I just bought Carrara 5 pro, and this is my first effort with it. I used the Desk scene preset, and made a few modifications. To do the maps, I used maps from the national Geographic Maps CD set (Mars from 1972 and a world map from 1970) and exported them as Microsoft office pictures, then copied and pasted them into Photoshop Elements where I used them as textures on a UV-mapped rectangle exported from Rhino. The picture on the desk is my grandfather. To get James posed right, I exported the chair and table as 3ds files then imported them into Poser And posed James in the chair with his arm resting on the table. Then I deleted the chair and table from Poser and saved it with just james in that pose, then I imported him into the carrara scene and scaled and positioned him. (I also had to reposition the chair). I had to import James as an obj because carrara freezes when I try to import a pz3 (even though I have 2 GB RAM). But I am really impressed with Carrara's fast, high-quality rendering.

I thought I'd seen your name before, and now I realize you are listed as a moderator for 3dsmax and Poser. Why would you need Carrara if you have 3dsmax? Nice render by the way, and welcome aboard! I've been using Carrara for a few weeks now, and am very pleased so far.

Glad to see you over here! Looks like a great first render. -Kix

i like the soft edges on the furniture. If you attempt to import with Native and the character has dynamic hair, yes, Carrarra freezes up. I tried everything about 8 days ago to get dynamic hair in thru Native, but no point, really. ::::: Opera :::::

Martian Hunter--had me fooled with the first effort bit--made me feel very downhearted! The idea of taking the chair back into poser is very clever. Native and Transposer each have important differences--why they are there independently.. Good poser things in the C5.0.4 patch update out today.

"I tried everything about 8 days ago to get dynamic hair in thru Native, but no point, really." Dynamic Hair and Cloth requires Transposer.

"Dynamic Hair and Cloth requires Transposer. " yes, i realize that. The trade-off is.....no morphs come in thru transposer, therefore it is only good for rendering poser scenes exactly as-is, not that there is anything wrong with that! ::::: Opera ::::

had me fooled with the first effort bit<<
I have previous experience with other 3d apps (vue, bryce, 3dsmax, poser, etc), so although this isn't my first effore with 3d it is with carrara. I noticed that carrara has max's "sideways" coorinates (with Z being the vertical axis instead of Y as it is in Vue, Bryce and poser). So far I really like carrara. I ordered the new Carrara 5 Pro Handbook ($31 on half.com), and am waiting for it to be delivere.

Random thoughts: One, I had that Mars map from 1972. On the back of it was a really cool painting of a sandstorm plume rising up into a mostly black Martian sky. I used to stare at that for hours thinking, one day.... Two, the Z axis thing is shared with Star Trek, as well. Remember the scene in Wrath of Khan when Kirk outsmarts Khan by ordering the Enterprise to drop below the flat plane that Reliant was flying in? "Z minus 1000 meters" I think was the command. It was "Z," regardless of the number of meters, though. Welcome to Carrara! - Dex

That Mars map prop is mapped 2-sided with the mars picture on the back

Very nice, and welcome to Carrara.

Operaguy. With Transposer, if you keep the link open to Poser, you can have a continuous flow of changes in Poser back to Carrara. It is a very significant plugin.

bwtr, You have my attention, if I might ask a few more questions. Let's say I wanted to do EVERYTHING in Poser, but render in Carrara5Pro. Naturally, Transposer is my bridge. Can you tell me what WON'T work? For instance, if I have extensive shaders on the skin of my model for noise, color variation, etc., and reflect shaders in the eyes for realism, do the effects I see in a Poser render come out the same in Carrara with little or no tweaking? Second, about the dynamic hair. If my shot is a close up with intense dynamic hair, and I calculate a sym in Poser for it, when the scene goes over to Carrara for render, does C5P know how to handle it? Will it render the individual strands, just as my Poser engine would? Lighting. I am getting good at Poser's depth map shadows at extreme settings for indoor shots. When I take such a scene, which contains no Poser IBL or AO lighting, into Carrara, will the effect be the same, or will I need to learn Carrara's lights completly? Appreciative of your information. ::::: Opera :::::

Sorry that my depth of knowledge is short of answering your questions in full. However. My understanding is that the Carrara rendering,texturing and lighting is probably superior to Posers. I import the very basics necessary from Poser and work on them in Carrara. It's something I have regularly done even when Transposer 1 became available. I have very few problems--certainly never felt a need to expect Eovia to change things. What they have done has been a surprise and great pleasure. I have had Poser from several versions back and I find working to the maximum in Carrara is more fulfilling than keeping up with the different way of doing things developing in Poser. To me now, Poser is just a handy "plugin"!

