Carrara 8.5 installing Daz content

mmoriarty311_698a63361b

Using Mac Book Pro OSX10.7.5

I have used Carrara for many years. . . since early Ray Dream days. Haven't used it much in the last year or so because I was waiting for something I could use with a newer operating system. So I was glad to see 8.5 come out.

I have installed Carrara 8.5 and go the Native Content to work properly (Scenes, etc. all seem to work) but I cannot get anything that is in the "Content" or Smart Content tabs to work. I have Installed, Uninstalled and Re-Installed a couple of times.

Sometimes I have had some things show up in the Content Tabs but if I try to drag a Character from the Content tab into a Scene I just get and dialog box that says "An error occurred while executing import . . . ." Cancel or OK

whether I hit Cancel or OK, Carrara locks up but does allow me to quit, but after quitting I get an error saying "Carrara has quit unexpectedly . . . etc.

I would like to be able to use this content, the people, animals, etc. but I have never been able to get any of this stuff to work reliably with Carrara. When I bought 8.5 I got a list of about 250 things to download. All kinds of V2, V3, V4, V5 , M3, M4 Genisis Essentials, 3 piece suit, fancy casual, casual fancy, casual underwear, dragon underwear, blah, blah, blah . . .

Can someone help me figure out why I can't get anything into a Scene?

Do I need all 250 of these things? Right now I would be happy if I could just get one character into Carrara.

BTW, I'm not newb to this stuff. I'm a graphic artist. I use Adobe CS6 all day everyday and have used Adobe products, Quark etc. since the 90's, I use AutoCAD, SOlidworks, Vectorworks, every day and learned to use almost all this stuff on my own. I'm generally able to work out solutions to these kinds of problems on my own or find help online. But looking in the forums here, even people who seem to do nothing but use Carrara and live on the Carrara Discussion boards have problems with this stuff.

I know Daz would like me to buy more of their products 'cause they send me emails every day trying to get me to look at all the characters, props etc that they have for sale. I probably would be interested in buying some of it if I could actually get it to work in Carrara.