Hello there! I need help in making a decision. Can you help me out? I currently use Poser 6, but am dissatisfied with its rendering capabilities. I want to purchase software with a superior render engine (including radiosity and global illumination) to render my Poser-assembled scenes with. Some of the scenes will be indoor, some outdoor. I don't need any modelling capabilities neither do I need foliage, sky, water or landscape generation tools. I am never going to animate anything. I have a 2.8GHz PC with 2 Gigabytes of RAM (not a MAC). Regarding the export of Poser models: the less painful, the better. I do not have the patience to re-rig OBJ's into the new software program. Professional quality toon rendering would be a plus, but not mandatory. I have only four options: Vue 5 Infinite Carrara 5 Pro Maya 7 3D Studio Max 8 I can obtain only ONE of the four options above. Which would you advise me to purchase? My system requirements can handle any of them. Thank you.

Download the demos and try them. Then you'll know which one to buy.

Carrara might be the best choice for the money. You'd have to try the demo and see if you like the program. Maya 7 and 3dsmax 8 are WAY overkill for just rendering poser, plus the expense is very high, learning curve long too. Maya 7 and 3dsmax each require a plugin to import poser content, the plugin for each is around $199. Vue5Infinite is all about the trees, sky and foliage that's what the program is for. It does import poser 6 content now. I have Vue 5 not Infinite and for my personal taste I don't like to render poser content in Vue, it's not that much faster for me in render times. Carrara 5 imports poser 6 files but not poser 6 dynamic hair or clothing. There is a plugin that will do this. Carrara 5 Pro has the plugin that imports Poser 6 dynamic hair and clothing. I'm in a similar situation. I have poser 4, 5, 6 and want faster render times. I'm looking at Carrara 5 and deciding on if I just need Standard or the Pro features. However I do what to model, do sky and tree's so I'm leaning toward C5Pro, you may only need C5 not pro depends. Definatly try the demo and see if you even like the look and feel of the program. Carrara is not poser, it's going to be different and you may or may not feel conforatble.

If you are looking for modeling capabilities in Carrara then its a NO. Renderer engine in Carrara is impressive and fast. However I heard that Electric Image renderer is faster.

Carrara is a general all around modeller and certainly better than v5.They didn't appear to want modeling, just good rendering.But, I have to agree w/ checking out demos. You need to know how comfortable you feel about the sw. Don't guess.

Message edited on: 01/13/2006 17:35

It is best to spend a lot of time with the demos. When I purchased Vue5 Infinite there was no demo, and I needed the application to create digital art for representation in a Santa Fe, New Mexico art gallery. Although I've managed to produce some complex artwork with Vue, the road was fraught with many beta potholes! Vue is certainly better than when I purchased, but it still has serious bugs (latest, alpha maps in 2 tier plants getting hosed when creating a new species (actually a variation) of plant from an existing one). I think e-on has cranked out over a dozen patches since release still has problems.

I think Carrara 5 Pro is the best bang for the $$. Obviously Maya 7 and 3D Studio Max 8 are powerhouse applications, and if you are planning on producing for the movies then go for it. However, as mentioned by others, very steep learning curves for both.

Carrara and Vue are both easy to use, although I think Carraras interface is now way better than Vues.

C5 has modelling tools and they work good, but the pro has some very interesting modelling tools that the standard does not have. Alternatively, you could get C5+Hexagon for 299 which contains the pro modelling stuff plus probably more (I cannot compare to the pro I have the standard.) What do strike me is that the rendering is far better than Poser and quicker. I love C5 and I love Hexagon now. :-) Oh yes I purchased the Transpose plugin, but have some problems when loading Poser characters, they sometimes lose their texture. I solve this by importing those as obj file.

