Hi, all --

It seems I pop in to this forum every couple years with basically the same question. I've been a user of Carrara since it was RayDream, was pretty prolific here on Renderosity years ago, but have drifted away, only to be drawn back in from time to time when I have a project that needs a tool I'm as familiar with as I am with Carrara.

So, here's the question: has Daz abandoned Carrara (at least on the Mac)? It sure looks like it, since the product page for C8P hasn't changed, and still says it's compatible with Mac 10.10 (Yosemite), but Sierra is 10.12 (and High Sierra, 10.13, is due out soon). I still have the Daz Installer program on an old hard drive; should I just go ahead and try installing it on 10.12, or will that lead to frustration, gnashing of teeth, and eventual heartbreak?

Thanks! Dex

And, I've answered my own question. I just installed C8.5P on my new MacBook Pro; everything seems to be working. The weird thing is that my MacBook Pro reports that it has four cores, but as Carrara renders a video, it seems to think that it is accessing eight cores (you know, the little colorful square tiles that represent which core is actively rendering a segment of the image). I'm not at all sure how that might be happening, but whatever, as long as it works, right?

Since it's been a while for me working with Carrara, I may be popping in here looking for answers to some questions you all may think are obvious, so in advance, I'll ask forgiveness!

Thanks for still being here, Renderosity Carrara gang!

-Dex

is multithreaded my 4 core Win7 machine gets 8 tiles too.

If you are a Mac user, and you don't switch from Carrara to Cheetah3D, you must have really fallen on your head.

8.5 works fine on Sierra except for one annoying bug. If younopen a Carrara file and a texture has been removed or deleted it opens a window an asks you to find the texture. Unfortunately, Sierra won't display the file name. Other than that and occasional crashes it's works well.

I took a look at Cheetah and it seems very capable. These days I'm using a lot of Daz created products and it doesn't look like Cheetah can import Duf files. I'm sticking with Carrara for now.

is a shame we have to suffer carrara bashing in the carrara forum. wth mann

brianp21361 posted at 4:11PM Sun, 27 August 2017 - #4313051

I took a look at Cheetah and it seems very capable. These days I'm using a lot of Daz created products and it doesn't look like Cheetah can import Duf files. I'm sticking with Carrara for now.

FBX exports from Daz Studio to Cheetah3D work perferctly.

sfdex posted at 4:05PM Sun, 27 August 2017 - #4313037

Thanks for still being here, Renderosity Carrara gang!

-Dex

Ha! Long time, no hassle. What are you working on that has you dusting off Carrara? Nice to see you around.

dr_bernie,

It's not the same. Daz content works natively in Carrara. I don't want to use Studio as a front end for Cheetah3D. Why have the extra steps? If you don't like Carrara, then don't use it. I'm sure your comments are appreciated in the Cheetah3D forum, but not here, especially when they're given in a negative way.

MarkBremmer posted at 12:01AM Sat, 02 September 2017 - #4313058

sfdex posted at 4:05PM Sun, 27 August 2017 - #4313037 Ha! Long time, no hassle. What are you working on that has you dusting off Carrara? Nice to see you around.

Glad to see you're still here, Mr. Bremmer! I'm working on visual effects for a short horror/suspense film and need to do a little sweetening of practical effects with some CGI elements.

And while it's apparent that eventually Carrara will stop working with any modern operating system (I did get an email back from Daz when I wrote to them about Carrara's future; they said that they're no longer developing Carrara for any platform), and Cheetah does look promising, I needed to knock something out in a hurry, and I'm familiar with Carrara, so, rather than diving into a project using software I'm unfamiliar with, I wanted to go with what I know. And I've been using Carrara since it was RayDream. It's powerful and intuitive for me (because I've used it for such a long time).

@sfdex - totally with you on the intuitiveness of Carrara. Sounds like a cool project you are working on.

I migrated my pro work to C4D Studio several years ago because it's very similar to Carrara in intuitiveness, but much more powerful. Plus, there are render farms available which is a must for many of my projects because of short timelines.

You'll have to post some WIPs and some final shots when you get a chance! You've made Carrara sing in the past...

Mark

This is off topic but I'm happy to see you back, Mark! I also use C4D r15 as bridge to send an animation to Realflow but I don't find this program so intuitive. See you soon on this forum!

@ brianp21361:

I respectfully disagree. Daz/Poser contents are actually handled better by Cheetah3D than by Carrara., and you will finish a project a LOT faster with Cheetah3D than with Carrara, with the added benefits of real-time physics and particles, a much more powerful modeler, a much faster renderer (actually 2 of them, one of them being a path tracer), and tons of other features too numerous to list here.

But just as an example, the image below was done with Carrara. It took me about 5 days or so of texture tweaking, and then a whopping 70 hours+ render time (probably because caustics were enabled) on a dual xeon box with 16 threads @2.66 GHz. I consider the result to be quite dull, and I abandoned the project, without ever publishing it. Note that I did this project when I was quite an accomplished Carrara user.

The second image was done with Cheetah3D. The FBX file imported right-out from Daz Studio. I did not modify any of the textures, except the rugs on the floor where the diffuse channel was a bit dark. The whole project took me about 1 day of work, spent mostly on lighting, with a render time of around 1 1/2 hours on a Late 2015 iMac with a 6700K CPU and 8 threads @ 4GHz. I am only a beginner Cheetah3D user, and I am sure an accomplished user can get far better results.

brianp21361 posted at 2:59PM Mon, 04 September 2017 - #4313062

dr_bernie,

It's not the same. Daz content works natively in Carrara. I don't want to use Studio as a front end for Cheetah3D. Why have the extra steps? If you don't like Carrara, then don't use it. I'm sure your comments are appreciated in the Cheetah3D forum, but not here, especially when they're given in a negative way.

I agree.

Hello Doctor Bernie! Wouldn't you be paid by DAZ to inject the lethal shot to Carrara?

@ DUDU.car:

My dear Dudu, this is a great conspiracy theory you came-up with. In fact, I myself often wonder if I am a Daz agent paid to inflict the final death blow to Carrara. I hope this clearly answers your question.

But seriously, anyone of you folks who still believes a Carrara 9 is in the works should quickly go see a psychiatrist and seek help.

Hi Dr Bernie, don't worry, it was a joke but this is not a good place to kill the hopes of the Carrara users. Personally, I don't need a version 9 to continue with Carrara, we have a bunch of plugins to make the bridge with a few professional softwares. Very friendly!

@ DUDU.car:

I knew you were joking Dudu, and it's a very funny joke because I often wondered the same thing myself.

I am not trying to kill anybody's hopes, but rather creating new ones, i.e. that after all the time we all spent learning Carrara, we can relatively easily move on to other 3D apps, without going through the same steep learning curves again.