Thanks for your response, FVerbaas.

I had some familiarity with Vyusur from reading posts in the Carrara forums.  Indeed she was kind enough to compliment me on a video I created of some work of mine.

 In the Carrara forums, being among friends, regular posters sometimes mention their life situations etc. in a limited way and I would have no doubt that she is sincerely busy.   (Not that you suggested otherwise!)

Actually, I didn't really know until yesterday that she had built up stores here and at DAZ with so many items.  I just thought that she had created one or two  figures which worked well in Carrara.  

I can say that, as an amateur modeller, I was impressed by the wireframe images shown earlier in this thread.   They seem to be an object lesson in edge loops and clean topology and are very impressive.  Whatever folks may think of DAZ3d, for them to accept figures created by an individual says a lot about the figures' quality.

As to the subject title of this thread, I'm afraid I can offer no information but I noticed some figures come with clothing. 

It is great that you are getting to use them in Marvelous Designer.  That was software I will always regret not buying last year when I had the chance.  I literally went to do so on the day they introduced subscription-only.  Worse, I had rushed to buy 3d Coat before the same happened but that event took much later and I could have got it for $99 cheaper shortly afterwards at Black Friday and again at Christmas.

Such is life.  The current annual subscription sale for MD would be tempting if my PC wasn't so low-spec. 

Yesterday I felt uncomfortable discussing another person - today it's true also.  I'm sure if I was mention of me was made to Vyusur, she would say 'who???'  But I've said only good things I hope.

Best regards

Since the creator, Vyusur, doesn't seem to have been heard of in these parts, I hope it's OK to mention that Vyusur is a woman who posts fairly regularly over at DAZ in the Carrara forums.

She is well-liked there and has shown work that leaves no doubt that she has real mastery of creating 3d models as well as being accomplished in traditional art media.

I'm pretty sure that her figures are popular for being able to be used in Carrara but I haven't bought any to verify that.  Carrara, like Poser, hasn't been engineered to use DAZ figures beyond Genesis 2.

I believe Vyusur creates most of her figures from scratch.  I can't honestly say which ones because I haven't kept too much abreast of things in the DAZ and Carrara worlds. However In her stores here and at DAZ  some of her figures are described as 'standalone'  or 'original' figures.  I simply don't know which - if any - of these are based on DAZ figures but I do know that she has created her own figures and they are accepted by DAZ.

Hope this is of use - I feel a bit uncomfortable introducing another person like this.

This is only a 'thumbnail' from a test animation in Iclone with two figures derived from Genesis 8.

It isn't much of a picture but it shows coloured lights and the mist and waterfall were applied in a couple of mouse-clicks and were previewed in real time. The animations are applied in moments.

Hi manleystanley. My user name should really be 'I'm posting this but won't be around for long...' I'm in the habit of checking forums late at night before bed.

Anyway, I like Carrara a lot but I also use Poser and Reallusion's Iclone. DAZ Studio, I seldom use but I can't argue with the quality of DAZ's figures and content.

Thinking about your subscription plan for Cinema 4d, I can't help seeing the cons to the plan rather than the pros. The obvious drawback is the need to keep paying monthly - which could be OK but there is the risk that it might become unaffordable and then all your work is lost to you.

One year of the fees you mentioned could go a good way to beefing up hardware. I have only an i5 processor and a GTX 750ti and that would certainly be the case for me.

Another year of those fees would get you well on your way to having a wealth of Reallusion software. (I haven't done the exact sums - there are always deals and bundles.

In case you haven't checked it out before, the animation software is Iclone which comes with free character creator and a certain amount of content. To be of much use, however, it is really advisable to pay for the professional character creator. With that you could use all your DAZ and V4/M4 figures in Iclone for stills and animation. You could export these with animation to Carrara. Character creator has morph add-ons to enable endless variation in character creation. You could also bring in clothing items and apply physx soft-cloth properties.

Iclone's renders are generally considered inferior by those looking for DAZ Iray realism but they can still be very respectable in the right hands Also Iclone has an Iray plugin for stills). Reallusion actively encourages and facilitates an export pipeline to the Unreal engine, where scenery and settings are up there with the best. I personally haven't looked into Unreal yet but but I could bet that fantastic Wild West scenery would be available.

