P3DO 2.7 by Senosoft is out

P3DO 2.7 by Senosoft is out

by | Dec 26, 2019 | Cafe Articles, Developers, Feature, News

>> December 12, 2019 – P3DO 2.7 is available <<

Yarp write:

“P3DO goes another step forward with 2.7 and the growing integration of DAZ Studio assets in its workflow.
P3DO first Daz Studio DUF format support was a Pose viewer with 2.5 in 2016.
This time we went much further and P3DO now shows the DUF assets references the same way it does for Poser.
There’s also the usual bunch of improvements and fixes as listed below.”

Overview > http://www.senosoft.com/softp3dopro.php

Download (Free and Pro) > http://www.senosoft.com/download.php

Murky Volume Plugin by Sparrowhawke3D

Murky Volume Plugin by Sparrowhawke3D

by | Oct 18, 2019 | Carrara Plugins, Developers, Feature, News

Sparrowhawke3D released a new plug-in!

Here is what he says:

The Murky Volume plugin can now be downloaded from my website along with a user manual and some presets.

The plugin is a volumetric primitive that can be used to create deep and turbid waters.  Light is attenuated through the volume so like in real lakes and oceans the deeper you get the less the light penetrates and objects in the volume get darker and darker.  Colours also attentuate differently depending on the depth and distance through the water.

If you have done an underwater scene before you may have used the Scene Atmosphere or Fog to get close to such an effect.  This plugin allows you to avoid doing that – which is particularly useful for a scene that requires views both in and out of the water. If you change the atmosphere then anything above the water will look wrong.  This short video (which I did early on in the project) shows the effect.

When a body of water is viewed from above the surface the existing Carrara shader absorption settings will work to make things get darker as they approach the Attenuation distance but once you get down into the water the shader is of no help.  I explain this in more detail in my Laboratory.

The plugin can work with multiple surface objects to create the right interactions between the surface of the water and the volume.  It checks if the ray is above or below the surface so the volume effect only happens below it. It can also work with exclusion zones to create an aquarium or submersible vehicle and inclusion zones to create a fish tank.

The visibility and other settings can be adjusted to make the water murkier with details explained in the user manual.  I couldn’t figure out how to add light beams but caustics work well on objects in the volume.

Inagoni

Inagoni

by | Jun 2, 2011 | Developers

Inagoni was born in 2004 in Japan and is dedicated to provide reliable and well integrated plug-ins for Carrara. Inagoni is now based in France and although the frequency of the release of new plug-ins is lower than before, the spirit is still the same.

The plug-ins are going through continuous improvements and new feature developments are guided by users requests and suggestions. These new feature are always given through free upgrades. This is the same for the upgrades following Carrara new releases.

 

Why «inagoni» ? In Japanese, inagoni is «The locust» (イナゴに). But the name came from an English song that was sung by a fellow Japanese who didn’t understand its meaning and was having a bright smile while the lyrics were very dark (something about dying from a cancer «in agony»). The contrast between the mood of the song and the singer was quite amusing and the name was kept.

 

ArchiTools

ArchiTools is an advanced building modeler designed for 3D artists. It’s UI has been especially conceived to make it intuitive, easy to learn and fun to use. Just a few clicks are necessary to create a complete building, and this new modeler being fully procedural, all its elements can be tuned and modified at any time during the construction process.

Velouté

Velouté is a powerful procedural texture builder for Carrara. It contains more than 160 basic functions shared by 18 shaders that can be easily combined to create a huge variety of textures. Random Lines, Gradient, Grid, Weave, Tile, Fractal Noise are some of Velouté’s shaders. 

All of Velouté’s shaders implement their own bump mapping which give much better looking than Carrara’s default bump.

 

Primivol

Primivol contains the following volumetric primitives: Fire, Cloud, Smog, Rising Smoke. Through these primitive, Primivol can also render any 3D shader as a volume, and can alter its shape with a set of modifiers and ramp-off functions. Lighting, self-shadow, density, color and many other parameters are accessible through the UI and can be precisely adjusted and animated.

 

Baker

Baker is a texture baking tool. Using the UV mapping of an object, it can extract flat texture maps, light maps or normal maps from any Carrara shader. Baker can also read ZBrush normal maps.

 

Deeper

Deeper is a small rendering engine to produce normal map from a 3D scene.

