OT: Carrara sale

LReavis wrote on 12/28/2009, 5:52 PM
I just bought Carrara animation software for US $87.15 after paying $30 for Platinum club membership.

I'm really not happy with Poser and have read that Carrara is much better. Here's hoping.

http://www.daz3d.com/i/3d-models/purchase-carrara?cat=331&_m=d&trid=974627864

Also, I recently downloaded the free Wings 3d, which creates clothing and other props.

Finally, I downloaded a demo of Argile 2, which is a neat program for morphing clothing, and other props or models that you might have. It's about US $100 if I decided to buy it. When I tried to load a morphed clothing .OBJ back into Poser 8, it crashed. Win 7 64 says that Poser 8 is incompatible, so I'll re-install my old XP on another SSD so that I can use it without so many glitches . . .

While on the topic of animation, I purchased Twilight renderer ($100) for the free Google Sketchup. With free plugins - proper animation and sketchy physics - I now can easily create and render photo-realistic scenes and animations. No glitches here - the free stuff + twilight works great.

This animation stuff really eats up my time, but gives me the possibility of creating scenes that I cannot be captured on video - such as buildings that no longer exist.

Comments

ingvarai wrote on 12/28/2009, 6:11 PM
> This animation stuff really eats up my time

Yes, indeed. I purchased Carrara about one year ago, and have spent countless hours with it. Myself, I do not do any clothing, persons or the like. Instead I use Carrara to create 3D signs that I use in real scenes in my movies, and for several other purposes.

For example - I have a scene where i make a car jump from a hill and fly, like a rally car. First I extract the car using Mocha Shape in After Affects. Then I use a "splat" in Carrara which I animate using Carra's physics engine. This gives a very realistic movement of the car. I then motion track the the "splat" and use the motion data to animate the car in After Effects.

Another use: I make autumn become spring. I have a scene shot in September, I need to change it to May. So the ground with lots of yellow leaves has to be replaced by light gravel. The camera was mounted on a crane/jib, and moves from high up down to the ground level.
I use SynthEyes to track the motion, export tracking data to Carrara, make a shape in Carrara and paint it with a suitable gravel and then export everything to After Effects.
If anyone is interested, I can upload before-after samples to YouTube.
Ingvar
srode wrote on 12/28/2009, 7:16 PM
If you have the proffessional version of Win7 you can use XP Mode for anything that isn't compatible with Win7. I just downloaded and ran it for one piece of software that wouldn't work in Win 7 and the XP Mode runs very smoothly. It's a virtual machine that runs within Win7 and you can save output to anywhere you want on your PC. Free for downloading to try it and keep it for free if you like it.
Radio Guy wrote on 12/28/2009, 7:54 PM
Great price. I too have Carrara Pro 7 but paid the full price but still a great piece of software for titling and of course those fantastics landscapes and skies.

Have fun with it.
JohnnyRoy wrote on 12/29/2009, 6:53 AM
> If anyone is interested, I can upload before-after samples to YouTube.

I am interested! ;-)

I have Carrara 7 Pro, Mocha Shape, After Effects, and MatchMover and I have been wanting to get into exactly what you are doing but haven't had the time. Maybe if I see what is possible it will inspire me to set some time aside to really learn Carrara.

~jr
ingvarai wrote on 12/29/2009, 8:56 AM
JohnnyRoy:
> I am interested! ;-)

Ok, give me some time, and I will do it.
Is it enough to post to this thread, or should I also notify you by e-mail?