With Reallusion, good hardware is necessary and the costs of things really do add up if you want everything. The Iclone community are not primarily focussed on cute females but on characters of all kinds for film-making. Some forum members are serious about westerns, some medieval, some contemporary, some sci-fi. The motion capture content is increasing all the time and is VERY good. Like I said, I can get it working in Carrara as exported .fbx (and that is starting from a morphed, Genesis 8 exported from DAZ Studio).

Lastly, anyone can offer their creations on one of the Reallusion stores. (Initially items are sold for 'DA Points' which can be used like currency to buy other members' offerings. Serious, proven, creators get to sell for real money).

Nothing I'm saying is anti-Carrara and items sold at Renderosity for DAZ studio at least can be used in this pipeline.

(I hope this helps and I'll say Goodnight!)

Apologies that I'm just popping in here with an observation before disappearing again and also that I may not have understood the problem correctly!

I notice that the ceiling grid is different in the second image. It has fewer thick bars on it than in the first image and casts fewer thick shadow lines. Has it been shifted or re-sized?

I think it's a rocket bike. The user's heels would be tucked up high, I think.

My post above missed some punctuation.

The settings consist of ticking the following boxes: One Tone, Comic Book, and Geometric Edge Lines.

Also the image posted, because it's .png took up the forum's grey background. The rendered image came out with a white background.

Since I started playing with this, here is another render with the document display Smooth Shaded, and Cartoon Settings with 'Three Tones' and 'Cartoon Shaded' ticked along with 'Geometric Edge Lines'.

The render is of a Robot article in the Poser content called 'Hard'. I'm not well-versed in Sci-Fi and really don't know what it is!! A satellite cannon - a bike or vehicle to sit on?? It is well-made - it's just that I'm ignorant of these things.

Your question led me to try this in Poser 11. I'm definitely no guru with Poser but, as EldritchCellar said, try Poser/display and Cartoon Settings. You can right-click on the figure and get the same Cartoon Settings dialogue box.

My settings are: One Tone Comic Book Geometric Edge Lines

I have the Ground invisible and Background Colour as White.

I also have document display mode (the interface window with all the preview spheres) to Cartoon w/Line

Finally I rendered in PREVIEW mode.

The figure is simply Kate2 Casual with Kate2 straight out of the box.

Also, a fantastic free program for achieving painterly effects is Fotosketcher - very easy to use and a lot of fun to play with.

All I know about the .fbx file format is that there have been different versions over the years and the different softwares which can import it may or may not do so with issues.

I use the format to export/import whole objects with rigging, textures and animation. I can export such a file from Reallusion's Character Creator and it works perfectly imported to Carrara (apart from texture tweaking being required) but it imports with big problems to Poser - the animation gets messed up.

Please excuse me if I'm not around for much longer - I generally don't get to posting until the end of the day.

The soft-body settings I spoke about above for stiffness and bending - with self-collision on - are really about all I used.

If you want to drape garments then making your own, very simplified meshes might work better than bought PA items. Try a well-tessellated flat disc with a hole in the middle to clear the figure's head and see how it falls over the shoulders and drapes into a poncho.

I often used to try fitting a kind of baggy vest made from a cylinder. The vest from just above the waist ended as a wide flat (or slightly sloping) disc - like a ballerina's tutu. I would paint soft-body-attach vertices where the base of the vest became a disc and maybe a few under the bust. You can create the beginnings of interesting garments and tunics from the resulting drapes.

If you try with a disc only to make a poncho, the mesh will be much like a flat spider's web with a hole in the middle. Try deleting some of the edge-loops within the 'web' so that a loop of faces is twice the size of the others and note how these faces stretch more in the simulation. Or else add in a few loops to tighten the drape at that point.

Try taking your disc and tilt it at an angle before simulating and see how that works.

I wasted way too much of my time with all this in the past (wasted because Carrara's Bullet Physics is incomplete or flawed) but it has helped me enormously with getting to grips with other solutions when I tried. I haven't even looked at Dforce but I imagine I'd have a head start in getting to grips with it from Carrara experiments. But, who knows? I might be wrong there.

Edited for clarification.

Hi Misty,

I haven't tried using point force for wind, I'm afraid. Gravity's direction can be changed, however, and it's value needn't be real-world. So a flag can look like it's blowing if gravity is set sideways. In Carrara, I don't recall there being a collision distance - I used to know this stuff quite well but forget now.

OK I just opened up Carrara - I think it is the 'margin' slider in the soft body modifier but you tried that already.

