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144 comments found!
3D Animation from Models to Movies by Adam Watkins (a good book, by the way) has a tutorial on faking radiosity (including caustics). Radiosity takes so long to render that I imagine it's often faked. Lightwave has caustics but I haven't found a way to make them look that great yet (C4D has nice looking caustics). I think with Carrara's G-buffers you can get alphas for shadows and then add the caustics in Photoshop. As an aside, light shining through a Jack Daniels bottle creates great looking caustics (they look even better after you've had a few nips!) Truespace has an amazing number of features and add-ons for its price point but I haven't been able to get past the interface (staring at all those tiny little icons and fly-out menus gives me a headache!) They do have a lot of learning video on their web site, however. If you like caustics, check this out! http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=131496&Start=37&Sectionid=19&WhatsNew=Yes
Thread: Live footage and carrara | Forum: Carrara
http://www.mainconcept.com/mainvision.shtml an inexpensive (and interesting) compositing tool I ran into the other day. Saw a demo of Discreet Combustion 2 the other day and my eyeballs nearly popped out of my head. $4,000 worth of product, though.
Thread: Particle Emitter in C1.1 | Forum: Carrara
Thread: Just starting out in 3D and need opinions... | Forum: Carrara
Forgot to mention that the Ray Dream Handbook (2nd Edition) has a lot of good info that is relevant to Carrara (supposedly much of Ray Dream is in Carrara). The Ray Dream F/X book also has good stuff in it (full of ideas for creative ways to use Ray Dream/Carrara). If these aren't sold in stores anymore you might find them for sale on eBay. If you want to see what can be accomplished with programs like Carrara, head on over to www.rustboy.com (supposedly he uses infini-d, parts of which are in Carrara, and also is possibly now using Carrara as well). I believe rustboy's head was done in Carrara's vertex modeler.
Thread: Just starting out in 3D and need opinions... | Forum: Carrara
Carrara is the best program I've found for learning 3D and while it's missing some features (like subd surfaces, caustics, radiosity) it has some features that even the big boys like Lightwave don't (plus it can produce great-looking output). The shader tree where you can "mix" diferent shaders together is very powerful. The manual is very nicely printed and very helpful (although it is a bit thin in a few areas like the particle system). Eovia has pulled together a few tutorials online and there are others floating around the net. Consider getting the Carrara 1.0 Bible (or even the Carrara for Dummies book which is an easier-to-understand version of the Bible by the same author). I don't recommend starting with something like Inspire/Lightwave (even though I did!). Lightwave is an amazing product but I don't sense that Newtek spends much time worrying about newbies (for example, lwave 7 doesn't ship with a tutorial, getting started, or anything like that). Maxon (C4D) at least has some very helpful documentation and lots of online tutorials. Carrara doesn't have support for subdivision surfaces (I think some programs call these metanurbs or hypernurbs) for smoothing blocky objects (supposedly this helps you great organic-looking things with lower polygon counts) but Eovia's Amapi does (and in brief tests I think Amapi's smoothing might work even better than Lwave's). Consider getting Amapi to fill out the lack of subd surface modeling in Carrara (Amapi even has some limited rendering and animation features inside it). I started working last night on a fish in Amapi, saved it out in RDS format (Amapi v6 supposedly supports Carrara's format directly), and was able to then work on it some more in Carrara's vertex modeler. The complexity of some 3d products can seem overwhelming. Carrara's room metaphor helps keep things uncluttered. I had a chance recently to try a Beta version of a major new release of a Mac 3d product and felt completely lost (and even more appreciative of how Carrara keeps things from getting too complicated).
Thread: old email from Mr. Clappier about transparency and shader trees | Forum: Carrara
Thread: One more thing I'd like added to C | Forum: Carrara
Thread: One more thing I'd like added to C | Forum: Carrara
Thread: One more thing I'd like added to C | Forum: Carrara
Lwave is amazing but I've found it to have one of the most unusual interfaces I've ever encountered (certainly doesn't try to follow any of the usual Mac/Win interface conventions). Even just selecting and pushing/pulling polygons in the modeler requires all sorts of mouse and keyboard gymastics. Even though lwave has a ton of features (the particle system alone is amazing) I've struggled sometimes to have it produce output that looks as nice as what I get from Carrara (lwave doesn't seem to texture map as well as C and I get the best results in lwave using procedural shaders). I'm starting to think that lwave has a render engine that produces very "cold" output (great for space scenes and cars) that lacks the "warmth" of other renderers like Carrara or C4D. Don't know if there's a technical explanation for this (or even if I'm right in my assessment). Plus lwave seems to have a tough time with soft shadows (there's even a plug-in being sold to work around this). Everything in the lightwave world costs more, too (plug-ins, add-ons, etc.) The Sasquatch fur shader is very cool (a lite version comes with 7b). I think there's a 7b for sale over at eBay right now as well. I've even thought of selling my lwave 7 and waiting to see if Carrara 2 and amapi have enough features to keep me from lusting after c4d (which does seem to be a bit of a bother when it comes to animation).
