I've built objects in Carrara with polygons carrying much more than three or four sides.  The top of a cylinder, for instance, will have 16 sides (at default).  Is that what you mean by "ngon?"

I do know that Carrara handles triangles best, quads well, and greater numbers of sides with less and less aplomb.  But it clearly does handle larger polygons.

I'm saving my characters to the browser -- just dragging the whole group into "my objects."  It's working just fine.

I haven't been able to figure a way to save a pose in Carrara.  For that, I've been building the poses in Poser and saving them to the library.

I've had similar issues but have rebooted the program, or on a more persistent presentation of the error, rebooted my entire machine.  Nil Pointer errors, as I understand (and I may be completely in error here), are caused by memory allocation issues in which the software is freeing up memory because it thinks it's done with it, but then it turns out to need. 

Maybe a reboot will help?

We're building our characters inside Carrara, now.  That allows us to add or subtract clothing and props pretty easily.  One of our characters smokes, and his cigarette is just parented to the third segment of his forefinger; no problems with bones or even shaders shifting around, as it would if we'd created the character in Poser and brought it into C.

Does that get at what you're looking to do? 

Hey, Hoofd --

I'd suspected as much.  Unfortunately, on this particular geometry, the option to smooth edges is greyed out.   In fact, all options under "model" are greyed out except "Transform."

I've fixed the geometry by opening it in the vertex modeler, converting it to the primitive modeler, then reconverting it to the Vertex.  The "creased" edges stayed creased, but by triangulating the geometry, it's no longer enough of a crease to render as a line in toon!pro.  Unfortunately, the model no longer is a conforming model, so I had to take it into Poser and redo the setup.

Painful, to be sure, but worth it, since this guy is one of the main characters in my current project.

Thanks for verifying my suspicion about the color of the edges!

Dex

Marcelo --

I'm in San Francisco, California.  But I lived in Rio de Janeiro for a year about fifteen years ago.  My Portuguese is very rusty!

Now it's off to work.  Annoying that work gets in the way of learning Carrara!

:Dex

C5Pro does have light cones.  I can't speak for C5 standard, and I don't know which you're using.  But light cones entered the Carrara blood stream back when it was still RayDream.

As for the horizontal lines in the lens shader, you can make a glow shader that uses a mixer, combining a light and dark color via the "wires" operator.  You can select  the number of horizontal or vertical lines independently, so you'd be able to make only horizontal lines appear.

As Miss Nancy said, it does take a while to learn your way around Carrara, but once you figure it out, it all does make sense!

:Dex

I have noticed oddness in Carrara's alpha channels for a while -- definitely since C5P.  I find, though, that the alpha channel is still there, but it's not accessible in Photoshop.  I have taken the animations into After Effects and have been able to use them just fine.  If you don't happen to have AE, it's more problematic.

Out of curiosity, what were your render settings?  Did you have "premultiply" selected?  It sounds like your description of the file as viewed in photoshop indeed is premultiplied.  Maybe C6 has changed how it handles premultiplied alphas, but I've always checked premultiply in my renders because it makes for cleaner composites (in my experience).

When next I'm in front of Carrara, I'll run a couple tests and see if it's a premultiply issue.  I seem to recall that there was a plug in available for Photoshop called unmult; unfortunately the version I found with a quick google search (http://www.redgiantsoftware.com/unmult.html) doesn't seem to do what I recall, which was to extract the alpha from a premultiplied file.  You might give it a try.

Let me know if that works.

Thanks, GKDantas and Miss Nancy, or should I say, ,*,muito obrigado?"

O senhor, I haven't begun exploring the motion clips in Carrara 6, but as soon I read your comments, I realized that may well be what I need to do.  I can see this coming weekend will be spent in front of the computer with the manual open on another screen!

A senhora Nancy,* it is impossible to delete frames from a Carrara timeline, but as GKDantas suggests, moving the keyframes forward through time will usually do something very similar to deleting the frames themselves.

Thank you both, though -- this has been most helpful!

*Eu amo o Renderosity!

Ciao!*

Wow!  Thanks very much for such a thorough investigation.  You're right; that certainly seems to be the issue. 

I did submit a bug report.  Please feel free to add this info to that report. 

So, it seems that I need to work in a small scale scene, then come up with some way of importing that into a medium scale scene to incorporate my DAZ figures.

There's a workaround (without having to go back to C5), so that's good!

Thanks again!

 - Dex

THANK YOU.  Don't know why I didn't get it to work for be until reading your response, but it does seem to work in the vertex modeler, after all.

Love this forum.

Hey, you wouldn't happen to know how to get the numeric entry to work in the vertex modeler, would you?  When I scale something to 90% (for instance) using numeric entry, it drops WAY more than just 10%.  (And I did try entering 10% instead, but it also drops in size significantly more than 10%.)  Attached is a still of what I mean.

Thanks, again!

 - Dex

By "scale of the other edge around the center of the object" above, I meant scaling the object  symmetrically in each dimension around the hot point.

:D

The "Pan" tool -- pictured on the right -- behaves exactly backwards of how it did in earlier versions.  If you select the PAN tool and move your mouse to the right, the image pans to the left -- precisely the opposite of how it did before.

The right-button solution that our Teutonic friend above suggested, though, works as I expect the pan tool to work, as the pan tool has worked for years in Carrara.

And, yes, I'm using C6.03Pro.

• Dex