Carrara vs Studio rigging and weight map tools

Jim_1831252

I'm feeling hugely inspired to get my Carr on, and am about to buy some more training material, but got to wondering whether the character rigging and weight mapping tools were better in one of these two particular applications. I would assume Carrara, being the loner big daddy in Daz's arsenal, would have the better tools... but then I might think the ones included in Studio Pro would be more "current".

Would it be correct to assume that learning the tools in one application would more-or-less carry across into the other?

Anybody with some experience with the tools have an opinion? Thanks in advance for all your wonderful input ;)

3DAGE

HI jimzombie
Welcome :)

For what it's worth, (IMO) Carrara is much easier to create a character from scratch, rig it with bones, weight map it, texture it, and animate it.

The issues come if you then want to transfer that model out into Poser or Daz Studio.

It's possible to export the model as OBJ and re rig in DS or Poser,. but not to simply load it in, since the bones and weighting are still different.

Hopefully as Daz Studio and Carrara get better at talking to each other, this will become easier to do.
In would be advantageous for Daz3D to make this happen, in order to have a compete content creation tool which can model, texture, rig, weight map, UV map and animate, and to enable that "content" to be used in any Daz3D application, or even Poser.

If you don't have Carrara right now,..
Download the Demo / trial version (full pro version) for 30 days, and have a play with it.
www.download.com
search for Carrara for whatever platform you use (Mac or PC)

Hope it helps :)

Jim_1831252

Indeed it does help. Many thanks, AGE ;) I do already own Carrara - snapped up Pro a few months back when it was a bargain. I have done some very basic modeling in it, but have found Hexagon, though crashtacular, to be a simpler, more user friendly and fun environment to learn in. Carrara's user interface with its tiny little fonts is a definite turn off, but the tools seem solid and it is certainly competitive against the higher end modellers for the budget concerned consumer.

I did consider the rigging might not be backwards compatible with Studio, though that does seem a little strange when considering the Daz figures work in Carr... or maybe that isn't strange at all. It certainly does make business sense to have the two programs as compatible as possible, so here's hoping to a bright compatible future.