First let's see something BESIDES posed, naked DAZ figures in some of your work - ever do anything ORIGINAL? Any schmuck can pose SOMEBODY ELSE'S models...

I'll take that as a "no, I have done nothing in Blender".

First let's see something BESIDES posed, naked DAZ figures in some of your work - ever do anything ORIGINAL? Any schmuck can pose SOMEBODY ELSE'S models...

I'll take that as a "no, I have done nothing in Blender".

Heh, heh.

Carrara needs a lot more or better features for modelling.  If you compare it overall to other apps, it holds up real well for the price, but if you really want something for more than rendering Poser stuff, then you find it is lacking in some really core features, like modelling tools.  Sure, you can model things in it, but it's not fun, and compared to something like Blender, it would take forever to model high poly objects in Carrara.  Carrara is cool, and can be fun, but for doing some real work, and creating scenes from scratch, with all your own models, it's kind of outdated.  Hey, that's just being honest.  I'm not trying to bash it, just being realistic.

I don't see many people creating really high quality models using only Carrara.  At least not on average that doesn't happen, and there's good reason for that.  Sure, some people probably do create some fantastic realistic models with it, but it's a rarity.  Hey, people actually still use Bryce for modelling some far out high detail models too, but it takes them months.

Nowadays, I'm trying to learn to model things myself, and that's really where I had to move away from Carrara quickly.  I wish I didn't have to!  And that's what I find wrong with Carrara.  It's become more or less another render engine for Poser stuff, instead of a complete 3D package at an affordable level.

FINALLY! Someone who gets it...

FINALLY! Someone who gets it...

Well, thanks.  I think.  Personally, I don't agree with the insults I read in this thread (a lot of them came from you, but some from others), but I do agree with the fact that Carrara has gone from a potentially outstanding general 3d application into what now feels like another Daz or Poser render agent. Since I don't do animation, I don't care where I render my Poser stuff.  There's plenty of great engines out there I can just export as OBJ.  When you think about it, Poser is the easiest way to pose the figures anyway (or daz studio), then as long as you don't need to animate, just export as OBJ to somewhere and render.  Sure you need to configure materials and textures, but once you set up a good skin material in your render engine of choice, you can just save it and reuse it.  It's not that time consuming.  So all this "integration" to me is a waste of resources, and actually pushed me away from Carrara a while ago.  Again, not bashing the software, just being honest.

FINALLY! Someone who gets it...

Well, thanks.  I think.  Personally, I don't agree with the insults I read in this thread (a lot of them came from you, but some from others), but I do agree with the fact that Carrara has gone from a potentially outstanding general 3d application into what now feels like another Daz or Poser render agent. Since I don't do animation, I don't care where I render my Poser stuff.  There's plenty of great engines out there I can just export as OBJ.  When you think about it, Poser is the easiest way to pose the figures anyway (or daz studio), then as long as you don't need to animate, just export as OBJ to somewhere and render.  Sure you need to configure materials and textures, but once you set up a good skin material in your render engine of choice, you can just save it and reuse it.  It's not that time consuming.  So all this "integration" to me is a waste of resources, and actually pushed me away from Carrara a while ago.  Again, not bashing the software, just being honest.

That is where you are missing out. I think you are confusing "honest" with not knowing how to properly use the software.

Part of the reason I started using carrara is I was fed up with going through 3 different apps to get to a final render.

And the reason I am so hacked off at DAZ is because how badly they blundered C8.5, and have done nothing to fix it. I have no issues with carrara in and of it's self.

Please, can we let we let this thread die a peaceful death due to lack of attention? "All sound and fury, signifying nothing.", I believe the quote goes from Billy Shakespeare. 

Images are nice.

Carrara needs a lot more or better features for modelling.  If you compare it overall to other apps, it holds up real well for the price, but if you really want something for more than rendering Poser stuff, then you find it is lacking in some really core features, like modelling tools.  Sure, you can model things in it, but it's not fun, and compared to something like Blender, it would take forever to model high poly objects in Carrara.  Carrara is cool, and can be fun, but for doing some real work, and creating scenes from scratch, with all your own models, it's kind of outdated.  Hey, that's just being honest.  I'm not trying to bash it, just being realistic.

