Hi.  In Carrara pro 5 is it possible to make the brick textures tile smaller, because some of my models that require them look really silly with huge giant size bricks?

Since I am coming from bryce, I was wondering if it is possible to do the following:

Create an infinate plane and texture it with clouds.  I know I can create a infinate plane in carrara, but how do I texture it with a cloud material.  I looked in the shader room and could not find cloud textures anywhere, yet when I insert a cloud, it is textured.  What am I doing wrong?

Thanks.

David

I don't think you're doing anything wrong; you're just expecting Carrara to behave like Bryce.  They have very different approaches to many of the same things.

There isn't a cloud texture in Carrara, as far as I know.  If you want to texture a infinite plane with clouds, you'll need to create the cloud texture in a different application (or apply one from a photo).  Or, you could probably get close to a cloud texture using some of the noise and fractal operators in the texture room.  Might be a fun exercise, but it's not the best way to create a clouded sky.

Clouds -- the volumetric ones as well as the old sort-of-volumetric ones that are still available in C5 -- are different animals from geometric objects.  You can't texture the clouds in the texture room; you can adjust the volumetric properties in the modeling room -- things like color of cloud, amount of  "silver lining," etc. 

Clouds that are generated in the scene by use of skies or realistic skies are different, yet.  Those are adjusted within the skies editors you get when you add a sky to the scene (in the properties palate on the right of the interface under "atmosphere.")  Color, shape and animation perameters are adjustable there.

Hope this is helpful.  Carrara is a wonderfully deep and rich program that's absolutely worth spending the time to learn.  Once you get the hang of it, you can create things you'd never imagine possible.

 - Dex

There are several different ways to scale a texture, depending on what method you are using.

1. If using flat mapping.....click ont transform & scale from there.

2. If regular.....put a check mark in the tile box & slide the slider or type in a number to the size that looks best...with this method make sure you type the same number in the seamless box...but do NOT check that box.

3. If using an infinite plane type in a low number in the scale area on the right..this will not affect the size of the plane when rendered even though it appears to shrink in the working view.

Primivol plugin will let you use a 3d shader as a volumetric primitive. There is a multi-thread bug still unresolved, but if you turn off MT it works fine, just a bit slower.

Whilst I have a lot of plugins for Carrara, it's amazing with all the questions asked that you can not really find a solution, one way or another, within the app itself. As all the magazines report -the best value for money on the market.

Bwtr --

I don't think that Carrara is lacking here.  I believe that the original question is asking something that Bryce does in a specific way, but that Carrara handles in a different way.

I provided a couple ways to get clouds into a scene.  It's just that Carrara does not create clouds by producing a textured plane.  In my opinion Carrara's method of producing clouds looks better than a textured plane.

If you wanted to use a hammer to put a screw into a piece of wood, and someone suggested that you should use a screw driver, instead, does that make the hammer a lesser value?  Nope.  The hammer can still be used to join two pieces of wood, but it is best used that way it was designed to -- with nails.  Someone is trying to use a hammer to drive a screw, when the best approach would be to abandon the idea of using a screw and use the nails that came with the hammer.  That's all that's going on here.  Hammers and screw drivers.....

 - Dex

Thanks for all the answers.  I think I may have worded the question wrong.  I would like to make  clouds that my airplane can fly down through.  Basically the angle would be looking down from above the airplane and the camera would follow the airplane down through the clouds to clearer skys below?  This is there is a way to do this with out having to place a zillion volumetric clouds by hand.

Also in the terrain editor, is there a way to clip a terrain so that you when I am using grayscale maps that I don't always have a flat ground square surrounding my grayscale map.  I'm not sure if I am explaining it very well.  In Bryce, in the terrain editor, we can have a slider bar the allows us to define what levels of the terrain are shown.  Any brycers out there that can explain this a bit better for me?

If you're animating your airplane through the clouds, a bazillion volumetric clouds is going to look best.  If not, then faking clouds with a shader -- probably best a photo, maybe from NASA.gov or something like that, edited to have an alpha channel or just basic transparency where the clouds aren't -- will do the job just fine.

I don't have the answer for the terrain thing; I'll be interested to know what Brycers will suggest.

 - Dex

You can use the replicator to place the bazillion volumetric clouds -- make sure to randomize the scale and rotation to make them look more random...