I have Poser and Vue, just wondering about Carrara? What can it do about what I already have.

Regards

Nothing, imho. Carrara has the poser capablilities, and Vue has a lot more power when it comes to creating natural landscapes, and has a very good (though a tad slow) renderer. What Carrara has is a modeller, Vue and Poser don't. You can find good free or cheap modellers that have at least the same possibilities than Carrara's, if not more.

Cheers Bruno

So nothing gained with Carrara then, cool

The main advantage of Carrara is that it will handle Poser dynamic hair, although its own dynamic hair is possibly even better.

I always found modelling with carrara touch and go to be fair. I prefer to use Hexagon or as mentioned a free modelling tool will do a good/better job.

Jon

Yeah, forgot about hair. Carrara has its own hair and fur solution. And it looks good too.

Carrara has been free in a few magazines recently.  It doesn't hurt to get the program that way if you just need certain features from it.

Quote - Cheers Bruno

So nothing gained with Carrara then, cool

I doubt Bruno has Carrara it does plenty see for yourself .

Thats cool but if you buy this book you get a lot of content AND a FREE  copy of Carrara 6 Pro
and that has a dynamic hair modeler in it.

here is the link   http://www.daz3d.com/i/3d-models/books-and-dvds/figures-characters-and?item=9166&cat=607&_m=a

sorry you missed the sale its 29.95 now with the book. If you register the free one you can upgrade cheaper also. I have Carrara 7 Pro. You can also get a Demo version at www.daz3d.com to try it out.

It's $23.09 from Amazon if you are in the US and buy $2 more to get free shipping.

I'd always recommend trying things for yourself :)
much as I love Vue, for you, Carrara maybe the app you enjoy using more, in the end of the day, that is what is important!
Bryce doesn't have the capabilities Vue does...but if you enjoy using Bryce, go for it!

I bought carrara while ago (as take sme while to really get ot grips with apps, long story), but I enjoy Vue much more.

I woudl love if Vue had procedural hair / fibres, mmmmm

I bought Carrara and absolutely hated it. It was wasted money for me.    :-(

I use Carrara along with the Anything Goos and Baker plugins for texturing and baking them for use in Vue.  I haven't played with Vue's texturing yet.  Carrara's texturing does most what I need for any type of model I have.  I don't model in Carrara at all if I can help it.

One big drawback in Carrara is that the atmospheres are crap. The cloud editor is really bad and makes skies look like they did in Bryce ten years ago. The most impressive renders of Carrara landscapes that you see will have just a clear blue sky. On the other hand, I think it is easier to set up a good indoor scene in Carrara than it is in Vue. 

I've used Vue much more often than Carrara. The superior character animation features in Carrara made it seem like a good way to learn animation, but I put off that notion once I learned that Daz had botched the ERC implementation and preferred to pretend there was no problem. If I need indoor scenes, I can build and render them in Modo 401 64-bit, (a program that makes Carrara's modeller look like a peice of junk by comparison, by the way.)

Yes.  Carrara renders better indoor scenes and Vue renders better outdoor scenes.  modo works great with both apps and does amazing indoor renders.

Thanks for all the feedback. So it's horses for courses then. Perhaps I might try it at a later stage, but I think that vue seems the one for me. Reasons, from my point of view is that you get some good results from the start. Well, I think I've got some good results anyway :lol:  and I find it quiet easy to understand. It's like any new software, its getting to know your way around it and how it does things and where they are.   

Hmmm...Modo 401.........goes away to google to look this one up.................:biggrin:

Vue comes with so many presets and sample scenes to open and examine how they were set up, lit, and make note of their render settings.

Carrara has presets as well, but the rendered scenes are just so so.

Chipp did amazing stuff with his Interior Pak lighting :)

All of them (Poser, Carrara, Vue, modo not as much) still have trouble rendering human skin that looks real.  For that you need at least Maxwell.

well, Maxwell has problems that wya to but nto same way, with Maxwell it's been getting it to co-operate
it produces such realism because it's an unbiased render iwith materials designed to work like REAL materials...but oh my they suck to work with :p

Allegedly the Mental Ray fast skin shader does a pretty good job of skin if you get all the dermal/subdermal maps etc. right

Yep.  Mental Ray is another great one for producing skin.

 carrara has a pluggin from DCG called toonpro that can cartoon your scene quite nicely. (not quite one click)
Vue doesn't have a one click way of tooning.  Each material has to be changed individually to toon nicely.  there is a python toon script in vue but all it does is put a black line around things, and doesn't have a variable tooning outline.

Love esther