okay, well...... can any other Carrara people answer my questions? I am serious about evaluating Carrarra strictly as a render platform for my type of Poser scene: close-in human interaction with highly realistic skin, dynamic hair and reflect/refract/gloss shaders in the eyes. Animation, not stills. Interiors with deep, soft shadows. AO, IBL/HDRI, exterior of buildings, fly-overs, cars, etc., are not my thing. So far, in investigating Carrara as a render platfor for my style of scene, Carrara is NOT superior to Poser in any way. If I can discover that it is, I have Credit Card in hand. ::::: Opera :::::

Hopefully, some of the poser user's can chime in.Unfortunately anytime you are asking a program to completely take a very complicated and proprietary format and import it better than the original program is asking for alot. I would say to check out the yahoo list maybe and eovia's site.The gallery may also help you. http://gallery.eovia.com/ Look at Markus Rothkranz he does some pretty advanced poser stuff. Rendered & MM in Carrara.

BTW, the picture looks great and welcome to Carrara. However, it may just be me, but it looks like his arm is not really resting on the table.

Opera,

The complex shader nodes in Poser your using for real skin (and maybe reflections) probably won't transfer "one to one" into Carrara. CS has a great shader system which is capable of producing realistic skin, but I doubt you can get a load and go transfer that you won't want to tweak.

As for the dynamic hair, typically you need to tweak it in Poser before importing with Transposer. Usually the root and tip widths need to be reduced and strand density increased to get good results in Carrara.

Soft shadows are also very easy in CS, but you will have to adjust your lights to enable soft shadows. The intensity of the imported lights typically needs to be reduced too.

I think that you can probably get the results your looking for in CS, but you would have to modify your work flow a fair ammount to streamline your work (and there would no doubt be a few comprimises along the way).

The render nodes in CS5 Pro, and the multiprocessor support may be a big enough improvement in productivity to offset the changes in workflow, and the usual problems associated with moving data from one software to another. On the other hand, your current "render garden" approach may still be the best solution. If you could talk Eovia into giving you another 30 day demo, it may be worth your time to check it out again so you can see for sure if it will do the trick.

The attached image is a quick and dirty comparison of Jessi with danamic rendered in Poser and Carrara. I used the default lighting in P6, and reduced the light intensity for each light by 20% after I imported the scene into CS. I doubled the strand count, and rediced the strand width about 1/3 of the original hair set up in P6. Both images had the same strand values so you can compare the results. I could have gotten better results if I spent a little more time on the strand size, and turned on soft shadows for the lights, but it's way past my bed time, and my contacts are getting cloudy (can't see the screen to well).

Hope this all helps a little!

