Being a student, I qualify for quite a substantial discount on Eovia products so I ordered Carrara 3. Got the beta a few days ago. Never used Carrara before in my life, but it's not too hard to pick up the basics (the very basics).

After fiddling around with cubes and spheres and playing with the lights, I decided to try importing some poser figures into Carrara. With the help of some tutorials I eventually got things to work properly (textures actually weren't a problem but transparency maps were giving me fits until I realized that you have to check the "light through transparency" box).

Anyway for those of you who are curious as to what a Poser figure looks like rendered in Carrara 3, I've attached an image. Nothing fancy and but I think it looks pretty good considering I didn't even take a lot of time setting it up (maybe 10-15 minutes importing stuff and moving/scaling them and plopping in a few lights).

Took about 20 seconds to render on a dual gig G4 w/ 512 MB of RAM. Carrara renders faster on my machine than Poser 4 does, even with things like anti aliasing and reflections added in. A similar scene in Poser using all the same elements (minus the texture on the jeans) took about 1 minute and 39 seconds to render.

(The figure is Taro from Rubio's room using Kozaburo's Messy Hair, and background/props were from Poserstyle)

Nice image. Nice to know Poser and Carrara 3 work well together. You have convinced me to upgrade from my Carrara 1 ziggie

"You don't have to be mad to use Poser... but it helps"

I can't confirm it, but I've heard that someone is working on a plugin or something that will make these two apps work together even better, perhaps like Poser and Vue.

Yes, a Poser-Carrara plug in is in the works and has been unofficially confirmed by someone (I won't say who) in the know... Regards, Paul

Really the only major problem I have now when importing a figure into Carrara is the fact that transparency map information isn't carried over. So I have to do it manually which could get quite tedious to do for every figure.

In regards to Poser/Carrara plug-in, I posted this a couple weeks back (forget which forum), which is part of an email reply I got from Jim Lumley of Eovia's Sales department:

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3. Within a short time after Curious Labs releases Poser 5 for the MAC Platform you will see an announcement of a plug-in for the two products.

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Since he was very open in answering this particular question, I assume it isn't a real big secret. Also note that he mentions it will be for Poser 5 and carrara. He didn't know whether it would work with Poser 4, although if the Mac version of Poser 5 works fast enough under OS X then I may just end up picking it up.

its only tedious for transmapping if you don't save your shaders to the library. Everytime you make a new shader, drag and drop it to your library (left side menu) to save it, and then reuse it over and over again. better yet, you can back up your shaders and so you always have them. drag and drop is not tedious at all :)) The work is only done one time.

Any chance you could do a render of that same scene with the non-photorealistic render option in Carrara 3? I'm curious if Carrara 3 can do a decent comic book style render.

Bijouchat: I think I understand what you mean (I've played with Carrara for like, 5 days). But I'd have to do a different one for each hair prop (for example) right? (Then again I could be totally misunderstanding what you're trying to tell me) jkm: I'll try a few NPR renders and see how it comes out. What I've seen of other people's stuff seems to indicate that Carrara can do some neat stuff but I personally haven't really played around with it yet.

you can easily use the same hair transparency recipe, even if its for a different hair prop, and simply change the transparency and texture maps, and then resave to the library under a different name. I save subparts of the shader for these purposes to the library so I can drag and drop them in. It really doesn't take that long... it takes longer for me in poser to do it in fact... as I have to go in and do the trans by hand... no drag and drop. my gallery is full of Carrara 2.1 renders... I just got version 3 here and am beginning to play with it. Its really really really really nice... what I see so far.

also, go looking for Babel in the freestuff if you are a PC user, it will read your Poser pz3 files and gather up all your textures, makes it a lot faster to get your Carrara scenes textured.

Attached Link: http://www.castironflamingo.com

this is a must go to site, Babel is here, and also a mini tutorial for Carrara. I do not use Grouper for importing Carrara as I find it unnecessary, but Babel is sure a godsend, and the Grouper tutorial will show you how to set up your Carrara transparency shaders.

Yeah actually that's the site that had the tutorial I followed to get things setup in the first place. When you mentioned the "hair transparency recipe" I think I finally understood what you've been saying. Yeah, that part's no problem, I just meant tedious in reference to having to change the trans map for figures with different hair if you have more than one (me bein kinda impatient and all). It's not a big deal really and it actually doesn't take me that long to do. Just being an ungrateful user and wishing there was a built in converter/plug-in so I didn't ahve to do any work. :) Re: Grouper and Babel, I can't use either since I'm on a Mac. But that's OK, it's something I've gotten used to. No biggie though, I'm slowly starting to get the hang of it and things are (again, slowly) starting to click. LOL, eventually I might even know what I'm doing! :)

jkm: Fiddled around with the Non photoreal render mode. Basically just checked and unchecked boxes at random.This is what came out. I find myself perplexed by the NPR mode. I'll probably fiddle with it some more eventually but for now I'm thinking I'll stick to the normal render mode. :)

Thanks for posting the image.

OK so I'm working in Carrara the other night, and suddenly BAM! Bijouchat's sugestion finally makes sense to me. LOL, it does save me one extra step so yeah, thanks Bijouchat. :)

you are very welcome, glad I could help :)