The above is a good basic shader adjustment tutorial.  You will note that other objects (particularly fabrics) frequently come into Carrara with a highlight which renders them plastic looking.  Set highlight to none and fabrics immediately look much more lifelike (less reflective).  If you have something which needs a small amount of highlight don't set it to none, just adjust the color from white to a very dark grey (play with it until you like the effect).

Klebnor

Brian:

I was hoping someone had a great solution, but here's a brute force method.  In assembly room duplicate the piece you have (edit>duplicate).  Manually place the new duplicate with one end at the opposite end of the original piece.  When you duplicate the new piece again, it should duplicate to the end of itself.  Repeat until desired length is achieved.  If it has to be really long, try stringing four together, group them, then duplicate the group.

I'm sure there's an easier way, but that's what I'd try.

Klebnor

I would think so.  Much of this content was reloaded with 7.1, yet only the executable had to be reinstalled.  If I come across any anomalies, I will post.  So far, I see no difference from 7.1 to 7.2.

Klebnor

Look at the color and texture - clearly it's silly putty !

Klebnor

Carrara 5 Pro was three years and two versions ago.  I'm just sayin.

I cleaned off my monitor, but I still see a guy with a bag of popcorn, smiling moronically.

It does look real, though.  Almost photographic.  Skin tone looks kinda fake.

FYI, some of the same improvements are available with Carrara (DAZ).  Poser and DAZ content imports pretty well, including scenes although, after a bit of a learning curve, you will probably just set up in Carrara.  C Pro 7.1 is much less than Vue infinite 7.5 (especially the platinum price, or if you wait for one of the regular DAZ sales) and has great lights and excellent rendering speed and quality.  I would take a look at both.

One note - Carrara is still a 32 bit program, but I run 32 bit XP, so it's not an issue for me.  It is apparently well multi-threaded since I use an intel Quad core and all four cores max out when rendering (fast).

Klebnor

Thanks, Mark.

Mine is set at 590 MB now, I think I'll play around with decreasing it and see what happens.

Klebnor

If you find that you consistently use the shader consolidation feature (I do it on every scene) you might check out another new feature.  Go into preferences>common file load settings and check the box for "Consolidate shaders on load".

Automation!

Klebnor

Sorry, I meant the one who shows up in my renders.  His female patients tend to squirm a lot.

My real dentist is a great guy.

Klebnor

I have the dentist office and it renders very nicely in Carrara.  There is a sample poser render at the bottom of the page.

Unfortunately, my dentist is a bit of a sadist.

Klebnor

Quote -
CP has a support email system set up through their website and that is their preferred method of resolving customer concerns and/or questions.
support.contentpuckerup.com/

Yes indeed.  And the major advantage of a 'support email system' is that complaints can be deleted immediately without any need for others to see them, and congratulatory crap from prostrate fan-boys can be posted immediately to the site.  CP is doing this already. 

I considered emailing them with my critiques of their new and improved website, but then I remembered ... I have a life.

Klebnor

No, most other scenes seem to load as normal.  I have reinstalled the offending scene (First Class Cabin from DAZ) without any improvement.  I am beginning to wonder if the relatively quick openings where second tries, when textures remained loaded in memory.  Perhaps this particular scene simply takes over 10 minutes to load.

Klebnor

Thanks for the input.  Among the first things I did was to defrag (I have more that 50% free space on both my C: Drive and in my Raid Array).  I also ran malware and adware tools, windows update, turned monitoring off the drives for Photoshop elements and closed all unecessary programs in the system tray.

The strange thing is that I have loaded this scene many times without difficulty.  This is a new phenomena and I'm stuck.

When it's trying to load there is very little CPU activity, plenty of RAM left and the page file never gets very big (relatively speaking).  Yet the drives are thrashing away!

If I can't figure it out I will have to do a complete re-install of Carrara, and then content.

Really looking foward to that!

Klebnor

If your camera is pointed at the back wall, it may well be the angle of incidence.  The bulbs are hitting the wall at close to 180% (vs. the camera) and so look much brighter.  Try shortening the range so it just hits the back wall and applying 100% range falloff.  This should light the side walls, but not over-light the back one.

As a test, turn toward a side wall and see if it doesn't render brighter.

Klebnor