Carrara

So, Bryce sucks from most people standards, or so it seems. What about the other Daz product, Carrara? How does that hold up against the competition? In comparison to Vue?

Vue and Carrara are very different applications. Carrara is more of a general purpose 3D app that also has some decent terrain tools, while Vue is strictly a terrain app (and a very good one at that).

Carrara is my 2nd favorite 3D app (Blender of course is #1). Although it lacks some things Blender has, it has others which Blender lacks. So the two work pretty well together IMHO. Carrara’s gui is a bit unorthodox, but is very easy to pick up.

Carrara’s interface at least was designed by Kai, same person who designed Bryce’s, from what I understand.

Carrara is a general purpose 3D program though, not just a landscape program. It’s a little funky, but seems okay - slower to model with in general than Blender, from what I can see. For on thing, it uses a “room” concept. Modelling, Texturing, Animation, Assembly Rendering, I think. They are all isolated as separate stages not sure how easy it is to move back and forth as I haven’t done much with it. I think it handles Booleans nicely from what I could see. Seems to be very much a step-wise refinement workflow compared to Blender’s ‘do whatever you want next’ approach.
Oh, and you have to keep drilling down for more detail/modification. Everything seems to be ‘nested’ in object-oriented fashion.

Vue is similar in purpose to Bryce but more typical interface and better results using defaults. I really like Vue.

The thing about both is the new versions keep getting more and more expensive (up into price range of The Pro packages), and they both also split off basic & advanced feature version.

Hi all
Just my input…
The only product that DAZ has (app-wise) is DAZ-Studio. Carrara was bought along with Hexagon (which is apparently quite good) from Eovia, and Bryce was bought from Corel (I think they were the last owners of it!- it has had many owner during it’s life, which is why developement has stagnated a bit). It remains to be seen what DAZ can do with any of these products in the longer term.

bigkahuna is right, only Carrara 5 pro has a graph editor (like blender’s IPO curves), and Blender has no math editor (which Carrara studio 1 has), so the feature set does complement. I have a intense dislike of both the Carrara and Bryce UI: to gimicky for my liking. And i find them hard to use because of that.

The shame is that when Eovia sold-up, DAZ didn’t get their REALLY good product, Amapi. The people who sell Shade bought that I think. Amapi is a very modeller which hexagon was modelled on (excuse the pun!), and doesn’t have that same interface.

One thing that can be said is that carrara, hexagon, STudo and Bryce can all complement each other, and if DAZ does things properley, they could make this a very good team of apps for mid-level 3d work.

But Vue still rock the most (and check out terragen 2: it looks like it will be excellent).

CHeers
DT

I used to play with Carrara at a time. Interface is cool, and the material “nodes” are great, at least from what I remember.
I did some images I was pleased with, but I’ve never managed to get very interesting things in term of modeling. And UV mapping was a pain in the back, with the version I used. Maybe it’s better now.
The GI renderer was good (easy setup for caustics, etc), so was the raytracer.
For animation, i remember it was ok, but I needed two screens to be usable.
I think it’s a good semi-pro application, but it should never be separated from a modeling tool with a good workflow (Amapi, Blender).

Be well

The shame is that when Eovia sold-up, DAZ didn’t get their REALLY good product, Amapi. The people who sell Shade bought that I think. Amapi is a very modeller which hexagon was modelled on (excuse the pun!), and doesn’t have that same interface.

Quite right. Amapi was bought by “Digital Frontiers”, a Japanese company that also sells “Shade”. I got a copy of Amapi Studio when I first bought Carrara 4 Pro, and although I never used it much, it did have some very cool features.

I bought Carrara originally because I found it to be the easiest 3D app to get “up and running” with. The UI is pretty unconventional, but is also very easy to learn. Carrara’s greatest weakness has always been it’s modeler, which has improved with each new version, and will hopefully continue to improve with the next version.

I had great hopes for Hexagon. It seemed to have all the things I was looking for in a good 3D poly modeler. Unfortunately, from what I heard at the last DAZ IRC chat, Hex’s future is pretty uncertain. It has major issues in the Mac version, no Universal Binary version is planned, nor any major improvements in it’s future. If you check the DAZ bug tracker, lots of bugs have been reported, but nothing seems to be worked on. I suspect that DAZ will just let it fade a slow lingering death until people just forget about it altogether…

As a scenery generator, does vue have any significant modeling tools?

Carrara has notable modeling capabilities as well as scenery generating capabilities, (volumetric clouds, etc.).

At this point I’m wondering if I should go ahead and get Carrara while daz is selling there products half off through October, or if vue infinite would be a better buy. I’m speaking in terms of what would expand my capabilities more. Since Carrara’s rep is mostly from it’s modelling capabilities (which I already have sufficient set of in Blender) and Vue Infinite’s is from it’s landscape capabilities (not so present in Blender), Vue Infinite would seem to be the better buy. Yet if Carrara allows both modelling and landscape tools to be used better in tandem, that may not be the case. As far as the UI, I don’t think that will be a problem. Any advice?