Dartanbeck over at the Carrara section of the Daz3D forums has created a great thread that serves as an alternative Carrara 8.5 Manual.
It includes up to date and sorted links to the video tutorials by Cripeman, details about animation, hair plugins and a lot more.
Here is a must have link for all Carrara users:
“In this video, I try to keep things brief, while also trying to help point out the fact that Carrara is one of the only 3D applications of its kind, especially when it comes to having to do things on your own – as opposed to having a full team of artists working on your project.
Carrara has the tools to do everything. Seriously.
Composite 3D text over video footage, enhance footage with special effects, create an entire animated movie with CG characters, build your own models or use DAZ (and other marketplace) content… making it incredibly flexible and easy to learn. It also comes packed with many presets which can be used as the time-saving starting points that they are, or used as a means to see, first hand, how certain things are done in Carrara – so it’s also its own instructional tool as well.
I hope you enjoy the overview, even though I realize now that I still haven’t even begun to scratch the surface!”
In this video, I ramble on as I toss Genesis and M5 with some of the goodies that came with Carrara 8.5 Pro into a scene using three point lighting, straight from the browser. So everything I do in here can be done straight out of the box right along with me – if you want. I didn’t rehearse anything – so I tend to get into my moments! lol But I think that some of you may find it a fun little half hour lost! 🙂
This second half includes stuff about zeroing and all that, transferring character morphs from a Carrara saved Genesis to a new ‘updated’ Genesis, after you’ve added more Genesis morphs to the collection, and a babble session on modeling clothes in the assembly room. It’s another half hour sit session – so don’t forget the brandy… I mean… popcorn!
Like the last one, I didn’t really edit out any of my babbling, as to me I’m hoping that it adds the sense of an idea for how long it should take you to do the same things. Often you can do it much faster, when I’m not babbling! 🙂
A lengthy explanation, as usual, this GI/IL Test Bed is a tutorial regarding setting up a scene for exploring the idea of ‘Painting with Shadows’ simply to gain positive experience that is sure to make lighting design more fluid and natural. You’ll be able to quickly and accurately test the results of a full lighting arrangement using only one light, while Carrara’s Global Illumination system takes care of the rest.
The idea of this is to gain experience in light angles and their resulting shadows, so that you build in your own mind a set of results that you like, and that work well for various situations, as well as to have fun with Carrara’s powerful raytrace engine.
Dartanbeck’s EnvironKit leverage the power of Carrara’s nature, terrain, and environment tools. While he builds a complete scene you will see how he has saved plant and terrain elements as browser presets that can quickly add an extensive natural environment around your subject. Many great tips are shared here!
Dartanbeck’s EnvironKit series leverage the power of Carrara’s nature, terrain, and environment tools. While he tours this extensive product you will see how he has organized light and sky elements into presets that can be loaded from the browser, and created custom morphing helper objects to control the distribution of Carrara’s clouds using surface replicators.
To me, Project Dogwaffle Pro: Howler is the perfect addition for applying post-work to my rendered animations from Carrara prior to the final production editing. I plan to do more video tutorials on some of these subjects, and discuss them quite a bit at the Carrara Discussion Forum at DAZ 3D.com
In this tutorial I slowly proceed through the process of using Howler’s Roto tools from within it’s curve tool to create an animated selection for the use of adding a post-work motion trail to the part of the animation where I want the effect to take place. In my own production, I would take less time doing the process, but would focus more on the final result, rather than just getting to the end of the process. For example, if I kept going with the project as it was by the end of this tutorial, I would undo the animated effect that I end with, and tweak the settings or perhaps even reshape the entire animated roto selection and start from scratch. The end result of this one was just a simple run through so that I could explain the tool, not focus on a great end result.
That all said, I find it much easier, faster, and much more predictable to add blurs and such to final rendered animations, rather than to use the included post working in Carrara. But in times before owning Howler, this was not the case, and I got pretty far with doing much of my work using only Carrara, as it has the ability to load it’s own end results and work with them further, and render them again to a new animated clip. So I’m not trying to discount Carrara’s fine features, or the fact that they are included in the amazing Carrara software. It never ceases to amaze me at how much work can be done without ever leaving it.
There are times when we’ll get a perfect rendered animation with the exception of a few little flaws. These flaws can create the need to destroy the render and try again, often trying to increase some setting or other in an attempt to correct the inaccuracy, or whatever went wrong. This adds even more time as now the render times per frame are also increased!
Since I’ve owned Howler, however, I would far rather use this amazing roto tool setup to quickly correct the issue with the original render. In my learning how to do that, I’ve found that we can truly do limitless wonders to our clips without the need of the really expensive alternatives to getting our hands on abilities like these. And the ability to save lengthy renders has been a huge blessing! Project Dogwaffle’s Howler is a lot more than I would have imagined it to be, and I’m really grateful to have found it.
