What features do you want to see in Carrara 6?

My wants are hopefully fairly simple since just about everything I've wanted in one app is already in Carrara. I would dearly love to see some sort of water simulation; ocean waves, flowing streams etc, complete with foam,lol. I know that a clever Carrara artist can simulate most of this using particles and animated displacement, but it takes a bit of doing. The other thing I would like to see is a little more refinement in Carrara's animation capabilities making it possible to easily set up complex "mechanical linkages" and the like. As it is,I use DCG's "Cognito" plug-in to do things like this. Not complaining here. Just two things I thought of off the top of my head.

I would REALLY like to see them bring back the ability to move the working planes in the vertex modeller since it makes it really much easier to duplicate with symetry! This is a bug in C5 which I reported early on, and it was acknowledged, but never fixed! Truthfully this the only thing I miss in the program.

mike

I would love to see better integration with AfterEffects, and good multi-pass rendering enabled as an automatic process.

There are a bunch of little things, but overall it's a really powerful and great package.  I'm sure they'll give us all sorts of cool new things in 6....

 -Dex

The number one thing is performance improvements in the various areas. Some things are very simple.

-dynamic hair and cloth
-soft-body dynamics
-enhancements in the usability for animation and rigging
-improved performance mainly with animation and scrubbing
+optimize c for hi mesh figures
+improve memory usage
-improve displacement- also being able to apply to domains
-better previews
+Better shader management dealing with application and use of multiple shaders on domains.(more tedious than need be) Like shading grps
-Tie it in better with hex, (fix hex) or include in c6
-Be able to save a configuration file for prefs to reload your prefs much easier
-True intuitive baking
++Real full UV tools or fix hex's
+Continued improvements in volumetric lighting options
-multi-pass options in rendering
-scripting or macros

How about nurbs?

Don't see nurbs happening. Most nurbs programs have had a hard time makin it. Amapi is nurbs.

Rhino is also.  It is a very useful program.

Rhino is also.  It is a very useful program.

Better lighting:

1. Volumetric lighting on all lights, not just spotlights
2. Area lights that can produce visiblevolumetric light
3. Can use shaders as light gels.

Lighting bug fixes:

1. Replicated lights should have their light conesspheres duplicated also. Can get round this with ReplicatorSurface replicator by using "Create" but no equivalent for particle emitter
2. Volumetric light through fog should not produce hard edges (see previous thread)

Richard

For the Mac version to be finished.

Moon size ajustment

1. Better performance, especially in physics
2. Not be owned by Daz

Quote - 2. Not be owned by Daz

LOL! Best wish yet!  :laugh:

Quote - I would REALLY like to see them bring back the ability to move the working planes in the vertex modeller since it makes it really much easier to duplicate with symetry! This is a bug in C5 which I reported early on, and it was acknowledged, but never fixed! Truthfully this the only thing I miss in the program.

mike

 

The working planes seem to work just fine in my vertex modeler in Carrara 5.1. What exactly is the problem you are having?

vasseur7

in C4 and below you could use control+click to move the working plans in the vertex room to set them up for duplicate with symetry. I would make one half the model then move the appropriate plan into position, duplicate it with symetry and then weld it together. Unfortunatly thes function the move with control+click hasn;t worked in C5.

Using "move to" for the plans can cause them to rotate slightly, causing problems for the complete model.

There are other, more akward ways (for my uses) to do this, dup with symetry in the assemble room, which works on the center point. Moving the object to the plan rather than vice versa, but for my purposes there are problems with each of these methods. For example using the assemble room method causes the duplicate to have reverses normals. If I'm working on poser clothing, moving the object in the vertex room, cause a multitude of problems.

If there is a way to move the plans that I'm unaware of please let me know.

mike

Quote - Rhino is also.  It is a very useful program.

Yeah, lot of rhino fans floating around, but Carrara atm is a general purpose modeller to me so...that would be alot to ask for especially since nurbs are questionable as a trend vs sub-d. Altho it maybe that C6 may offer more modelling tools.

The main thing I would like to see Hexagon merged totally (100%) into Carrara 6 with improved UV, displacement, paint and texture tools to work like they should have in Hexagon 2. Carrara 6 needs these features built in.

Also:
• incorporate all the features of DAZ Studio
• native support for normal maps
• broader file type support...collada, direct X
• improved render engine to better compete with what Modo has recently brought to the table.
• ability to better use anything produced with ZBrush
• water simulation would also be excellent

Stan

Hey Mike, Hope you day is going well. I may be misunderstanding what you mean when you say you could move the plane(s) in the vertex modeler with a control/click, but I can do it in the Mac version. Maybe it is a bug in the Windows version. Chris=-)

Quote -

1. Not be owned by Daz

umm why? I think its great.. especially for all us poser/daz geeks who use carrara.

and some one already suggested my wish about the scalable moon :)

Why "not be owned by Daz"?