I have some experience with Vue5e, Max 6 (as Viz2006) and with the Carrara5 Pro trial version. No experience with Maya.
Of your available choices I would go for the Carrara because it is stable and has an excellent texturing, assembling and rendering function. I have found both Vue and Max to be disappointingly unstable - crashes - even for the pros. If you are going to build scenes, Carrara seems second to Max-except that Max crashes so often. Max is very unforgiving of "wrong" inputs. If you know Poser6, then you know something, at least, about Carrara user interface as they are a bit similar in important ways. Rendering in Carrara (which would include very advanced textures, shaders, lights and so forth) is far advanced to many other software except maybe the very highest end. If you decide on Vue5, do get 5Infinite because the lights in Infinite only support accurate shadows which are an absolute must for good rendering. I also use Cinema 4D and in some important ways, Carrara seems comparable - not all ways - but some very important ones - especially if you don't want to model in Carrara. (Hex, Modo and Cinema are superior modelers)
You mention that you will assemble in Poser - much easier in Carrara. You also mention that you will render some scenes outdoors - infinitely better in Carrara.
Maya? Don't know - download the trials as suggested above. I also know that you would want to think about the community that supports your learning curve - ie: forums and tech support. Carrara seems very good to me so far - I asked a question on the official Vue forum at Eon over 10 days ago and no answer yet. I've ordered Carrara5 Pro. I want in on an affordable upgrade path and a good renderer/scene builder/atmospherec modeler. If cost is no object whatsoever, but reliability is; I'd look at Maya and then decide between Carrara and whatever you find out about Maya. This is a great forum here and at the Eovia site as well.
Regards, wb

Message edited on: 01/13/2006 19:39

DaQuestiener. Well Carrara 5 Pro can sure handle Poser scene alot better than Vue Infinite, Max or the other programs you mention. It can import Poser as Poser native format and in that format you can load POSES, Clothing, hair, Props right in C5Pro. Also C5Pro can import Poser 6 Dynamic hair via the build in transposer 2 feature. The C5Pro translucency will make clothing look very realistic with the C5 render engine. Sub surface Scattering will help make the skin tones more real. All in all C5Pro can do a much better job for a very good price.

Yes I fully agree.

Yes agree too but Carrara only have one bug that some people are already aware is alpha channel on poser that needs to be fixed.

I just had a very positive experience with Charles Brissart, Eovias development lead. I had sent him an email outlining some memory allocation errors (crashes) Ive been having with Carrara5 Pros new volumetric clouds in complicated scenes (usually, a lot of distributed instances). He sent me an upload URL, and I sent the problem file. Within 6 hours he sent me back an email stating that he had duplicated the problem in the debugger, and that it would be fixed with the next patch release. Now Eovia isnt perfect, but this kind of response causes me to have an honest respect for such software companies, and I sent him a very kind email back.

Attached is an example. Brand X is Carrara4 Pro with Transposer 2. The fanatics at eon's web site don't like anything that objectively demonstrates Vue weaknesses.

Message edited on: 01/14/2006 01:39

TransPoser 2 does a great job with Poser hair. You're right though. Vue 5 Infinite turns Poser hair into pasta mops.

I would recommend C5 Pro for the following reasons. 1. It is less expensive than your other choices. 2. It handles Poser 4 5 and 6 files natively 3. It has an awesome rendering engine, very fast and high quality. 4. It's user interface is simple yet very very powerful with a very low learning curve compared to the others. (It is a bit closer to the way Raydream Studio used to be, rather than C4.) 4. It has excellent modelling capabilities for the money. 5. It has great skinning and lighting options. And its good to hear that the volumetric clouds will be fixed in the next patch. That one bug has been driving me nuts. Give the C5 demo a try, You'll like it Im sure.

sparrownightmare wrote, "4. It has excellent modelling capabilities for the money." NO I disagree this one!! Modelling lacked symmetery tool and you have to work on every side or shift key everytime you select a polygon!!

Umm... While symmetry would be nice, especially since I do a lot of starships and such that tend to be symmetrical; I don't really care that much. With a bit of creativity and half a brain, you can get around that particular issue. I dont usually even use the vertex modeler, Im a spline junkie :) And symmetry aside, it has excellent modeling tools; you just have to work with it a bit to learn all the tricks and such. If you need something symmetrical, just create it and duplicate with symmetry. Doing it this way also gives you an easier way to introduce small imperfections on one side or another without bollaxing up both sides. Faces for example could have a mole on one side and contrary to opinion, no-one and I mean no-one has a perfectly symmetrical face or body.

