9/23/2024
Due to family medical issues, Requiem is on indefinite hiatus.
An elderly family member of ours took a bad fall on Labor Day night, and we’ve been dealing with the aftermath ever since. Hopefully, things will get sorted out, but as of right now, doing a daily comic is not something my schedule can allow.
Sorry to have this happen, but as everyone knows, real life comes first….and at least we don’t have too many running storylines on the backburner.
I am sure we will all live, if a little impatient, while the computer does its thing more slowly than we like. The results have never failed to impress us, and I have no doubt it will be an impressive set again when we get to see it in a couple more days.
I am curious though why you are working with Carara rather than with, say, Daz studio? The render engine for both is the same I think, and Daz always seems to me a bit easier to use? Which must mean that Carara does something well that Daz does not or not as well?
1. The render engine in Carrara is totally different. It renders faster and with better quality. And the program handles large amounts of people a whole hell of a lot better with less memory overhead. I can have twenty people in a scene without it dying.
2. There is no capacity to actually model something in DAZ Studio. It’s just built to render and texture objects, that’s it. I can model 3d meshes in Carrara. And import a huge amount of 3rd party assets. The import functionality in DAZ Studio is minimal compared to what I have access to in Carrara.
3. No vegetation labs and tree labs for flora.
4. No actual atmosphere effects (no creating sky and cloud conditions) No sun, no moon or moon phases. No oceans. No clouds. No haze. No configuring the sky and atmosphere by latitude/longitude and literal time of day and year.
5. A large variety of freely available plug-ins that let me do anything I want with shaders and textures and actual starfields in the finished product.
6. No capacity for actually creating 3d landscapes in DAZ Studio.
7. My hatred for the interface of DAZ Studio burns with the heat of a thousand suns. It didn’t always used to be that way, but they changed it around and removed the customization of it a few versions back.
8. DAZ Studio is based around the walled garden concept to get you to buy only their content…and these days they are not very supportive of the other programs I use. I do occasionally use it still, just as an importer for the occasional 3d asset. (Most recently the private jets that were seen during the Maris Island sequences) but I otherwise avoid it like cancer. I just plain hate the program. I know why, from a business standpoint, DAZ abandoned Carrara and went with the DAZ path, but I do not like it. In Carrara they had a 3d suite of tools that would have knocked Vue d’Esprit off it’s pedestal….and it handles 3d environments a lot better, and is a lot more stable than Vue has ever been
That’s just for starters, plus I have been on Carrara since 2005, and I have a huge library of things that I have built to use in it that are totally incompatible (the import functionality doesn’t even exist for DAZ Studio to read them).
Thank you for taking the time to answer my question that unintentionally may have come across as impolite.
A few of the things you mentioned I was dimly aware of, but I am sitting on an older version of Daz and an even older free(ish) version of Carara so I was not aware the programs had diverged this much.
If I have time to revisit my hobby of creating renderings in the future I will have to look at Carara again, obviously, as I did indeed use it only as a landscape and speedtree generator for a couple of scenes that needed both in quantities. I found it counterintuitive to use, but then I guess I never gave it an honest try.
It also gets even odder with the fact that development got a little flaky with Carrara around the time that it stopped being actively developed, and the most recent version has some issues to it that cause me not to use it.
A couple interface glitches, and a problem with the conforming clothes functioning, basically…so I’m sitting at a version back (the first one that went 64bit, 8.11, and it is a rock 🙂 )
It’s a shame about DAZ Studio in a way, I was liking it up to the time they changed the interface around, and also changed up the file format (breaking compatibility with their older stuff in cases). While it was not my final production renderer, it could be set to be ‘good enough’. I used to use it as the digital equivalent of a scratch pad for stuff quite a bit.
I originally got started out in the early 2000’s with 3d stuff, back when Bryce was still a thing and Bryce, Poser, and Raydream Studio (which became Carrara) were all done by the same company (Metacreations) so I’m used to a lot of the interface quirks that are in there. I also keep up with the modern stuff like 3dS Max, Inventor, Solidworks, things like that.