Because I want to be able to check for new releases without worrying that someone else can see my screen.

Because I find borderline pedophilic pinups distasteful.

Because Daz Studio has an impossibly awful interface, and I expect nothing more for Carrara.

Because I don't want to belong to a club.

I have to agree with renderer -- to an extent. I find much of DAZs stuff cheesy, with an almost adolescent bent.

Eovia had a straight path in application development, and a personal development connection to many of its user base.  I do not get the same sense with DAZ.  It's kind of like Walmart taking over the development of some important product.  DAZ is a content marketer, application development only has value to the extent that it can help drive content.

Just look at Bryce.  I upgraded to Bryce 5.5 just to help keep the progam alive, and the biggest change in going from 5.0 to 5.5 was to provide an easy channel to DAZ Studio -- (read CONTENT SALES). Now, it seems, Bryce 6.0 will be released soon, but it sounds like the much superior(?) Vue 6 Easel will be on Bryce 6 like a monkey on ugly!  Who will want to pay $$ for an upgrade to a progam that is still ~3 years behind the competition -- any competition?

Sorry, but I do not have the same sense about DAZ as I had towards Eovia, or Metacreations, or Fractal Design Corp. for that matter.

ok...let's not go there. Bryce was a mess and yrs. out of circulation...can't make that up. Vue 6 isn't even real yet, they all sound good in the promos. And Eovia is DAZ now...don't expect that to disappear. Stay on the thread.

Like to see displacement map generation along w/ normal map built in also.

I hope that Daz is keeping much of the Eovia team as well as giving them the space they need to keep it moving forward as the great program it is. Eovia seemed like they cared about turning out a quailty product that has many up to date features and a fast renderer, love the interface also, care went into it.

Perhaps a digression, but there is relationship between fantasy becoming reality, and the company that owns the code is key to that relationship.  Please be cautious about policing threads if they wander about a bit.  Associative thinking/discussion may get complex, but linear thinking causes fewer new neuron connections to form. ;-)

·         At any rate (most were covered by previous posts):

·         Texture displacement of plant objects (like bark on trees – as it is, it hoses the plant object).

·         Random morphing, for unique individualization within a plant species, while being distributed.

·         Boolean cutting (as in a 2D plane slicing through a sphere), with ability to break apart slices into discrete objects.

·         Option to keep Boolean tool, rather than lose it to the new object.

·         Option to keep material during Boolean action.

·         Ability to manually manipulate (move, scale, rotate) textures in UV space, with OGL visuals (as in trueSpace).

·         3D paint.

·         Enhanced physics, to include fluid physics simulations (like wave and ripple effects).

Quote - Why "not be owned by Daz"?

Because I want to be able to check for new releases without worrying that someone else can see my screen.

Because I find borderline pedophilic pinups distasteful.

Because Daz Studio has an impossibly awful interface, and I expect nothing more for Carrara.

Because I don't want to belong to a club.

umm.. ok  lol

but look what daz has done conmpared to poser as far as content is concerned.. im just hoping for more plugins and shaders and addons for carrara :) some gained popularity from daz would help

I have to agree with steama, since I use Daz Studio, Hex 2 and C5 together, it would be a marvelous program merged together !

I've only been using Carrara Pro for a few months now, but one thing I would like is the plant (tree) room to have more options to create flowers and other plants  and grasses (which can blow in the wind).  A really cool and easy use hair lab (one that is way better than Poser -not that Poser is bad but compared to some others it lacks a lot).

Maybe the programers could include a few premade scenes showing off the particle generator with examples of snow, rain, and fire so that really dense people (mainly me) can see how it works and try and duplicate it.

Volumetric material shaders, similar to the ones in Bryce because volumetric shaders are not just for clouds.

Maybe a wings3d plugin, or better wings 3d importing support.

Maybe photoshop like layer support for complicated 3d scenes.

More presets for the terrain generator, like icebergs, volcanoes, floating islands (Laputa), swamps and marshes, stalagemites and stalagetites.  The ability to hollow out terrains to make caves.  (I'm still having trouble adapting from Bryce).

Sincerely,

David  :p

More water presets please

After looking at different 3D packages here's my wish list.

