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Well, unfortunately I have to say goodbye too. Been doing other things, but now preparing for large scale animation next year. The plan was always Carrara. Carrara was top of the line. But not anymore. Found Blender. I never expected this to say, but Blender is much better as Carrara. Daz probably will never update Carrara anymore, because DS Studio is their main tool. I can understand that. Blender has passed Carrara long time ago and is updated all the time. So the distance will get bigger and bigger. Carrara will never have new plugins anymore. Blender has 26.000 addons and objects. And Blender is free.
I do not like the Blender interface and struggling with it, but this is because it has so many options. I have almost relearn animation again. When I found Carrara, I was impressed by it. Now I am impressed again by Blender. Carrara is still a good tool, but I think it is the end of the line (forever?) and others do improve. Blender YouTube has over 1 million subscribers.
I had my doubts with Blender because almost everything is different. But now I know the basics, my doubts for switching are gone.
I have had a good time here and the forum has always been very helpful. But it is time to move on unfortunately. I wish Daz would not have abandoned Carrara.
Wish you well. Stop in and say hello from time to time.
I find myself in Blender more and more often as well. I use it for specific tasks. Example, UVMapping! I have tried two dedicated UVMapping programs, two sculpting programs, Blender, Hexagon, and Carrara for UVMapping. I struggle with all of them, but each for a different reason. Have decided that Blender's UVMapping tools have the best cost-to-suck ratio.
Personally, I still have fun in Carrara for its own sake and will continue for personal enjoyment. But that does not stop me from using other programs as appropriate. Therefore, if I were in your shoes, I suspect I would be using Blender for the big project as well. Sounds like it is not merely for personal enjoyment.
Good luck on your animation.
If you get some free time and just want to reminisce with Carrara's tools, consider entering a challenge.
That is going to take a while. I know maybe 5% of Blender, because the setup is very different. But there are some similarities, like NLA, graph editor, rooms. Not sure about a challenge, because Blender is good. I can compare it with Carrara, because I know most of it. Attachen skeleton to a mesh takes minutes. Mark a few constraints at the mesh, let Blender create the skelton, including hand and face bones. Most of the time no weight painting for correction at all.
UVmapping in Blender is not easy because it works with nodes. It has more options, but hard to learn. Found a video on this and been working on this today. I think it is not fair to post links here.
There was a free add on or other supplement that I downloaded for Blender UVMapping. It added some tools. I learned about it in one of the many Blender videos available. UVMapping was not in the name so it is not easy to remember or find. Not going to say the extra uvmapping tools made it easy, just saying it made it better than the alternatives I knew about. If I can remember which video, I will send you a link as a PM.
Bye
Yeah, nice one.
...and there's always the comforting thought that, when ever we decide to return, even for a bit, we have another opportunity to say: Hello!
Blender looks really amazing! I think you're making a fine decision.
I don't know if I Can ever leave Carrara. I have checked out the newer Blender and find it fascinating and wonderful. For someone like me wantng something like Blender, the development team is nailing it. Carrara still does what I've always wanted it to do, so I'm keeping it home. But if I knew that I had to learn a whole new 3D language, it would have to be Blender.
Something that really drives me nuts about Carrara is the crazy Sequencer area, with the Graph Editor and all that.
That along with the tweeners selection and their parameters make Carrara such an amazing tool for animating stuff. It's really hard for me to break away from that.
Something that I didn't play with much during the 8.5 Public Beta were all of the new blessings in the Graph Editor, but also directly in the main Sequencer window. Being able to make selections of key frames, which now forms a ghosted box (marching ants) that we can manipulate as a whole - affecting all of the keys within it. So, say we want to soften a particular motion, for an extremely simple example. We can select all of the key frames and drag the box's upper or lower edge inwards toward the center of the box, and we'll be reducing the extremes from highs to lows of those selected.
The Graph Editor always was a true graph editor, I think. And with the multitudes of Tweeners, we can illustrate pretty much any kind of motion one might dream up.
I just really enjoy how "In Your Face" and easy the experience is in Carrara.
Don't get me wrong. Carrara is a very good tool. When I started it, it was the best there is. But not anymore. Not only is Blender much better, but it will be improved all the time. I cannot look into the future, but I think Carrara will never be updated again. Also no new plugins. In the back of my mind I always thought "What will happen if a future (Windows) operating system does not support Carrara anymore." If I am correct W11 still does.
