It took me a while to figure out, but that method of loading the character in Poser, adding the morphs I want, and saving (making sure 'use limits') is checked and then importing into Carrara has solved all my morph problems.  I don't know why certain morphs don't work in Carrara any other way, but for me the important thing is that the workaround works, and I can get all morphs working in Carrara.  At some point though it would be nice if Daz fixed this little issue so I could load all morphs in Carrara and they would all work.

Well, speaking as someone who paid to purchase Carrara 7 at full price, I don't feel cheated.  I didn't know DAZ's pattern of releasing free former versions to magazines, but I also don't like to wait a year and half to upgrade.  I quickly bought Carrara 8 pro when it came out and I don't feel any regret about how I purchased version 7.  I'm like that with movies too; if I want to see something I go and see it in the theatre right away, I don't like to wait for it to come out on dvd.  And for books I will shell out nearly 3 times as much for the hardback version rather than wait the year-plus for the less costly paperback version.

I don't think DAZ has respected Carrara particularly to this point, or realized what they've got, but on the other hand a DAZ employee mentioned that Carrara 8 has been the biggest and most successful software launch in the history of DAZ  up to this point, so I'm thinking they will start hopefully paying more attention and devoting more resources to its development.  Even so, I don't think DAZ is killing Carrara though.   On the other hand, it looks pretty clear that they don't care much about developing Hex.  But Bryce seems to have some weight for them, as evidenced by the new version being beta tested now.

Ok I finally got 'not-brain-dead' enough to realize that I could resize my bump map images to a smaller size to fit this free tool's parameters and I gave normal maps a try last night.

So far it's hard to see much difference, but a key question would be what do I set the bias to when creating the tool?  It defaults at 1, and it seems to get way bumpier if I move it up from there.  Also what should I be setting the bump levels at in the shader when using the normal map?  I'm trying to do skin at the moment, to get an idea, and Tugpsx, if you're still out there, I know you know a lot about skin (I've seen your work and it's impressive).  Any tips from anyone?  I'm sort of stabbing in the dark right now.

The first post I ever made over in the Carrara forums at Daz, Brian was the first person to answer my question (I think it was within 5 minutes).  It's still a little unreal that we won't be seeing him posting anymore, but I have no doubt that he's off rendering and creating now (just on a far grander scale).  A truly remarkable man, with a unique and creative vision in his art and in his commentary.

Awesome, thanks Mark!  :)

Stupid question, does using normal maps result in longer render/calculation times than using bump maps?  Also, while I'm asking stupid questions...   :)  Can I take a bump map for a character skin and turn it into a normal map or do I have to be a master of photoshop before thinking about using normal maps?

mackis3D, I don't want to go too far afield, but I felt exactly as you do now about Carrara hair - I assumed it was something that would be difficult and complex to understand, however I was wrong.  Now if you want to build it from scratch, I'm no expert but the other day I thought I would experiment in building a short hairstyle from scratch for M4, took me about an hour of fiddling before I came up with something that was at least adequate, if not fancy.  Now that's really saying something about how useable the hair is, when you think about the fact that I'm still a moderate beginner at Carrara and I had never tried anything like that before.  In general though for very good hairstyles I rely on premade Carrara hair (my personal favorite is anything by 3Dcelebrity at Daz - check out 'dynamic venus hair' for an example, and naomi's hairs are pretty good too).   Styling is actually easier than with prop/character hair, now that I understand I really only need to know 2 tools in the hair room to make it go wherever I want - the select tool which will allow me to select which guide hair I want to move, and the brush tool, which will allow me to brush it in the direction I want it to go (just like a brush in real live).  Within the menu of the brush tool is the 'point' feature, which allows you to adjust the point of the hair where you want the brush to effect it (if you want to move only the very tip of the hair, move the point towards the end of the guide hair, if the middle then adjust the point to the middle, and if the root, adjust down to the root).

There are some very good hair tutorials for dynamic Carrara hair out there, http://forum.daz3d.com/Hosted_Tutorials/carrarahair/c6hairpart1.html

1. Dynamic Hair tutorial part 2
   http://forum.daz3d.com/Hosted_Tutorials/carrarahair/c6hairpart2.html

are two examples that really helped me understand how it all works.

Ok, that's pretty far afield from the original question, so I apologize, but I'd hate for you to avoid one of the greatest assets in using Carrara just because (like me) you might think it's too difficult/complex to learn.

Carrara isn't for everybody, there is no right answer in all of this, but so far it is the one purchase I've made (at full price for Carrara 7 pro by the way) in all of 3d that I am 100% happy with.  It works well for me, and I come from a Poser background.  Even at the regular sale price at DAZ for the Pro Carrara 8 version it is possibly the best value for money in all of 3d, except of course for Blender.  Vue is better at landscapes and atmospheres, but with a little elbow grease and willingness to work it, Carrara isn't terribly far behind, and Carrara does a host of things that Vue doesn't (also Vue is much more expensive).  Modo I've heard can render much faster than Carrara but again Modo is very expensive, and within it's price range Carrara is blazing fast.  With all it can do, it's mind-boggling that Carrara 7 Pro is free with a magazine subscription.  At that price, I can't see a valid reason not to get it.

