Hi, I'm a very very new Cararra owner, and I'm hoping to learn to make and rig items in Cararra, with the hopes of exporting sometimes to Poser. Is this possible with the 2.1 edition?

Well, Carrara 2 doesn't have bones or rigging , but you can model whatever you like and export it as an object file for Poser.

Shucks, I thought it did. The whole reason I wanted Cararra was as an alternative to Poser. :( There goes THAT idea.

Back to Daz I guess. Thanks for letting me know

I don't think Poser can import rigging information from other 3D software anyway. As Patrick says, you have to create objects in other software for importing into Poser and rig it in the Setup room (in Poser) to use it as posable figure.
I'm not 100% certain on this, but I can't see any options for what you want in Poser 6.

You said alternative to poser so that's a bit confusing. I think C3 up would rig, but 4 and, of course, 5 will give better options. Really, only C5 would be considered an alternative, since you can import poser formats in native mode w/ standard.

Okay. Depending on what kidn of deal comes from Daz on upgrades, I may very well upgrade to the top. We'll see. :) I'll also have to see how well Poser imports into cararra. I've had bad experiences importing into other programs before >_<

I am trying to find the best way to put C5 scenes in Poser 6 as well.  I just dont like the look of imported poser characters when rendered in C5.  ANy advice?

Sparrownightmare,

You need to spend time in Carrara learning texture room, and lighting, also good textures are everything. Some poser textures are simply not going to look right in Carrara's realistic renderer. If you think you will be able to just import and render from Poser. I don't think it will happen.

Well the characters look absolutely beautiful when rendered in Poser, which is why I would rather render them there.  I would rather lose a tiny bit of detail on the C5 scene and have the characters come out better.  For an example compare these two images

http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=1141183&Start=1&Sectionid=0&filter_genre_id=0&Form.Search=sparrownightmare&Form.Criteria=Author

The above image was rendered in C5 with an imported poser character.

http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=1177169&Start=1&Sectionid=0&filter_genre_id=0&Form.Search=sparrownightmare&Form.Criteria=Author

The above image was done entirely in P6.  They are the same character, just with different clothing.  They used the same base mesh model, the same textures, the same hair etc..  Look at the quality difference.  This is why I would rather render in P6.

The lighting and rendering setup in your Carrara scene is very basic. You aren't taking advantage of Carrara's capabilities at all. Have you learned to use GI, indirect lighting, HDRI, soft shadows, less ambient light, light color, or 3 point backlighting? Carrara has a much better render engine than Poser, but you need to learn how to take advantage of it. It wouldn't be much work for someone who knows Carrara to make your model look better than in the Poser render.

Hi Richard,
I have to agree with Ren and Patrick on this one.
I'm surprised that you prefer rendering in Poser - your gallery shows you've put some time and effort into Cararra Studio, lots of cool sci-fi stuff in there.
Have you seen Shonner's skin tutorial: http://www.shonner.com/drafts/carrara_skin_tutorial_a.htm
Its good stuff, and Carrara 5 should come with a sample skin/SSS shader to mess around with. The Operator functions (add, multiply, overlay, mixer & subtract) in the texture room are what you need to start mixing and matching stuff.

And if you are a bit stuck with lighting(?) - put your scenes into one of the pre built scenes that comes with Cararra (remove the original models & textures) and see how that comes out. Theres a lot of useful lighting rigs and environments that are included to get people started.

Personally, I've always thought Poser plays poorly with other software - Poser (5 & 6) has a great texture room, but you can't bake the textures you create and then export them in to other software. So for me there's just no point in learning it or using any textures unless they are bitmap files that I can mess around with in Photoshop. Just my 0.02 on the issue.
I think I've said more than enough, its someone elses turn now ;)

I have decided to try doing it a different way.  I have been using Carrara and Ray Dream Studio since version 2.0 of RDS, so I'm fairly familiar with its functions.  and actually in P6 you can use a BMP file as a texture.  If you looked at the close up of Marelle on my gallery page, the texturing is a BMP file material.  I agree, Poser does not like to play well with others.  I really dislike a few things about it, like the library system.  Its a pain to get to a lot of things, especially when  you have a lot of content.  ANyways, since I can export renders in Poser to a PNG file, I am just going to do 2 renders and assemble in PSPX.  Thanks for all the help.

The lighting setup in Carrara is pretty complex and well worth exploring. Sometimes you don't need all the bells-n-whistles either, but it is good to start exploring what they can do in different situations.Using lighting is vital and often under-rated subject. BTW more in depth lighting tutorials for C5 is a good idea.

All my images are rendered in Carrara from poser, Ill never go back, but thats just me. E

I have to agree with what others said about rendering in Carrara vs Poser (any version).  IMHO Carrara beats Poser in every aspect (with the possible exception of rendering dynamic hair).  Typically, lighting imported directly from a Poser scene will look bad in CS. But comparing the difficulty of setting up good lighting in Poser vs CS (not using preset lighting), Poser takes a lot more work than CS to get similar results. 