• Hair
• Cloth
• Better control with physics
• More control for wind (draw wind paths)
• Liquid dynamics
• True Volume materials (Like Hypervoxels(Lightwave) or Smells Like Almonds(Cinema4D))
• Character Animation Tools (Muscle, skin deformation, lip sync, tendons and pose adjustment tools)
• Better FBX support
• More control over instancing
• Other types of plants that you can deform with the wind modifier (Grass, flowers etc)
• Better skies
• More control of the particle system
• Soft body dynamics
• Geometry paint
• Direct X export (Full export geometry, textures and animations)
• Scripting

I think this would really make Carrara a contender with the big 3.

I think closer integration of DAZ Studio, Hex, and Carrara is fine (seamless file transport), but I think actually integrating their code into one application would be a mess.  In my opinion, DAZ Studio is a rough analog of the Carrara Assembly Room, and I prefer the Assembly Room metaphor/UI, to DAZ Studio UI -- any day!

Whereas it would be nice to have more of Hexagons tools in Carrara, Hexagon also has a much different workflow (Eovia had 2 different development teams for Hex and Carrara), which would make it difficult for both dedicated Hex and Carrara users to switch to Carrara 6 -- as that would pretty much represent a radical transformation for both applications.

I think modeling, qua modeling, is specialized enough to warrant a separate application, but closer integration of the output side of each application would be great.  Maybe a plugin kind of connection would work; that is, Hex could be purchased as a stand-alone product, or a plugin?

I really like the idea of an enhanced plant editor, and as I stated earlier, Random morphing for unique individualization within a plant species, while being distributed (as Vue does) would be welcomed (they are almost there anyway, as a variable seed function exists for the present editor).  I just heavily edited some plants in C5.1, and it is a pain in the bark…but, much better than C4 was!

I don’t think 64 bit coding was mentioned?  I would hope that the next release has both 32  as well as 64 bit versions of the program.  I’ve had more than one scene go to the big bit-bucket in the sky due to a lack of memory (on my 4 Gbyte of RAM workstation).

BTW, I'm beta testing M.S. Office 2007, and Word has this cool language xlation.  Does the following make any sense -- for those folks who speak French?  My name is french, but my language is American English. ;-)
Je pense une intégration plus étroite de studio, de sortilège, et de Carrare de DAZ est très bien (transport sans couture de dossier), mais je pense que réellement l'intégration de leur code dans une application serait un désordre. À mon avis, le studio de DAZ est un analogue approximatif de pièce d'Assemblée de Carraras, et je préfère la salle metaphor/UI d'Assemblée, aux studios UI de DAZ -- tout jour !

Considérant qu'il ferait beau d'avoir plus d'outils d'hexagones à Carrare, l'hexagone a également un déroulement des opérations beaucoup différent (Eovia a eu 2 équipes différentes de développement pour le sortilège et Carrare), qui le rendrait difficile pour les utilisateurs consacrés de sortilège et de Carrare au commutateur à Carrara6 -- comme qui assez beaucoup représenterait une transformation radicale pour les deux applications.

Je pense modeler, qua modelant, est spécialisé assez pour justifier une application séparée, mais une intégration plus étroite du côté de rendement de chaque application serait grande.  J'aime vraiment l'idée d'un rédacteur augmenté d'usine, et comme j' ai énoncé plus tôt, morphing aléatoire pour l'individualisation unique dans des espèces d'une usine, tout en étant distribué (comme le fait Vue) soyez accueilli (elles sont presque leurs de toute façon, car une fonction variable de graine existe pour le rédacteur actuel).  Je juste ai fortement édité quelques usines dans C5.1, et c'est une douleur dans le … d'écorce mais, bien mieux que C4 était !

Je mets le ’ t pense que le codage de 64 bits a été mentionné ?  J'espérerais que le prochain dégagement a les deux 32  aussi bien que 64 versions de bit du programme.  Le ve du ’ I a fait aller plus d'une scène dans le grand peu-seau dans le ciel dû à un manque de mémoire (sur mes 4 Gbyte du poste de travail de RAM).

LC you can use displacement on trees. It is for a whole object tho...not domains, domain support would be great. But UV map works most precisely. The map is most important tho. Displacement works very well if setup right.

ren_mem,

I'll have to play a bit more with that.  Everytime I try it I lose the leaves, but I was using the Trunk, etc. domains.

Thanks, I'll try!

LC for clarification. The displacement appears to only be global so u can use domains, but it will apply to the whole object. The only way around that I know is w/ a uv map where u decide what gets displacement. I would think easy to fix, but it should support domains. Remember anybody can go suggest things for c6 in the bug tracker. They actually read them and follow up.

