mihnea's the name. bought carrara 5 pro recently, and have to say i love it! just wanted to say hi.

HI~ :)

m

Oi you lot in here, from those of us in the Bryce forum, make sure you look after Drac, otherwise he'll get shirty and abuse you all ;) .

i never get shirty as i hardly wear anything when i post on forums...

Hi Mihnea. 

G'day.

Welcome

Welcome Draculaz, I hope you enjoy your stay.

Oh wait, I'm new too!   (/me puts on his "I'm with stupid" T-shirt.)

Welcome Drac and Drawbridge. Let the fun commence!

I'm new too and am loving it.  Spent several hours last night and was totally absorbed.  Never noticed the thunderstorm till I test rendered something and went to get a snack. 

The texture room seems way more complicated than Bryce's (which I might add I never mastered either), luckily I hear there is some user guide for sale that is aimed a newbies like me.

I have the pro version and am wondering if there is a way to (not sure of the terminology) set it up so that it could go through a list of seperate carrara files I want to render them out, without me having to open them one at a time and hitting render? 

Also does anybody know what DPI is good for colour laser printing?  I'm planning on using to Carrara, Poser, Wings, Photoshop to make a graphic novel as a grad gift for this girl.  I have 45 days left, luckily I have the first part of the story written, and can give her the first part if I can't get the whole novel finished.

And I have almost two of the multitude of 3d models I need made.

Can Carrara multireplicate like Bryce?

Thanks for all of your help and sorry Drac for hijacking your thread.  I promise to not do it again...maybe :p

Sincerely,

David

Welcome all!  I've been around this forum for a long time; it's populated with lots of folks who really do know this software and love it.

I'm one who falls in the "love it" category, and the "hope I can figure out what I need to do" category.....

I'm not familiar with Bryce (haven't touched it since sometime in the mid '90's), but I do believe that Carrara is a much more robust program with more detailed modeling capabilities.  Bryce does some amazing things, but once you get used to Carrara, you'll be hooked.

As for your render question, I'd suggest looking in the help file for render queue or batch render. (I'm not in front of my computer with C5pro on it, so I don't remember exactly what it's called.)  That functionality is in there. 

As for DPI, check the specs on the color laser printer.  I have a fabulous color ink-jet printer that specifies 150 dpi, but I tend to render anything for print out at 300 dpi, just in case I wind up sending it off to a different print facility.

"Multireplicate?"  Don't know what that is.  Carrara does have a great surface replicator.  Is that what you're looking for?

Good luck!

• Dex

Thanks Dex for all your advice.  The multireplicate in Bryce would allow me to select my object, say a cube,  then type in the number of copies I wanted and presto 50 cubes evenly spaced out.  Just wondering if Carrara can do this as it would help me create this detailed floating city for my comic.

David

There goes the neighborhood! They'll let just anyone play with 3D these days won't they?

Yes Pedrith. The surface replicator that Dex mentioned does do that and more. Randomize the size/placement/angle following the geometry of any surface, with a texture (picture) based control of placement. (Place a greyscale pic in the right place, then the layout of the duplicates follows the 'brighter is more' mentality.)

When you go to the render room and pull up on the 'Current scene/Batch Queue' tab across the bottom you can add scenes (files) to the render queue and make whatever changes you want to the render settings of the file. Different resolutions, quality settings, 'Save render to file...' settings, blah, blah, blah.

What I hear from folks who do renders for print, (I usually do my work for screen or video,) that setting your render to twice the DPI of the output device, then downsampling in PhotoShop or (insert program name here) is the best bet, since it does a cleaner anti-aliasing.

Hope this helps.

Welcome Drac and Drawbridge. Carrara's a really deep program and there are a lot of great people here to answer questions. And do take advantage of the plug-ins for C5 too. Eric and Julien are excellent programmers who constantly update their stuff and listen to their users for input. Carrara has its roots in raydream, Infini-D, and Bryce, so we all eventually find our way here. Have fun - hehe - especially with the landscape features. Scott