I don't see many people creating really high quality models using only Carrara.  At least not on average that doesn't happen, and there's good reason for that.  Sure, some people probably do create some fantastic realistic models with it, but it's a rarity.  Hey, people actually still use Bryce for modelling some far out high detail models too, but it takes them months.

While there are some who use Carrara this way (Kixum and Mike Moir spring to mind) I don't generally think Carrara is considered by really anyone as the absolute GoTo solution for the 'awesome vertex modeler' category.  It's never been billed that way and I have serious doubt anyone ever bought Carrara solely as a modeler or with the expectation of getting Modo or C4D or 3ds level of modeling features.

But there is modeling and then there is modeling.  If my goal is that I need a precise complex model of something to machine tolerances and I need an app solely for modeling this one thing, which I can then convert into an .obj or something to be used in any other app, well then sure there are better apps for that purpose.

On the other hand, if you're in the middle of building a scene for rendering and you suddenly think, 'man I sure wish I had a wall over there with an doorway and some windows and some windowboxes with flowers, and some custom built trees' etc, then Carrara is perfect for this sort of thing without having to save the work, close down your app, start up another app, model from scratch, import into your original app, restart the scene you're work on, resize and rescale, and place, etc.  Eh, why slow down the workflow when it's as easy as slapping in a vertex object, hop into the modeling room for a sec, then back to the scene, ready to go?  The fact that this kind of thing can be done quickly and seamlessly in on app makes Carrara by default superior to any other modelling app (no matter how excellent the other modeler is in features that Carrara doesn't have) for quick and efficient workflow.

Also not to be underestimated is the breadth and number of Carrara modelers that are built in.  Leaving aside plugins like Architools for the quick construction of buildings and stuff like that, we have a ton of different modelers built in.  I think most people only think of the Vertex modeler, but there's the Spline modeler, and the Metaball modeler, modelers for Plants, Terrains, Clouds, Fire, Water, Particles, Text, Hair, to mention just a very few.  Are all of these different modelers the very best modelers of their type anywhere in the industry?  Of course not, but surprisingly some of them actually are (I'm thinking at the moment of the hair modeler which is simply outstanding for any hobbyist-priced software and fully the equivalent to what can be produced with pro-level priced apps).

But who buys Carrara just as a modeler?  No-one, except maybe Titanic401's fictitious and non-existent caricature of a Carrara fanboy strawman (which means no one).  The reasons for going with Carrara are multiple, but if I had to guess I would say it's ability to use Poser and Daz characters natively probably ranks high on the list.  The huge number of modelers is likely much lower on the list, and a side-benefit, for most (not all) Carrara users.

I would never ever argue with anyone that Carrara has the greatest and most feature intense vertex modeler on the planet.

By the same token, I think it would insanely difficult to argue that Carrara's multiple modeling abilities aren't incredibly useful within the context of a larger scene construction and workflow.

I know you mentioned it being easier to pose daz content in Poser or Studio (which I very much disagree with, but this is a subjective opinion only; for me Carrara is waaaay easier to pose characters with), and then exporting as .obj to render in other apps, I do this myself from Carrara, because I have a great love for TheaRender, and until such time as someone invents a plugin for Thea that's what I have to do.  But let's not pretend there isn't a lot of time and trouble involved in this process, it certainly isn't an efficient workflow, and nowadays if I need something rendered in an unbiased engine quickly and correctly, I use the Octane for Carrara plugin so I don't have to go to the trouble.  Sure Thea renders a bit faster than Octane, and I'm not as in love with Octane for it's rendering, but it's so close the differences between the 2 are negligable, and again with the plugin it's a one click solution within the same application.  That's a huge benefit to me in time savings, and I know I'm not alone in preferring the all in one solution in this way.  Again, not trying to bash whatever your favorite software or workflow is, just being honest.

