headwax. opened this issue on Oct 03, 2013 · 105 posts
dr_bernie posted Thu, 03 October 2013 at 4:25 PM
Don't get me wrong ManleyStanley. Genesis is certainly a remarkable software achievement. All the accolades and praises it received are proof positive to that.
But being a great software achievement is one thing, and improving significantly user's workflow another. Genesis's workflow improvement in Carrara is, from where I am standing, negligible when taking into account the 3 years time it took to implement it.
Look at this clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkWBRuJlQhA.
It's an Aiko 3 walk cycle. The movements are very natural and very believable, and it's only a gen3 model. You can find dozens upon dozens of gen 4 animations that ate very good and very believable too.
My point: Carrara does not need a better mesh to produce better poses and better animations, it needs better posing and better animation tools.
Now look at this render I did with a demo version of Shade 12 a year or so ago. Warning: The image contains full frontal nudity but it's within RO's TOS.
I spent a couple of days getting used to Shade's quirky, but manageable, interface, then I opened a Poser .pz3 scene and I tweaked the shaders highlights and ambient and and SSS parameters, added just 1 light and rendered.
Look at how accurate and clean the render is. Look at how natural the skin is. It took me only a couple of hours of texture tweaking in Shade to get this result. Had I spent a day or so adding multi-layer textures, the result would have been outright spectacular, probably breathtaking.
My point: Carrara does not need higher resolution textures. Gen 4 textures are excellent as they are, as demonstrated by the Shade render. What Carrara needs is to process light more accurately, i.e. Carrara needs a better renderer, to bring-out the details of already excellent gen 4 textures.
Now how long would it have taken to improve Carrara's posing and animation tools, and implement a renderer like Shade's? You tell me, but certainly not 3 years.