--Martian Manhunter, Great Job!
DR

Thank you dustrider, that's the kind of information i've been trying to obtain both in the Carrara and Poser forums here, and at RDNA. I appreciate you taking the time to both attempt a fair test and posting the results, with images. Now, you don't give your rendertime comparison. Next time you come back through here, can you tell us? Even if you don't have the exact numbers, just a rough comparison of render time. I would say the skin qualities on your two renders are equal, and the lighting is close, but could be made equal pretty easily, but the resolution on the hair...that would have to be considerably kicked-up on the Carrara side; see how individual strands are resolved on the Poser render overall and especially in the tips, and only groups are resolved on the tips in Carrara and the strands are coarser. To get a true apples/apples I would have to push the Carrara tools to resolve the hair tighter. I am not asking you to expend a lot of time on my behalf, it is my responsibility to do this research, but can you at least say this: is Carrara at least CAPABLE of rendering that hair as fine as the results in the Poser image? My Carrara 30-day time trial is still running. My initial investigation revealed my key question: FOR MY TYPE OF SCENE, you can't use one as "the app" and the other as a supplement; you have to use them in concert together. I was hoping I could use Carrara strictly as a render platform and do everything else in Carrara, OR use Poser to simply establish my characters and their clothes, move all the assets into Carrara and pose, arrange, light, animate and render there. Nope. Not for my type of scene, extreme close ups with high realism on skin and dynamic hair in animation. There's no native dynamic hair in Carrara, and the animation slider is far more sluggish than Poser's, so posing and animating do not flow as well as in Poser. Also, I was able to tell that the animation tools are not on a par with Poser's. But the real killer? I took one scene typical of my style in through Native with simple prop hair instead of dynamic. I pushed in close, more than twice as close as in your image above, and I tried to get the sharp resolution (although with soft shadows) on hair and skin. Naturally, being quite new, I was fumbling with tools I had not properly learned. But when I began to render, and began to discuss my render times with other people, it started to emerge that the vaunted Carrara render speed is not necessarily there. I was rendering in Poser faster than in Carrara, going for the same quality ON MY TYPE OF IMAGE. Now, with deeper study of Carrara's tools, it is VERY possible I might get advanced enough to catch up and surpass my times in Poser. And of course, not all my scenes are extreme close ups, and if Carrara REALLY rocks on scenes like the one assembled on this thread, and on outdoor HDRI/IBL scenes, then that would be fantastic; I'd be in heaven to be in carrara at that point. But one word, with respect, to Carrara fans: for my type of scene, if you invest a lot of experience and experimenting in it, Poser is no toy. From the other point of view: can you do everything in Poser and just render in Carrara? The answer is no, per everything I've learned and from your statements. Now, the tweaking might not be so bad (reading what you wrote). Carrara has an excellent road to realistic skin through shaders and SSS, I believe that. Learning to use both programs, more or less like on a teeter-totter, might be worth achieving. That way I could put the emphasis on either program depending on the scene, according to which program does certain things best. I have long been considering doing just such a teeter-totter method with Poser and 3DSMax or Maya. It's the learning curve to get good that is daunting. It has taken my SUCH a long time to get decent results in Poser for my type of scene, admittedly an ambitious style to work in, regardless of the app. I can do everything I want and need in Poser. But I wish it were faster rendering my extreme animations. Again, thank you for your effort. ::::: Opera :::::

Martian Manhunter, I apologize for kidnapping your thread. I had no intention to do so, it just sort of happened. I have been trying to dig out this information for several weeks, and the opportunity simply arose. I hope you are not offended. It is not totally off-topic however, as your JamesPose/chair import/export trick is a perfect example of using the two programs in concert. Best of luck in Carrara. ::::: Opera :::::

opera, that's ok. As tp your question, bsed on what I've observed, Carrara renders a bit faster and offers a better looking result, so IMO, it is a better application for rendering Poser scenes than straight Poser.

ren_mem. yeah, his elbow is a wee bit off the table, because when I imported the table into Poser I must have scaled it a tiny bit too big (and posed him with his arm resting on the too-big table), so when I imported James it came out with his arm a tiny bit above the surface of the table.

Message edited on: 02/11/2006 07:35

I really like that render! Love esther

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=106&Form.ShowMessage=2579803

I've moved the dynamic hair discussion to a new thread so that others with more experience may share additional information

exits lurk mode<< These are just one mans observations: Carrara is intended to be more of a Complete 3D/CG Solution with a fairly robust modeling toolset as well as a very good internal shader system a good fast powerful render engine and a relatively low price and it of course it offers import of static/animated poser scenes. its value as an alternative to posers own rendering system will depend on what your rendering intentions are. As an animator most of us are interested in some form of story telling If the main focus of your animation/story telling absolutely requires long ,in close, lingering face shots of poser females with constantly "swimming" dynamicly animated hair with minimal back ground scenery and no real need for fully immersive outdoor day light environments with trees,water& moving clouds then I respectfully suggest just using poser for rendering. WHY?? posers dynamic hair system is essentially a special effect,like cinema4d 9.5 awesome new hair module, like Lightwaves powerful volumetric hypervoxel shaders , like blenders (yes I said blender), new powerful liquid simulation system etc etc. these effects will ALWAYS perform best in their NATIVE programs despite the Best efforts of some to bring them into other programs similarly face_offs "real skin shaders" are a third party "special effect" that requires poser NATIVE python engine at render time. so frankly Eovias import of poser "hair generation" effects are a polite forced solution at best IMHO. on the issue of speed Carrara pro4-5 IS way faster than poser for rendering as long as you are not rendering poser dynamic hair "effects". and honestly why would carrara be faster than poser when rendering a poser native special effect intended to be rendered in poser??. Dynamic hair aside though where poser will start to fall on its face is when you add a dense environment like a Sanctumart/stonemason set peice or additional figures particularly from the "unimesh" family And to be even more Frank about it Eovias claim that with carrara pro5 you will "no longer need poser" is "misleading" at best. IMHO if you want to use poser/DAZ assets to the fullest potential currently available, you will always "need "poser. you can animate,dress, morph,wardobe wizard,mimic poser figures in poser easier than you can in "poser friendly" programs and ive looked at them all but after all that is done in poser then properly learning the Carrara render system will yeild you faster /better renders after import of the ,ready to go, poser scene >>>returns to lurk mode<<<

