recently though so I don't know for sure. So what's the difference between Carrara's tree's and Tree Druids plug-in trees? This biggest is animation obviously. That's a function that I hope the will bring to Carrara at some point. Also, Tree Druid (TD) allows you to create a tree by season. In the fall it even creates leaves on the ground - the plug in version. In Carrara you need to always tell it what size and how many leaves you want. Here is where I'm really impressed with Carrara trees though. It has a tremendous amount of options that the plug-in TD does not. In fact, the advanced options are formidable. You can control everything, spiraling of leaves, leaf count etc. The image above shows the advanced tree options. Don't be overwhelmed by the advanced tree interface though. The standard tree interface will get you decent trees fast.

Cool. This looks good, and it is only really 1.0. I am sure it will be updated more and enhanced for animation. -Paul

I just now preordered too. Wooohooo, can't wait to play with this!

does anyone know about plugins for Carrara 2 working in C3... I got a lot of them... hey you 3d party gurus... let us know what you are all up to!

bijouchat,

Most of the DCG plug-ins are already converted and in testing right now.

Best regards,
Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
3D plug-ins for Carrara
http://digitalcarversguild.com

Great! So I know my stuff from you is ok... I guess I better shoot off emails to Zenstar and Lost Horizon... even though there's a tree editor, I still want to use the Tree Druid plugin... (though, I could get along with the standalone, which I do own) and the fresnel plugin in PPex is something I definitely like a lot.

Can you place one of several texture layers (ie. a stone texture) on a group of steps in a stairway using world mapping so that every step doesn't look like an identical clone? And can you select a single group of objects from a very complex scene and work on it alone, with the rest of the scene temporarily invisible and out of the way?

Hi Max, I'll give you a cautious answser of yes because I'm not sure that I fully understand your shader question without seeing an example. Being able to select "local" or "global" coordinants is available in Carrara2 as well as Carrara3. It simple is dependent on how you set up your shader tree.There are actually a bunch of ways to accomplish that in Carrara2 and even more in C3. Now for your other question: Something that you can do in C3 and currently C2 IS work on a group of objects separatly. That's a very important function to me too. Any group of objects can be double-clicked on and will open up as a group by themselves in an assembly room window. After editing the group, a small button at the top of the assembly room window will read, "Jump Out". Selecting that button will let you leave the group and rejoin the total scene with your group in place. As a matter of fact, one of my model building tricks is to have groups within groups for easy editing of components. Even a single object can be designated as a group! They only thing that I wish was different would be how the Area Renders functions. Currently, if you're editing a group and do an Area Render on the group, you actually get the full scene in the render. It would be nice if only the group you were working on was rendered. Hope that this clears some things up.

Funny Mark, I was just thinking that about the Area Render tool.
I do have a question about the UV Mapper capabilities. Dose it work like UV Mapper wear you export the Map, work on it on a image editor and then bring it back to C to position it?

No exporting required. It is a tool that is accessed from within the vertex modeler. You have the options of Sphere, Box (with all its variations), Cylinder and Planer. You can easily adjust your vertexes to match your maps and get a real time presentation for reference. Pretty cool.

can you select the vertices and move them around, or have edge mode, etc? I dunno, looks good for simple stuff, for complicated stuff I'll probably still be using uvmapper pro.

The entire mesh, or individual vertices and edges may be moved whereever you want them. You can select any combination of vertecies, edges and whole polygons. I can't compare it to UVmapper pro, just UVmapper. As compared the regular UVmapper, IMHO, it's much, much easier to use. (But then again, my parents dropped me a lot on my head when I was a baby...) As with UVmapper, you can move and adjust meshes over the texture maps so layouts for Poser figures is easily accomplished. Now it's just the whole Poser import thing... With the press releases on Eovia's site, I'm cautiously optimistic about the future. I do a lot with aircraft meshes so this feature is outstanding for aligning texture maps with those kind of parts too. At any rate, it's much better than what Carrara had internaly for mapping before nothing.

very true, C had nothing before. regarding Poser, I import whole scenes from Poser quite a lot for rendering in Carrara, I have a method for doing it, its really not that hard for me anymore. There are some quirks, but I have managed to get around them. I just cannot do animations very well... for this I'd like a plugin.

Hi folks,

Just a quick post showing Anything Grooves, Anything Grows, and Shader Ops in C3.

It's not HDRI, but shows what can be accomplished using Sky and the seperate Skylight, with no Indirect lighting, settings in the updated GI renderer.

Regards,
Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
3D plug-ins for Carrara
http://digitalcarversguild.com

aaaaarrrrgh... that looks great!! As I own all of those... I can't wait to use them!

Beta arrived today! Having trouble getting background image to show in vertex modeller. Also have no preview in UV mapper. Will try again in OS-X. So far looks pretty cool. A little crowded in places and some duplicate buttons...but the tree engine is wonderful, and creasing in sub-D's works great.