Alternative to Carrara 8.5 for Mac OS 12.1 (Monterey)?
giles_martha_67e07f467e
Posts: 4
I am a long-time user of Carrara, Bryce, Poser, and Hexagon (a little bit). I am trying 3D again after a long absence, only to find that Carrara 8.5 is not supported in Monterey. Is it no longer being upgraded?
Are there alternatives to Carrara (paid or free) that cost less than $1000 (one-time) or $75/month? Preferably with the ease of use of Carrara, basic modelling and rendering, without a massive learning curve. I don't need crazy advanced modelling of complex figures like in Maya or Cinema 4D, just some basic modelling, posing, and keyframe animation. I do some cartoony, simple animations for presentations and web, nothing Hollywood-level.
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Carrara is not being updated for now. No indication that it will be in the future. I am not a Mac user so I don't know about potential workarounds. Carrara 8.5 still works in Windows. I still do much in Carrara.
Future? For myself, the change in interface for Blender has made a huge difference. It does have a learning curve, but I recommend the free Blender donut tutorial guy for Blender 3.0.
https://youtu.be/nIoXOplUvAw?t=0
I use Carrara in Windows a lot, and the only other 3D program I use regularly is E-on Software's VUE. I doubt it fits all your needs, but the hobby version ("Creator") is available for $200 per year/$20 per month, with substantial discount sales sometimes, the development is continuing, and there is a free trial version for Mac and Windows.
More info here:
https://info.e-onsoftware.com/vue/overview
Here is a short animation I did partly in VUE, starts ~ 2:32 - the helicopter flyover and the underwater submarine passby:
As has already been mentioend, Blender might be your best bet, especially with the price (free) and available tools to move DAZ assets into Blender.
While you don't need the "crazy advanced...." features of Maya, you could always look at Maya Indie. Full-blown Maya for $280 USD a year (well below your $75/month). There are also bridges to Maya for your DAZ assets.
https://makeanything.autodesk.com/maya-indie
-- Walt Sterdan
Carrara 8.5 is officially not supported on macOS 10.15 (Catalina) and higher. But according to BrianP21361 it will run on Catalina (and probably even on Big Sur and Monterey). You can read about that in forum thread https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/468516/unable-to-open-files-macos-catalina
Apple no longer supports 32-bit applications since the release of Catalina. So you can not use QuickTime for animation output in Carrara. Instead use sequenced output.
I've been looking for a long time to find something else. But there is nothing like it. If so, it's way too expensive and can't do what Carrara can. Vue is simply too expensive and does not have many functions that have long been integrated in Carrara. For me, Blender's operation is just a bit too focused on modeling. Everything needs to be recreated. That's why I went this route to be able to continue using Carrara. For this I installed a virtual machine on the Mac, Parallels or VirtualBox, in which macos Mojave is installed. Now I can continue to use Carrara to its full extent without changing or restarting the computer. It works really great. It's a cheap and good solution. I invested the money I saved in Zbrush. :)
Carrara works for me in Catalina. Others have had issues with opening existing files. I haven't been able to try it on a newer operating system because I can't upgrade (my computer is too old).
I tried virtualization with Parallels just to see how it would work and it was very s low. Carrara was only using one core to render. What king of rendering speeds have you achieved?
Hello,
If you are not into blender, but willing to experiment, you may try to run Carrara on Linux via Wine HQ. It works decently enough. At least on my computer it uses all cores available. The only thing to note is that it is better not to cancel rendering operations as Carrara may crash then and Cloth plug-in by Sparrowhawke didn;t work (last time I tried, was many year ago). But most things work except posibly for a few plug-ins and latest DAZ 3D dolls. Victoria 4 and Michael 4 seem to be doing fine. And everything else seem to be working pretty well, especially considering it was not designed to be wine hq friendly.
However, if you are not nostalgic, I would go with Blender 3D. Version 3 is awesome. Functionality wise it is bonkers. Who needs Maya anymore?
And it only is more complicated if you do advanced things. Nowadays for simple 3D tasks blender is almost as simple as Carrara is if you take time to learn fundamentals of Blender's ui. Everything esle is similar, just with plenty more functionality.
Thanks for the suggestions, everyone. I have it running on an older WIndows PC that I kept around for things like this. I will probably try these suggestions when I don't have a deadline looming :-)
That's a good plan, I did the same for the discontinued Abobe Pagemaker for a long time, using it for a newsletter I put out. Eventually I moved to Xara, but the old machine bought me many years.
I work with Parallels 17 pro and my iMac with i7 processor there uses Carrara 7 of 8 cores. (or whatever I set. The whole thing costs 99.00 per year, the student variant only uses 2 cores. That's very slow That's right, as I said, Vue costs far more per year and can't do that much. I have Cararra also running under Catalina there I can use all the cores but it's not much faster but it doesn't work very well, especially importing image data and all 3D data like OBJ dae etc.
For several years, Vue "Creator" licenses have gone on sale for around $100/year, a couple of times a year including "Black Friday". I agree Carrara has features that Vue does not, and I use it a lot more. But VUE can do some great environmental renders/animations. I only upgraded to the subscription version because my older paid for version does not support my 12 core/24 thread AMD CPU like the latest version. It makes animation in VUE much more feasible. Here is a fun feature that I will remember if I draw the "Fantasy" genre in the 48 Hour Film Contest: