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144 comments found!
Also check out the plug-in sites at www.digitalcarversguild.com and www.losthorizonsoftware.com and http://www.zenstar.com/ to see what affordable add-on goodies are available for Carrara (plus vectorstyle which eovia sells direct). Hey MarkBremmer, get that new site done already! I'm looking forward to seeing it.
Thread: Carrara 2 | Forum: Carrara
If animation is your thing then you ought to check out lightwave. The learning curve is steep (not to mention the price) but lightwave is amazingly powerful. You could spend days just inside what they call the Graph Editor. Personally I spend most of my time in Carrara and C4D (I find that both products have very accessible interfaces and can produce great looking output). There's so much to learn when it comes to 3D that you could probably spend a lot of time with Carrara before even needing to possibly upgrade to something more powerful. Carrara's vertex modeler is missing some features (like beveling, knife tool) but is I think a nice friendly introduction to polygon modeling. Carrara makes things like caustics and global illumination seem like child's play (plus the bones are easy to work with although I don't think they are as fully-featured as what you'd find in something like lightwave). Also, the user community for Carrara is usually very helpful (if you ask a dumb question on a lightwave list you're likely to get your head ripped off). I've played with a bit with electric image and thought that it might be a bit advanced/complicated for someone relatively new to 3D (but http://www.dvgarage.com/ does good work).
Thread: Amapi 7 to C2 bridge, how well does it work? | Forum: Carrara
I've got nothing against amapi (except that it constantly crashes my computer!) but personally I would prefer to see Eovia add some muscle to the built-in Carrara vertex modeler (things like beveling/rounding, interactive extrude, knife tool, etc. to bring the VM more in line with other polygon modelers). Lightwave has the separation between modeller and layout and at least for simpler projects that can be a bit of a pain. I've only played briefly with the amapi 7 demo so I can't speak to how well the bridge works. One thing I'd wonder about is how the bridge works when it comes to texturing objects inside Carrara and how does it interact with third-party uv mappers. It seems like most complex texturing is done in conjunction with these uvmapper programs.
Thread: Diffusion? | Forum: Carrara
In both lightwave and c4d, color and diffusion each have their own separate channels. My guess would be that using multiply in the Carrara color channel (to multiply a color in source1 against noise in source2, for example) might accomplish basically the same thing? In general I think Carrara has a rather flexible/powerful material system although (especially at first) you can strain your brain trying to predict how things are going to turn out when you start mixing things (I think some of the higher end programs give you a visual, node-based overview of what's happening with your shaders and some even let you work at that level when building shaders and I wonder if something like that could be done for Carrara).
Thread: Carrara and Infini-D | Forum: Carrara
Lightwave has this approach (separate modeler and animation programs) and it can be a real pain, especially when working on smaller projects. I much prefer the approach taken by Carrara and C4D (everything integrated into one package). In a studio workflow where jobs are compartmentalized and some people just model all day and some just texture, light and animate all day things might be different but I don't really see Carrara being geared toward that kind of high-end studio work.
Thread: something I whipped up today with vectorstyle | Forum: Carrara
You just load up a model and say "Save As/Flash(.swf)" from Carrara and fiddle with the vectorstyle settings a bit and voila.
To get to the still image above I played my .swf in the Flash player and then just did a screen capture.
Thread: something I whipped up today with vectorstyle | Forum: Carrara
In this case I used a hub model I got at turbosquid. It was only offered in lightwave .lwo model format so I had to use lightwave to convert it into a format Carrara could handle (I used .obj). I wonder if c3 will be able to import the .lwo format (can amapi 7 do it)?
Thread: Carrara and Infini-D | Forum: Carrara
Infin-D must have been a pretty interesting program for its time given that people are still talking about it ... I gather if one tried to use it today, though, the render times would seem very slow. To me where C's material system (which does allow you to do some pretty nice procedurals using the mixer concept) gets confusing is when you want/need to have multiple textures on different parts of a single object. C4D handles this through selection sets (you select and name a bunch of polys and then you can apply textures just to that named selection) and Lightwave lets you define different surfaces to go with different polygon selections (and then those surfaces can be textured separately). Unless I'm missing something, C's way is much more cumbersome (detach, cut and paste in the modeler and then fiddly layer lists when texturing).
Thread: knife functionality in vertex modeler | Forum: Carrara
Attached Link: http://www.lineardesigns.co.uk/products.shtml
At the risk of going really off-topic, I found the inspire numeric plug-in link.Thread: knife functionality in vertex modeler | Forum: Carrara
There is a commercial plug-in (sold at safe harbor, I think) that adds numeric functionality to Inspire bringing it closer to the "real" version (I think it was based on lwave 6.5). I think one problem with the lwave community is that many of them started way back in the Amiga days and had to bootstrap themselves at a time when everyone was clueless and don't see why anyone else should have it any easier! I like working in Carrara's vertex modeler, too, and that's why I'd love to see a few enhancements in C3 so I don't feel like I'm missing quite so much relative to lwave and c4d.