 In the realm of 'a moving picture is worth 1000 words' Here's a 10 second scene I was able to build and animate - extremely quickly - all in Carrara, and even though this was just a test animation for dynamic cloth in Carrara, I think it kind of illustrates my above point:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIAp6vysYZE&feature=youtu.be

First off, I'm using V4, with morphs, and a conforming top (from V4 basicwear).  Carrara can use all this natively and with no trouble (as well as Genesis and Genesis2, and other poser and daz figures).  There are other softwares that can do this, Poser and Studio and in some senses Vue, and maybe C4D with interposer pro.  Carrara is not unique in this sense, but the list is actually pretty small, and some will scoff at using premade content, I'll just scoff right back at those who don't believe in saving valuable time using high-quality premade content when it can be used.  :)

Next, it's animated, because Carrara has a very robust set of animation features.  As I've learned watching SciFiFunk's tutorials, Carrara's NLA functions alone, and the fact you can have more than 10 NLA tracks you can mix and match, are extremely valuable in animating.  I'm no animator, but I'm learning, and NLA is just one of the many many animation tools Carrara has built in.  Here I've gone in the 1st 3 seconds from a T pose to a static standing pose, and then started an aniblock for V4 that I imported in.  I forgot to put in a Mimic Pro track for blinking and breathing and lip synching such, but I could have done that too and mixed it in no problems.  Carrara can import and use BVH, Aniblocks, Mimic Pro, Poser animations, etc.  Again the list of applications that can do this is limited.

Next, the dynamic cloth.  I modeled this in the vertex room starting with a simple vertex cylinder, tesellating it, cutting out the top and bottom to make it a tube.  Could I have modelled this in another modeling software?  Sure, but why, when I can do it all in Carrara without ever leaving the application.

And then I went into the assembly room and modeled there, on top of the V4 character I was attaching the cloth to.  Hmmm, not sure anywhere other than Carrara could I have done that...

I ran the cloth simulation, it's super fast and runs nearly in real time.  There are other dynamic cloth solutions, but again, I'd have to have exported, imported, tried to match it up, etc.  I can't speak to Marvelous Designer because I've never used it, but Carrara's cloth sim runs in real time, and much faster than for example Poser's cloth sim.

I then modelled the hair in Carrara's hair room.  Took me all of 3 minutes to put the hair together, then the hair sim was incredibly fast too, again nearly real-time.  Also there is nothing in the hobbyist world that even comes close to the realism of Carrara dynamic hair.  It's fully on part with pro level software.

Hit render button, done.

Yes, this is low quality in render settings, simply because it was a test and didn't matter and that I wanted a quick animation render (and it was very quick to render, and now I can change/correct/refine my cloth settings next time to zero in on exactly the look I want).  But the point is, all of this was done - very quickly and easily - with Carrara, and I no other software that I know of can do all of this together in one app (and this doesn't even scratch the surface of what Carrara can do, all by it's lonesome).

Hi Daniel (Jonstark)!
Your simulation is impressive, I saw only once a so good performance (by PhilW).
I believe that there would not be to much work for DAZ to improve this feature, but they are obsessed too much by the evolution of DS and not of Carrara.
You speak about comparisons with MD and Poser, it should be said that these softwares are a lot more advanced for simulations and the results are impeccable.
Unfortunately, one cannot export the hair since Poser (I do not think so).
To summarize, I can say that you gave me  again confidence in simulations of Carrara (clothing and hair), which it would be nice, it is that you carry out tutos in .PDF to be able to use your experiments on the same computer. (my work computer never goes on Internet).
Thank you to share your experiments !