As lmckenzie said above, though, depending on your needs and how comfortable you are with Poser, you may not need all of what Carrara provides.  Just depends on the individual, and what I found limiting about Poser may not be a problem for someone who uses it for totally different purposes than me.

All I use are Daz V4 and M4 currently (in the past I used V3 and M3 reduced resolution, but now with C8Pro and since I've moved to a 64 bit computer there seems no reason not to use M4/V4 even for my unimportant 'background' characters).

I have no problems.  I'm not saying it didn't take me some time to figure out how to use them with no problems, but currently I have no problems (that I'm aware of) all morphs work correctly.

I do use Carrara magnets to help simplify clothing fits as I find they are usually simpler and faster than fiddling with umpteen-hundred different clothing morphs and experimenting to find the one that will make the clothes move in the direction I want).

I have no idea whether bone scaling has problems in Carrara; I'm not sure what that would refer to.  I used Daz Studio a total of once, and found it so counter-intuitive and difficult I never used it again, so I'm not familiar with what d-forms are or how they work.  Poser magnets I know how to use but in Poser it took me too long to use them so I generally avoided, again in Carrara I at first avoided magnets for the same reason (thinking they would just be too complex to figure out) but eventually I discovered they were easy enough to use.  So working in Carrara, I do use the Carrara magnets and haven't felt any special urge to try to import Poser magnets into Carrara to do just the same thing.

If you were going to use Poser stuff in Carrara the two things you have to learn/understand is how to retexture your Poser stuff once it's in Carrara so that it's not too shiny, and also how to import the Poser stuff so that any morphs come through intact.  Again, I have no idea why you would need Poser magnets in Carrara (maybe there's something I'm missing), and I'm not certain what bone-scaling and Studio d-forms are, so I can't speak to that.

But I have no issues (that I'm aware of) with using either V4 or M4.

"Not much point for me to use Poser if I'm just going to load its content into Carrara and set up scenes there.  I'll stick with Poser."

You're right on the first part and it's your decision on the second part.  Carrara is a far more robust and powerful app than Poser, that said you will have to make some minor adjustments on your textures from Poser as Carrara reads them differently (mostly it makes poser skin too 'shiny' but by lowering hightlight and shininess you can correct that).

However there is no reason I can think of to want to load Carrara stuff into Poser, so if you're happy with Poser and intend it to be your rendering app, then there's no reason for Carrara at all.

I was very dissatisfied with how slow Poser was to render, so I picked up Carrara 7 (and have now upgraded to Carrara 8).  Poser does one thing better than Carrara at the moment, which is dynamic cloth (and the only reason I haven't deleted Poser from my computer altogether).  Carrara dynamic hair is phenomenal and blows away anything I've seen from any other app, also Carrara includes modeling capabilities, a much faster renderer, landscape-building features, (plants, ocean, buildings etc) and very extensive and precise lighting.  Posing in Carrara is (for me) far easier than any other app I've used (others may feel free to disagree) and also be wary of losing some morphs if you build in Carrara (the best way to preserve all morphs to the exact specs of Poser is to build your character first in Poser, then save it making sure that 'use limits' is checked.  Then import into Carrara and the morphs will all behave correctly; then retexture the skin in Carrara and save for future use).

Again Poser does do dynamic cloth better than Carrara (though with the new bullet physics softbody, Carrara is being worked on and getting closer).  For everything else, I use Carrara.

Not trying to bash Poser, even though I'm not a huge fan of Poser I still use it on occasion, just wanted to clarify about what Carrara can do.

Mark, gotta ask a followup, are you saying there is nothing but splats in that shot?  No real 3d trees?  And you just used mutiple instances of the same splat using the replicator?

Because if so, that's awesome.  I always assumed that if you did a render of a tree and turned it into a splat that the shadows wouldn't look right since it's a 2d image instead of 3d.  But that scene looks great, I didn't see anything which would make me think the shadows looked wrong.

Looks fantastic!  I'm not sure I'm following the screenshots though, I mean I can see the settings, but how are you getting it to appear the raindrops are falling?  Or is that a visual deception based on what my eyes are expecting to see and they are not necessarily falling at all, but rather randomly changing position and my mind is percieving them as falling?

Very cool to see though, however you did it :)

"What a shame that some need to post that juvenile Poser/Daz stuff on this more mature Carrara forum site."

Carrara 7 Express is on sale for $1.99 (yes only 2 bucks) today, so this is an excellent time for those poor bastards who are still caught in the Daz Studio/Poser trap to get free and into a much better software   :)  Then they can give up the juvenile and become more mature.  Though actually since I've been using Carrara I haven't really stopped being immature, so results certainly vary.  :)

Hey Klebnor, that looks really good.  Where is the shape light pointed for this scene?  Is it facing away from the screen or pointed towards it?  I'm trying to get a handle on how shape lights work too  :)

Thank you so much lkiilerich, that's exactly where all my poses were.  Now I can finally re arrange my poses to be in logical places (instead of where I saved them at the moment, without thinking ahead)  :)

I'm noticing there's a lot of stuff in there, not just my poses.  Gonna see how much I can delete outright to free up system resources.

I do use Vista.. could that be it?  And if so how do I find this Virtualstore folder?