The original poster stated "I don't need any modelling capabilities" so why is this thread FULL of whining about the lack of symetrical modeling? The original poster asked questions about specific areas and Carrara 5 pro covers these very well.

Maybe I need to post with whine-less message. Any suggest how I can do that?

Maybe I need to post with whine-less message. Any suggest how I can do that? Don't post:) Seriously. This is a first edition of the new VM. It has received a large amount of new tools. I'm sure in C6 we'll see a few more enhancements and likely symmetrical modeling. Be patient:)

Gweb...maybe you need MORE wine :D If they connect hex a bit better w/ carrara I think that would work great as well.Improved uvmapping is also on my list:) However, it sure does a whole lot and for $100 upgrade from c3 is darn near impossible to beat.

Well, here's a twist on the question - do I really need Carrara Pro as opposed to Carrara 5 standard? The pro features mostly seem to be truly pro, like render farming, that I'll never need. OK, so you get Transposer bundled, but C5 + Transposer is cheaper than C5 Pro. Also, I tend not to use dynamic hair/clothing anyway. So what are the killer features for Pro? Incidentally, another question: how much of a Poser 6 material does C5 translate? I'm tired of the way that Vue mangles Poser's reflectivity and specularity settings and ignores some parts of Poser 6 materials altogether.

Imports always have issues to work out poser or otherwise.c5 does support p6. Transposer is really only of benefit if you use dynamic items.Native p6 support w/ bones comes standard.The comparison matrix will help clarify.Pro really has more (file support, modeling tools, animation tools, also irradiance maps)
http://www.eovia.com/products/carrara5/carrara_pro_vs_std.asp Make sure you don't need pro, if you decide to go with c5. Eovia said that the $99 upgrade was a special price. Also it will still cost you at least $299 to upgrade later to c5pro unless they have a promotion.

Message edited on: 01/16/2006 15:31

Hmmmmmm. I'm looking at Carrara, too. Have been (on-and-off) for quite a while now. Over the last few weeks, I've been hearing some stuff about Carrara that has gotten my attention again.

I've recently purchased a plug-in for P6 (GlowWorm at DAZ) which drastically increases the power of control over native P6 firefly renders. GlowWorm allows for multipass rendering. A great advantage........but on the other hand -- the downside is that it's time-consuming.

But I'm still not satisfied with Poser's render/memory issues -- Poser tends to choke on complicated scenes. This has been a problem with Poser for a long, L-O-N-G, time. It forces the user to try all sorts of "tricks" in an attempt to get Poser to render a scene.......an occasionally irritating process. Not to mention forcing you to operate in trial-and-error mode.

Carrara Pro, huh?

I'll have to spend some time browsing the Carrara gallery. See what others have done with Poser scenes imported into Carrara.

Message edited on: 01/16/2006 17:51

For shear rendering power carrara is awesome standard or pro.It's biggest strength I think is rendering.

"Poser tends to choke on complex scenes" - not only that, but they are a beast to set up compared to any other similar application. The fact that you can't easily duplicate an item without saving it to the library and loading it back, for instance. For anything beyond simple ready-made backdrops, Poser is not really an option.

I've created some complicated scenes in Poser. But it takes all sorts of jumping through hoops to get Poser to render the scene out.

My current most-frequently-used method involves splitting the scenes up into parts & rendering the pieces separately. Then compositing the renders in Photoshop.

Unfortunately, the recent history of Vue as an alternate renderer hasn't been so rosy. Also, even when it's not broken by "updates": .........Vue is great for outdoor scenes. But when it comes to indoors -- it's a bit problematic.

Perhaps Carrara might provide a way to side-step the problem. It's certainly worth a look. Who knows......? It might even be fun to try a hand at modeling something. Contribute to freestuff.

Message edited on: 01/17/2006 17:58

Attached Link: http://www.eovia3d.net

Thanks for the link, dlk. I'll certainly give it a look. :)

Get Carrara 5 if you want to make images like those found in the Carrara galleries.

