which is an old build at this time.

there is a comment on my free stuff about 8.5.230, it's an old build. the g8 and g3 presets need the latest build to work.

sadly, there is no development news out about a carrara upgrade.

There are several fabulous plug ins that add to the carrara fun box. HD, Phong tesselation, fluid dynamics, cut outs and blimps, jiggle, etc

Carrara died of neglect long ago. It's hasn't been update past Genesis 2; and more then likely never will be. DAZ just didn't have coders that could that could do anything with it. I only bought in to C8.5 because DAZ customer service assured me all the bugs would be fix in C9. And we see how far that got.

has anyone tried the hivewire animals?

the poser la femme doesnt work?

the hivewire3d animals work in Carrara but you need to use the duf ones for DS not the Poser ones.

as usual though you will need to adjust the textures for best results ;-)

thanks

plug ins

https://sourceforge.net/projects/carrara-time-savers/

the last build of carrara 8.5.119 supports ds triax weight figures and blended weight figures. add your ds runtimes as ds files when adding to tray

there is also a HD plugin available to use the hd morphs for the genesis figures, not sure where the tutes on those are.

there is also a plug in for phong tesselation, lets us use the veins tiff files

Phong ♥ HD https://sourceforge.net/projects/carrara-time-savers/files/

FLUIDOS II carrara plugin https://sharecg.com/v/94992/related/9/Plug-in/FLUIDOS-II

Back in 2006, when Daz first acquired Carrara, they didn't just get the software. They acquired the entire Eovia company, including some former Metacreations employees who were programmers for Carrara and Hexagon. They had a contract with Daz to continue development of the software, which also included the Ray Dream physics engine and renderer. It's not documented anywhere for sure, but I suspect that somewhere between 2010 (the release of Carrara 8) and today, they lost those programmers or their contracts expired and they left to go somewhere else for more money. That's probably why Carrara has not been updated in any significant way for almost 10 years!

I suspect the main reason Daz wanted Eovia to begin with was simply to have a way to render their products quickly. Bryce was purchased two years earlier for that very reason, but it was just too slow to please most users and there was no way to significantly improve the Bryce render engine without re-writing the entire code from the ground up. Bryce is basically a render engine with features built up around it. Carrara was a modeling package with a render engine built into it. There's a big difference in how you can expand on things there.

Personally, I think Daz should have integrated iRay into Carrara instead of DS as a secondary render engine option. Kind of like how 3dsmax and some other big professional software can offer a number of plugin render engines with their apps. Instead, they must have lost their Eovia team along the way and finding a way to program for Carrara without them proved too expensive or difficult.

there is an Octane plug in for carrara, but is expensive.

MistyLaraCarrara posted at 12:48PM Wed, 23 December 2020 - #4408069

there is an Octane plug in for carrara, but is expensive.

Yeah, I was thinking more like a built in render option. I've seen it in other software like Maya and 3dsmax, where they will have a drop down list under "render" that allows you to choose a render engine that comes with the software. They usually have the default one, which in Carrara's case would be the current Ray Dream engine, but then they also offer iray, vray, or arnold. There's not need to purchase another standalone plugin. The option is built into the software. DS has that now too, where you can choose iray or the older engine. I think it was renderman or something like that. Plugins the way they are now in carrara are just bridges to other standalone engines. I'd have loved to see iray actually integrated into carrara.

the only render engine results that blows me away is vray. demo reel is gorgeous.

the iray results i've seen are kinda mono looking. all look the same.

i think a lot of the badly lit renders can be blamed on the ambient light being too high. no depth of shading. and not enough caustics renders, even tho is quite a hit to render times. even with 8 cores i don't turn it on for animations ore than 180 frames. >.<

the fake gi does help with render times, but does something wonky to shadows. finding the balance tween results and times is the trick

MistyLaraCarrara posted at 9:22PM Wed, 23 December 2020 - #4408318

the only render engine results that blows me away is vray. demo reel is gorgeous.

the iray results i've seen are kinda mono looking. all look the same.

That has to do with the industry that each render engine is being used for. What i mean by that is Vray has been around for the last 20 years more or less. It's been adopted by huge vfx studios and really put to the test in movie and animation productions over and over again. So the people who were making sizzle reels and shorts with vray are mostly people in the vfx industry and working for visual effects companies.

Iray is fairly new to the industry and was adopted first by architectural, jewelry and product visualization companies. Mostly because of how accurate it can recreate real world lighting conditions and materials with almost no thought about the settings compared to vray. Vray started out as an architecture render engine for 3dsmax originally too, but other render engines have started to take over those industries now because of how easy they are to use. You will notice that the majority of professional renders in the Nvidia iray reels for iray are product shots, interiors and jewelry stuff while vray is now mostly vfx shots and artistic renders.

is vray a descendant of mental ray?

i vaguely remember mental ray being part of 3ds max6

Vray was originally developed as a plugin for 3dsmax, then eventually it found its way to other software and as a standalone engine but it was never really shipped with 3dsmax as a built in render engine that I know of. As far as I know, 3dsmax users always had to purchase the plugin as a plugin render engine.

You are right about Mental Ray, and also later iray were for sure shipped with 3dsmax as optional render engines built into the software at no extra charge. I don't think that is the case anymore, because now 3dsmax (and Maya too) ships with Arnold render engine built in. I think 3dsmax users have to pay extra for iray and mental ray now, just like vray.

When I last tried the 3dsmax trial, it had at least 3 different render engines built into it that you could choose from. I liked that about it. Even blender has two choices now, Eevee or Cycles built in. Eevee is a viewport render engine, but it can also be used as a very good final render option, and Cycles is the path tracing option like iray.

Carrara for me is a custom software. I use it to render anime manga character, it has all I need to create such. About upgrades and things like that I have no need off as long as it can achieve what I want. Visit my webpage, is all made in carrara 3dcgx.com

there are things I use to make the renders even better I use Vibrance on IPAD to fix the images also filter forge has plugins for vibrance. and like Misty says there are many plugins available for Carrara I personally use Yatoon sometimes to make the lines around the character.

the pbr plugin adds a channel for roughness maps

theres also a hdri plug in

Carrara Time Savers