 Hi DUDU, in case you missed it, there's the thread over at the daz forums where a bunch of us are playing around with getting dynamic cloth simulation in Carrara:

 http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewthread/49954/

 Stringtheory is the one who came up with the concept, and it seems to work, really well and really fast, though we're still trying to find the right settings for different types of cloth behavior, all the experiments and settings are in that thread.  Stringtheory did mention he would put together a tutorial on this, but I don't know when he'll have the time to do it.  I would put up a tutorial myself (even though none of it is my idea, and I would give full credit to Stringtheory, Marcus Severus, Diomede and the others since they really pioneered this approach and I'm just trying to refine it  :)  )  but since we haven't zeroed in on exactly the right settings to use for different types of cloth this is still in the experimental stage right now, and more testing needs to be done. 

"But the point is, all of this was done - very quickly and easily - with Carrara, and I no other software that I know of can do all of this together in one app (and this doesn't even scratch the surface of what Carrara can do, all by it's lonesome)."

Jon, all of what you mentioned there can be done in Blender, Maya, 3dsmax, to name a few.  The 3dsmax has a cloth engine built in which is a lot like Marvelous Designer in what it can do, which I found amazing.  I only played with the trial version, but wow.  If you take Poser content out of the equasion, then Blender can do all of it too.  Blender's hair can render just as realistic, if not moreso, because of more complex lighting and rending.  The Cycles hair is incredible, and looks like a photo when rendered, just as you mentioned in Carrara.  Of course, the Poser application is the only thing Carrara has that these others do not, but that's kinda my point.  I don't really care about Poser integration, and feel so much more effort could be invested into other features, where Carrara clearly fell behind over the years.

 I was about to express surprise to learn that Maya, 3ds, etc could use daz content natively, since that's rather a large component of what I mentioned went into that little test sample, but then reading to the end of your paragraph and sounds like I'm not wrong about that and they cannot use Poser/daz content natively (please correct me if I'm wrong).  I realize you personally don't care about poser/daz integration and that's cool beans.   Whatever works for your particular pipeline and is the best for you personally, it's all good.  :)

But at the same time, for a general discussion of what's going to be useful to the market at large, having a huge premade library of high quality and ready-made content ready to go and work natively in your preferred application is (without question) a tremendous benefit.  There may be certain situations where it makes logical sense to build every model in the scene from scratch, but for most of us that's a huge and unnecessary task that will kill a lot of project time that could be better spent getting to the final render and composition.  For myself I don't have the skills in modeling, or the patience and love of modeling  to do that, and would consider it an insurmountable obstacle/time killer if I were forced into that position in using an app that can't make use of the huge existing library of poser/daz content that is already ready to go.  Carrara can do this, and the list of other apps that can dot this is pretty small, and this gives great value to what Carrara can do (to the objective market in general, not you specifically).  I wouldn't own and use Carrara if it couldn't use the daz/poser content natively, for example.

 Also I would point out that by bringing Maya and 3DS into the discussion you're now comparing a $65 application (Carrara) with apps that cost thousands of dollars.  The fact that Carrara can stand up to the comparison at all with such more highly priced software is astounding.  Carrara is certainly not aimed at the same market segment as those who have gigantic blockbuster budgets and need a full production studio with software to match. 

 Blender is definitely better at some things than Carrara, but fortunately it's free, so anyone can integrate into it into their toolkit.  I would say it's decidedly better at fluid simulation, for one example.  Blender hair is pretty good for stills, but I haven't seen anyone using it for animations where it looked realistic in the way it draped and behaved on a human.  That may simply be user error, or that no one has yet 'broken the code', so not a value judgment on Blender's hair system itself, but Carrara hair sim is nearly realtime, incredibly fast, and realism-wise is on par with programs that cost thousands of dollars.  I think you mentioned before you yourself are not into animation but stills, so fair enough you probably can get just as realistic looking hair from Blender, but objectively speaking for the broader audience, if Carrara can do more realistic hair sims more quickly than Blender and give realistic animations quickly, then even if it's a 'dead heat' to how realistic the hair looks in still renders I think anyone would agree that's an edge to Carrara. 

 At some point someone somewhere will probably add to Blender the  ability to use the daz/poser content natively.  If this happens, it will undoubtedly change the game and the current landscape, and may mean that Blender will eventually become the the more popular all-in-one solution that it certainly can be.  But at present, I'm not aware of any other program that can do the whole of what I did in that simple test animation, quickly and efficiently.

