Some anomalies in Carrara's lights behavior that need to be fixed, or am I the only one to consider them as anomalies?

1. A bulb light has a range, a range fall-off, but has no fall-off type (Linear, inverse squared or logarithmic). Is this an omission or or is it the way a bulb light should behave?

2. A tube light emits light from both its ends. This isn't how tube lights behave in real world. Is this the way tube lights are supposed to behave in 3D world or is it an implementation shortcoming?

3. Disc and rectangular shape lights emit light from both sides. The also emit light from their periphery. I believe I saw in a demo of Cinema4D that their shape lights emit light from one side only, which is the behavior I would personally expect from a shape light.

Correcting these issues (if indeed they are issues) shouldn't take more than a couple of days and they would make Carrara's lighting so much more accurate.

Quote - This would be my number one request.  I would lilke to use HDRI inside without removing the roof and/or walls.

Klebnor

Thanks. This should not take more than a month for one developer to implement, so it still qualifies as a featurette.

Do you agree with my definition of spherical HDRI lighting? i.e. it's not a background image but a light type whose properties are supplied by a spherical hdri map.

The map is wrapped around a sphere and each point of the sphere is one ray of distant light that is perpendicular to the sphere at that point. It has all the properties of a distant light except it does not cast shadows.

There should also be a slider to set the global intensity of the hdri light, but we already have that.

@ maxxxmodelz:

I agree with you that Carrara's modeler is anything but high-end, and you shouldn't consider it for any complex modeling task.

But fortunately there is Hexagon, which currently sells for $19.95 at Daz. Hexagon is a modeler in the same league as Silo. It is very responsive and very comfortable to work with. It has native support for .car files, so you can model in Hexagon, then open the file in Carrara for texturing, rigging, animating and rendering.

For this reason, and considering Hexagon's very low price, I am not insisting on Carrara's modeling room improvements at this time.

Although in the long run, as Jon Stark suggested in another thread, I would very much like to see all of Hexagon's features migrated to Carrara.

Regarding HDRI:

1. Make the HDRI lighting work in indoor scenes that have no windows (Like Poser and, I believe, Lightwave).

2. HDRI shouldn't be implemented as a background image but as a light type whose properties are supplied by an hdri image. In the case of a spherical hdri map, each point of the sphere is a distant light **composed of only one ray **that is perpendicular to the sphere at that point and has all the behaviors of a distant light except it doesn't cast shadows.

Quote - I would add a searchable content browser

Thanks.

I would like to add to this request:

1. Larger thumnails in Content Browser. Thumbnails are currently too small and sometime difficult to see.

2. Instead of the mile long list of Faces, Figures, Hands, Poses and Props, have them in 'subtabs' of their own so you can access them quickly.

In fact my suggestion for the content browser would be to trash the Smart Content tab and copy shamelessly Poser's Library Management system. It's neat, it's clean and it's very comfortable to work with. This is more than a featurette and would probably take a couple of months for one developer. But it's far shorter than the time Daz spent on the smart content thingy.

@Tsarist: Your first request is definitely a featurette. A Reality plugin is a multi-month development and can't be oonsidered a featurette.

@Jon Stark: Shader list rollback is an annoying issue in the shader room. When the shader list is too long to fit in the height of the screen (V4 or M4 shaders are typical examples) and you scroll down the list and double-click on a shader to bring it into view (to add SSS for example) the shader list jumps back to the top. This is truly annoying and slows-you down a lot when you want to go through every shader in the list because you must scroll-down the list continuously to find where you were.

A dynamic cloth plugin is not a featurette. But I guess a knife tool is.

I hope this list will grow to about 50 featurettes and then I will submit it to Daz for review and implementation.

Quote - Which was unnessary in the beta.

dr_bernie no it's not a matter of mesh but weightmapping. As I've said repeatedly, DAZ could have weightmapped the mil 4 figures for carrara, but they wouldn't have worked in Studio. So it never happened.

Weightmapped V4/M4 (A sort of Victoria 4.5 or Michael 4.5) in Carrara would have been more than enough for me.

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.

http://s1089.photobucket.com/user/dr_bernie/media/Demo%20Shade/PharaohTempleShade_zps070e0f15.jpg.html

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.

Quote - I will NEVER touch Genesis in Carrara. What a total mess!

Thanks! You just made my day! The Genesis added value to Carrara is nearly zero!

Quote -   Thanks for the heads up on this  dr_bernie - I just downloaded the demo and it looks fantastic! I had no idea this package existed before today. Looks like I'm going to have to get my wallet out and buy yet another 3D package :-(

Thanks StealthWorks. With your comment 'I just downloaded the demo and it looks fantastic!', you just made my day.