Replica

Replica clones objects in arrays or on existing surfaces, and each clone can even have a randomized or controlled position, scaling, orientation or even shading.

 

 

Shaper

Shaper adds Free Form Deformation capabilities to Carrara. Shaper is a very handy deformer that allows you to deform any geometric object with a cubed grid of points.

 

SWAP

Swap can replaces any kind of element in the scene hierarchy by another one: it can replace lights with cameras, cameras with lights, or any objects with another one.

OSGPlug

OSGPlug is a free open source OpenSceneGraph exporter for Carrara. Its source code can be used and modified without any restriction. A build for Carrara 6 Windows is available for download but if somebody is in need of an update for another version, I’ll be glad to do it.

 

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Sparrowhawke 3D

Sparrowhawke 3D

by | May 6, 2011 | Developers

Name: Jeremy

I’ve used Carrara professionally for many years to produce photo-real product images, illustrations and animations.  It is the most important application in my toolset.  In the past I did a lot more coding for commercial desktop applications and 2D games for fun and so I’ve learned to apply those skills to extend Carrara with my plugins.  I also use Carrara in my spare time and have always wanted to produce a comic series or graphic novel.  The application is not quite ready to meet my demands yet so a lot of my spare time is also dedicated to writing plugins to improve it.  Once I get an idea and started on a project I find it hard to stop unless I run into a brick wall.
“I think I spend too much time on plugins at the expense of my other sedentary interests in music, writing, drawing, ancient and medieval history, but with my other long time hobby of running Dungeons & Dragons campaigns (for close friends) I have a creative outlet to express all these interests.”
Many of my plugins have been written to make the animation of complex machine parts easier or to add simple handy tools and shaders, others are purely for fun. I hope to continue to add more plugins and keep them free – but one of these days I might write some intended for sale.

 

JIGGLE

Jiggle is mainly used to give the fleshier parts of CG women more realistic and natural motion during animations or for some outrageous and silly fun.  Unlike a softbody simulator it works as an automated magnet deformer that responds to movement and gravity

TRACKS and CHAINS

Makes the difficult task of animating drive chains and tank tracks and other caterpillar vehicles possible by wrapping the links around sprockets or wheels – as well as handling the task of animation

 

THE TRANSFORMS PACKAGE

Contains some simple but useful operations to speed up your workflow when putting a scene together.  The DropToFloor, PointAt, JumpHotPointTo and JumpObjectTo commands save time in positioning pieces and parts and the Offset and Rotate commands allow for precise changes in position and orientation.

BELT DRIVE

Comes in the form of a primitive to create the belt and a modifier to turn the wheels.  This can be used to make an animated fan belt, drive belt, conveyor belt, escalator etc.

WHEELS

Makes the animation and steering of vehicles easy by rotating their wheels in the right direction and speed as you drive them around the scene.

SPRING PRIMITIVE

Is used to create and realistically animate a variety of helical springs.

 

MIPMAPPER SHADERS

The MipMapper and AutoMipMapper help to remove moire patterns and twinkle noise in both stills and animations by using a blurry and lower resolution texture when the object is farther away or turned away from the rendering camera.

PIN MODIFIER

This modifier can be used to pin one object to another and keep it in place when the object is deformed.  It’s great for adding a button to a conforming or dynamic costume – but it has many other potential applications.

CLOTH DEFORMER

Is a long and challenging work in progress to bring simple and effective cloth simulations into Carrara.  It may not be cutting edge, fast or finished but it can be used for drop cloths and with dynamic costumes when proxy figures are made with simple primitive shapes for faster and reliable collisions and works in all the recent versions of Carrara.

THE LABORATORY

In my Laboratory Windows users can find unfinished and undocumented plugins and experiments such as the EdgeFalloff shader, the FollowTerrain modifier and the latest builds of the Cloth simulator.  Enter at your own risk and become an assistant (or a test subject) and help to suggest improvements for these plugins under development and review.

