MarkBremmer posted at 12:01AM Sat, 02 September 2017 - #4313058

sfdex posted at 4:05PM Sun, 27 August 2017 - #4313037 Ha! Long time, no hassle. What are you working on that has you dusting off Carrara? Nice to see you around.

Glad to see you're still here, Mr. Bremmer! I'm working on visual effects for a short horror/suspense film and need to do a little sweetening of practical effects with some CGI elements.

And while it's apparent that eventually Carrara will stop working with any modern operating system (I did get an email back from Daz when I wrote to them about Carrara's future; they said that they're no longer developing Carrara for any platform), and Cheetah does look promising, I needed to knock something out in a hurry, and I'm familiar with Carrara, so, rather than diving into a project using software I'm unfamiliar with, I wanted to go with what I know. And I've been using Carrara since it was RayDream. It's powerful and intuitive for me (because I've used it for such a long time).

And, I've answered my own question. I just installed C8.5P on my new MacBook Pro; everything seems to be working. The weird thing is that my MacBook Pro reports that it has four cores, but as Carrara renders a video, it seems to think that it is accessing eight cores (you know, the little colorful square tiles that represent which core is actively rendering a segment of the image). I'm not at all sure how that might be happening, but whatever, as long as it works, right?

Since it's been a while for me working with Carrara, I may be popping in here looking for answers to some questions you all may think are obvious, so in advance, I'll ask forgiveness!

Thanks for still being here, Renderosity Carrara gang!

-Dex

THAT'S IT!  Thank you so much!

Hi, Mark --

Thanks for the response.  It's what I figured.  Given the price that Daz is aiming to extract for the upgrade to 8.5 (just to get Carrara to WORK on a current OS Mac), plus the cost of Syntheyes, I might just as well jump over to C4D.  I already have a for it and its upgrade path is far less onerous than Carrara's has become.  Bummer, because, as you may recall, I really do love working with Carrara.  But it's probably time for me to jump to one of the more standard 3D packages, anyway.  

I'll miss hearing "you made that in Carrara?!?" though.

Thanks,
Dex 

Hi, cjd --

Yes, 8bit output is somewhat limiting, but for much of the kind of work I want to do, it's fine.  So long as I can render out a decently photo-real image, I can play with it in After Effects to match it to a background plate.  I usually render images against a solid green background in Carrara and use AE to key the image into my footage because Carrara's alpha channel is pretty weak.

 - Dex

Alas. But thanks for the response. I guess Daz just doesn't really take its customers seriously. Fortunately, the FBX export is able to get models, textures and animations into the Unity engine. Only problem is that it confuses Unity's coordinate system, but that can be worked around in Unity. So all is not lost. Now if we can only get a manual! :D

I know I'm late to the party, but these are great, Kix!  (Also loved your image of the Enterprise half burried in sand.)

 - Dex

Cool. Thanks Mark. In the words of my former governor, "I'll be back." :D

Thanks for the response, Mark. Good to see you're still here, and still using Cararra. So the .151 release hasn't really been officially released yet? So, if I bought C8P today, I'd still not have a stable release for Mac? Or am I misunderstanding you? I've been looking around the Daz site and see that there are still a number of ways that Mac is treated as second class. Things like collada export "support for the MAC OS will follow," and the fact that the Mac AfterEffects export is only good on AE6.5. (CS5 is version 10, isn't it? 6.5? Really?) Forgive me if I sound unconvinced. Really, have they stepped up to actually support Mac, or are we still the unloved stepchild? Can you hear my pain from years of abuse and neglect? ;^)

Thanks, Mark, Eric at DCG, and everyone else who helped figure this workaround out.  This forum rocks.

Still thinking that Daz really doesn't care much about making sure Carrara is really Mac compatible (despite the fact that this issue is less to do with Daz and more to do with the new OS), but at least I can continue to use it until I get up to speed on something else.

 - Dex

I had the same issue when I just fired up Carrara.  I have tried C6P and C7P and have no text at all.

I went to Daz to see if there's anything there about it, and of course there's not.

I tried to file a bug report, but their bug report system seems to be down.  Or at least not willing to listen to me.

I'm really getting sick of how poorly Daz treats Mac users.  Probably time to jump over to C4D or something that takes its users seriously....

Grr.

Good luck with this.  I thought I'd throw my experience in to the mix, as well.

Mark has hit the frame rate info on the head, and his trick about up-ressing the footage is a great one.  I've also used a slight post production blur trackmatted with an edge detection in AfterEffects to soften up edges a bit.

One word of warning:  Carrara's alpha channel is a little weak when you're using motion blur.  Carrara's motion blur (use the vector blur) is quite good, but Carrara doesn't seem to know what to do with the alpha channel under the blurry parts.  For that reason, if I'm rendering something that I'm going to composite atop live footage, I render it against a pure green solid and key it using Keylight in AE.  The blur keys just fine in Keylight, and the built-in spill supression takes care of any odd coloration in the semi-transparent areas.

Hope that's helpful.

 - Dex

The problem with Carrara's alpha channel in render is that it doesn't handle blurs well, so if you're rendering with motion blur, you're better off using a chroma-key green background and doing the composite with Keylight in AfterEffects.  Keylight handles blurs and semi-transparent areas really well, in my experience.

 - Dex

Yep, that's the same sort of issue I've had; you might try putting your alpha channel info into the transparency channel, as well, but I haven't had that help much.  Fortunately for this kind of mograph look, having that little light frame doesn't detract; in fact, it kind of feels like it should be there.  But it's maddening when you can't get it to work.  I'd suggest adding this to Daz's bug report.  Lack of full alpha accuracy can really screw up someone's day....

:D

I've had similar issues in Carrara; only thing I'd suggest is to make sure all the shader channels are empty, as opposed to set to a value of zero.  But even then, it seems that there's a bit of an issue with alphas in C.