Carrara is much more intuitive. With Blender I have to do more studying.
Agreed. Carrara is ultra-intuitive and Blender is worth the effort to learn.
Perhaps after I get past this next big hurdle I'll join you in learning Blender. I don't think I'll even drop Carrara unless it just doesn't work anymore, but Blender is totally worth getting to know a bit better.
Pjotter helped me track down the name of the add-on I mentioned above. It is called text tools (#5 in the video I am linking to). It is free. In my opinion, it is a great help to the kind of very basic UVMapping that I am generally doing. I may not be saying 'bye' to Carrara as of yet, but I do many individual tasks in other programs, as is true of almost everyone. If you are like me and struggle finding a convenient UVMapper, consider revisiting Blender with some of these add-ons, especially text tools (IMHO).
I also enjoy watching the programs (video) that are available through the Foundation. Very helpful for getting to grips with Blender.
As I have commented on the Bryce forum. I started out with Povray, Ray Dream Studio, and Bryce (Poser was a little bit later.) This was all under Meta Creations ( A great company for its time). When Carrara 1.0 was released it was incredible software. It was exactly what I need as I could not afford 3D Studio Max or Lightwave 3D (The 2 major apps at the time). Over the years I eagerly purchased the newer versions and I was pleased with each upgrade.
On my original PC, it took days to render a scene(486 with megs of ram not gigs). I did a test render in Carrara and Cinema 4D of as close as I could get to the same scene, Carrara was painful but still capable.
I installed Carrara yesterday for nostalgia purposes. I have lots of fond memories and it brought back some excitement. As someone has commented that it's the artist and not the tool, to some extent I might agree. The tools I use now are faster with many more options and provide me with extensions that allow for faster creativity. My renders have better clarity and are faster. This is in no way dissing Carrara as I have said it was/is still a good piece of software.
Currently, I use Cinema 4D, Blender, Modo, and Daz Studio each of which has its purpose in my workflow. over the last two years, I have come to appreciate Blender more and more.
As said above is it the artist or the brush? maybe both. when the brush is old and the hairs are left on the canvas it's time for a new brush.
For me, it has been sad to see this and other MetaCreations software suffer a slow death. It would be nice to see Daz Open-Source Carrara and Bryce so as to let the community develop it.
I think that it is also about your objective.
I've been using Carrara since 2016. In all that time, I have seen many of these types of threads. However, in absolutely ZERO of them have I ever seen an artist provide a specific render example where "X software" is clearly easier to use and provides a better result than using Carrara.
Undoubtedly there are cases where this is true. But it is also undoubtedly true that Carrara is simply better for some tasks.
We don't all have the same specific objectives. Carrara meets my needs for the type of art that I wish to do, in a way that is intuitive and comfortable for me to do it. To me, that is the bottom line.
This. UB said it beautifully, this is exactly where I'm at.
I don't seen any reason to change my main software of choice. I'm finally starting to learn how to use it a little bit, would be a really strange decision for me to jump ship now. :)
We're all grown ups who are mostly rational (or at least sometimes rational, in my particular case). No one is so weird to pledge undying allegiance to a software, even if we're fond of it. But objectively, Carrara is still far and away the right fit for me. And I don't envision that changing anytime soon.
That said, if another software is better suited for a new project, then ok fine I guess I'll go learn it. But I actually *like* using Carrara :)
except maybe.....
That's fair if the software is still working for you great. I left Carrara not because of its capabilities or lack of features, it was more of a quality-of-life kind of thing (bug fixes, performance issues, memory leaks, a UI that is way too small for a 4K monitor). Yeah sure no software is perfect but I don't like to lose my work because of a weird quirk. Do as you will, keep in mind that there are free alternatives that offer better stability and vast expansion through extensions(Free and Paid).
I am not a Blender fanboy as Cinema 4D is my main app, I use to dislike the Blender interface but a couple of years ago I revisited it and now it works more like an industry-standard app.
I know personally that trying new software, especially a free alternative to a paid one is hard. What have you got to lose other than a little bit of hard drive space and a few hours to learn something new? Its interface is not as scary as it use to be.
