what were yoo using before discovering Carrara?
Mistara
Posts: 38,675
what were yoo using before discovering Carrara?
i was in Poser.
and Bryce from its meta days. dont remember the version # was pre 5.5
and wings when it still had a .hole material
the days of trying to render posette in bryce, her skin left big gray patches >.<
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Oil on canvas, still my preferred method.
But to answer your question, my gateway to Carrara was an old version of After Effects (5.5) I bought off Ebay when you could still do that kind of thing. And the gateway to that was a few classes at a local junior college in Illustrator and Photoshop which demystified computer graphics just enough to get me hooked. Carrara was the only affordable 3D application that would run on an old G3 iMac running OS 9 at the time.
brought back memories of paint by numbers
I was a Poser user back in the Poser 4-6 days. I then had nothing to do with 3d stuff for a long time, although had upgraded Poser to 8. Somewhere along the line I had acquired but not really used Carrara. I think a trial version was included in something else, or there was a sale special. I just remember that I had it but almost never opened it for years. I decided to get back into my 3D hobby about 6-9 months before the first Carrara challenge. If it were not for the Carrara challenges, which got me hooked, I would probably be a Poser user.
I got into 3D for the first time back in the 1980s because I was the research/teaching assistant for a Professor who did not want to get chalk on his hands and was teaching a course that was simulcast over local TV. He handed me the manuals for some statistical and graphcs software and told me what he would normally want on the blackboard. I don't remember the names of those programs.
Poser, Bryce and Lightwave. I moved to Carrara when I realized it could handle Poser content seamlessly, i.e. no "Import", just load from Carrara's own browser which links to Runtimes. Plus Carrara can handle large scenes much better than Poser itself - lots of lights, more easily manipulated props & cameras, etc. Lightwave is a great program, but Carrara has become second nature and I don't feel I'm missing a lot from Lightwave. I still occasionally use Lightwave and Poser, and even Bryce, when I find a particular 3D element that doesn't work well in Carrara, but that is rare.
Never understood all the Poser craze, lol ...
Even though I had it (version 4), cuz my wife bought me the whole MetaCreations suite for my birthday, pretty much never used it, I was always curious about modeling, making my own stuff, biggest thrill ever ...
Bryce was pretty limited in that department (just bolleans) even though it had the best raytracer on the market at the time.
I then realized there is this little app called Wings3D and I was hooked ...
Then Silo came along, and I thought I was in heaven, true ZEN of modeling.
Carrara was just another addition to my rendering tools since Bryce did not have GI and AO, and Carrara's animation was more straight forward
The game "Neverwinter Nights", the first one released in 2000, was my thing. It required a 64MB graphics card, and mine was only 32, so I continued to replay the Baldur's Gate saga until I got a graphics card that worked for it - which was actually a whole new computer.
I made a collection of freebie texture replacements for the game - and I did so by extracting the textures and repainting them - nothing to do with 3d.
I was asked to join a team for the Spelljammer series to do texture work for them. I cleaned up some of their ship textures, made some new ones, and did all of the armor texture they wanted. My pal from the team asked if I would join him and his wife for a multiplayer run through another series he was working on with someone else. That drove me wild about the game!
Playing multiplayer reminded me of real D&D games, except that the miniatures wer animated and the scene tiles were 3d and they were Alive!
He wanted me to make some new amor pieces for the game, but I had no clue about 3d modeling - nor any interest.
He turned me on to GMax, a free version of a watered down 3DS Max for folks working on free game stuff. There was a plugin for GMax and Neverwinter Nights (BioWare developed NWN for the purposes of allowing users to easily hack it - made a lot of free tools for doing so) - so I got my feet wet.
He let me use his 3DS computer to start trying my hand at box modeling. I took to it right away, but still wasn't all that interested in doing that all day everyday.
I stated taking my creations into GMax, posing them and taking pictures of them for promotions. That's when he sent me his version of Poser 5 and turned me on to Daz 3d.
I loved Poser - but that became short-lived - not being able to do any modeling within it. Although I didn't want to make models fulltime, I still needed to have the tools handy for what I wanted to do with animations. Too many specific needs to rely solely on content.
Lightwave seemed to be the closest comunity I could find for working with Poser content within the software - though it still looked like a major PITA, so I never looked at LW that seriously.
Once I saw Carrara and saw what it could do with Poser content... I was immediately sold.