Jon, you make some excellent points and arguments.  However, I can give you some examples of Blender hair being used in animation if you're interested.  Here's some links:

Blender hair dynamics test:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzGwkQRpOmQ

Styling Blender Hair in for Cycles render:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaG1ZUf1B4

Styling and rendering long hair with Blender Cycles:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVJyGzPJIeQ

For examples of Blender hair being used in real production, you can research some of the Blender animation projects, like Sintel:

http://www.blender.org/features/projects/

Blender Hair Dynamics with Collision test:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9v1IHo1R1o

There are many many more examples of it in animation too.  Plus, with the Cycles renderer, it's become ultra realistic, as Cycles has special nodes to render hair that give it incredible subsurface effects and realism.

Also, the movie Big Buck Bunny used dynamic hair in older versions of Blender extensively.  That was a full-length feature film, rendered with Blender Internal engine.  The realism of dynamic hair has come a long way since that feature film, with Cycles hair rendering.  Blender can claim it's hair was used in a real studio production (Sintel and Big Buck Bunny), which so far is something Carrara hair can not claim, and does make a huge difference in proof of concept.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vpg9yizPP_g

Finally, here's a thread showing some hair render tests, using 90,000+ strands, and curly, complex stylings on the Sintel character.  Not ultra realistic, but about as good as the ones I've seen in any Carrara tests, except using full GI lighting too, with inter-strand shadowing.  Of course, it's capable of animation too, as you see in some of the other example vids.

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?289219-Sintel-hair-render-test

I think it's slightly misleading to suggest Blender can't do the same or better as Carrara with hair for animation, because the evidence is all over the place if you know where to look.

I think it's GREAT that Carrara has dynamic hair as it does.  I think it's even better that you and others are tutoring people on how to use it properly.  But there ARE other alternatives to great animated hair out there, especially in Blender, which cost the user nothing at all to use, and definitely competes with all the major production applications, like Maya or 3dsmax.  Again, you have me beat in the fact that Poser content is not natively supported.  You are correct there, and if that is important to the user, then Carrara is the way to go.  But let's not suggest that it isn't available anywhere else, at no cost.

Maya and 3dsmax do not support Poser natively.  You are again correct with that assumption.

Peace and love,

David.

  Thanks David, actually I had seen all of those clips before and more besides (back when I went out scouring youtube for examples of Blender hair in animation) and those same clips are exactly what I based my prior opinion on.  It's funny how we can both look at the same clips and come to such different opinions, but that's the nature of subjectivity I suppose.  :)    Apples to apples, only 2 of those links:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzGwkQRpOmQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9v1IHo1R1o

Are actual animations that someone (like me) probably whipped up in Blender on their own, trying to test settings and get a realistic human hair behaving with a character moving.  They aren't horrible, and I can see there might be room for potential, but compare it with one of my first tests with Carrara:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsz65nEkq5U

I'm not an expert or a genius (far from it), if anything I'm kind of an idiot, and if a stumbling newbie to dynamic hair (I've played with Carrara for several years now but never ever animated dynamic hair until about 3 weeks ago) can come up with something like that off the bat, then I think that speaks to how easy/quick it is to get a good simulation of human-style dynamic hair in Carrara.

I scoured youtube looking for other users of Blender and their test sequences and couldn't find anything that much better than the first 2 clips you posted.  My first thought is either there's some sort of limitation in the dynamics of Blender that makes realistic human hair very difficult, or (perhaps much more likely) users just haven't yet figured out the most realistic settings to use.  You know what though?  I also did youtube searches on 3ds, Modo, Maya, Lightwave, Houdini and C4D.  Found some pretty good ones for C4d and Lightwave, and a few that were decent for Maya, but I also found lots of ones that were not so great to very poor, even with the big name/price software.

