I am rapidly learning to adapt to Carrara's lack of 100% P6 support (the biggest weakness is in the interpretation of shaders, which is no surprise). Case in point, this morning's attempt to actually use Miki/Samyra: With two characters, two small props (a drape and a cloth_square, one transmapped hair (Koz Chignon), a mini patch of "dynamic" pubic fuzz, and three spotlights, I get a render failure. "Please turn off a couple of features and reduce your texture, OK???" Sure, I didn't want to actually use V3 and Miki and all those shader elements anyway. I open Task Manager and run the render again. I have a 2800 Sempron, W2K, and 2 megs of RAM. Poser chokes and begs at 576 megs. What the &#;&$&@% is with THAT? And the failures began, by the way, when I added the third spot, NOT when I added the dynamic hair. And they CONTINUED after I removed the light, which I take to be a reliable sign of a memory leak. Meantime, I have been fighting with the third light, which I want to illuminate one figure but not the one farther away from the light and emphatically NOT the backdrop drape. I flail at the DisStart/DisEnd settings for half an hour, and it seems my choices are illuminate nothing or light the drape. No alternatives. And yes, I tried every imaginable extreme to try to bracket my what to what I needed. No dice. I give up. I switch to C5P. I recreate my lights and camera setup in a few minutes, using Carrara's wonderfully simple and straightforward tools to create exactly the effect I wanted with the third light (I don't even have to take advantage of one of Carrara's major bells, the ability to declare that a light should not illuminate a specific object). I putz around with the shaders to get something close to what I had in Poser, and when I'm close, I run a render. It takes 30 seconds for a small image, and TM reports 824Megs. I increase the render to 1500 wide at 300 DPI, enough to choke Poser rendering a lowres ball, and the render takes 2 minutes. I'm confident that with some study I can manually transfer all the refinements of a Material Room shader into Carrara's different but equally powerful idioms, so far I just haven't had the incentive. Time to break out the user manual. I realise many of us don't have the resources to add a second application in the $330-$500 range to our toolkit, but I'll tell you what, if you factor in the time wasted fumbling with lights "in the dark" and the frustration of being told that something involving two figures and a curtain "is just more than I can handle; sorry," Carrara pays for itself in a hurry. M

I'm right with you mickmca

I hope we both realize that the pioneering work on SSS, shaders and textures to get truly great skin fairly close up has not actually been done in Carrara.

I personally have also faced the fact that to approach my own criteria for accepability on strand hair, Carrara's render time comes back up close to Poser's -- but that's only for close ups.

What about dynamic clothes. I haven't tried it yet, have you?

All of these speed issues avoid one even more powerful argument: if justified, you can go 'up the ladder' on hardware with C5; it will respect dual core and dual processors. I have spoken to several tech people and it is possible that you can nearly triple render time by going from a fairly standard AMD 3500+ up to a (granted expensive) dual core/dual processor rig with Carrara.

I'd love to stay only in Poser. I honestly love the program. But I'm having to face the fact I will probably have to move all the way up to XSI, Max or Maya, or at least have to use Carrara (strictly as a lighting and render platform) for my Poser scenes/animations.

Please, let Poser 7 come out now and be my deus ex machina.

::::: Opera :::::

Message edited on: 03/09/2006 13:53

note: i just got an email from Eovia: They just dropped the price another $70, it is now $329

I think what kills poser, in addition to being several years behind the render and memory management curves, is all that morph crap that really bogs it down. that's why an old trick in poser was to export a posed, morphed figure as obj, then re-import (all boxes unchecked) and render in poser.

that would be a great strategy for still renders

Actually C5 renders a little bit more than twice as fast on my X2 than it does when only using a single core. Export and import in P6 is even easier now as you don't have to deal with loss of transparency maps anymore when saving as a material collection first and then reapplying that one. (The attached script exports all objects of the current selected frame, creates material collections, deletes the exported figure/prop and reimports and applies the material collection. Should only be used on a copy of the original work as this will obviously no longer exist when the script did its work ,-))

wait......that script has a place for start and end frame......you can run an animation with it?

looks like the multi-frames options are commented out

No animations, sorry. While the Python method allows start and endframes, it only exports one frame :-(

why can't this script be called in a loop from another?