 

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Senosoft

Senosoft

by | Apr 28, 2011 | Developers

Name: Laurent

I am a great fan of comics, mangas, drawing in general and 3D movies. I did my first comic strip when I was a young boy, I am still drawing and painting watercolors. I am IT manager, so when I got my first computer I wanted to animate my drawings and do small games. Doing graphics with Paint Shop Pro. I did a couple of them, and the next step was doing 3D games with 3D characters. This is where I got hooked with 3D starting with Poser 3 which I liked a lot. I needed a tool to organize the vast amount of 3D models, textures and Poses. So in 2000 I began to work on a file manager – code name P3dO – which was initially only intended as a helper for my 3D projects. But I got trapped and this secondary project became the main one. Over the years it has grown into a huge software with 3D viewing, 3D animation, support for numerous 3D formats, the main ones being Poser, Daz Studio and Carrara. Still with the same pleasure, I love doing this, I love 3D.

 

 

P3dO Explorer 

P3dO is a thumbnailed browser for 2D and 3D graphics. It has support for 3D viewing, 3D animation and various files formats (30+) the main focus being on Poser, Daz Studio and Carrara. Carrara features include:

  • show thumbnails (CAR, CBR, HDR/HDRI) *free*
  • thumbnails editor.
  • scene References tree (textures list) *free*
  • scene References thumbnails aka Scene Manager.
  • Carrara Runtimes shortcuts.

Plus various tools: favorites, search tool, mass renamer, image converter, great ZIP/RAR support. Navigate and organize your 3D assets with P3dO.

 

 

Learn more about P3dO Explorer Buy P3dO Explorer Pro

 

F1oat

F1oat

by | Apr 11, 2011 | Developers

Name: Frederic

I am a hobbyist user of CG applications for several years, mostly because I am fascinated by Pixar’s films ! After watching many films, I wanted to understand what was under the hood. As I love to learn by the practice, I started to use Blender and some other CG applications. I discovered Carrara in 2008 : I am still impressed by its power, performance and very efficient user interface. I work in the field of software engineering. I have started to write software in 1981 with a ZX81.  Few years later, I got and Atari-ST and learned C language. Since I am more comfortable with a C++ compiler than with a graphic tablet, I have decided to write tools to help me for Carrara animations. PyCarrara was my first plugin dedicated to procedural animations with Python language. By end of 2010, I have launched the PyCloid project: a particle system plugin with many innovative features. I am not an artist, but I love the idea that my C++ lines and mathematics will help artists to produce good looking and magic pictures.    

 

 

PyCarrara

PyCarrara is a free scripting plugin for Carrara. CG artists can write scripts in Python language to achieve various effects on scene objects, such as:

  • Scripted animation
  • Procedural scene construction
  • Drive motion with audio files
  • … and many other exciting applicationsThe project is currently in apha stage with a very first plugin release providing basic features:
  • A script driven tweener
  • A script driven modifier for objects translation
  • Python function to get access to audio tracks

 

 

Learn more about PyCarrara Download PyCarrara

PyCloid

PyCloid is an enhanced particle emitter. Two modes : – standard mode : particle emission from a point or an object surface – deformer mode : the facets of a mesh are converted to particles to simulate object destruction

Emission can be controlled by a shader to have variable particle density over the surface or achieve partial mesh destruction. When using destruction mode, the particles initial velocities are initialized with the mesh facets motion for realistic effect.

[youtube width=”265″ height=”214″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJQGdBYLMHo&feature=related

[youtube width=”265″ height=”214″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0tCrR23f10&feature=related

[youtube width=”265″ height=”214″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQBQR9FP__s&feature=player_embedded

More about PyCloid

 

Fenric

Fenric

by | Mar 30, 2011 | Developers

Name: Ted

I’m an Enterprise Software Architect, whose been programming since my Dad brought home a TRS-80 way back at the beginning of third grade… But I’ve always loved art – drawing, painting (oil), and of course CGI. I started dabbling with POV-Ray before it was cool Very Happy ‘course, back then, my dabbling was writing x86 assembly routines to speed up the renderer… Programs most used: Carrara, Photoshop CS3, XCode, Visual Studio Programs I have access to: DAZ Studio (free, not Advanced), Poser 7, Hexagon 2.5 , Bryce 5.5 Other Programs: GIMP, Paint.NET (though only the older version that came with source and supports my Tablet PC), Blender (but ARGH) Favorite Style of art to do: Anthropomorphic “Furry” art, particularly foxes. Best advice for new people: If at first you don’t succeed, try something else. Doing the same thing repeatedly won’t change the outcome – experiment!