I had watched the other clips you posted too, but most are tutorials on how to create realistic hairstyles in Blender and don't include any particular animations of it reacting to dynamic forces (I watched them about 2 weeks ago when I was thinking 'it can't be this easy' after my first experiments with Carrara hair, and I was looking around to see what else was out there).  The other links were for a cartoon-stylized short (Big Buck Bunny) which has no human style hair (though I do love the movie, don't get me wrong) and Sintel, which is in a category of it's own.

 Now as fur and grass, Blender hair looks and behaves great in animations (as in Big Buck Bunny), and obviously neither Big Buck nor Sintel were aiming at doing a realistic style of hair, so even though they had a big budget and large production team for Sintel, just because it doesn't look like realistic human hair doesn't mean there's anything intrinsically inferior about Blender's hair sim (it's not supposed to look realistic in that show, but instead is supposed to match the stylization of the rest of characters in Sintel) and of all the animations I've seen Sintel is the one where it looks like the dynamics of the way it moves in reaction to scene forces (wind, character movement) that there could indeed be a good dynamic hair physics engine buried deep down (though it often looks more like cloth movement to my eye than strand movement, but leaving that aside).  On the other hand, it's very difficult to know when you're talking about a production with a big team working together about what went into it, so I'll just reserve judgment altogether, except to say I don't think anyone should hold it's lack of hair realism against it, as that was never the point and would have looked out of place anyway.

 My general opinion is that it could be possible that Blender may be able to produce realistic dynamic human hair in animation, but I don't think the users have 'cracked the code' yet of what settings to use to make that happen.   I should never say 'can't be done' because I've seen that label misapplied too many times to other software (as for example it often is with Carrara).

Blender has Cycles, an outstanding unbiased render engine.  I'm even more jealous that there is a plugin for TheaRender, my personal absolute favorite unbiased renderer of all time.  Currently if I want to render in Thea I have to export to .obj and import into Thea, retexturing once it's there.  I would kill for a plugin for Carrara to Thea but sadly it doesn't exist yet.  In fact, if Blender suddenly got native daz/poser support tomorrow, that along might enough to make me flip over to making Blender my goto app, even though I find the UI in Carrara waaaay waaay more easy and natural to use (but then again I'm already used to Carrara and comfortable with it's UI).

On the other hand, Carrara does have plugins for Lux (Luxus and now Luxcore), and Octane, so it's not like there aren't unbiased render options with Carrara too.  Nowadays nearly everything has unbiased render options.  Iclone even has Indigo, for example.  Not sure if Vue has any... but I'm wandering from the topic.

I sometimes wonder if I could go back in time to when I started dabbling with this hobby, would I tell myself to go with Carrara?  I certainly am no fan of Daz, and have 0% faith in their development.  I do think there will be a Carrara 9, but I'm just about certain it will all be fixes to use Genesis2 content more easily and nothing much more substantial than that.  But for what I need, I think Carrara as it is does just about everything already, so even though there's little to no real development, I'm still good with Carrara as is, and I'd probably tell my past self 'go for Carrara, you won't be unhappy'.

Although if Blender got native use of daz/poser stuff, I just might have to flip to using it as my main app instead of simply an app that I use for a few things when needed.  Oh how I wish there were a Thea plugin for Carrara.  I might have to study up on programming languages and create it myself  (after all, I once slept in a holiday inn express  :)  )

Did you guys ever see some of these strand hair animations with Blender?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BDoQhjpp2Q

https://vimeo.com/10145247

https://vimeo.com/86840172

https://vimeo.com/101554952

https://vimeo.com/44546452

This one is a fully produced animation, done back in 2007 with old version of particle hair:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMsbU-RDjI8

Sorry to crash the thread, guys.  I won't post again.  Just wanted to stick up for Blender a little. I recognize David's name from the Blender forum, and mistakenly thought it was the Blender forum for a second when I started reading. I'm like, what's all this Carrara stuff?  haha.  duh. ;-)

No, worries. Blender is a useful tool, and it's always good to see what the 'competition' can do. :)