There are 2 ways to do this:

Either save them under an existing folder inside [program files]Carrara #PresetsShaders

(Program files are on Windows, or wherever your Carrara is installed on the Mac)

OR

Save wherever you want and then in your browser for shaders there is a menu in top right corner of the little browser subwindow where you can choose to add a new folder and you can add the folder where you saved the new shaders.

Thank you so much for these! And they come with special textures, too - amazing! Thank you!

Sorry for my delayed response: I was away from technology for a couple days.

I did some tests to illustrate what I mean about light through transparency and Caustics. In this particualr one, I did get a 6s. increae in render time, but it's not always an increase. Maybe it worked this way because I have a solid transparent object, as opposed to alpha-mapped one, which seems harder for Light-through-transparency to compute.

Also, I like the shadows produced by Caustics more - the object has solidity to it, while still being transparent. It seems more like glass objects in real life.

(In both cases my light sourse has hard shaddows in this case, but you wouldn't know it from the Light-Through-Transparency image).

cjd, DUDU0001, thank you for your responses!

cjd, have you ever used the software? It was featured in the latest issue of C3DE (Carrara 3D Expo Magazine), and from the tutorial there I understood that you need to set up your animation in a specific way to achieve more or less smooth results, otherwise there will be a lot of artefacts. If you've used it yourself, other than the render-edge distortion, did you run into limitations of the type of scene/footage that could be used?

DUDU0001, I've had pretty good results with simplified render settings. In fact, when you replace light through transparency with caustics, you sometimes get better looking results. (And faster) But my issue is that for the length of animation I am looking at, if I don't optimize on timing, then with the speed of my machine, it will be rendereding long into the second half of the century. For example, if I do the same as you - by leaving all settings checked in the top render tab, it is normal for my machine to take about 12 hours for as single frame - 12! hours!That is 12 days of non-interrupted rendering for each second of footage. Not an option. Especially since I need the machine for a lot of other things too, so I can't afford to have it as a dedicated renderer.

I know that there is a way to import noth pz2 and bvh, but my question is more about the details of setting up the use of BVH files: what are good resources of BVH files that work well in Carrara, and is there special prep that needs to be done in order to use them.

Strange. If I shift-click on a selected polygon, it deselects, but if I shift-click on an un-selected one, it adds it to selection. 8.5 Pro build 243

I am on Windows and I can do it using Shift+click instead of ctrl+click. I think Shift+Click is how I've always done it.

(I just tried it in the Vertex room on a random sphere I inserted.)

Great shaders! I played with the metal and glass ones a bit, and they are wonderful and educational as starting points for further customization. Thank you!

The leather previews look amazing. I am looking forward to them.

This is brilliant. And thank you so much for sharing!

I second 3doutlaw's question about collection downloads. I think it might also make your own job easier if you can upload a single file, single link collection and just have a bunch of images associated with it as prewviews of what's inside.

But, of course, whatever works better for your own needs is best.

Thank you! I'll keep watching your site.

Thank you for the explanation! It makes perfect sense now.

Sorry, my bad. I've used Anything Goos and love it, but I think I confused this "Bevel" in Shader Plus function with Anything Grooves.

Is there a reason to use Anything Grooves over Carrara's own displacement?

Also: how does "Bevel" fare in terms of render time? Does it add more than what additional geometry would have added or less? Would you use it in animation?

Mark, that is very impressive result.

I have a couple of questions tough:

1. What was the unshaded mesh like?

2. How is this different from Carrara's own displacement.

I have the plug-ins, but I must have been usinfg them wrong, because I didn't find my tests very impressive.

Once again, thank you for posting a reminder here. You did a great job hosting it, and I hope you get to host again! (and that I would actually be able to participate next time - I am very very sorry.)

Quote - You know I'm no sales man for DAZ, but the mil4 legacy shapes for G2F are on sale for about 2/3 off. This is an item that has been on my wish list for a while and I have never seen on sale before. So even if you are just thinking about getting in to G2F I'd recomend getting this set now while it is on sale.

You know what sort of C.O.B. I am, and I'm jumping on it, wrong time of the month for me, low on funds, but just can't miss this.

The G2M mil4 legacies are on sale too, I can get both for about 2/3 the coast of one.

I am not seeing this promotion. Victoria 4 for Genesis 2 Female shows up at no discount whatsoever. Is there some sort of requirement for it to show up?

Quote - If you're going this route, I would render a very crude low Poly HDRI, then render a decent backdrop of the room, then render all the furniture and people separate with just the floor as a shadow catcher.

Yep, that's the idea.

It's not the HDRI that I am worried about, I've got it already. I don't need it to be 100% precise either - it's just to approximate the lighting. It's the backdrop that gives me grief: 30 blipping hours! And I can't seem to find a way out of it. I just don't see what else I can trim down.

Mark, thank you for stopping by and for your suggestion!

I have turned off everything I could find: I turned off all unneccessary render passes. I am just rendering 3D channels like distance, position and Index, Global Illumination, Glow, Background and Material Diffuse. I am not even rendering Bump, and just in case I turned Bump off in all the shaders. In the render options I am only rendering "Shadows". Nothing else! The Anti-Aliasing and lighting Quality are set at "Fast"Lighting Accuracy at 2px, so is Shadow Accuracy. Object Accuracy at 1px. Sky Light at 200% and Indirect Lighting at 100%, and I am still looking at over 30 hour render for my target resolution. Just for the room, no furniture, no characters. I just don't understand it.

I am not using textures whenever possible - nothing but black board and floor has actual image textures. Everything else is just procedural noises and turbulance mixers for colors or color gradients. The model is not super high poly either.

(The reason I want to render the room by itself is because I came up with this crazy idea of rendering the room as HDRI background using the spherical camera and then redering the characters with shadow catchers as floor and no room walls, but the HDRI instead of the modeled room for reflective light. But I can't even get a good render of the room within reasonable time....)

Good call on the texture hypothesis! I just figured out that simply adding the floor texture to your model, I am also adding 12 additional minutes of render time. So the solution is to keep textures to the absolute minimum and go with solid colors whenever I can get away with it. Also - no reflective surfaces as much as possible.