What's the story with Carrara on Mac?
dzkalir
Posts: 0
Greetings Carrara community!
I apologize if this question has been asked before; I feel it must have, but a forum search didn't turn anything up aside from a potentially similar topic about Bryce.
I'm a hobbyist who started out with Ray Dream Studio in the 90's, took a break, returned with Carrara in the early 2000's (back when it was under development by Eovia), took a break and switched to Mac OS X, and now would like to return. I'm delighted to see that Carrara has been taken in by DAZ 3D and received active development. Since it's what I was most familiar with, it's my default choice to return to 3D rendering with.
My concern is the Mac compatibility issue. Carrara 8 had major issues with OS X 10.7, and my understanding is OS X 10.8 is the same. Carrara 8.5, still in beta, seems like it will restore compatibility with OS X 10.7 and 10.8. I'd be fine with waiting for Carrara 8.5, but it's concerning to me that the compatibility issue took so long to address. It's been a year and a half since OS X 10.7 was released, after all; I'd hate to buy Carrara 8.5, only to upgrade to OS X 10.9 (supposedly due this summer) and then potentially get hit with another compatibility bug that would take another 1-2 years to fix. Virtualizing Windows or earlier versions of OS X are possibilities (although they come with a significant performance hit), as is delaying a major OS upgrade for a few months. Holding off on operating system upgrades for that long isn't doable for me, though.
Has anyone in the community heard anything about what's going on with Mac support? Has DAZ 3D taken steps to ensure that a fix to such a major compatibility issue would be quicker in the future? I'm just looking for some reassurance that I wouldn't find myself stranded for more than a few months if a major incompatibility occurred.
Thanks!
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Comments
Unless APPLE decides to pull another 'let's kill all backwards compatibility' with 10.9 then it shouldn't be an issue. Most of this is Apple's fault...
Agree, this is Apple's "fault". The major compatability issues involved moving the fonts folder in osX.6, and then moving a lot of internal assets in X.7... I guess it had something to do with making the os more effecient, but it's not like it was some dramatic coding thing, they just reorganized the OS folders from what I can tell, and that's what broke most things....
C8.5 is running very smooth for me on osX.7
With the risk of starting an argument I'm going to stick up for Apple on this one. Sure they changed things. They do it all the time. So does Microsoft. Unfortunately, it broke Carrara. However, all developers get advance copies of the OS to test their software and make it ready for upgrades. In this case Daz had at least 4 months to prepare for the changes before Lion was released. Here we are a year and a half later and Daz has yet to fix OSX compatibility. Sure, the beta runs about 95% in Lion and Mountain Lion, but it's still a beta. There really should have been an 8.2 release that made it compatible with Lion.
I love Carrara. I've been using it since version 1.0 and Infini-D before that. I try to stay away from all the Daz bashing in the forums because it's really not very productive. But enough is enough! It's time to release 8.5. And it better work this time. I don't want to wait for 8.6 for a stable version.
My two cents.
95%...? What is the 5% that is not working under osX for you?
Holly,
Three things come to mind right away. The spot render is completely broken for me. With big scenes I get errors saving about 50% of the time. An occasional hang up and crash when quitting a render. Lot's of Genesis errors, but I don't count those because its still in beta.
My spot render is also broken, on at least 1 computer. I was told it's my computer's fault even though it worked in the previous beta... :blank:
I don't get the crashes on saving unless it is a specific weird figure like CyberV4... I was able to save the figure by using the browser instead of Save As...
I don't use Genesis.
I've seen the problem with the spot render on three different computers all with different video cards and processors. Like you it worked fine with a prior beta. I don't believe it's a computer problem. It's Carrara. Fortunately the save issue only happens the first time I save, every time I save. . If I click cancel and then save as, it does work. The scene is kind of large with Stonemason's Urban Sprawl 2, Two M4's, an M3 and a Genesis figure. It's annoying but not a deal breaker.
Losing the spot render tool has definitely slowed everything down for me. Here is my bug report still listed as "new" since October:
https://bugs.daz3d.com/view.php?id=48182
Please add to it if you have more info.
Holly,
I added the information for the three computers that show the same issue.
Thank you... Once I saw I'd lost it on one computer I didn't upgrade my other Mac... stayed with .132 (or whatever the number of that beta was...)
I appreciate the replies. I'm not looking to assign blame to a company; it's quite possible that Apple doesn't make things easy for software developers. I'm not a software developer, so I wouldn't know. Daz certainly wouldn't be unique in the issues that they had, either. I believe the Maya community recorded a number of complaints about support for OS X 10.7 and/or OS X 10.8, as well. But as far as I've seen, there aren't any actively developed 3D render suites with Mac versions that are still incompatible with OS X 10.8, aside from Carrara.
I just want to avoid a scenario where I buy software and then find myself unable to use it for any time longer than a few months as major bugs are ironed out. If it's true that they had a single Mac developer who subsequently left the company and that resulted in the massive compatibility delays with Bryce and Carrara, I'd understand. I just want to know what the company is doing to ensure that a scenario like that wouldn't happen again. And if the Mac isn't a priority platform for Daz, that's perfectly OK and I won't hold it against them. It would simply mean that I would unfortunately have to look around for a render suite with more commitment to the Mac platform. There's nothing personal about it.
If I have it right, what I've gleaned from the community is that version 8.5 is due to come out of beta some time in February (which may just be a rumor?). Compatibility with OS X 10.7 and 10.8 should be fixed with that release. However, there's no indication that Daz has done anything to strengthen support for Mac development. Does that sound about right?