 

Pose and Shading Tools 2

Here is a set of new Carrara features that are sure to be a hit! Included are two new commands, a new tweener, and three shaders to spice up your artwork:

Pose Transfer Command

Stack Tweener

Clear Timeline Command

TowardAway Shader

Color Balance Shader

Color Separation Shader

Color Merge Shader

Buy now!  

Carrara Enhanced Remote Control

The Enhanced Remote Control suite is a set of behavior modifiers and scene commands that work together to add much needed functionality and control to your animation workflow. It provides the basic functionality of Poser’s ERC for creating joint-controlled movement within Carrara. But it also provides so much more, giving you the building blocks to rapidly create advanced, realistic animation.

Control them all: Shaders, light values, position, rotation, morph settings – even other modifiers!

Commands:

Add ERC Modifier

Create ERC Chain

Add Pin Modifier

Delete Keyframes

Remove Duplicate Keyframes

Jitter Keyframes

Change Morph Limits

Property Explorer

Modifiers:

Pin

ERC

Buy now!  

Pose Helper for Carrara

Have you finally set up the perfect pose, only to realize she’s facing the wrong way? Change your mind about which hip that hand should be resting on? Ever wish you could just bend all of the joints in that tail the same amount when there’s no Easy Pose to fall back on?

Now you can. With the Pose Helper for Carrara, you finally have the ability to swiftly and easily make these changes and many more!

Left / Right Pose Symmetry based on scene element names

Morph Zeroing

Pose Zeroing

Rotation Setting

Scale Zeroing

Scale Setting

General Scene Option Setting

Full undo/redo support

Works on content, native figures, and groups of primitives

Works across multiple figures and groups

Buy now!  

BVH/PZ2 Exporter

The Poser Pose Exporter plugin adds a new dimension of compatibility between Carrara and other Poser compatible software packages. This plugin adds the ability to export Poser Pose (PZ2), Animated Poser Pose (PZ2), and Poser-compatible BioVision animation data (BVH) from a single, easy to use function.

  • Exports Static Poser format Pose File (PZ2)
  • Exports Animated Poser format Pose File (PZ2)
  • Exports Poser compatible BioVision Animation File (BVH)
  • Configurable Operation
    • Choose whether to include or exclude:
      • Overall Motion (global translation)
      • Joint Rotation
      • Morph Dial Settings
      • Joint Scaling (independent X, Y, and Z parameters)
    • Configure start and end frame range for animated poses
Buy now!

Ivy generator

I’m wrapping up development on my latest project – a port of Thomas Luft’s “Ivy Generator” to Carrara. I’ve put together a little Q&A for you guys:

Q: What is it?

A: It is a scene command plugin that grows an ivy-like plant on an object. It includes shaders.

Q: How much will it cost?

A: Nothing. It will be available from ShareCG, and will include source code

Q: How does it work?

A: 1. Set your scene options to display three decimal places (yes, really).

2. Pick an object with renderable geometry

3. Move the Hot Point of the object to the place where you want the ivy to start

4. Choose “Generate Ivy“.

5. Review and adjust the ivy settings, click OK

6. Watch progress bars

7. Adjust scale and position if needed (it should be close).

8. “convert to other modeller”, vertex object (or else it won’t render properly).

Q: What sorts of objects will it work on

A: – primitives

– splines

– metaballs

– vertex objects

– terrain (but not very well)

Q: What sorts of objects will it NOT work on

A: (Seriously… don’t do it – these crash Carrara) – fire

– clouds

– ocean

– fog

– lights

– cameras

– target helpers

Q: Does it animate?

A: No

Q: I mean: can you animate the ivy growing?

A: No

Q: Can I go back to an object later and grow the ivy more?

A: No

Q: Can I have a description of what the ivy settings do?

A: This will be provided in a readme with the plugin.

Know more ate Daz3D forums:

http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=149552&highlight=ivy+generator

Download!

Poser Weight Map Injector

This is a pair of utilities to facilitate importing weight-mapped Poser figures into Carrara. This is a multi-step process, and is not guaranteed to work for every figure.

Requirements: Weightmapped Poser figure like Miki4 or TylerGND, Poser Pro 2012 SR2 and Carrara 8 (unknown if earlier Carrara versions are supported)

Download

 

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