But since I've owned Carrara, I've become more and more impressed with it. I still get sent links to new updates coming for Max, Maya, LW, Modo, etc., and at first I get all excited about that stuff - then I realize that I feel that with a bit of imagination, I can already do all of that stuff within Carrara - plus use content that's all sold at a uniform scale... which I love!
I love the Daz3d artists, and have several faves at Renderosity as well. For me, it's really nice to be able to buy anything that fits into my idea of content that I might want to use in my work. I don't just look at what the product "is", but also at what it "could be" - since I love changing things. That's what got me into all of this in the first place!
So I consider Daz3d and Renderosity to be my 3D Development Teams within my production ;)
The first 3d software I had was called Imagine 3D for the Amiga, probably in the late 80s. After that I graduated to Inspire 3D (on a PC by then), a cut down version of the mighty Lightwave (I did have a copy of that at some stage too). I had an early version of Poser, but hadn't used it in a while and then came back to it as I wanted to do a music video with animated people (which never got completed!) and I used Poser quite a lot. I then got Vue, at first to generate backgrounds for my Poser figures, and then started exporting figures from Poser and into Vue because of the better lighting (with GI) in Vue, but you couldn't edit figures in Vue, so I was always going back and forth between programs and Vue was slow to render to the quality that I wanted.
I then discovered Carrara - what a revelation! Everything under one program with a consistent interface, and it rendered with global illumination at around ten times the speed of Vue for a similar quality. Although I have other programs, Carrara remains the core of what I do. Also it could replicate things like Vue's ecosystems, and it had strand based dynamic hair, which I immediately fell in love with! If you delve deep into my Rendo gallery, you can still see some of this progress, from purely using Poser through my early thoughts on using Carrara, right through to now when we are able to enjoy things like Octane and VWD which are keeping Carrara at the forefront of what is possible in 3D (certainly as far as the hobbyist and small professional studio is concerned).
I started with a program called Swivel3D. It was Mac only and only worked in black and white, not even grey scales. That was in the late 80's. It was purchased by Macromedia and disappeared. I switched to using ShowPlace from Pixar and then Infini-D. I think Infini-D and Ray Dream Designer were merged to create Carrara later on. I've been using it a very long time.
Imagine 3D on my Amiga 3000, 4000 and finally 4060 Tower. I don't count Poser or Daz Studio since they couldn't do the modeling that Imagine could do... being used to it Imagine's animation capabilities I never messed with their animators. Imagine 3D came to Windoze for a short while before support entirely stopped. I also had Lightwave 3D for the Amiga but never learned it very well. "What do I do. Upgrade Lightwave... naa... too much" after checking out 3D apps for Windoze finally chose to give Carrara 4 a try... within a week I upgraded to Carrara 4 Pro and Never Looked Back.
I remember having to do overnight renders to get a simple image of a few spheres, something that would take seconds now, and at higher resolution and better quality - and an overnight render can generate several seconds worth of animation of complex and realistic characters! We really are spoilt by the power we have available at our fingertips.
10hrs was normal
I don't think any would need to ask me that question, really. I think most can guess the answer I would give.
well, it should have been "What software were you using after BRYCE?" Answer "Bryce" :)
I used anim8or (http://www.anim8or.com/)
I remember when I was looking at colleges way back in the late 1980's, the Computer Science department at the one I finally settled on was showing off renders of a couple spheres and explained that they had written their own version of something new called a "ray tracer" that automatically calculated the correct lighting in just 5-6 hours of mainframe time! Amazing!
My entire college career there was never any such thing as a "Computer Graphics" or a "Game Design" degree. Those were singular classes in the CS department that you could take at the graduate level only (or as an undergrad with permission). And I went to a school very focused on engineering graduate research, so it was close to cutting edge in a lot of areas. My only exposure to 3D before I stumbled on Poser much much later was an introductory CAD course.
As for the OP question - I answered this in another thread already but to sum up: I started with 3D graphics with Poser 4 (I had to go look - amazingly I still have the box) and then switched to DAZ Studio when the first Genesis came out. Mostly I just used them to make character portraits for table top dice and paper RPGs but I really had no idea what I was doing and most of the "art" was me painting over parts of the image in Photoshop. Around 2013 I actually started taking the whole thing more seriously as an art and began paying attention to things like color and light and composition. Then near the end of 2014 I saw the Carrara forum challenge "Pulp Covers" and decided to give it a try and loved it so much that I soon switched to using Carrara almost exclusively.
