What are the costs of getting into these things?

I seem to recall the Optitex one costing a fortune to use. But it's been years since I looked.

Oh, thanks for the heads up on Handy Dandy. That's in my wishlist now. :)

I'm noticing I get this with 3Delight but not with Iray. But thanks for the note about surface values. Going to see if I can adjust something there. Iray takes forever to render anything - never used it before but also haven't used this software in a few years.

I just end up in whatever camp works with the budget.

When I returned to 3d in July, I went with Daz Studio and then Genesis 2 because of price.

Was a little slow today or I'd be giving Poser a chance again... seeing how there was a thing and then a non-thing all sudden like.

If I'd had Poser 10... I might have ended up on a different path.

One benefit I've got is I can easily pull in content made for V4/M4 and Genesis 1 onto a G2M or G2F figure.

I think to do that in Poser I'd have to get the pro version. And I'm not sure if there is a way to pull Genesis 2 content back down to V4/M4.

As for the Smith Micro Figures - I'm really baffled about why the Poser users don't seem to care for or use them. I've not seen them since Poser 7 though - have they not improved in all that time?

It works pretty well.

There are some issues, as noted with the geografting. As I don't do animation this is trivial for me as I can just pose such figures in Daz Studio and export them as obj files.

• Doing that also seems to make Carrara run faster for me. So I tend to post each figure individually in Daz Studio, and then bring them into Carrara one at a time for scene composition. Props, lighting, terrain, plants, etc... I of course do in Carrara.

I've also only had the application for a little over a month - so I have likely not yet encountered some issues others have had.

Like you - when I actually put it into my cart at Daz, the price was half of what it claimed to be beforehand. Seems in addition to a lot of regular sales on it, there are some hidden discounts. If they just changed the price on that thin to reflect what it actually ends up costing people - a lot more people might be using it.

My current profile image, attached as well in case I change it...

is a Genesis 2 Female rendered in Carrara 8.5 Pro on a 2014 Macbook Pro.

Like you - when I actually put it into my cart at Daz, the price was half of what it claimed to be beforehand. Seems in addition to a lot of regular sales on it, there are some hidden discounts. If they just changed the price on that thin to reflect what it actually ends up costing people - a lot more people might be using it.

This looks like its the result of using something like bootstrap (which I see in the source, is in fact used here).

Basically you have CSS designed to detect a mobile device and adjust everything when found. It does so using the window size. So adjusting your window can cause the screen to go into mobile mode - where buttons get moved and things go single column, etc...

But if mixed with other plugins that use different methods for mobile detection, it can get really weird when not actually on a mobile device - and you get things like ads displaying over places that have moved because they think they're mobile.

Bootstrap is great - I love that plugin and use it myself at my work. It really smoothes out a lot of CSS issues. But it also assumes people are on more modern displays and that the chances of them zooming the display, using a small resolution, or even using a window that is much smaller than the rest of the screen... are small.

Quote - So I took the figure into the assembly room, selected the polygons around her neck but under the outfit, and dragged them down towards the center of the body - solving my issue.

Edit timers on posts here - curious. Haven't seen that on forum software much in the last decade.

Wanted to add that the motorcycle figure I edited was a Genesis 2 Female - Olympia 6 to be precise, with an outfit on her that was made for Vicky 6. And she was still rigged and posed when I made the edits.

The other figures in my scene were brought into Carrara as obj imports. I'm not yet sure which method taxes my resources more so I just kind of mixed it up this time.

Quote - You can model in the assembly room (not the model room) to work while it's still in the pose, I believe.

In my newest piece I have a person on a motorcycle in the foreground. On first importing into Carrara part of her back poked through her clothes in a spot that I could not 'pre-hide' in Daz Studio. So I took the figure into the assembly room, selected the polygons around her neck but under the outfit, and dragged them down towards the center of the body - solving my issue.

I noted in one of the threads over on Daz...

Its thorny because it competes with their main application: Daz Studio.

Its poorer competition in some ways (assembly room and model compatibility) but then far better in others.

