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Geometry-Aware Shaders

AnythingGoos – According to author Bill Fleming in his book 3D Photorealism Toolkit, “The most common problem with 3D images is that everything is too perfect.” Anything Goos comes to the rescue by analyzing your object and applying different shaders to the convex and concave parts of the model. Nooks and crannies can collect dirt and grime, while paint can be scratched and chipped away from protruding corners. Add procedural 3D noise for absolute realism. Now machine parts can convincingly be weathered and worn, clothing can have “sewn” hemlines and lace trims, and metals can be aged and tarnished intelligently.
Anything Goos from Digital Carver’s Guild

Terrain Tools detects the intersection of different objects and creates an influence zone where effects happen. For water this might be foam or scum at the edge of a pond. For a terrain this might be a sandy beach that follows the contours of the waterline. More than just terrains, a shader can be made to react to the intersection of any object, or only a specific object. Weeds can grow from the ground along the edges of a house, or ripples can radiate from a boat on the water. Surgical implants can emerge from scabs or scar tissue.
Terrain Tools from Digital Carver’s Guild

Render FX

Toon! Pro is a complete system for creating the look of cel animation. A top-level shader lighting model converts existing shaders to a programmable stepped shadow. The Toon! renderer can trace lines around your image with user selectable strength and depth cues. Combine photorealism and toon in the same image by overriding Toon!’s renderer on an object-by-object basis. Not just for anime, Toon! Pro can also create convincing line art and clean technical illustrations.
Toon! Pro at Digital Carver’s Guild

Wireframe Pro also combines a render effect and a shader to create line art, but with the added ability to fill in the geometry with an intelligent grid. Your model can actually be made of triangular polygons, but Wireframe uses “smart quads” to connect vertices more cleanly, and nothing says computer graphics like a 3D grid. The look may be dated but the plugin is more flexible than that, able to create clean line art and technical drawings where depth and shape are as important as outline.
Wireframe Pro at Digital Carver’s Guild

Figure, Animation, and Poserâ„¢ Utilities

BVH/PZ2 Exporter for Carrara exports figure poses and animated keyframes to Poser’s PZ2 format, including character morph dial settings for Poser and DAZ3D figures. BVH animations are compatible with most 3D programs.
BVH/PZ2 Exporter for Carrara at DAZ3D

Pose Helper for Carrara flip poses with symmetry, zero morphs and/or poses, isolate a body part with or without it’s children and swap or copy settings. It’s not just for Poser and DAZ3D figures, but useful for any figures you create in Carrara too!
Pose Helper for Carrara at DAZ3D

Pose and Shading Tools 2 provides a mixed bag of “missing” features including the ability to transfer a pose from one figure to another based on joint names (Poser style). Tweener Stack allows up to 6 sub-tweeners with configurable percentage weight for blending, and the Clear Timeline Command will be a time saver when creating multiple NLAs or importing animated poses and BVH sequences. A handful of useful shaders manipulate color balance, blend modes, and color separation, and the TowardAway shader solves the problem of backwards textures on the backside of polygon normals.
Pose and Shading Tools 2 at DAZ3D

So which plugins are the best?

Well that depends on how you use Carrara. A suite of plugins might yield one or two features you use again and again, while a one-trick pony could be just what you need for a certain image! This list is far from complete, and doesn’t even include the many free plugins available for Carrara – which I’ll save for another time. New plugins are in the works that promise to improve Carrara’s particles and add Python scripting! In the meantime I’ve compiled a list of links below to various plugin and addon vendors for you to explore. Happy rendering!

Carrara Plugins

• Digital Carver's Guild
• Fenric's Plugins
• GoFigure AniBlocks
• Gridâ„¢ Render Farm
• HolyForest Shaders
• HowieFarkes Nature add-ons
• Inagoni
• Ivy Generator for Carrara
• MIMIC Pro for Carrara
• Shoestring Shaders
• Sparrowhawke3D's free plugins
• VectorStyle2