> but haven't had the time
Learning Carrara is a rather overwhelming task. I use some parts of i that I know well, other parts I will never learn because it is of no interest to me (all those various skins and clothes, hair, characters etc). I know nothing about MatchMover. I use SynthEyes (initiated by a tip in this very newsgroup), SyntEyes is just fantastic. SynthEyes exports to Carrara. Your footage is best suited if shot from a moving camera, dolly, crane, jib or from a moving vehicle. Import it into SynthEyes, track everything, and export to Carrara and you have a virtual world identical to the real one you shot with your camera.
You can then position objects (spheres, cubes, text) in this world, you can even animate them. When done, export it with an alpha channel and overlay it either in Vegas or in After Effects.
Ingvar
kairosmatt wrote on 12/29/2009, 9:13 AM
Ingvarai-please post it here so we can all see!
kairosmatt
JohnnyRoy wrote on 12/29/2009, 10:00 AM
Posting here when you get the time is fine. I did some matchmoving when I first bought the software and was able to insert a large bamboo hut onto the lawn in my backyard with a tracking shot. That was with Vue 6 Infinite and MatchMover. I haven't tried with Carrara Pro yet. I see that Carrara will import RealViz XML which is one of the exports from MatchMover so it should work.

~jr
LReavis wrote on 12/29/2009, 12:19 PM
"If you have the proffessional version of Win7 you can use XP Mode for anything that isn't compatible with Win7."

I tried XP Mode but I did not find it useful. For example, when I tried to install my Antics animation software on it, Antics wouldn't open - "no grapics device was found," - or some such error message regarding the VGA card.

And it was soooo s-l-o-w on my Q6600 machine. Most virtual machines are slow, but I found that VMware's free player with EasyVMX was MUCH better, but it also would not allow Antics to run. So, dual-boot Win7 64 + XP 32 for me.
srode wrote on 12/29/2009, 4:35 PM
interesting observations with XP mode - I found just the opposite on speed - my VMware XP installation was painfully slow at anything and my Win7 XP mode seems to have the same speed after it completes booting up as my regular XP OS did when I used it - Q6600 maching also but overclocked to 3.33ghz and a fast Raid 10 drive that Win7 is installed on. I did set my memory limit manually to 4 gb - the default was 512 - figured that was way to low for anything of use.
kkolbo wrote on 12/29/2009, 5:39 PM

Has anyone compared Carrara to Blender? I have been working on climbing the steep hill into 3d. I have been doing some simple stuff with iClone (not recommended except for their prepackaged video FX) and I learning Google SketchUp. I have the training materials and was planning on learning Blender after that. Comments?

KK
LReavis wrote on 12/29/2009, 5:58 PM
"I did set my memory limit manually to 4 gb"

srode: how did you do that?
ingvarai wrote on 12/29/2009, 8:04 PM
> Has anyone compared Carrara to Blender?

Excuse me for chiming in, because I have only tried Blender just a little, and I threw it away because I had no time to learn yet another 3D tool. I will just talk a little about Carrara and my experiences with it.

Cararra is made for Mac I suspect. It lacks some of the familiar Windows behaviours, like extensive support for the right mouse button. Data entered into an edit box will still be editable of you shift focus to another control (your keyboard activity is still editing the value), which is rather annoying. Besides of this, the user interface is pretty nice, once you get used to it.

Here is an advice:
Go to vtc.com and try out Mark Bremmer's eminent video tutors. They will get you up and running - fast.

Here is one of the main reasons to go for Carrara: The user group is nothing less than fantastic. Whenever I ask, I get many replies, and many of them again are supplied with images supporting the explanations on how to do things.

For me, as a video enthusiast and hobby user of Vegas, After Effects etc, Carrara seems to be a good choice. I have had no time to try other 3D apps. And by the way - Google sketch is nothing compared to Carrara. Carrara has physics (calculating the movement and interaction and gravity forces of objects) which is very fun to play with.
Ingvar
deusx wrote on 12/29/2009, 8:34 PM
Blender should be much better. Never used it, but nobody even mentions carrara in more serious 3D talk. On the other hand it may be easier to get what you want with carrara since in the 3D arena better apps usually come with a much steeper learning curves and if you don't really need all those things they offer why bother.
ingvarai wrote on 12/29/2009, 9:29 PM
> Blender should be much better. Never used it, but nobody even mentions carrara in more serious 3D talk.