Quote - The main thing I would like to see Hexagon merged totally (100%) into Carrara 6 with improved UV, displacement, paint and texture tools to work like they should have in Hexagon 2. Carrara 6 needs these features built in.

• water simulation would also be excellent

Stan

I agree that carrara could do with some better modelling tools.
Maybe better physics, and you mean fluid system don't you? Why not ask the blender team nicely about their el`beem fluids simulation engine, since it is open source and see what you come up with.

Quote - What features do you want to see in Carrara 6?

The ability to import all Poser 6 Material Room settings including the ones for the Unimesh Realism Kit when used on a figure contained within a poser 6 file.

Much more control with the surface replicator/the abitlity to use gradients for skies= need  more control/ditto matrix03/the ability to hide an item from the render/layers.

Export to WMV video.

Functionality, consistency, control. Camera navigation should work the same in all windows. Camera navigation tools should rarely be pre-empted by other tools (I admit that's not always possible). Tools should show clearly when selected (instead of glowing a little after a second or two lag). Options to turn off previews, esp material and material room previews (when you are working with a handful of SSS-enabled shaders the redraw time when navigating material room becomes horrendous!) Option to maintain windows in last-used state, particularly UV mapper window. In fact, memory would be a good addition to many of the tools and functions; I would prefer if the majority of editors opened with last-used defaults with the option to reset to system default. Clicking over and over and over again in the weld pop-up, for instance.... _ Nudge controls. (And not just for camera). More hotkeys for common functions, identified if possible within the menu descriptions. Ability to add new hotkeys for personal frequent-used commands (forgive me if that is now there but I missed it). "Tear off" or another way to independently open and scale preview window while in another "room." Consistency in use of control, shift, alt across different rooms and different commands. And, certainly not last but last for this off-the-top-of-my-head list, fix the grouping-erase bug and the reversing-normals bug and the nil pointer bug! Oh...and could we please rethink the new modeling paradigm? Or at least implement it consistently and completely? As it is, basically you get warning boxes to click through and random extra faces you have to delete, but otherwise you continue modeling in the same way as before. And what exactly is the point of a "cancel" button that returns you to a corrupted mesh? (I have to add, because some people take it upon themselves to do damage control in the guise of being helpful, that I do not add words just to pad my sentences. When I say "independently open and scale" {the preview window} I do NOT mean "open a preview window." That function already exists. What is not currently possible is to have a free-floating, scaleable preview window large enough to see what you are doing, that doesn't block access to the rest of the pallet -- and that remembers where it was if you close pallet or change rooms.) (Corrections and help I will, of course, happily accept.)

New user for C5 Pro.

I would like better water simulations (I currently use metaballs which does give a nice 'liquidy' feel but kills my processor) to include waves, rivers, volumetric materials (e.g. depth cued)

Better ecosystem style module, similar to surface replicator, more on the plant room as from a number of those above.

Low priority suggestion:

Audio output on all of the formats that support it. It's a little inconsistent that only Quicktime is supported here. AVI format for example also could support sound.

Hmmm Here goes.

1.  Make aura and soe of the other special light effects internal, not post render.  That way you can get a better idea of what they will look like in test renders.  Also improve the controls for them to add more features.

2.  A more robust and effecient rendering engine.  I am sick and tired of doing a render with several poser figures and other objects in it, only to have the render crash after 10 hours of rendering, usually at an annoying 90% complete or so.

3.  Improve transposer to make the imported figures more effecient and use less RAM

4.  A better realistic sky system, preferably with a starfield option and the option of adjusting moon size, color etc for more customizeable night time lighting scenes.

5.  A better light option for light with sunlight and moonlight.  Make it so you can position the moonlight source and see it visibly as an object in the assembly room.  This will really help lining up objects for proper lighting.

6.  Improve the shading domain system to allow you to create shading domains on both internal and imported objects on the fly in a similar manner to how layers are created in layered list shaders.

7  Add preset lighting options for items such objects as candle flames, or flames in a fire.  Also add objects to which they can be assigned.  A fire object would be great to save a ton of time when making fireplaces and campfires as well as candles and torches.

8  Add some more basic and advanced shaders for items such as fire, man made materials such as metal grids, fabrics etc.

9.  Add a sea spray / foam option for making things like realistic surf rolling in against seaside cliffs.

10 improve the terrain editor with more options and filters.  Add in some more options for terrain modifying tools.    The ability to import all settings from terragen files would be great.

Well thats all I can think of for now.