Anyone using Carrara to do animation using Poser imports? I'm using Vue as the environment and importing Poser characters. Any advantage over Vue? or disadvantage? Dale

The main advantages would be a better renderer (matter of opinion on my part), mainly I say this because some of the abilities that Vue's renderer is just getting, Carrara has had for awhile now, so its a bit more mature and stabalized on the rendering side of things. You can actually model objects for your scene's in Carrara, you have a spline modeler, vertex modeler, text modeler, metaball modeler, boolean modeling, and the Amapi 7 modeler. You also get a lot of special effects capabilities that Vue does not have. IE. Particle systems, particle fountains, etc. Personally while I like Vue a lot, and think its incredible at what it does, I think Carrara is a better choice for a more well rounded package with a broader range of features.

As you already own Vue, I think it is not useful to get Carrara for importing Poser content, I find that Vue handle them better, and render them at least as good as Carrara. One of the disadvantage of Carrara could be that it doesn't import dynamic hair and clothes, and you need a plugin to import Poser content (except in "Pro" version). The advantage are the modeling function that aren't in Vue, but if you want to get a modeler, for the same price you can get Softimage, and it is a quite good software;) (euphemism)

One of the disadvantage of Carrara could be that it doesn't import dynamic hair and clothes, and you need a plugin to import Poser content (except in "Pro" version)... Yet, but I have heard this is changing very soon. And you do need a plugin with Vue to get dynamic hair, thats what Mover does. Softimage is a good deal, but I wouldn't recommend it to work in conjunction with Poser, and its interface, do to the power it does have, is quite a bit more complicated then any of the software you have suggested thus far. Really what you should do is just demo all the software you are interested in, and go with what you find works for you. Brian

I use both.. Vue's and carrara's renderings are nice... but carrara is WAY faster!! Vue's handling of plants is WAY better!!! carrara is far better at modeling..blaaa blaaa blaa... if you're thinking about getting carrara .. do it! you'll use it more than likely right along side Vue

If you have Vue already, you may be able to upgrade to Vue 5 Infinite next month which is a fantastic outdoor scene generator and renderer (it exports HDR files, too).

yaa vue 5 to infinite $399.. little too much for what i want.. but then I already have both :) i like having carrara along side Vue.. that and Vue is still a little querky... where as carrara is 99% stable

Message edited on: 02/18/2005 17:46

Some how my post disappeared. I'll try again

I have a demo of Carrara 4 but don't have the time to check it out. I'm currently working on some animation that will be about 20 minutes long. I have only have four done and although the film festival is late September the deadline is June. :((

Currently Vue is coming out with Infinite, Poser with 6 and Daz with Bryce 5.5. Keeping up with the Jones's will brake my piggy bank ( A small piggy bank). I'm gong to wait for the dust to settle and probably buy Vue Infinite because I wont have much of a learning curve.

thanks for you input.

Dale

Message edited on: 02/19/2005 02:00

Message edited on: 02/19/2005 02:03

It's true that Carrara doesn't support Dynamic Hair for Poser, but It DOES support Dynamic Cloth. You shouldn't post incorrect information if you are not sure. Patrick Tuten

I haven't tried Vue, though I love so many of the renders I have seen. I have C4pro and I am learning it, but one thing I found right away is that it is a very fast renderer. One of the reasons I got this was to import Poser characters for animation as well as have the capacity to make my own (after hours and hours of practice!). Poser was just too slow to realistically create animations, at least for me. I don't know if Vue is fast, I know it produces nice renders. So does C4pro. I downloaded the demo before I bought to see if I could import and render some simple Poser animations and it worked well. As I become more experienced I hope to be able to share more.

Vue can take a lot of horse power to get something done. Rendering on network for me just doesnt work. I find using just one machine to render one scene work better. But the price is I lose a computer for a day or two. Right now I have one computer rendering 720x405 pixels, 63 of 151 frames, 42% dome, and Time left is only 19 hours and 33 minutes. I have 12 computers nine are 866 MHz two are 2.1 GHz and one is out on lone. Dale

You have 12 computers at your disposal? Lucky guy! Care to share the wealth sometime and setup a render farm for the rest of us? :D

Transposer 2 is out! It supports all aspects of Poser animation import, including Dynamic hair.