How to use DAZ Studio's 'Toon Santa' in Carrara 8.1?
craig_b2717bf573
Posts: 3
Before moving on to Carrara 8.5 (or 9), I decided I should try, once and for all, to learn 8.1. Since there's no manual, I purchased the Infinite Skills DVD set (worth the money and fun too). When I got to the section on importing DAZ Studio content I was totally jazzed, since I own a boat load of DAZ content.
It looked so easy when PhilW did it on the DVD (obviously a talented guy), so I decided to start a holiday animation using Toon Santa from 3D Universe. First, I asked Carrara to directly open Toon Santa. It loaded with no problem. But when I asked for a quick test render, Carrara crashed.
I look through this forum and found a post by Stezza from 2012 that said: "I could never get 3DU Toon Santa to work in 8.1 or earlier but so far in 8.5 it is working with this simple workaround. This didn’t work for me in all previous public releases so something has changed in the 8.5B". Stezza had a workaround, but I didn't understand it.
Next I tried using DAZ Studio to open Toon Santa and then export it in a collada.dae format. That seemed like an okay workaround -- except for one problem. It seems that DAZ Studio exported Toon Santa as a scene. Once imported into Carrara, I don't know how to turn it into an object that I can save in Carrara format.
Is there a way to do this, or do I need to go to 8.5? I'm hoping somebody can help -- I'd like to get back to PhilW's DVD.
I'm using iMac OSX 10.6.8 with 6GB Ram
Thanks in advance for any insights!
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Comments
There is an excellent manual for Carrara! Go to your Carrara menu bar: Help > Carrara online help
That opens one version, a really good pdf manual. I also have the updated versions linked to on the top of this menu
Okay, so were you actually able to get the little fellow into Carrara? I don't have it. But here are instructions on creating your own, custom browser setup, into which you just drag things from Carrara into the browser. For saving the whole scene together, use the save as option from the file menu to that same custom browser setup, so that you have nice, easy access to it later, when you need it later. I think it's very good to save as many things as you need into your Carrara browser - saving it as you optimize it (messing with shaders and lights, etc.,)
Hi,
is this the post you refer to?
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewreply/120807/
did you follow the instructions in the image?
Load Santa PS
When loaded, Santa is missing several objects..
1. his pom pom
2. his glasses
3. his belt buckle
4. the fringe of his coat.
Select each missing item from the instances tab on the RH side and then on the menu bar at the top select Animation—-> Set IK & Constraints then untick Change the IK setting.
Just checked it in 8.1 and it works as in 8.5 ;)
Hope this is a bit easier to follow for you :-)
Just rendered him to show
here he is with all parts :)
in 8.1
By doing this to fix up Santa you won't get the error when you render as you do now..
well that's on a PC anyways ;)
Wow! Tahnks, Stezza!
He sure is a great Santa! That looks like a nice, easy fix - and then save to the browser so he's fixed and saved! ;)
Sweet!
Dartanbeck - Thanks for pointing out the online Carrara manual. It didn't show up under Menu > Help in 8.1 (at least not on my mac), which may be why I missed it. But I did find it on your excellent "Carrara Information Manual" post. I'm sure this will be useful as I go along.
Stezza - Thanks for your workaround to this weird problem file. Following your instructions, I got it to work okay!! Here is what I did.
1. Opened a medium empty Scene
2. Selected Content tab in Browser tray
3. Click black button at right end of Browser tray
4. Selected "Add Runtime" manual not auto
5. Navigated to folder containing the Toon Santa runtime
6. Clicked Open, and it appeared under in Content tray
7. Dragged Toon Santa from Content tray to empty Scene
----
8. At this point Toon Santa is missing pom pom, glasses, belt buckle, coat fringe
9. Follow your instructions: Select each missing item from the instances tab on the RH side and then on the menu bar at the top select Animation—-> Set IK & Constraints then untick Change the IK setting.
Everything now works correctly. I can pose, render, and save as .car file. I wonder how many more DAZ content files have this problem?
I did a little testing and found out that the render crash I had experienced previously was caused by the missing items. If I stopped at step 7 and tried to render, it crashed. If I did all 9 steps, it did not crash on render.
One downside is that I can't seem to make the fix permanent. If I reopen Toon Santa in a different scene, I have to re-apply your workaround. Of course, I can save the fixed version as a .car file and then import it into future scenes. Any thoughts on this?
Again, thanks to both of you for your help.
Glad you worked it all out.. :)
that's about it.. save it as a car file then import into your other scenes and or do as dart posted.
If you have 8.1 pro the next thing to do with Santa is go in and fix up the textures by adding bumps to his clothing and hair to his beard and fur linings.. Really makes a difference
Have fun ;)
stezza, tel me, how did you figure that out about the IK!?
edit: never mind, i just saw that I asked you the same question before :) good to be consitent
Hi Dartanbeck,
I just read your article about making "My Carrara Content Storage System" in Carrara Browser -- it's Totally Awesome! I had no idea that "My Objects" in the Objects tab linked directly to a specific folder.