Because your comment is a reminder to Daz that there are 3D apps out there that costs less, actually much less, than Carrara Pro and they perform a lot better.

What amazes me is that Cheetah3D is mostly a one man project. Yet every major or minor release since version 5.0 contains some significant improvements including a full implementation of the Bullet physics engine (if I'm not mistaken it has live simulations) and a Javascript based scripting engine.

Maybe Daz should bring Dr. Martin (I forgot his last name) on board as a consultant to lead Carrara's dev. team and doesn't let them embark in a 3 years development that adds very little value to Carrara.

That is why I think E-Frontier, the maker of Shade, is the best candidate for a Carrara acquisition, for the reasons I stated in my original post:

1. Shade has a large audience in Japan, but its user base outside of Japan is mostly negligible. Therefore Shade and Carrara will not compete with each other in the same geographic area.

2. E-Frontier is the former owner of Poser. Shade has the Poser Fusion plugin built-in. Therefore Poser compatibility is part of their corporate culture. The acquisition of Carrara by E-Frontier should therefore not hinder Carrara's Poser compatibility.

3. E-Frontier has been able to remain profitable with a relatively low-priced 3D app, therefore they should be able to keep Carrara's price unchanged and still manage to be profitable.

4. E-Frontier has the technical know-how to design a world-class renderer that can hold its own against the likes of Mental Ray. Incorporating such a renderer in Carrara will add a tremendous value to it and boost its sales, while Genesis brings very little value to Carrara, and I doubt Carrara's sales will improve the slightest because of Genesis compatibility.

Thanks maxxxmodelz for your comments.

I can understand your frustrations with Carrara's modeler. I agree it is somewhat limited. It's certainly adequate to model a chair or a desk or a sofa or a simple building. But if you want to design a realistic model of the entire US fleet in the Persian Gulf you should look at something else.

I'm surprised that your associate did not use Hexagon. It certainly is a lot better than Carrara's modeler, and has support for native .car file format, so you can model in Hexagon then texture, rig, animate and render in Carrara. Hexagon is not in the same league as, say, Modo but at a price tag of $19.95 it is a very good deal.

Carrara's animation tools aren't that bad. The timeline and graph editor are quite capable and its NLA clip system is surprisingly well-thought and bug-free, although the blending between 2 clips is occasionally problematic. If you use Daz Studio's Animate 2 plugin (which is often referred to as the poorman's Motion Builder) then you can create some very believable animations in Carrara at a very low cost.

I don't have benchmarks for Shade's renderer. I only compared its speed visually against the render speeds of trial versions of Lightwave and Cinema 4D on the same Poser scenes and it holds its own against these two particularly fast renderers.

Shade is currently priced at $499.- in the US. At this price its renderer is a solid match to renderers in $5,000.- 3D apps, and this is what makes Shade a remarkable product.

As I mentioned in my previous posts, the best thing that could happen to Carrara is a renderer like Shade's. If Daz is smart enough to implement such a renderer, it could boost Carrara's sale to a point that Carrara could well become Daz's main source of revenues.

As I mentioned above Carrara's Genesis functionality is of no use to me, but Poser compatibility is essential. If Daz sells Carrara without Poser compatibility I will just stop using it.

Look at this app: http://www.cheetah3d.com/ list of features. It is priced at $99.- (Occasionally discounted to $69.-). In every respect it beats Carrara, but it's Mac only and does not have Poser compatibility.

If you're a Mac user and don't need Poser compatibility, Cheetah3D is a far better value than even a heavily discounted Carrara.

What is difficult to understand is that Cheetah3D is essentially a one man development, yet it has all the features that you could wish for in a well-behaved 3D app. So how come Daz with its quite large dev team can't do what a one man team can?

Quote - Oh, and I really like what Shade can do, but the few times I've tried to come to grips with it, the interface just kicks me right out. I don't know how the newest version stacks up as far as interface improvements go.

Thanks for your vote of confidence for Shade.

Shade UI is a bit clunky but it's still quite good, compared to Lightwave's for example, but this is a matter of personal taste. I looked at a Shade Pro 12 trial a couple of years ago. I might get a trial license for the newest Shade 14 to see how it has (or hasn't) improved.

As I mentioned above Shade strongest point is its absolutely kick-ass renderer. Shade's renderer takes no prisoner, to say the least.

My greatest wish for Carrara is to have a renderer like Shade's and I am sure if Daz3D has the smarts to spend a year or so to design a renderer that matches Shade's, then customers will line-up at Daz's store to buy Carrara, so much so that they will even fight for their turn.

Quote - Oh, that is what this is about.

You mean a Carrara vs. Shade or Carrara vs Poser debate? You're right, that is what this is about. To keep Carrara healthy and kicking we need this kind of debate.