I used to generally try simulations of V4 sized cloth starting with stiffness around 27% and bending to zero or just above. The mesh would be well-tessellated.

If the mesh stretched like goo I would increase stiffness first, then bending. That was just my way, though, from trial and error.

Ultimately, I think soft-cloth in Carrara will always be time-consuming. A member now banned from DAZ once said that one of the Beta versions of Carrara 8 actually had better physics than the version that was released. Animated figures could be draped without messing up the simulation. It's a shame if that was true - Carrara would have had results like the cloth room in Poser.

Regarding Poser cloth sims, I found that I could use the dyn_to_morphs utility for Poser to send cloth-room animations to Carrara. The utility sends the whole Poser scene out to where it can be opened in Carrara complete with animation and simulation.

Two things I found:

(1) I found it best to go on and export the animated, simulated figure from Carrara as .fbx and then import it into a new Carrara scene. Otherwise the figures were starting out at point (0,0,0). Once I had it saved as an independent .fbx, I could scale it, duplicate it and place it anywhere giving it a starting point other than (0,0,0).

(2) I had to set the frames per second in Carrara to be the same as Poser's. Otherwise the clothing and figure got out of sync.

The best cloth sim of all is VWD, I would say.

Carrara's soft body Bullet Physics can do great things in the form of drapes, curtains, flags, blankets and many other objects made into soft body.

Like , I think, all cloth physics simulators there is the possibility of poke-through and/or explosions. It seems to depend on bits of colliding meshes being in the wrong place during iterations of whatever collision calculation is taking place. (A calculation could, I guess, be looking at vertices colliding or faces or edges but collisions aren't always detected for whatever reason and one mesh passes through another or else gets tangled up).

A work-round for the problem with hands is to attach another object, such as a flattened sphere, to each hand, in a parent-child relationship. After the simulation is run, make the objects invisible. It might take a few tries to get the right amount of protection from poke-through along with the spheres' outlines not being obvious on the covering cloth.

The major flaw in Carrara's soft body is it's failure to work where an animated mesh is being collided against (such as with the legs of a character walking). There will almost always be entanglement or explosions.

I had to go out and now see more contributions. Thanks, Ohki, I didn't want to go searching for a way to do that when I thought I'd get it done in DOS. Sometimes it's nice to look directly at file attributes and so on - even though in my case I often only half-know what I'm doing!

Yes, hborre, I too now have the new version of Poser working but need to complete all the content downloads next.

Thanks and regards to all.

I didn't manage to find the thread referred to (I could have looked harder) but went ahead and renamed the file and it seems to have worked.

For info, I opened a DOS command window and used the REN (RENAME) command:

REN filename filename.exe

I seem to recall from way back that right-clicking and choosing rename from the pop-up menu in Windows may not rename the filename suffix if there is one. (in this case I needed a suffix of .exe).

Wow. I went off to make a quick snack for a family member and came back to a reply. Thanks so much. I suspected that it should be an exe file but couldn't imagine it changing it's name during the download.

I'll take a look at the thread you mentioned and will try to fix it. Thanks again.

Thanks, Glitterat3d, for your answer to my question.

Yesterday I had a ton of clear thoughts about what I'd like to see done to Poser but, right now, my brain isn't focussed. This (as is the other discussion on a wish list for Poser) is a fascinating read. It also serves to show me how few of Poser's features I really know about. As well as Poser I mainly use Carrara and Iclone with Hexagon and I try 3dCoat occasionally.

There is nothing tantalising, I can assure you, that I'm holding back on but I'll leave my 'essay' for a later date. Just one thought, though. There was a time when I recall the basic 'VUE' software being released with different content themes (such as fairytale, I think). Poser could be released in similar content editions: Sci-Fi, Fairytale, Toon, Children's, Medieval, Western, Steampunk, Modern Everyday, etc. The content packages would be assembled from existing content plus commissioned work. The content creators, currently, are lone operators, as far as I can tell. Why not invite them to team up in creating official packages? Customers could get one base content package of choice and be able to buy others later - as a whole or bit-by-bit.

Professional Mocap files should start to be provided for sale also. (OK I'm re-inventing Iclone now, but why not?)

Lots of legal issues would need to be addressed with content developers but there are whole sweeps of history that could be organised into themes for sale.

So, there's a mini-essay!