Nyghtfall opened this issue on Jul 04, 2010 · 10 posts
jonstark posted Mon, 05 July 2010 at 12:04 AM
mackis3D, I don't want to go too far afield, but I felt exactly as you do now about Carrara hair - I assumed it was something that would be difficult and complex to understand, however I was wrong. Now if you want to build it from scratch, I'm no expert but the other day I thought I would experiment in building a short hairstyle from scratch for M4, took me about an hour of fiddling before I came up with something that was at least adequate, if not fancy. Now that's really saying something about how useable the hair is, when you think about the fact that I'm still a moderate beginner at Carrara and I had never tried anything like that before. In general though for very good hairstyles I rely on premade Carrara hair (my personal favorite is anything by 3Dcelebrity at Daz - check out 'dynamic venus hair' for an example, and naomi's hairs are pretty good too). Styling is actually easier than with prop/character hair, now that I understand I really only need to know 2 tools in the hair room to make it go wherever I want - the select tool which will allow me to select which guide hair I want to move, and the brush tool, which will allow me to brush it in the direction I want it to go (just like a brush in real live). Within the menu of the brush tool is the 'point' feature, which allows you to adjust the point of the hair where you want the brush to effect it (if you want to move only the very tip of the hair, move the point towards the end of the guide hair, if the middle then adjust the point to the middle, and if the root, adjust down to the root).
There are some very good hair tutorials for dynamic Carrara hair out there, http://forum.daz3d.com/Hosted_Tutorials/carrarahair/c6hairpart1.html
are two examples that really helped me understand how it all works.
Ok, that's pretty far afield from the original question, so I apologize, but I'd hate for you to avoid one of the greatest assets in using Carrara just because (like me) you might think it's too difficult/complex to learn.
Carrara isn't for everybody, there is no right answer in all of this, but so far it is the one purchase I've made (at full price for Carrara 7 pro by the way) in all of 3d that I am 100% happy with. It works well for me, and I come from a Poser background. Even at the regular sale price at DAZ for the Pro Carrara 8 version it is possibly the best value for money in all of 3d, except of course for Blender. Vue is better at landscapes and atmospheres, but with a little elbow grease and willingness to work it, Carrara isn't terribly far behind, and Carrara does a host of things that Vue doesn't (also Vue is much more expensive). Modo I've heard can render much faster than Carrara but again Modo is very expensive, and within it's price range Carrara is blazing fast. With all it can do, it's mind-boggling that Carrara 7 Pro is free with a magazine subscription. At that price, I can't see a valid reason not to get it.
As lmckenzie said above, though, depending on your needs and how comfortable you are with Poser, you may not need all of what Carrara provides. Just depends on the individual, and what I found limiting about Poser may not be a problem for someone who uses it for totally different purposes than me.