The first thing I do when I import a scene from Poser is delete all the Poser lights, and set up my own. I typically use HDRI with a couple of bulb lights on either side of the "front" of my scene (turned way down), and possibly a spot light or 2.  Textures usually need some help too. I usually have to reduce the shine value, fix bump map and/or displacement map issues, and tweak the highlights, but the whole process will usually take less than 30 min., and is well worth the time spent.  Unless for some odd reason a project requires the use of Poser for  rendering (which would often happen before Carrara had rendertime displacement), I won't even consider rendering in Poser anymore.

The main problem I have been having is with dynamic hair.  Like i said, hopefully now that DAZ has EOVIA, they will play together a bit better in future versions.  I haven't even started playing with HDRI yet.  I am still trying to learn how to use the vertex as opposed to the spline modeler.  I agree with you on lighting, Poser is a pain to use compared to C5.  I love the distant light function.  It makes getting realistic shadows a lot easier.  Does anyone know of any good tutorials on getting P6 Dynamic hair to look good in C5?  I have that render online now in my gallery.  I did all of the main rendering in C5 for the building backdrop, then just used the rendered BMP as a backdrop in P6.  I added the figure, posed it and did a couple of quick lights to get it to match the rendered backdrop.

Exporting from Carrara to Poser would be highly unusual for most people.  Carrara is a much more robust renderer than Poser, although Poser has made great strides.  The images you use for comparison don't really tell us anything except that the settings for that particular Carrara render don't suit your taste.

I agree on C5 being a better renderer.  I have found an alternative torendering it all in Poser  that does pretty well.  I am redoing one of my older images using my new process :)  I will let you decide which looks better.

"I will let you decide which looks better."

I know you mean well, but based upon what render settings and lighting in Carrara? ;)  If you choose settings in Carrara that don't match up to the Poser render then you simply need to adjust your Carrara settings ;)  There is a learning curve to it, of course.  I don't do stills much, and it's a pretty broad topic.  There are lots of threads in this forum and others that could be of help with your render/lighting settings in Carrara.

Quote - "I will let you decide which looks better."

I know you mean well, but based upon what render settings and lighting in Carrara? ;)  If you choose settings in Carrara that don't match up to the Poser render then you simply need to adjust your Carrara settings ;)  There is a learning curve to it, of course.  I don't do stills much, and it's a pretty broad topic.  There are lots of threads in this forum and others that could be of help with your render/lighting settings in Carrara.

Its not so much the lighting that I have problems with, it's the level and quality of detail on the imported poser items.  C5 creates a bunch of very mixed up procedural shaders for the P6 textures on import using transposer, and it is nearly impossible to get them to look the way they should.  They all seem to have a plastic doll quality about them.  The figures themselves come out much better in Poser.  In C5 it loses much of the surface detail, moles, freckles etc.  I will see what I can do on retexturing the models in C5 and see if that works.  AT this point, I will be happy if I can just get rid of the overly smooth plastic look.

Yea, you're right about the "plastic doll quality", but that goes back to just learning what you need to adjust in Carrara.  I've been working mainly in Animation Master lately, but I remember I always had to make a few adjustments in C5Pro after importing a Poser figure if I was doing a close up still, which wasn't often.  I believe I had to lower  'shininess' and also fiddle with bump.  I'm sure there are others who do more Poser stills than I who can shed more light on the topic.

As a quick suggestion, if you're using Poser 5 or 6 to set up figures to be rendered in Carrara, pretend that you're still using ProPack or Poser 4 (with the exception of bump. Don't use those old .bum files ... use .jpg bump maps, if any.) In other words, don't include any procedural shaders in your Materials Room setup ... they won't translate properly in Carrara. Don't use Shader Spider partial shaders or Occlusion Master settings. You can get better AO effects in Carrara, anyway.

It's true that you'll need to tweak some settings after importing into Carrara, but the same is true when exporting from Poser to Vue, or I suspect, any other app. Just accepting the default values post-import won't yield optimal results. Once you've taken the time to tweak details a bit, you'll probably come to agree that Carrara is by far the superior rendering app, even when compared to the fanciest Firefly settings in Poser 6. I had the same "too shiny" and "plastic doll" issues at first, but that's only because I wasn't changing anything after importing into Carrara.

Most satisfactory for this Carrara newbie is the app's much faster rendering times. I was pretty tired of spending several minutes watching Poser calculate shadow maps slowly, then causing my HDD to make bizarre grinding noises during render that no other app causes. With Carrara, complex scenes that Poser 6 can't really handle on my computer render relatively quickly, and without the evident strain on resources and hardware.

Sorry Poser. I loved you for years, but you've got issues, issues.    :-)

Yeh I know what you mean about issues.  Right now Poser is playing badly with me.  I try to render a test scene and all it does is sit there with a completely blue render meter and nothing actually rendered.  I never use .bum files, always jpgs.  I never had Poser 3 or 4 or pro pack, I started with 5.