BUT mostly... Carrara is not a beginner app. You don't have to be advanced for it... but you need to be beyond just loading in the latest naked female character and hitting the make art button...

And that is risky.

Because selling nude female character is the bread and butter of a digital-Barbie shop.

Anything that makes it harder for your customer to play with the dolls is bad.

Carrara is fine as a 'now that you have learned Daz, move on to this' application... except it isn't. Its NOT 'Advanced Daz Studio' - you open it and end up seeing a UI based not on Daz Studio, but on a fork from Poser 4. Carrara is using a UI developed by Metacreations, and refined over the years...

So its got this odd space to fill...

It would be the perfect application to sell for the customers who have moved beyond the make-art button but are not professional modelers... except that to be in that niche it should work well with Daz Studio from a training perspective, rather than against.

You could make C9 use Daz Studio's UI and drop the Assembly room for just having it bolt onto the side of Daz Studio... and then anger all of your existing Carrara users...

Or you could revise Daz Studio's UI to be that of Carrara's Assembly, Shader, and Render rooms... and anger all of your existing Daz Studio users...

The ideal solution in that... isn't.

I think you have your workflow backwards.

Most people would start in Daz, and send that to either:

Bryce, Vue, or Carrara.

I can't imagine why you would try to do it the other way around. Its a bit like buying a house, so you can tear it apart to get wood planks.

I'm pretty sure I tried the things to person in the last post suggested - but I'm not 100% sure, so when I 'get home and get the chance' I am going to test it one last time - because think the 'double prop-prop' still freaked out when GI was on, even when I tried his suggestions.

I do know I did try flipping off cast and recieve shadows on the prop.

BUT I did NOT turn off shadows on the base genesis-2-human figure... (obviously turning that off would create serious other issues in the look of a render...)

I guess if I wanted to get into adult-animation with Carrara, I'd be exploring my M4/V4 collection... and I could see people needing that being very upset because it does appear that genesis compatability was the point of the 8.5 upgrade.

I am mildly curious now as to what app people who do such animation actually do use - given that the quality of such animation has been horrid everytime I wandered across it, maybe they're just sticking to Poser / Daz directly?

(Then again the poor scene composition and dismal lighting of such animations tends to imply the lack of quality rendering is not due to app-choice... :) ).

Given that prime here is over $3 ($3.99?) - Daz would lose its PA's to Renderosity if it didn't raise the floor.

They claim they will offset that with good discounts on higher end items - time will tell. So far in the two cases, that higher end discount has been condition based - you get it after first buying something that is in a general sale.

But...

They did need to raise the floor.

The change has a sale at the moment that if you buy a new August item, you get a big discount on any Daz Original.

I used that to buy Carrara 8.5 Pro this month for $65. If I had bought 2 new items, my discount would have been even greater.

Victory is achieved on this. Though animators will hate it… I hacked my way to a renderable result.

This is what I posted on Daz:

Export your genesis 2 figure from Daz Studio with the settings I have attached, and she will come into carrara as an obj file that has textures intact, and will render in global illumination.

You can also get it worked with a rigged figure by exporting as collada - but it came in as a mess of files, and the genital prop was locked to something, and as a newbie user I could not sort it out. But that -might- be a clue for an animator who needs… ‘adult’ functionality for whatever.

Now I can get back to sanity on some other project, the bug in my brain has been stepped on. :)

Notice how I am NOT letting Carrara know this OBJ came from Daz… things got really weird when I tried using the daz preset, but my OBJ export was different at that time too - so I am not sure which end of this process is the important part that fixed it… :)

I am guessing the rules at renderosity also forbid me from posting a render of the results given what is being focused on here?

(Now if I ever need this in a project, it will be like back in Vue 3 when the only method of import from Poser was obj, and so I had to be very particular about having all my things set up perfectly before taking them out of Poser…)

Thank you. I was unsure where to post exactly since I'm seeking 'advice / suggestion' from people on what I should get... Kind of a "WTB some reviews folks." :)