Why is Vue particularly problematic with indoor scenes? It isn't as easy to set up indoor scenes in Vue as it is in, say, Bryce, because of the lack of tools like constrained dragging. But once you have it set up, I don't find any major problems. Without wishing to be rude, I didn't find the Carrara gallery here to be a great advertisement for Carrara (with some exceptions), when I had a quick look. A lot of the images are very simple and often overly bright. It makes one wonder if the software is difficult to use for more elaborate scenes, and people aren't really pushing the program to its limits.

LOL I own Vue4Pro. I think people who used VUE is usually for their serious hobby. Vue is easy to make image with simple terrain and pretty plants. I won't use Vue for animation because of renderer speed is terrible slow. It may be a reason why many people gave up on Vue animation project due to speed problem and they may have decided to post their images in forums. I have not tried indoor with Vue and can't say how difficult it is. Carrara is a great program but it lacked symmeterical modeling. Some people here are tired of hearing this. I use Carrara for my serious small business and hobby. I just don't post images here except to show people some modeling and rendering techiques. Sorry that you did not find impressive images made with Carrara here. Some people dont like to show off their real work. Vue is unlike Carrara in my opinion.

Most of the Carrara images here are done in earlier versions of the software. There is a noticeable quantum leap in image quality with C5 as can be seen in the gallery. I'm kind of curious as tyo what GWeb neds symmetry so badly for. What kind of business graphics do you need to do? I couldnt find any images posted here from you which is a shame because I'd like to see some of your work. Right now I am rendering my first attempt at importing a poser figure into a scene and using some of the new tools. I just wish I could get Indirect ighting to work. It keeps crashing my machine (total system crash as in reboot). Has anyone else had this issue. And no I am not using volumetric clouds.

I have posted images in here and they are in archieve. Everybody need symmeterical modeling because everything is symmeterical. I do not have time on modeling each side to make sure it is symmeterical with other side. I do not like to use shift key. I use ZBrush alot for symmeterical modeling. You could find awesome images at www.zbrushcentral.com Some zBrush images are rendered with Carrara. Ken Brilliant used Carrara for renderer engine with his models.

I don't generally have to have symmetry. There are ways around it. And it is possible to construct fairly elaborate scenes in Carrara. A few of my images contain over 200 objects and dozens of light sources. Add in transparent ad semi transparent objects and that is a lot for the software to handle, especially for such an inexpensive package. While these scenes take a long time to render, most of that is because I render in a very high resolution (1600x1200 @300dpi) I sometimes have my images printed poster size so I like a super high res master. The thing I like most about Carrara is the interface and ease of use. I am currently teaching my wife how to work it. I am starting her with Ray Dream to get her feet wet and I estimate by next summer she should be able to do some fairly complex images. Programs like C4D and Maya have a learning curve as steep as Mt Everest. Carrara can be self taught to the point of being useful, in just a week or so.

Whatever, lets assume that 1 sided modeling dont bother you much.

No, it doesn't. Like I said earlier I usually do my main models in the spline modeler. Which is pretty to get symmetry in. If I need to I convert it to the vertex modeler and go from there. This process is much faster and less mouse intensive than just using the vertex room for a lot of things. You just have to be good at figuring out how the object will look when done. For instance the wings on my Raptor fighter are actually one symmetrical model, done in the spline room. I have yet to find something which cannot be done this way. For people I just use Poser, so no it doesn't bother me much. The whole symmetry thing has been rehashed to death so Im not going to comment on it further.

Everybody including myself knows that Spline modeling have symmetery but it is for "Semi-Lathe Workshop", it has alot of gap area that you could not get polygons where you want it placed. Modeling little more complex and you'll agree with me.