Yup, I finally installed Blender for a couple of reasons. A favorite vendor switched his product line from VUE to Blender format, and I found some really great free products which I could not get into Carrara in a useable manner. I still will generate animations almost exclusively in Carrara, but will use the Blender renders as backgrounds, etc. Maybe get to animating in Blender, but not for a while, Carrara has become second nature and I have (mumble, mumble) GB's of great content that works fine in Carrara.
Very presumptious of you to say that people here are afraid to try Blender. I use Blender that same way that I use Daz Studio - to get otherwise unavailable stuff into Carrara.
As for the hours it would take to learn "something new," I prefer to spend those hours learning to use the very deep software that I already enjoy. I know, how weird is that? :)
Regarding your "quality of life" requirements, those are very personal. My experience is that Carrara is VERY stable. And I could care less about a 4K monitor..
It seems strange to me that people post on the Carrara forum, and infer that Carrara is now sadly inferior to the new stuff. This generally doesn't go over too well. If you made the same kind of statements on the Bryce forum, I think that you would get a similar response.
I think almost everyone on this forum has Blender. It's free after all, so why wouldn't we?
I don't claim to have any sort of huge mastery over it, but I've got it. I just don't use it much. In fact I use Studio a whole lot more often, even though that's a software I mostly hate using. But it's useful for rigging and importing morphs on my Genesis figures, so I use it as a Carrara plugin.
Whenever I see someone suggesting Blender, I'm often at a loss as to who they're talking to. I mean, is there anyone who has played in this hobby for any amount of time who hasn't already heard of and downloaded Blender?
Actually I take that back, there may be some people who are brand new to Studio who don't know about other software (but probably not many), however I'm baffled by the notion that people on the Carrara forum would never have considered Blender before. I mean, I may have been living under a rock for the past 20 years, but c'mon :)
I too dabble in Blender in fact I use it almost daily for some things, 3D modelling and rendering isn't one of them
I have dabbled in Silo and 3DCoat, will probably do more in them this year - love how Stezza does a model a day !!!
Not assuming anything, in Blenders 2.7x days the interface was not that appealing to me at all so much so that even wanting to try it again was a stretch. I spent a lot of money on Carrara and its extensions.
Like I said I installed it fired it up and I am reacquainting myself with it. It reminds me so much of Cinema 4D early on. It's probably the app that got me into C4D and had it not been neglected for so long it might still be using Carrara. I know it sounds like I am trashing Carrara but this all comes from a good place. I would love to see the developers pick it back up and develop the heck out of it.
Just for startes:
A scalable UI.
Fix Memory Leaks.
Add catches for stuff that happens when a user does something that was not intended as a feature of the app. (Moddeling room conversion).
Add Cycles as a render option.
Thats about it for starters
I know this rubs some folks the wrong way, I expect if a developer still sells software and claims all the featurts as in Carrara or even Bryce that they at least work on it to make sure that it is the best it can be even if it's the last version they will ever make.
(Edited by mod to fix quote)
I agree with all of your suggestions, for what it's worth. :)
Though I don't think it'll ever happen that daz will ever put any time into dev fixes. If anyone ever figures out a way to fix geografts, for example, let me know :)
Some software that I have collected hoarded used on my computer. Carrara is my favourite though !!!
Your list is similar to mine, but bigger :) I think I had heard of Curvy before, but only had a vague idea of what it was. Went and checked out some vids on it, it looks like an amazing and fun modeler. Then I went and checked out Sculptris, which I have heard tons about, yeah that's another one I need to learn to use, it looks so cool. I saw Terragen 4 on your list and said 'wait, isn't that super expensive?', then I went and checked and apparently it's a free download! Whoa, didn't expect that! Isn't it known as the best landscape/nature/sky generator even more than Vue? I thought it was super expensive, but looks like it's new pricetag is now within my budget Oh wait, I just read the fine print, the free version is a 30 day trial with limitations... :) You've got Poser 11, that's 2 versions newer than the newest Poser I have (though I still have Poser 7 installed and mostly use it instead, weirdly, not that I use Poser much at all anymore...). Pegasus, I forgot all about that one...
Terragen - Terragen 4 is available as a free download. The free version may be used for non-commercial purposes, or 30 days of commercial evaluation.
this is my PC desktop ... nothing unusual