On the Mac it goes to: Documents > DAZ 3D > Carrara 8 > My Presets > My Objects. To test it, I added a subfolder called "Toons" in the My Objects folder, then copied in "Toon Santa FX.car" file. I fired up Carrara, looked in the Browser tray -- and there it was listed under My Objects > Toons. Unbelievable -- it worked the first time.
Question: In the Browser tray it shows a default image for "Toon Santa FX" instead of thumbnail. I tried copying the "Toon Santa.png" file into the My Objects > Toons folder -- it didn't work. I also tried renaming the .png to "Toon Santa FX.png" so it would match the .car file -- that didn't work either.
(see problem in attached photo)
Any ideas on this would be much appreciated.
Try dragging the Toon Santa FX from the instance tab and dropping it into the Objects tab... It will then save a thumbnail of it ;)
"Dragging it from the Instance tab and dropping it into the Objects tab" worked great.
Thank you Stezza
The only way to add your own personalized icon to a .car file is to hack the file in a text editor. The old forum used to have a thread about it some years ago, but I can't recall how it was done. The Windows world had some utility or plugin that automated the process somewhat, but again, it was so long ago that I don't recall the name or even if it's still around.
Dart, you're a PA that sells super Carrara products. How do you customize your product thumbnails?
I think the thumbnail only works in C 8.5 .
could be wrong .
I think the thumbnail only works in C 8.5 .
could be wrong .
You're wrong ;-)
It works for objects and shaders, but other things like Skies and such just save with a generic thumbnail.
It's not the IK that's broken (that's why you're un-checking it), it's the scale. In the CR2, all of the scale dials have min and max both set to zero, which Carrara doesn't like. If you look at the"un-fixed" toon santa, you'll see that the scales are all zero and the limits are all zero. You can't fix it by hand, either - Carrara will just throw an error.
And this is in more pieces of content than I really care for, honestly.
Things Carrara doesn't like:
- ERC links that use the display name instead of the channel name
This causes dead morph dials. CorVas's "Simple Details", the "Perfect V4" series, and Aery Soul's "Alice" all have this problem
- "otherActor" links to bones that don't exist
Most often in clothing. The ususal symptom is that when you conform it, some parts of the clothing will stay put even when you move the base character (most often the hip). Royloo's A3 Kimono does this.
- Bad constraints
Carrara actually cares about the "min" and "max" entries in the CR2 file. It is not at all unusual for Poser stuff to have both zero, both one, or in some cases bizzare random numbers - especially in the scale. Figures will be invisible, or come in at some weird size. Bounding boxes will stretch off to infinity and "An error has occurred" will often occur. When this happens, check the "Motion" tab and see if it's all zero, very strange numbers, or weird things like "-1.#J", "#INF", or "#DEN"
yeah.. the mars curiosity rover doesn't work either and no workaround has been found for that either :-(
Fenric -- This is very useful (and disturbing) insight into the issue of using DAZ content in Carrara. One of the big selling points for Carrara is that it can directly use the large existing library of DAZ and Poser content. Now it looks like that may not be true -- and the DAZ content issue may be a much larger problem than just Toon Santa.
Stezza says: "yeah.. the mars curiosity rover doesn’t work either and no workaround has been found for that either :-("
I can't help but think that DAZ Productions, Inc., dba DAZ 3D is well aware of this issue and has chosen to remain silent. But is that fair to their Carrara customer base? I'm sure there are lots of Carrara users (like myself) who own DAZ content and would like to buy more DAZ content -- and expect to use that DAZ content in Carrara.
Maybe DAZ 3D could ask content developers to identify whether each of their products (like Toon Santa) is compatible with Carrara. I'm not suggesting that developers be required to change their product - just tell us if it is or isn't Carrara compatible. This doesn't seem like an outlandish request -- does it? I mean, www.cornucopia3d.com already notes on each content item, which versions of Vue 3D it is compatible with.
Any thoughts about this from other Carrara users?
Yeah that, or D3D's Poser File Editor, or Notepad++
The thing is, Poser files are really just Python scripts.
The problem is that there are a lot of buggy scripts floating, around - especially older ones. It's not really fair to blame Carrara for not just quietly accepting those bugs, though. It would be nice if it was a little more forgiving, but it's not really a defect in Carrara.
And yeah, studio accepts some of those more gracefully, but it chokes on others, and you can even find ones that Poser itself doesn't work with. Learning the basic structure of the Poser files and how to edit them really is a valuable skill if you want to use Poser compatible content.
Perhaps I'm recalling it wrong, but haven't most of these 'toon figures had issues? Or were they ones created by a different artist? I'm pretty sure I read a thread on the old forums where somebodyhad an issue using the 'toon kids or something and the response from the vendor was pretty much along the lines that it didn't say it was supported in Carrara. Sorry. That was a long time ago, so maybe things have changed, or I'm remembering it completely wrong.
That's my point -- none of the DAZ/Poser content vendors say they support Carrara. That means we have to buy the product first and then find out if it works in Carrara. I for one would rather work in Carrara than Studio or Poser. It would be very helpful if the vendor said Yes or No on Carrara compatible.
If this is impossible, maybe it would be worthwhile to post our own list of what works with Carrara and what doesn't. It would be useful to every Carrara user.