HI dzkalir :)
No, ...very little of that sounds right,.
it sounds like you're reading forum rumours,. from people who don't work for Daz3D.
The "Main" reasons for the Beta development of Carrar8.5 is to add support for Mac OS, and to integrate the latest Daz3D figure (genesis) and all of it's new technology, into Carrara.
One reason that this has taken longer than anyone anticipated is that there have been some new file formats developed for Daz Studio and Carrara, which are still being tweaked.
I have no idea how many "Mac" developers Daz3D employ,. but it would seem to be an insane business strategy to have only one developer for any platform, working on several applications at the same time.
What if they were ill, or dropped dead, or got a better job offer...
Then you're out of business, or looking for a replacement and spending development time to bring them up to speed with the applications.
As for Bryce,. As far as I'm aware,. It's development cycle came to an end at the wrong time, and Mac OS support will be added to the next version.
Also,...Many programmers are Multi platform.
As far as I'm aware, there's supposed to be some information from Daz3D this month,.
what that information is,.. we'll know when it's announced.
Until then,.. the rumours will continue.
hope that makes sense :)
3DAGE is correct.
Carrara's beta was interrupted while Genesis and the interchange formats were being finalized. The beta works very well on Mac except for a few issues we expect will get sorted once the development resumes. In fact the beta has fixed a huge amount of issues that were in 8.1 on Mac (like a deadly memory leak). 64bit rocks! It's very stable.
We were told there will be "an announcement in Feb. we dont know what...
Thank you very much, this is exactly the sort of information that I figured the community could provide! :) I'll be holding out for the February announcement, then.
Hi all. I just purchased Cararra 8 but I cannot even install any of it. None of the installers will open. They quit instantly. Now I'm feeling sheepish for not having read the forums before purchasing. I'm on a Mac Pro with 10.8.2. I was on the beta team back when it was under Eovia's wing.
Should I be calling and asking for a refund?
If you want to try the beta, the details are in a stickied thread at the top of the Carrara forum...
I cannot even open the installer to actually install the beta. It just quits on startup! Same with EVERY item I downloaded from the site when I purchased it.
That sounds like you're getting corrupt files. Can you try downloading with a different browser?
Just tried in Safari again, and it wouldn't even extract the zip this time. So I tried in Firefox, and I had the same problem I originally had. The zip will extract, but the installer quits immediately after opening it. I only have 1 download attempt left on the 8.5 Beta LOL.
Scott,
I wouldn't give up on Carrara yet. It may be something simple. I'm able to use and install Carrara on a new iMac running 10.8.2 . Mountain Lion has some new security features called sandboxing that could be the problem. Sandboxing was designed to keep malware from installing on your system. There are different settings that you can adjust to allow programs to install. These are in the security tab in the system preferences. The default only allows software that is purchased from the App store to be installed. Daz's installers have to be run a different way than normal now. It's very simple. Instead of double clicking the installer, right click on it and then select "Open". That bypasses Apple's Sandboxing one time. You'll have to do the same thing for each install or set your preferences to allow unknown software to install. Which I wouldn't do. I hope that works.
On my Mac Pro, I already have it set to open apps from 'anywhere'. Still no dice. But just now I managed to get Carrara to install fine on one of the iMacs in the studio.
Both my mac pro and two imacs are running 10.8.2. I even copied the installer over from the iMac just to make sure I was using the same installer file. Still, installer crashes upon opening on my Mac Pro.
I'm going to attempt to manually copy the fully installed app from the imac to my pro. Will report back how I go. I appreciate the assistance :)
I guess I would start looking to see what's different about the Mac Pro versus the iMacs. Does the pro have some third party utilities that the iMacs don't?
OK another quick update - I created a new user on my mac pro, and the installer works fine. What the?!?!?
What do you do to maintain your system? Do you have any third party utilities installed? Device drivers?
I have some USB3 PCI card drivers installed (but no card currently installed) and I also have some Apogee Duet II Audio Interface drivers installed... but these are installed for all users, not just one. So that doesn't explain it. Assuming there's some permissions error, although I tried repairing permissions to no avail :(
At a guess, something in ~/Library folder is interactiving in a negative fashion. Easy way to test is to rename the (hidden) folder from a different (admin) account and log back in as the problem user. That blows away all kinds of things, but if it works you can try to do a comparison of the new and old ~/Library folders.
And of course you can log out, back in as an admin user, move the old ~/Library folder back into place to restore things.
If you are comfortable digging into things another option would be to browse the ~/Library folder structure for Daz/Carrara things, rename them and try again.
On the whole, I haven't seen as many user profile issues on OS X as on Windows, but that doesn't mean they don't exist (and I've dealt with far more Windows than OS X users so nothing should be read into the relative frequency)
Carrara 8 doesn't work on my Mac running Lion or Mountain Lion. Never has. This has been an issue with Carrara since the beginning of time. They just can't seem to make a Mac version that works, especially since 8.5.
No excuses.
Final Cut works. After Effects works. Excel and Word work. Premiere works.
This "Apple's fault" is ridiculous.
DAZ has never given support to the Mac community. Probably never will.
ricmorton,
You should try the Carrara 8.5 beta (now at version 204). It works very well on my Macs running Mountain Lion (OSX 10.8.3).
Have you filed a bug report? I prefer 8.5 to 8 and it works just fine for me on Mountain Lion. Well, other than a few bugs, but I've reported issues I've encountered.
SO RELEASE THE NEXT DAMN VERSION!