Sorry, but for my part, it's still a solid "NO".

Sites like DAZ and Renderosity are big, well established, and at least show a preview of what they offer, alowing me to see whether I will benefit by joining BEFORE I register (and give my information to the site, even if the information is minimal).

Also, please note, that the sites you mention are primarely stores, and commercial establishments, and the communities they host are secondary to their main goal.

If I do share my knowledge (without being paid to do so), I'd want to share it with as many people as possible, not keep it under lock and key for some community members only. Isn't it the whole point of sharing knowledge about Carrara, so that more people would be inclined to use the program? - Not just the dedicated users who would register at a Carrara off-mainstream community.

For a new community which, apparently, tries to welcome all, the lock and key looks strange, if not suspicious. To me.

As I said, I am not trying to make you change your mind. Just giving you an outside perspective on how this looks (or can look) PR-wise. :) And a potential reason for why you might see fewer visitors than expected.

But I do wish you the best of luck in this undertaking.

Quote - I also thank you for the testing.  My results at the moment are essentially the same.  Still, I believe this product can produce excellent plant models.

So there really is NO way to clean up unnecessary polys?

Thank you for checking it out and sharing the results!

The idea is great.

But requiring a log in for vewing resources and tutorials doesn't exactly send a welcoming message.

Of course, you do what is right for your goals, I am not suggesting you change it. It will keep me away, but maybe your target audience won't mind.

Thank you!

Quote - I continue to post tutorials on here, and talk about carrara on DAZ. Life goes on, but I wonder how many will "defect" to Octane once the plug in is ready.

I realise this is a rendering package only, but rendering your work is the presentation so very important.

I plan to sit in both camps when this momentus event occurs (release of the plug in).

And thank you for continuing your tutorials! I continue to learn from them, especially since I have extremely limited experience with animation, and that needs to change.

I thought the Octane plug-in was already available as alpha(?). I don't have an NVIDIA card, so Octane has been out of the question for me and I haven't been following. I wish they worked with other cards too.

But it will be useful to know how well will the plug-in integrate into Carrara. Will it support dynamic hair? Atmosphere settings? Clouds? Fog? Inagoni volumetrics? HDRI? Automatic material conversions with at least the best guess for the standard channel alternatives? If you are registered at the forum, these are the questions to ask :).

I think the extent of the integration will determine how many people will switch.

Quote - Where do you post your renders/animations/results?  The DA Carrara group gets very few posts.  Not sure where the most popular Carrara gallery is?

I don't publish often, but when I do, it's here and on DA. DA recently had more posts, because there are folders in the gallery, so I can publish my less successful/polished and more experimental images, or even tests, and share them without getting my "portfolio" folder polluted. My DA account is here: http://antarann.deviantart.com/

I think many people who use Carrara just don't post. I know that people are using it and for great results, but maybe most are too busy, or just don't feel the need for forum communication?

I myself post very rarely and usually when I either hit a technical wall, or when I happen to stop by randomly and see a question I know an answer to. And that usually happens here. I like the forums here better: I can follow the entire forum (not just a specific thread) and get alerts whenever people post, and since the posts here are usually to the point and there aren't dozens of them per day, I can pay better attention to what's going on. Not to mention that I like the tactful, insightful and expertly knowledgeable moderators here.

But there are months when Carrara just does what I need it to do and I spend my time working, forgetting to visit the forums. I suspect I'm not really unique in this.

Thank you!

That explains it, although, to me, it significantly devalues the entire thing. I'd love to be able to produce plants which are filly geometry based (especially since these seem to have enough polygons to actually make the polygons which get alpha'ed-out completely unnecessary... and it's all triangles anyway, so you get a lot of fidelity from the geometry alone...) There is no setting in the program to force the alpha maps into geometry?

Replicated geometry-only objects render much faster than alpha-mapped stuff, so for me having a program to generate diverse plants with geometry-only shaping would have been worth the pricetag for big projects. Without it - not so much :(...

Also, given that CG Artists version is limited to 100000 poly export, not being able to clean up unnecessary geometry seems especially unfortunate...

And, Stanley, thank you so much for testing it out and sharing your findings!

Thank you for teh trial report! Question: How heavily does it rely on alpha maps?

