Carrara Studio

swampfoot · Post by **swampfoot** » Mon Feb 14, 2005 6:20 am

Did anyone ever use Carrara Studio I'm thinking about buying it to use along with Moho. I hear Carrara is similar to Bryce which I also use and enjoy. I'm think of putting a traditional animated character in a 3d environment. Thank you

bupaje · Post by **bupaje** » Mon Feb 14, 2005 6:02 pm

I am using Carrara but for all intents and purposes am a new user. I'm also not experienced enough in other programs to be able to offer you a comparison of it versus other modelers. The quality of the renders is very good and it does have good animation tools. It also does have a lot of other cool tools considering its price relative to 3DS Max. However I would budget a little extra money and buy a few of the 3rd party plugins that are available which really add a few features like texture baking. Good place to start out would be the forums at http://www.3dxtract.com to ask questions if you need more info to make a decision.

cribble · Post by **cribble** » Wed Feb 16, 2005 9:27 pm

I haven't used Carrara properly yet, but from what i have seen and used of it, it is a very nice tool in a nice user-friendly environment. I haven't animated within Carrara but its like any other program really, the ability to do frame-by-frame and auto in-betweening.
One down side is that you have to work in dfferent rooms (within the program!) to create, compose and render.... but if you think about it, it does make life easier.
Seems like a good piece of software, i think you should go for it.

Tel750 · Post by **Tel750** » Thu Feb 17, 2005 2:22 am

I have Carrara Studio version 2 through to 3. I did have some success but found that the time spent modeling, animating and rendering was to long for my liking, thats why I am back to Moho. The price is right, it is a powerful application but I would say you will need to dedicate some serious hours to get up to speed and then maintain using the thing. I plan to use Carrara to make simple 3d models to add to my moho animations. Render times are long, I have a Mac 876mhz dual processor, which at the time I upgraded to Carrara 3 was virtually brand new but rendering took an age, no wonder Carrara 4 now has provision for network rendering for up to 5 computers. Hope this helps. By the way I am a hobbyist things would be different for you if it is your field of expertise.
Cheers
Terry

Tel750 · Post by **Tel750** » Fri Feb 18, 2005 1:58 am

I tried to import a Carrara 3 file into moho last night but it didn't work. I noted that C3 does not allow me to save a file as obj. which I assume is the problem. I will try Graphic converter tonight to see if I can convert the carrara file to and obj. file, otherwise I will have to upgrade to C4 which does save to obj. I have just missed out on the upgrade special too!

Cheers
Terry

saintmovius · Post by **saintmovius** » Sat Mar 19, 2005 1:47 pm

I have Carrara 3 and as for a modeller it's not my favorite. I also use Cinema 4D A lOT!! It is my favorite 3D program. In order to move an object from Carrara to Moho you have to EXPORT it as an OBJ file, then it will import in quite nicely...textures and all! Enjoy!

bupaje · Post by **bupaje** » Sat Mar 19, 2005 7:23 pm

Have you had any luck importing models with multiple textures from Carrara to Moho? I thought you couldn't but I notice that models I bring in from Canoma do allow multiple textures so might be some way to do it in Carrara? Up until now I hadn't figured it out and end up with one texture but I know there are several different ways to apply textures and not sure if it is a problem with converting stuff from shaders to textures or what.

myles · Post by **myles** » Tue Mar 22, 2005 7:07 am

By coincidence I recently bought a copy of (Australian) Digital Creative Arts which had a free (registration required) version of Carrara Studio 1.1 on the CD (I ran into a minor problem with the installer, which may have just been my copy). I believe Digit magazine also included 1.1 a few months back. I dabbled with RayDream back in version 4, so I thought I'd give it a whirl - thinking it might come in handy for some Moho props or scenery.

The OBJ files it exports need a slight tweaking to work in Moho. They export with tabs in some places instead of spaces. Replacing all tabs with single spaces in a competent text editor (I don't think you can do it in Notepad

) results in OBJ files that import okay in Moho (multiple texture files, converted from a shader, included). Possibly it's the same with later versions of Carrara?

A quick email to Lost Marble support, and I'm informed the next patch is already fixed to directly cope with these types of OBJ files (even before I emailed about the problem -

spooky, huh?). I kowtow before The Marble.

Regards, Myles.

bupaje · Post by **bupaje** » Tue Mar 22, 2005 7:41 am

Excellent! I actually saw this a bit too late to try as I'm juggling stuff before heading out; if LM doesn't get that well timed fix in before I get back from Utah I'll try it then. All hail LM!