Forum: Carrara


Subject: Does Carrara read Poser bump maps?

Krewz opened this issue on Apr 19, 2008 · 4 posts


Krewz posted Sat, 19 April 2008 at 6:31 AM

I'm still using Carrara 6.1 trial, going to buy soon. When loading Poser content and scenes in Carrara the bump maps don't seem to render. I've tried rendering Daz's V4 and Xerr as well as some other non-Daz figures. I have Bump checked in the render tab and the shaders seem to have bump nodes, but no bump is rendered on the figure's surface.


Sueposer posted Sat, 19 April 2008 at 11:00 AM

C6 imports the poser bump maps into the shader, but often sets their value to 0%.
To get it to apply the bump, open the shader and click on the top level shader so that all the other shaders are listed as a summary on the right. The bump subshader should show that there is a map and have a slider for % applied (which now probably reads 0). Adjust the slider to the level of bump you like.


Miss Nancy posted Sat, 19 April 2008 at 3:34 PM

there is a bump channel in poser 7 and a displacement channel in poser 7.
the bump channel is an hold-over from the old version 4. it doesn't cause any actual
displacement.



Joe-B-Wan posted Wed, 30 April 2008 at 2:52 AM

Quote - C6 imports the poser bump maps into the shader, but often sets their value to 0%.
To get it to apply the bump, open the shader and click on the top level shader so that all the other shaders are listed as a summary on the right. The bump subshader should show that there is a map and have a slider for % applied (which now probably reads 0). Adjust the slider to the level of bump you like.

You have no idea how thankful I am that you pointed this out. I couldn't for the life of me figure out why my bump maps were having no noticeable effect. (I did find out they don't usually make for good displacement maps)

Another thing I've found about Poser map placement in Carrara shdaers is that if there is an Alpha map from Poser, it will load into the alpha sub-shader channel in Carrara. I've found on V4 at least, you don't want it there.
You need to either move it to the transparency sub-shader channel, or do away with it altogether. (depending on what it needs to do for that domain)
It took me forever to figure out why I couldn't get any nice lighting effects or reflections on her eye surfaces and corneas.