Judging by the missing polys in your image, the obj is pretty polygon-heavy, so what would it need the apha maps for in this case?

Thank you again for all your answer, Mark!

For that particualr path no amount of Surface Fidelity seems to help. I was able to separate the working portions and import the others as separate figures, but then my Carrara is acting weird lately, and I can't quite figure it out. (I just posted another question about it.)

(Sorry for the delayed response, I got swamped by life and work and only now got back to testing things in Carrara.)

Now I know what the Clip in Shader Ops is for! I never had a chance to use it.

Thank you for the HDRI tips. The scenes I had in mind where indeed outdoor scenes, so it should simplify things a bit.

For the interior, though, I see that the spherical camera does have the lens zoom setting, but I don't see a difference in the renders when the setting is changes. Is it because the spherical camera ignores the setting, or do I need to check some other option for this to take effect?

Quote - Forgot the Vector line stuff. Compound paths and such import successfully as cross sections. They will not import as the wall projections. You can rotate the cross-section if you are using Pipline Extrusion. However, you can also simply select the cross section of your choice, select all points and use the rotation tool as well.

I typically save my .ai files as v3 for maximum compatibility. 

I was importing the path as a crossection. The image is attached. (Saving it as Av3 yelded the same distortion :(...)

For the wall projection(envelope/sweeping path), does the path need to be opened or closed? Does it need to be oriented in a special way?

Also I found that I can rotate the cross section on its plane, but I cannot rotate the plane itself in 3D (with either extrusion method). The rotation is in # of degrees CW or CCW, but within the same plane. Am I doing it wrong?

Thank you again!

Thank you, Mark!

From your answer I am guessing that there is no better method to NPR setup than trial and error?

A) How would I set up Color Clipping in Carrara? Or were you referring to post processing for the clipping? And when you say "build watercolor shaders" are you referring to some Carrara-assisted shader creation, or just shaders based on watercolor painted textures?

B) That sounds like a brilliant idea! I'll try to see how well it can be implemented.

Other things:

1. I love that Dark Arts Tutorial! I've followed it before when I needed some technical reflections. But here my question was more specific: what settings to use for things like camera position/orientation and render ratio to have a map what would, when imported look correctly scaled for an environment that matches the scene it originated from?

When I import HDRI images, they all work very well for reflections, but when used as backgrounds they often apprea pixelated/distorted/not really space/perspective accurate. So I was wondering what I need to do to prevent that?

1. Ah, thank you! This makes perfect sense.How would I go about preparing the ai files for such import (aside from saving as AIv8)? Do the paths in AI need to follow any rules in order to work for the import? I tried importing a compound path and some of it imported properly, while some parts resulted in a very messed up geometry, and I just don't see a reason why that would happen, because the messed up parts seem no different than the non-messed-up ones...

Another question I always stuggle with is whether there is a way to rotate a crosssection plane in the spline modeler? I think the answer is "no", but I keep wishing it would be "yes"...

Thank you again for your answers!

Wow, this is amazing! Thank you so much!

If you do develop the clips and decide to sell then, I, for one, would be extremely interested. It sounds like an absolutely amazing helper package, because I'd dread creating them all myself.

Questions:

• If you create these clips, are they figure specific? Or would all generation 4 figures be able to use these packs? (I am hoping all generation 4 figures share the names of their basic morphs, am I wrong?) Also, if they are figure specific, are they also figure name specific: in other words if you have a M4-based character that got renamed and appears in the scene as, say, "M4_Scientist" instead of "Michael 4", would the NLA clips and poses still work on the renamed figure?

Is there a special setting that needs to be used to make the clips more universal?

• You are using a basic shape of M4. What if you wanted to start off with a character that had a different facial features morphs and/or body shape? Does MimicPro have any issues with that?

Also, what would be a good way to optimize such a character for animation, since morph information is resource-heavy and you probably don't need all the shape-defining morphs once you've designed your character's face/bodyshape?

Thank you again! I am looking forward to seeing your progress as you continue working on this rig. Please post here when you reach the next stage with it.

Congratulations! :)

:thumbupboth:

Very interesting concept. Gave me some ideas. Thank you for putting it together!