I know the part about "no longer needing Poser" is not true, if for no other reason than the fact that Trans Poser requires Poser to be installed. I rarely use dynamic hair. What I basically plan to do with Cararra, is import poser figures (pre-posed in Poser) into scenes built in Carrara (sometimes using carrara's modeling and sometimes using imported models either purchased/downloaded or ones that I make in 3dsmax or rhino). Basically, as much as I love poser, I have never liked its rendering engine because it's too slow. I had been using Vue for imported Poser scenes, but when I decided to get a couple items of good software to go with my new computer I decided to try carrara 5 Pro instead of upgrading to Vue 5 Infinite, because when I tried the demos for both, carrara seemed to render faster and use less resources than Vue.

It's always a matter of using the right tool for the job. I'm finishing up a 90 minute movie in which I use a bunch of Carrara material, as well as a bit of Poser (some of our alien creatures are poser people way off in the background). Some of the effects are created in Photoshop and animated in AfterEffects and placed in the scene to seem like 3D elements. Whatever will give you the effect you're looking for, make it look the best, and be most efficient is, in my opinion, the way to go. It's certainly possible to render figures in Poser and composite them in Photoshop, PSP, or AfterEffects into Carrara environments. Shadows can get kind of tricky, but here's where I think I'm really going to love the poser import -- I'll be able to import an animation from Poser into Carrara, render it with shadowcatchers, render the figure in Poser, and composite the whole thing back together in AfterEffects. I'm sure I'm going to run into a major load of problems with this approach, but, hey, it'll be fun to try. Once I'm done with the movie I'm working on now.... Anyway, thought I'd throw my opinion in for what it's worth....

Wolf, thanks for commenting, I know you have extensive experience with this and was hoping you'd see these threads. Yes...I am DELIBERATELY choosing the close-in, subtle-head-and-eye-movement, strand hair realism, interactive conversational type of female AND MALE character scenes (watch this space for the big reveal this spring). And no disrespect intended to those who have chosen a different paradigm. I am beginning to reach similar conclusions to yours, but also discovering that not only is Poser better than Carrara on dynamic hair, the issue of render speed on close-in skin, with beautiful mood shadows and SSS/anisotropic effects, there is a feature/implementation gap as well. My expoloration was just a calculated shot at hitting a triple down into the corner on the first pitch, if Carrara could indeed take complete Poser scenes OF MY TYPE and render them with speedy dispatch with minimal fuss. ::::: Opera :::::

sfdex, agree completely and already ramping up the multi-tool workflow that ends up in After Effects, a program I like a lot. I think Carrara has match move functionality, also, right? ::::: Opera :::::

quote: "these effects will ALWAYS perform best in their NATIVE programs despite the Best efforts of some to bring them into other programs" That's what I had been saying all along. There's no way you're going to get better rendering quality vs. speed from Poser's dynamic hair in anything other than Poser, the program it's been created and optimized for. I think that pretty much sums it all up in a nutshell.

well, that's fine, we groked that before you said it. We did not EXPECT anything, we just need to find out. It is a necessary effort to get as close as possible, know the facts, and understand the cost so it can factor into a decision to purchase Carrara due to it's other benefits that ARE native. And, lest you forget, Carrara's publisher is promoting this program in a major way as highly sympatico with Poser. That's why it is getting a lot of attention from Poser people. They did not accompany this marketing with an intense exporation of what works, what does not work, and how well. SOMEBODY had to go in an geet the real skinny on how a major feature, dynamic hair, performs when transported. ::::: Opera :::::

C5Pro does, indeed export its cameras to AE, (Windows AE 5, 6 and 6.5 -- no word on 7 yet, and Mac AE 6.5). C5Pro also does import MatchMove info from MatchMover Pro and Syntheyes -- neither one of which do I have, but which I'm looking at seriously for my next big project. It's getting more fun all the time!