Using Genesis2 in Carrara 8.1

Roygee

There are a couple of active threads dealing with workarounds for cloth and dynamic hair sims where it seems that there are problems with collision with high density meshes. Thought i'd test in Blender, as it also uses Bullet and do a comparison.

I needed an animated high-poly model to test and what better than V4.

Long story short - found that it is possible to export Genesis 2 from DS using generic Collada and import that to Blender, clothed and animated. In fact, it seems to work better in Blender than in Carrara - no poke-through in the couple of tests I did. I don't have any clothing other than that which comes with DS, so couldn't do a thorough test.

Then found I could export from Blender using FBX and it worked in Carrara. The shaders need work in Carrara because it adds a glow channel to every shader. Get rid of that and adjust the shininess and you end up with a viable Genesis 2 in Carrara 8.1. May be worth testing in earlier versions, but I don't have any loaded.

I haven't tried every permutation of the FBX and Collada export options, but found that:-

1. Carrara will load the .dae, but every clothing item has a skeleton, so doing anything with the figure becomes a real mission, having to select multiple duplicated bones to do any movement. Seems the "Merge skeletons" function doesn't work with Carrara, but does with Blender, which gives a single skeleton.

2. The FBX export doesn't work directly in either Carrara or Blender - you need to import the DAE into Blender then export FBX to get this working. Carrara seems to prefer Blender's flavour of FBX to DS's.

3. The poke-through issue isn't solved using this method - works in Blender, but not in Carrara.

I haven't done any exhaustive testing and don't intend to - this just came about as a side issue which has momentarily distracted me from my main purpose. Thought I'd just mention this in case someone who doesn't have Carrara 8.5 and wants to use Genesis2 for animation feels like having a go:)