Lwave has subdivision surfaces for modeling (basically you make a chunky rectangular blob by pushing your mesh around and it makes it smooth and organic looking when you hit the TAB key!) but I find that the hypernurbs in C4D yields nicer-looking results (fewer artifacts, less smearing, and generally a smoother look). But if you're into subd supposedly Amapi has several different smoothing options and thus in some ways could be better than lwave or c4d.
Personally I'm looking forward to Carrara2 (with a few more features and its nice warm output C2 should be able to hold its little head up high).
If you're intent on leaving Carrara behind also take a look at Cinema 4D Art (v6 without the animation) and take a look at:
http://www.maxon-computer.com/deepshade/
Hope this hasn't been off-topic (or downright rude to Carrara) but as a recent Lightwave purchaser (who still loves C but is also lusting after c4d behind C's back) I thought I'd share my experience. Also, I'm a relative newbie so take everything I say with a grain of salt. Sometimes I've noticed that the beauty of high-end programs doesn't always become apparent until you've spent lots of time with them (or have to do a job on deadline for a client).
Thread: How to make a snow storn (including a repeating loop snow storm easy!) | Forum: Carrara
Thread: One more thing I'd like added to C | Forum: Carrara
I'm getting mouse shoulder-itis (even had to put my wife's bursitis shoulder ice pack on the other evening!) from doing test renders in Carrara. I appreciate being able to do them but my mouse is definitely getting a workout. Maybe there could at least be a control key sequence to say "test render the same area I test rendered last time". You can do Ctrl-R but then you switch over to the Render Room and have to wait a bit for the full render. C4D handles this nicely in that you can Ctrl-R render from any view and at least for simple scenes the renderer is very fast (no need for area rendering at all).
Thread: One more thing I'd like added to C | Forum: Carrara
Can Furrific produce somewhat realistic-looking results? I couldn't really tell from the samples at www.afx.com Sasquatch for Lightwave seems to be making good progress in the realism dept.: http://www.worley.com/sasquatch/sasquatch.html#top Anyone know how a fur shader works? Does it somehow do displacement mapping to change geometry or just fancy procedural shading?
Thread: How to use transparency maps in Carrara? | Forum: Carrara
In some 3d programs you can use alpha to alter geometry. Let's say you want to have a bunch of star-shaped holes in a sphere for example. You can apply an alpha texture map of black stars on a white background. Then if you put a bulb light inside the sphere and turn on volumetric/cone lighting the light will shoot out through the the star holes. Making the stars 100% transparent (not an alpha) is different but maybe in some programs amounts to the same thing. C4D for example has separate transparency and alpha channels in its material system. Lightwave has an option where you can say that a texture map is an alpha (and I think this can happen in any channel that accepts texture maps). Carrara's G-buffers are handy in that you can do things with the alpha mask in Photoshop as suggested in the previous posting. Some programs allow you to render in multiple passes to facilitate compositing in Photoshop or After Effects (I've been surprised to see how much "3D" work is actually done post-process in Photoshop).
Thread: CD | Forum: Carrara
Seeing the CD might inspire more people to submit for the next one. I'm thinking about doing a tutorial on physical forces.
Thread: How to use transparency maps in Carrara? | Forum: Carrara
Isn't there a subtle distinction between transparency and alpha? I think transparency means see-through-ness whereas alpha means is it there or not. Then there's translucency to complicate matters which I think means whether or not a backlight can cast an image of itself on the material such the image can be seen looking at the front of the material. One of the things I've been playing around with in different apps is putting a bulb light inside a sphere and then seeing if you can see any light seeping through the sphere surface (from the outside) with different transparency/translucency/alpha settings. The result seems to vary somewhat between apps.
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Thread: Just starting out in 3D and need opinions... | Forum: Carrara