Quite frankly, as an owner of both Vue5 Infinite and Carrara5 Pro, I find that Carrara5 does very well for both indoor and outdoor scenes. Except for Vue's ability to generate unique individuals when populating a scene with plants & rocks, Carrara seems superior in almost all aspects. Positioning distributed objects in C5Pro is much more accurate. I also personally prefer Carraras real-world (3D world) terms used in the shader tool. Vues abstract function driven tool is powerful in its own right, but uses terminology more appropriate for a mathematics programmer, than a 3D artist. Im good with math (I have an instrumentation hardware technology background), but I do not like such abstractions put into a program presumably designed for digital artists.

As for terrain generation -- I've started importing Carrara generated terrains into Vue, because Carrara's terrain modeler works that much better for me. If you want to simply do drag-'n-drop artwork (nothing wrong with that) then Vue is pretty fair, but, in my non-humble opinion, not worth the price of admission.

On the other hand, Ive started using Vue to generate a variety of plants, to be imported into C5Pro for distribution.

Carraras renderer is totally beyond Vue. I can render high quality scenes in C5Pro in one day that would take Vue a week to render! Even then, the C5Pro results always seem superior.

BTW, C5Pros network rendering is probably not quite as easy to setup and use as Vues, but it is much more reliable for large renders.

If I had to choose only one of the two programs Vue5I or C5Pro, I would take C5Pro any day!

Well written. :)

I have noticed over saturation in carrara, but this is easily corrected and frankly that is totally relative to individual taste. Depends on the point. People make the art using the tools so depends on who is using it. There is alot of old work here and it is limited.There really should be more Carrara work out there no doubt. Vue has a graininess everywhere I don't care for.Go to eovia's site and check out the gallery there. Again some things are relative. Some scenes may appear complex when they don't require near the skill of a seemingly more simple scene.I can't say I have seen any overly impressive Vue scenes either w/ rare exception so not sure what your comparing it to. Can't really model in Vue whereas in Carrara you can despite what Gweb tells you :D.Obviously, you'll have to decide for yourself what works for you.

Phantast wrote, "I didn't find the Carrara gallery here to be a great advertisement for Carrara (with some exceptions)" Then don't get Carrara. Simple answer.

GWeb wrote, "I do not have time on modeling each side to make sure it is symmeterical with other side." No one I've seen here models that way. People are smarter than that and have found ways in Hexagon and Carrara and other 3D modelers to make symmetrical objects very quickly.

There is someone who posts frequently in the Carrara gallery which would lead visitors to think that Carrara is the worst 3D program there is. Hopefully there are enough people to post much better artwork in the Carrara gallery to compensate.

Shonner, I assume you dont have Hexagon or ZBrush? Is everything in half in your life? :P

I have both programs. I can cope in the world and can reason. I don't consider myself higher-functioning or lower.

If you want to look at a vast set of excellent quality renders create with Carrara Go here. http://www.eovia3d.net/fame/fame.php I think those do a great service at showing off what can be done with Carrara 5 with out Symmetrical modeling. http://www.eovia3d.net/gallery/ Carrara 5 Pro is by far more feature rich than Vue 5 Infinite it also has a superior render engine and less bugs.

Well. If you are specializing in 3D mechanical design then symmetrical tools are an asset -- but represent a short cut, not an absolute. Organic modeling...not sure why one would consider a symmetry tool of great value, as nature, on an organic level, is not symmetrical. The U.S. Manned Lunar Mission managed to do fine with organic humans using drafting boards and manual symmetrical drafting. The LEM (Lunar Excursion Module) used a computer that had less power than todays scientific calculator, and landed fine with non-symmetrical input from this little CPU, and the organicnon-symmetrical human astronauts.

So what is this overtly big deal about symmetry anyway? The greatest technological achievements in human history were done without it.

I feel sorry for his clients that have to listen to his rants for why he can't model anything for them using a computer to aid him.

Message edited on: 01/19/2006 23:18

GWeb wrote, "Ken Brilliant used Carrara for renderer engine with his models." Which weren't symmetrical, by the way.

Symmeterical modeling is a fast way to make a complete model. After you make a symmeterical model, you always can make it imperfect with other tools. I am no rant, I am realistic. Geez If your happy with one sided modeling, I think your nut but if ur happy with it then go for it.