Frustrated by purchased Carrara scenes made in Large size - Why?
Jonstark
Posts: 2,738
I picked up several Carrara items during the latest PA sale, and I'm just playing around with some of them, but I'm fairly frustrated to find that some of the best looking ones are perhaps going to be useless to me and I'll have to send them back.
The reason? The creators made the ridiculous decision to build the scene in the 'Large' magnitude. I can't scale them back without everything going wonky, and guess what? This is DAZ where a lot of us users like to drop in pre-made props and people that are around V4/M4 size... Medium! I don't want to drop in my prop (in this particular scene I was working on, it was the shuttlestar spaceship, but that's beside the point) and have it be microscopic size. If I try to scale down the terrains and clouds for the original premade Carrara scene, everything goes crazy - land jumps randomly all over the scene, so do clouddomes and render times suddenly shoot through the roof, forget about the terrain shaders, they're useless and will have to be redone.
This is frustrating, because I want to buy Carrara content (especially if it looks good) to support the Carrara content creators, but if they are too thick-skulled to build in MEDIUM like any moron would realize to do then the scenes are USELESS to me (and likely 90% of other Carrara users). I'm sorry for being abrasive, but I can't imagine what someone is thinking, building a Carrara scene in 'Large'. :(
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Comments
I don't know if this will help, but you can select the scene. Click on the interface tab. There is an area called Scene's Magnitude. Change to medium and click on the Change Screen Magnitude button.
This will not resize the scene, but it will fix the camera movements so you can pan around the scenes with normal scale items (like V4).
ncamp
Thanks ncamp, I appreciate that tip. I already knew about this and doesn't help though, because it's not just the wild swings of the camera that I'm trying to correct, but trying to get the scene as a whole resized to medium so everything works together properly. :( But I do appreciate the attempt to help.
I think it is the atmospherics such as haze that are most affected by the scaling. I think it wisest to simply scale up the elements you are importing.
Have you tried opening an empty, medium scene and dragging the large one in? Some things that may help in this would be to first open the large scene version, and make a unique name for the main camera - and take note of any scene effects - so that you can introduce that stuff to your new medium scene.
Thanks Rashad, you're right I could scale my props up, but that is also problematic, but that likely is one of the few approaches that may solve this. I'm still really irked that a content creator here on DAZ would be so foolish as to make Carrara scenes in a scale so tremendously different than what V4/M4 standard medium size would be. It's like they're just asking for trouble. You may be right that the atmosphere effects and scaling may be what's driving the decision, but for example all of the Howie's scenes I've seen so far are all scaled 'medium' and there is nothing unrealistic about his scenes at all, so I don't think it has to be large to get the right effect.
I... honestly didn't know you could do this. That could be a real workable solution, if it works. What's the exact process? First open an empty medium scene, then go the scene tab and drag one of the premade 'large' scenes into the medium scene (like into the instance tray?) is that how it works? And it will automatically resize the large scene to medium? I'm rendering an animation at the moment and can't immediately check, but am I understanding correctly?
I... honestly didn't know you could do this. That could be a real workable solution, if it works. What's the exact process? First open an empty medium scene, then go the scene tab and drag one of the premade 'large' scenes into the medium scene (like into the instance tray?) is that how it works? And it will automatically resize the large scene to medium? I'm rendering an animation at the moment and can't immediately check, but am I understanding correctly?I don't think that it resizes anything. It just gives you a medium scene to work with. Yes... just:
* Open a new, medium scene
* Drag in the Large scene into the instances tray
* You'll need to add any atmospheric stuff yourself if it uses any - like realistic sky.
If the terrain is now too large to work with, try grouping everything and scaling it down - otherwise, bring in a plane or new terrain piece shaped to your liking, and use existing scene shaders to color it correctly.
Hi Jonstark.
If you need to rescale some objects, groups or replicators, as long as they are not rigged or animation groups you can use, Edit->Promote to Master. This will create a master group you can 'Overall' scale in the transform panel without the objects moving positions etc. Just make sure to save a NEW scene file and not overwrite the orginal. You can still 'Jump In' and copy objects from a master group, though the objects may be at their original scales and positions there.
Edit to add: changing the scales of volumetric clouds as well as most indirect lighting scenes will affect final render quality and times.
I had given up entirely on Carrara landscapes early on in my Carrara uses simply because of the problem Jon is having. I would open a preset, not fully understanding the difference between the different scales, and then trying to use my DAZ content with it - where the content would just be lost and incomprehensibly tiny once I could set it in a visible spot - which was nigh impossible due to my lack of knowing that, what you see in the view port can differ from the resolution rendered in the final. So my early Carrara work always used the Millennium Environment - which is excellent, but tiny in Carrara's vastness. Then I started using sky dome style background surrounds.
Since then, I've realized that you can open the preset terrains and such in a medium scene, giving me the medium scaled camera controls - which works beautifully with content. Finally wrapping my head around how terrains resolutions can be set, I've also learned that I could simply select the preset terrain and lower it below the ground plane where I want to film, while still having the surrounding environment. This all happened shortly after buying most of Tim Payne's Skies for Carrara, which I used to create my atmospheres. The incredible high quality of his products enticed me into collecting his entire store. Very nice stuff!
I'm not sure which products there are that come only in Large scale, but I have a feeling that the author was into the idea of vast, picturesque shots, using the actual environment as the topic of focus.
There might be a situation where the terrain is special - which is the main focus of the product. If this is the case, it just may be that it is made with a special height map to generate the cool terrain, and possibly even some well-made shaders to go with it. If this is the case, you may locate the images used for height maps, and use them on terrain created for the medium scene - and then apply the shaders. When using Insert > Terrain, for example, you'll get a default 100 x 100 foot plot. This scale is what was used to determine the settings in the default mountain terrain. So simply changing the size of the plot will have an adverse affect on the look of the terrain. If you really like a certain terrain, and just want to change its scale, the bottom of that panel, in the terrain modeler, has an option for rescaling. Otherwise you can just remove the default mountain generator and use the height map option. This will generate a terrain according to the dimensions in the top, by default in a medium scene being 100 x 100. So if you height map that, it will use the gray scale data to make a 100 x 100 terrain. In that example, you could set it for 500 x 500, use the height map and have a terrain generated at that scale. Now you simply set the height ratio for the desired effect from the height map.
Even using a height map in this way, you may still go back and apply generators and filters to further change the terrain mesh. Examining the original product can tell you if there are additional filters, etc., used with (or without) a height map, and what sort of scaling has been applied to the height of the height map data. This is where Carrara works really well with those applications designed for creating height maps.
I mostly use Howie Farkes scenes and my Daz people fit into them just fine.
The preset wizard scenes are indeed too big so know the issue all too well.