Thread: Carrara and Infini-D | Forum: Carrara
Didn't Infini-D have a better particle system than Carrara? I think mr. rustboy is still using infini-d (although I think he did some modeling in Carrara's vertex modeler).
Thread: knife functionality in vertex modeler | Forum: Carrara
All the talk about differents apps got me to playing with ULead's Cool 3D Studio demo last night and maybe they're on the right track with all the different presets for all sorts of things (like the Carrara browser tray but on steroids). You can quickly drag&drop to get the ball rolling and then can tweak from there. The tool packs a surprising number of features into a compact interface and has some things that Carrara doesn't (like collision detection in the particle system and pre-made particle emitters for things like smoke, snow and fire that look like they may have been taken from the impressive wondertouch particleIllusion which also supplies the particle effects for Discreet Combustion). Especially if you're doing work hourly for a client it seems like these days there isn't much time in the budget to realize a particular effect or to use a 3D program and a 2D particle program and a compositor or video app all on one job. Overall I don't think Cool 3D produces output on par with what Carrara can do but the swiss army knife approach with tons of presets certainly makes for an efficient workflow.
Thread: knife functionality in vertex modeler | Forum: Carrara
It's a long story but the bottom line is that I just plain enjoy working in Carrara. I think the spline modeler alone may be worth the price of admission. Also, the availability of affordable plug-ins like those from DCG and Lost Horizon and VectorStyle helps as well. Plus the Carrara user community is overall very supportive. And maybe there's a bit of David vs. Goliath in there as well (go Eovia!). I gave up on Carrara at first because I thought it was under-featured relative to the big boys but over time I've learned assorted tips and tricks for making Carrara behave (plus the v2 release offered caustics and global illumination and smoothing and the third-party plug-ins help fill in some of the gaps). I started with Inspire and then upgraded to Lightwave. Lightwave is an awesome beast but I've yet to tame it. I think it's the kind of program you have to use every day in order to feel comfortable (partly because it doesn't tend to follow standard interface conventions; for example to constrain a circle you use Ctrl instead of Shift). Plus the renders seems to take quite a while, especially if you have anti-aliasing turned on (even at a low setting). If you want nice-looking glass you have to create all these extra surfaces for Air-Glass-Air refraction transitions. There's an amazing fur shader called Sasquatch but it will set you back $500. If you ask a question on a Lightwave forum you're often told to RTFM (or worse). And finally I just like the output I get from Carrara better; I find that I really have to work at it in Lightwave to get the same quality of output. C4D is a very interesting program and I really like their modeler and materials system. It's easy to get great-looking metals and really glossy colors plus the renderer is fast. C4D is big in Europe so a lot of the online material is in German, though. The default interface layout doesn't give you quite as much room for your models. Some of the deepshade shaders are amazing (http://www.maxon-computer.com/deepshade/) plus C4D has the SLA system of procedural shaders. And the particle system can spit out objects (even lights!), not just little particles. Sometimes I'll model in C4D and then finish up in Carrara. The bottom line is that Carrara is fun and relatively easy-to-use, has a friendly user community, relatively affordable plug-ins and usually produces great-looking output (some of the "you have to render at four times the target size and then downsample in photoshop" problems notwithstanding). Given that I'm willing to live with some of its quirks and shortcomings. I've been very impressed by the Carrara efforts of TOXE and LITST and Mark Bremmer (and others too numerous to mention). If I were trying to do something along the lines of Jimmy Neutron (my wife and I are hooked on that show!) I'd probably have made a different choice (Lightwave has a lot of features geared toward efficient workflow and working with very large, complex scenes plus it's very stable). If Carrara didn't exist I'd probably be using C4d most of the time. I will say that both Lightwave and C4D seem more stable/robust than Carrra. Maybe that's part of what you pay for although the price gap between Carrara and these other programs is diminishing over time and Eovia's tech support folks seem quite active these days as well. Back to working with Lost Horizon's new fresnel shader ...
Thread: knife functionality in vertex modeler | Forum: Carrara
Attached Link: http://www.losthorizonsoftware.com/products/ppex.php
re: my previous comment about lost horizon software's new tracer feature - an update has been issued already and it seems to have solved my problem and now the new tracer feature is working great (no crashes to report).Thread: Contest Results; Shishido is our winner! | Forum: Carrara
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Thread: Carrara 2 | Forum: Carrara