Mike Moir is hosting a revival of the Carrara Community Movie Project. Animators can join the group here on Cafe and chose one of the shots to render.
“If you want to participate with this Easy Come Easy Go test clip just download the assets in the assets thread and then tell us which panel of the storyboard you want to animate. Once you are done upload the finish file and we can edit them together to create the final movie.”
Carrara will have a new GPU render option soon, according to an announcement on Octane Render’s website!
“Today we’re proud to announce that an integrated plug-in is being developed for Carrara from DAZ 3D by Simon Guard….
Carrara users will be pleased to know that they will soon be able to experience OctaneRender’s dazzling speed and quality from inside DAZ 3D’s Carrara, allowing an instantaneous photoreal preview of the scene while editing cameras, lights, materials and objects in the scene.”
on February 3rd, Otoy put out a limited call for beta testers for their Octane Render plugin. It currently supports Windows 7 & 8 preferably 64-bit, and Carrara 8+ (64bit Pro preferred). The testing phase will take “a few weeks” and when it’s done the plugin will then be released as an ongoing beta product. http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=38065#p169499
**UPDATE – new video posted Jan 26 2014
Plugin author Simon Guard posted a second video showing his progress with the Octane Render plugin for Carrara. The video demonstrates some JAW DROPPING NEAR-REALTIME updates between Carrara’s Assembly Room and Octane’s GPU-powered unbiased renderer.
DAZ 3D’s Millennium Dragon 2 model is loaded in Carrara and posed. One of the shaders is converted to the plugin’s Octane Materials Shader tree, which helpfully preserves the original shader in a sub-tree until Octane’s shaders are activated. A menu item will batch convert shaders, but it is not obvious from the video whether converting improved render speed or quality. Remarkably, Carrara’s native shader appeared to pass the imagemap textures to Octane as well.
Trees from Carrara’s Plant Modeler are replicated. A small Terrain with several instances of trees demonstrates Octane’s depth-of-field. As a pièce de résistance HowieFarkes’ NOBLE PINES full environment scene is opened in Carrara and rendered by Octane, although limits of the automated material conversion become apparent. The update looks promising already, but a title at the end says there is still much to do, “texture baking” “animation” and “live DB”.
**from Oct 25 2013
Octane Render offers GPU-based unbiased renders in realtime on your graphics card. The company claims speed increases of 10x to 15x over traditional CPU based unbiased engines. Octane Render supports all major platforms and runs with Window XP, Vista, 7, 8 (32 or 64 bit), Linux 64 bit and MacOS X. Currently, Octane Render requires a CUDA enabled Nvidia video card to be installed.
Octane Render runs as a standalone program, but over the last few months the Octane community has been rolling out integrated plugins for a growing list of 3D programs including Maya, 3DS MAX, Lightwave, Blender, and Cinema4D. The integrated plugin for DAZ 3D’s Carrara was announced on October 24.
A lengthy video below shows the current state of the plug-in:
A release date and price for the plugin has not been announced. The plugin will require a Standalone license, but combo prices for the Standalone and various plugins are offered on the website:
OctaneRender™ for Poser® + Standalone Combo v1.x License (329 €)
OctaneRender™ for Maya® + Standalone Combo v1.x License (359 €)
OctaneRender™ for LightWave™ + Standalone Combo v1.x License (339 €)
a plugin for DAZ Studio is currently in beta and available for purchase:
OctaneRender™ for DAZ Studio v1.0 beta + Standalone v1.1 License Combo (279 €)
PySwarm for PyCarrara 0.6 was recently released (01-25-2014), among the many new functions and fixes, is the addition of several demo scenes to experiment with and learn from.
FractalDimensia also recently revealed the future plans for PySwarm at the DAZ 3D forum thread:
So here is the current order of future MAJOR enhancements (I’m leaving out other improvements): 1) Revised containment algorithm (V0.6.1) 2) Basic motion animation (V0.6.2) 3) Terrain following (V0.7) 4) More motion animation (V0.7.1) 5) Predator-Prey rule (V0.8) With that said, I am willing to consider shifting priorities based on user needs. “First come, first serve.” If you have a need for a feature, and no one else is requesting something else, just let me know. I’ll consider changing the order!
Thank you to IamArtistX and we hope to see more free or commercial products from you soon!
The fine print: These shaders are provided free of charge for use in any personal render, they are NOT to be used in any COMMERCIAL product, nor are they allowed to be used in part, full, or any fraction thereof in a MERCHANT resource, on the front of a magazine, and/or freebie disc, DVD or electronic means.
Baby blue leather sample (low resolution preview).
– Free download is only available until February 4th –
Quote from the website: “We’re giving away a fully functional, free version of HitFilm 2 Express, our hybrid video editor and visual effects software.”
Mike Moir is hosting a revival of the Carrara Community Movie Project. Animators can join the group here on Cafe and chose one of the shots to render. 