But in all seriousness, Carrara is right up there with Vue in terms of most of it’s capability, and it will do things that Vue just can’t do. I’ve done a lot of tests, and due to Carrara’s implementation of Poser figures I can have a huge number of people in a scene and actually do poses and change expressions on demand without having to reload anything. This comic section here would be undoable in Vue without major rework/reloading entire meshes for every panel. And the memory overhead is dang near enough to cripple even my machine.
I am curious though why you are working with Carara rather than with, say, Daz studio? The render engine for both is the same I think, and Daz always seems to me a bit easier to use? Which must mean that Carara does something well that Daz does not or not as well?
1. The render engine in Carrara is totally different. It renders faster and with better quality. And the program handles large amounts of people a whole hell of a lot better with less memory overhead. I can have twenty people in a scene without it dying.
2. There is no capacity to actually model something in DAZ Studio. It’s just built to render and texture objects, that’s it. I can model 3d meshes in Carrara. And import a huge amount of 3rd party assets. The import functionality in DAZ Studio is minimal compared to what I have access to in Carrara.
3. No vegetation labs and tree labs for flora.
4. No actual atmosphere effects (no creating sky and cloud conditions) No sun, no moon or moon phases. No oceans. No clouds. No haze. No configuring the sky and atmosphere by latitude/longitude and literal time of day and year.
5. A large variety of freely available plug-ins that let me do anything I want with shaders and textures and actual starfields in the finished product.
6. No capacity for actually creating 3d landscapes in DAZ Studio.
7. My hatred for the interface of DAZ Studio burns with the heat of a thousand suns. It didn’t always used to be that way, but they changed it around and removed the customization of it a few versions back.
8. DAZ Studio is based around the walled garden concept to get you to buy only their content…and these days they are not very supportive of the other programs I use. I do occasionally use it still, just as an importer for the occasional 3d asset. (Most recently the private jets that were seen during the Maris Island sequences) but I otherwise avoid it like cancer. I just plain hate the program. I know why, from a business standpoint, DAZ abandoned Carrara and went with the DAZ path, but I do not like it. In Carrara they had a 3d suite of tools that would have knocked Vue d’Esprit off it’s pedestal….and it handles 3d environments a lot better, and is a lot more stable than Vue has ever been
That’s just for starters, plus I have been on Carrara since 2005, and I have a huge library of things that I have built to use in it that are totally incompatible (the import functionality doesn’t even exist for DAZ Studio to read them).
I hope I answered your question 😉
A few of the things you mentioned I was dimly aware of, but I am sitting on an older version of Daz and an even older free(ish) version of Carara so I was not aware the programs had diverged this much.
If I have time to revisit my hobby of creating renderings in the future I will have to look at Carara again, obviously, as I did indeed use it only as a landscape and speedtree generator for a couple of scenes that needed both in quantities. I found it counterintuitive to use, but then I guess I never gave it an honest try.
It also gets even odder with the fact that development got a little flaky with Carrara around the time that it stopped being actively developed, and the most recent version has some issues to it that cause me not to use it.
A couple interface glitches, and a problem with the conforming clothes functioning, basically…so I’m sitting at a version back (the first one that went 64bit, 8.11, and it is a rock 🙂 )
It’s a shame about DAZ Studio in a way, I was liking it up to the time they changed the interface around, and also changed up the file format (breaking compatibility with their older stuff in cases). While it was not my final production renderer, it could be set to be ‘good enough’. I used to use it as the digital equivalent of a scratch pad for stuff quite a bit.
I originally got started out in the early 2000’s with 3d stuff, back when Bryce was still a thing and Bryce, Poser, and Raydream Studio (which became Carrara) were all done by the same company (Metacreations) so I’m used to a lot of the interface quirks that are in there. I also keep up with the modern stuff like 3dS Max, Inventor, Solidworks, things like that.
But in all seriousness, Carrara is right up there with Vue in terms of most of it’s capability, and it will do things that Vue just can’t do. I’ve done a lot of tests, and due to Carrara’s implementation of Poser figures I can have a huge number of people in a scene and actually do poses and change expressions on demand without having to reload anything. This comic section here would be undoable in Vue without major rework/reloading entire meshes for every panel. And the memory overhead is dang near enough to cripple even my machine.