All the new features look great but has anyone found out about whether the UV editor was fixed/improved?  The cylindrical mapping option has been broken forever (reported by many)and the ability to manipulate the vertexes in the editor was really difficult.  I was hoping for a big improvement in this area or else you still need to export the objects, use UVMapper to map it right, work the texture in Photoshop, save the Object and then reimport into Carrarra and then attach the textures and hope it all works.  Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't.

Otherwise, Carrarra was a good modeling tool for most things non-organic, and then nothing beats ZBrush.

I can confirm that all of those bugs are still there and that the best workaround is to use the shader names and export to UVMapper and after you import do not touch it with the vertex modeler again.  Otherwise you get any number of nasty things from crashes to ugly mapping and some weird changes to mapping.  Aside from this really frustrating issue, I really like Carrara and the way it handles many workflow issues.  I just wish they would wrip out the UV Editor portion of the Vertex modeler and create a new UV Modeler totally separate from the Vertex modeler.  It has other issues like when you inadvertantly leave a point that is not connected to the mesh.  Eventually this little lone point corrupts everything resulting in the big crash.  It took me forever to figure out this was what was causing it to crash so often.  Now I am very carefull about deleting things.

I will not be upgrading if the first users report these same problems.  I have Lightwave 9.2 and am migrating my work to that.  It does require a couple of mental gymnastics for me to use it versus Carrara but so did ZBrush.

Dan

Dan

Try mapping it in UVMapper, saving it as a new object and then importing it into Carrara.  Otherwise you need to convert it to a vector object, assign the material zones and use the internal uv mapper to get a reasonable mapping.  Carrara does a fair job but doesn't give you the fine control you get in UVMapper.  I have had this same problem in Carrara and it usually is a messy UV Mapp where the map wraps around to the other side of a flat UV map.  In other words in stead of breaking the map at the edge it connects it to the other edge across the map.  Seems wrong but it does it especially with cylendrical mapping.  If you take one out of  Carrara (export) and look at it in UVMapper you will see what I mean.  Simply mapping it in UVMapper usually fixes this problem.

Dan

For Carrara 6 to be of much use to me it needs a better UV mapping editor.  The one in it now is almost useless.  I rely on UVMapper for almost everything I do in Carrara.  I recently bought Lightwave 9.2 and am transitioning to it for projects as I become more confident in it.  I also recently switched to a Macbook Pro and if I can get a UV mapper capability in Carrarra I won't need to keep a windows machine around just so I can UV map things.  They also need to fix the bug that lets it forget material and vertex names on an regular basis.

So far Carrara 6 looks like it has some nice features.  I guess we will get the details over the next few weeks with Siggraph happening next week.   

Dan

Hoping you have an answer for this too.  When I use my Intuos 2 with my Mac in some programs like Carrarra, the mouse or pen inputs accelerate after the mouse or pen is stopped.  The results are very large coorinate numbers and of course everything is hard to find.  This happens even when trying to move a camera.  If I just nudge the camera position is seems to work but if I try to move it any distance, zoooom, off it goes.  This also happens with rotations, only the object rapidly spins in place.  Any ideas?

Thanks

Dan

Lite wireframe, not texture.  I have tried copying the texture to the preview node but that doesn't change how it renders in the preview mode.  I have not tried doing that and then saving and then adding it to the scene.  I will have to try that tonight.  Thanks for the idea.

I have poser 7 on one of the new MacBook Pros and it works very well.  In fact I have been pleasantly surprised at the speed.  Anyway, I thought it was at setting in the .hr2 file somewhere that wouldn't let you change the preview mode.  I think my setup is for OpenGL already.  I will have to check on that though.
Thanks

It seems the drive I have in my laptop supports the wrong kind-of DVD format.  So I went out and bought myself a new external DVD/CD drive (HP 940e) that supposedly supports every darn DVD format.  And...it worked, read the Poser CD no problem.  So, I am finally seeing how Poser 7 measures up...so far so good.

Thanks to all for the suggestions.

Thanks for suggestion, I cleaned the drive and checked to see what it was.  It is a Phillips CDRW/DVD SCB5265.  I wonder if it only reads a certain format of DVDs.  Since the drive indicator in the folder for Poser 7 shows it as a CD it may be that that is the problem.  The drive does read some DVDs but I really don't use it that much for DVDs.  I did send an email to E-frontier support.  I wonder how they will fix this.  Maybe I will have to download it.  Buying a new drive is not an option.  Oh well, more waiting while everyone else wows and woos.

Big sad day here, finally got the boxed version and the CD for Poser 7 will not read.  It spins and sits there.  The folder for the CD is empty so I suspect I have a bad CD.  Has anyone else had this problem?  

Thanks for the information on Objaction Scaler.  It works great.  Many thanks!!!! 

Thanks Wraith, I guess this has been discussed a length in the past.  It has just recently become a pain for me as I try to work an animation walk through of a building we designed. I thought it would be easy to do and spent to much time repositioning the figures in the scene not to mention getting all the figures dressed in suits and dresses and getting the lighting right.  What an effort.  Next time I will not volunteer so readily.   

Thanks for the ideas.  Not sure how you lock parts of a character.  How do you do that?  It would be great if poser had a feature where you could hold down the shift key when you loaded a pose and it would prevent translation and turning of the hip.  So if your figure was upside down when you loaded the pose, the figure would remain upside down (ie hip stays in place) and the pose moves all the body parts.

Also, does anyone know what you can change in the pZ2 file for existing poses to keep the character from translating or turning.  I have looked at several purchased poses and am about to start experimenting with them to see what works but some knowledge would make the trial and error go faster.

Dan

I just pre-orderd Poser 7 figuring they need the cash to finish the product that we all eventually user.  Since I am in the software business, I appreciate how much it costs to really test a product as complex as poser.  You do the best you can with the budget you have (determined by how many will buy and how much they will pay).  As a community, if we want to keep the price from reaching the hi-end product costs, we basically sign-on as testers.  For those of you who want to wait until the early adopters ring out all the bugs that is your choice.  I kind-of like testing and enjoy letting the programmers know when they missed something.  As for my hopes, it would be for poser 7 to use the full power of my PC: memory, dual-core processor and graphics card with lots of memory.  Yah, I hate waiting for renders too. 

Thanks for the suggestions. I hope to get a chance to try these out this evening.  There really seems to be a lack of precision with all of the ways available to create things in Carrara and use them in Poser.  I always seem to be scaling things up of down in Poser to get them the right size.  I also noticed that if I scale things in Carrara and then export them, the object saved is the unscaled object. 

I wish I had the time to really study this and come up with a more precise way. 

Thanks to all for the help,

Dan