This certainly applies to Sony Vegas too, that it is not mentioned in "serious" talk, as you call it. Apart from this, I have no opinion, since I only have used Carrara.
Before selecting a 3D tool, search for Blender vs Carrara and see what you find. One of them might be better doing animation, one better at stills modelling. Myself I never do landscapes, skies, people etc. I do text and objects, and Carrara is just up my alley for what I do. Especially since SyntEyes (match-moving) exports to Carrara.
Ingvar
srode wrote on 12/30/2009, 3:12 AM
L Reavis - Start > Windows Virtual PC (not windows XP Mode) > Highlight the VM you want to change the RAM for, then click settings at the top on the menu bar, then click Memory and a window on the right will give you the option to set the RAM for the VM - it wil also tell you what is available to use. I used about half of my available, 8gb installed so I used 4 GB.

There's also an item called integration devices you might want to explore - it lets you select which devices on your PC you want the VM to share with the Win7 OS.
Radio Guy wrote on 12/30/2009, 5:19 AM
RE -" Cararra is made for Mac I suspect. It lacks some of the familiar Windows behaviours, like extensive support for the right mouse button"

Actually Cararra is for windows and runs fine on W7 and has as Mac version too but the interface is unique but looks the same on both operating systems The right and middle mous buttons do indeed work but do some cool things un mac or windows like in layout and other areas.

LReavis wrote on 12/30/2009, 11:23 AM
I've played a bit with Blender, but I have invested $$ in human figures & props for Poser, and I've read that Carrara can use them - in addition to native Carrara content. Moreover, there's quite a bit of free content on the web for Poser that hopefully I can use in Carrara. As far as I know, Blender cannot use Poser content, and I haven't seen any human figures for Blender that seemed as appealing as some of the better Poser/DAZ figures.

Finally, Poser has some 3rd-party tools, like Argile, that are quite powerful - able to quickly sculpt a figure face to match the photo of an actual person's face. Presumably, I'll be able to import those into Carrara . . .

Srode: Thanks for the tip. I just looked at my RAM allocation in the virtual machine, and it was 2048. I would have thought that was sufficient; but I upped it to 3340 anyway - close to the max that XP-32bit can use (I, too, have 8GB installed). So I'll give XP Mode another try before I pull out one of my XP installation disks.
LReavis wrote on 12/30/2009, 5:43 PM
During the last few hours I've installed Poser 8 in XP mode, with its new 3+ GB memory allocation.

Poser 8 does indeed open as fast or faster than in Win 7 -64bit, even though it was quite slow to install. However, when I try to pan the camera, the result is an extremely jerky view. It seems that it can't utilize the OpenGL capabilities of my graphics card.

And when I right-clicked on the desktop and opened "Properties," the "Advanced" tab was grayed out - no opportunity to tinker with the VGA card settings there. So I closed it down.

Nor did opening the Windows Virtual PC settings seem to have any options for the VGA adapter.

Unless a cure comes my way, I'm afraid I'm resigned to installing Poser, DAZ, and Antics on an XP OS. It's a shame, for being able to hibernate the XPmode virtual machine at will and free up resources without having to reboot is a really nice feature.
ingvarai wrote on 12/30/2009, 6:15 PM
> Unless a cure comes my way, I'm afraid I'm resigned to installing Poser, DAZ, and Antics on an XP OS

FWIW, Carrara runs fine on Vista 64
Ingvar
JohnnyRoy wrote on 12/30/2009, 6:22 PM
I've got Poser 7 running fine in Windows 7 64-bit. If an application does not run on Windows 7 or Vista, just go into the properties and set the compatibility mode to XP. Some applications, like Vue 6 Infinite also need to be run as Administrator because they write to the Program Files folder which is no longer allowed since Vista 64. All this can be controlled by the properties for the EXE file.

~jr