Carrara 8.5 Pro Any Good?
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Carrara 8.5 Pro Any Good?
mwokee
Posts: 1,275
in The Commons
I have an offer to purchase Carrara 8.5 Pro at a very good price but am wondering what it can do. I'm still struggling just with Daz Studio basics and have enough trouble staying focused on current projects. Any advice is welcome.
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I am biased but even if you only render in DAZ studio it is a great modeler and you can export landscapes and trees too if so inclined
You may want to factor in the whole idea of investing your time to learn software that is no longer being developed (hasn't been updated since 2013 IIRC). In my mind, this cost far outweighs the dollars out of your pocket, but that's a decision for you to make.
That being said, it is still capable of doing many things that DS can't - the active Carrara community members here can tell you all about that. Plus, it comes with a fair amount of older content, too.
- Greg
you also might want to grab it while you still can ......
I think Carrara is one of those programs that you either love or hate. I really never liked it, but some love it. It also has had no updates at all for years, so you might want to consider that as well.
Laurie
Plug in developers still alive and kicking.
several fantastic plugins have come out this year
It even has a great renderer, but it use only CPU.
Just wonder, how it would perform on the newer processors, like Ryzen 3900X.
I have just rendered example scene from https://www.daz3d.com/wonderous-wares
The render took 25 minutes 8 seconds on my old computer with i7-3770K @ 3.5 GHz.
i7 is your old pc? my "new" intels only up to i5
haz a ryzen 7 octacore
this is a real time render of Howeie's Secret Lake on the octacore. I named K8ty tee hee Kate-ee
But actually, I like the best Carrara posibilities together with VectorStyle 2 - https://www.daz3d.com/vectorstyle-2-for-carrara
Below is Scrappy - https://www.daz3d.com/scrappy-the-robot - processed with it.
Carrara, I love it. Some good and some bad.
A - Good. 1) I can start, with an empty scene, a blank canvas if you will, and do absolutely everything myself in Carrara. I can model my own figures and props, uvmap them, paint them, rig them, and animate them. I can grow dynamic hair on my custom people and have wind and movement flutter their hair. I can create my own landscape, create my own trees and plants, and replicate my trees, grasses, and stones on my landscape. I can import real world DEM data if I want a actual location. I can carve out my own channel for a stream and have Fluidos water meander through, or flood. I can create a custom sky or set the sky to a specific time/day/year. I can create and animate a bank of clouds. I can model, uvmap, texture, and paint my own aircraft, animate it being struck by lightning, and then use physics to have it crash to my landscape.
2) I can use most (but not all) of the items in the Daz store if I don't want to build everything from scratch. Use Daz store or other figures, textures, clothing, pose sets, hair sets, etc..
3) Most often, I do a mixture of creating my own stuff and using my hoard of Daz3D props, figures, etc.
B - Bad
1) Daz3D is not supporting the program.
--- As Wendy pointed out, plugin developers have since added fluids, hair conversions, shader surface mesh projection (think HD morphs), and more
2) Daz3D has not maintained compatibility between Carrara and its base figure rigging for Genesis 3 or Genesis 8. Most recent was Genesis 2.
---- An amazing Carrara user (Misty) diagnosed the problem and created character sets to allow use of Genesis 3 and 8 figures and content using blended weight rigging
3) Daz3D recently stopped supporting the regular Carrara render challenges.
---- Carrara forum regulars are a cheerful and supportive bunch. There is a current challenge anyway.
4) Blender fans could point out that it is also an all-in-one software
Misty actually pointed out our active plugin developers,
not everyone wants a photorealistic render platform either and Carrara has NPR and toon options
...Carrara also has native import for .3ds (not Max though), .lwo, and .fbx files.
You can model in it? I used it for years and never knew that. I have been thinking about trying my hand at modeling so might look into it.
FTR, the reason I went back to DS was that I started running into issues with some content not working well or at all, even pre-G3. The Michael 4 Beard for example. Since there's a solution for G2 & G3 now, all the more reason to revisit
yep, you can model in it! click on wacky modeling to see what Carrara'ists are up to in the Carrara Board.
and have fun doing it
It was great back in it's heydays, and still pretty capable. But if you really want to dive into a more robust software than daz studio, I would suggest blender. 2.8 is really a huge step up for them, as far as making UI more "normal" when compared to other similar programs, and it has so many free and paid for plugins it's not even funny. I did have a lot of fun with carrara, but I ended up migrating away as it was a royal pain to get daz figures in there.
It’s still easier than getting them into Blender though
best thing is you can load up Carrara and belt out a render in 10 minutes where it would take days to do in DS that's if DS could even load 9 Genesis figures anyways..
Thanks for that, so there is a hope for the newest Ryzens, as well.