That would kind of kill the idea of freeing up memory. A 30 frame animation would then consist of 30 objs instead of 1 figure... It's probably better to just use one of the scripts that remove the morph deltas.

I am getting errors..... Exporting Black Eyes L 1 Deleting original Black Eyes L 1 Importing Black Eyes L 1 error loading Black Eyes L 1.obj Exporting Glasses Wire Deleting original Glasses Wire Importing Glasses Wire error loading Glasses Wire.obj Exporting Miki Importing Miki Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 98, in ? poser.error: Error importing fil

Did you set the temp directory to an existing folder? tempDir="C:temp"

no! i am the idiot it is not idiot proof for. Let me read the script a little better!

I agree 100%, i got so sick of poser giving me memory errors, i got carrara too. I really like it so far,but am having troubles getting my camera to look the same as I had the scene in poser. hopefully I can figure it out or any hints and tricks if anybody knows any. The lights are amazing, so many options

that light only shines on certain selected objects is not meant as a method to save memory it is to help with renders to make them better, eg if youwant a light on only an alpha plane and no shadows, which looks great on jepe's fire props BTW. I use it to maybe make a person stand out more in a dark scene. Love esther

The not shining on objects thing may not be designed for what I was doing, but it's a big help when you don't want to take the time to calculate (or merely adjust, as Carrara allows you to do) falloff zones, which requires a bloody HP calculator on your desk with Poser. (The way you needed some basic trig to get something related to Depth of Field out of P5. The problem is that cameras have a different 0,0,0, point than the universe, so you have to do a bunch of math to figure out where the camera "really" is. I'll never forget the day I figured out that the thing sticking out of Judy's navel was the zeroed out Main Camera... sort of.) I used it recently to put sparkle on a sword. So much easier than aiming a light down the blade, yada yada. The Carrara cameras are spooky because, I think, they use real camera values. Poser cameras are notorious for NOT being what they say they are (or where they appear to be). Focal lengths are not correlative to camera lenses, for example. I actually find using the Carrara cameras easier, because they behave the way my cameras do. Carrara pulled Traveller's state of the art Samyra shaders in with minimal loss. Unfortunately, the "losses" are places where the vocabulary is simply completely different. For example, the highlights that work beautifully in Poser made her look like she'd been oiled, and the "noisy" bump maps popped up into gooseflesh. Minor fixes, once you get the hang of it. I haven't looked yet to see if Carrara has a text-based native file (like PZ3) that can be edited. I'm guessing not, but that will settle things, if it does. The PIA with shaders in both apps is having to make the same bloody change to "shine" on 20-odd materials, once you find the right setting. I don't see myself abandoning Poser, although imports into native format (rather than Transposer) are starting to intrigue me. I have a feeling I'm going to discover that I need Poser less and less for what I want to do. As a ten-year fan, what makes me sad is that the things we are discussing have been a mess, some of them, since P3, and the various Poser folks have chosen to take the MS Road on enchancements: Put your energy into glittery new toys, and don't worry if the wheels keep falling off. M

I LOVE being able to have lights illuminate only certain objects. When I was working in photography, I'd have just about killed for such a thing.:-D Magic! I is extremely handy. I haven't been running in to many compatibility problems with P6 to C5. Could be because I don't use dynamics very often. Hmmm... I do use it for draping cloth sometimes. I should see how it works with C5.

As I said, the biggest problem seems to be adapting the shaders. By the way, Car does indeed seem to use a text-based file format, so it may be possible to write a Perl script that will move Poser materials settings to Carrara's format. More than I have time for right now, but worht thinking about. M

Is it the highlights that make the skin look shiny in carrara. they're set to black I notice on one of my imports and the shinyness is only 7%. what should I do to get rid of that plastic look to the skin? Love esther

As a temporary solution, I set shininess to 90%. Non-intuitive, but "shiny" seems to be REDUCED by larger values! Maybe I'm misinterpreting the result. NB: There is a new thread in the Carrara forum with some interesting discussion of using Face_off's RealSkin tut to create a Carrara (sic) shader. M