Since then I've gotten more into modeling my own things and have learned just enough Blender to be dangerous and added some other tools in occasionally, but I have no plans to abandon Carrara.
I started my 3D journey with Google Sketchup with iClone3 standard and 3Dxchange2 to import the meshes.
I have anim8or now. Turned on to it from following Project Dogwaffle. It's an amazing little modeler/animator!
Really? I always thought that Google Sketchup was something new! LOL
Yeah... and RAM was miniscule as were the hard drives! I remember (and this is likely long after when you guys are talking about) having to upgrade to a 1GB HDD in order to install printer software! The game, Neverwinter Nights force my hand to upgrade to a 64MB graphics card! Oh the times....
One day we'll look back on all of this and wonder how we could bare waiting a few whole minutes for a render to complete! ;)
Earlier in this thread, I was talking about my "software journey" and that led me to looking through my own Rendo gallery (right from the beginning - I have never deleted anything) - and I decided to load up again a scene and character that I did in the early days of me using Carrara (from about 8 years ago). The character is Bruna by Syltermermaid, I don't think it is still available, but here she is in an updated form and rendered with Octane Render for Carrara with a custom hair and my own skin material formula (still using Bruna's original textures). I hope you like it and thanks to this thread for inspiring me and sending me down memory lane. Beats rendering shiny spheres!!
I was running DazStudio.
LOVED that software (DS) after buying and struggling with Poser off and on for years.
I saw my first render out of the box from Carrara and was HOOKED!
Were you running the beta D|S prior to the first official release of D|S 1.0?
I think I started trying out (and loving) D|S back around beta build 0.7 I think... I still have every installer of that I've even downloaded... somewhere around here. It was wonderful then... it's amazing now! I'm amazed at how far Daz3d has taken that app over the years. As soon as they offered the Pro version for free... I couldn't believe it and hurriedly 'bought' a copy before they realized the mistake! LOL
Then I saw the big announce (e-mail) that, for a limited time (still going) DS Pro is Free! So I wrote about it in this forum. It was DS, Bryce and I think even Hex, if I'm not mistaken... all Free!!!
Like you say though... even as much as I've always wanted to (and still do) try Bryce, Carrara has stolen my 3D heart - no real need to break away from it. As much as I'd love to delve deeply into Bryce, and into DS and get to learn those tools through and through... there are too many things I need to finish in Carrara first, and that list grows faster than I can complete it, so.... ;)
This is an early pic I rendered on the Amiga in 1995 or earlier.. the original wax 1024x768, this is smaller but the large version for my art web page. I belive this was my first attempt with glass that turned out ok... the texture on the board is a bitmap of hair applied flat to the end of the board which causes the streaks... still looks a bit like wood.
I hope that image was loaded from a floppy disk...
I'm grateful too... for the same reasons! Wow! Consider your hopes fullfilled, Phil... I love the image! My earlier Carrara renders aren't quite as pretty! LOL
Oh well... I still like them! This one was so far back that I still didn't have a grasp of how infinite Carrara is compared to Poser or D|S, and so I was still using Millennium Environment!
Speaking of that, Millennium Environment is still an excellent product in my opinion. Yeah... no real need for it in Carrara - true. But it has so many possibilities, and has full 360 degree (horizontally only) capabilities and a crap-load of excellent texture kits available for it. But when I first (excitedly) loaded it into Carrara's Medium Scene, I couldn't believe how tiny it looked! LOL
Then there was the matter of figuring out that I had to tell the lights to ignore it, and just make its textures glow instead... worked great then! ;)
Still (and again) running through your video tutorials. by now I've taken all of the "Hello, I'm Phil Wilkes" videos and put them as intros for each set. I love the one from Advanced Techniques, where you talk about your past experiences and show earlier works... all beatuiful renders... all of them!
Man... I forgot how dark I used to render my images. I bought my first laptop when I bought Carrara. Slick new Core2Duo machine so I could have two whole rendering cores!!! Never realized their screens are so much brighter.
Yeah, you don't think I'd choose the poor ones to show!
I started off in GMax, making scenery addons for Flight Simulator!
anim8or - we used to have regular contests where you built everything from scratch
everything in this modelled and anim8ed in anim8or
it was a joy coming to Carrara where I didn't have to build everything ;)