Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Well, perhaps.
But we Carrara artists are the one's who are missing the move. Daz3d is now opening up their doors again for new Published Artists to emerge from this community. WE are the one's dropping the ball right now. We need to get our knowledge of Carrara put into the good use of creating some great products to help people along in our software. Daz has their hands full enough right now... and it's with some VERY important developments. We need to follow Howie Farkes lead and produce some Carrara content that truly makes the community's heads turn! And submit them to Daz.
As for the earlier post, I rarely, if ever swear at Carrara - and it almost never crashes on me. Sorry you feel duped.
Over 180 Carrara items just searching on Carrara. http://www.daz3d.com/shop/catalogsearch/result/?q=Carrara&x=8&y=9
That's good to hear! Wish I had the time and knowledge to be a PA. Maybe some day.
One of these days I'm buying your dragon animation set! :)
Not many problems at all here unless I do something stupid. Mostly Windows XP Pro 32 bit and sometimes recently Windows XP x64, but I don't have everything over on that box yet. My Vista machine's mobo died and I can't afford Windows 7 and the Windows 8 beta download keeps stopping half way through. The crashes with Carrara and all programs for that matter on my x64 box stopped when I upgraded my video card drivers.
If they had that we wouldn't have those low DAZ prices. It's a tradeoff. Those of us who are brave and patient enough are the beta testers. I usually don't have time to contribute to that part of the cause.
The usual procedure is that they have most of their developers working on one program at a time. They've had a few working on Carrara while mainly work has been ongoing on Genesis and Studio, but now that Studio is working better with 4.5 out, maybe those folks are now working on Carrara again. I hope so at least.
I have taken my time responding to this thread because I wanted to think my post through because so many people had insightful things to say.
I'm in the same boat. I do this professionally and I'm making about HALF of what I did 4 years ago. Customers are much harder to bring in, more expensive to service, and harder to lock into a long term contract. I would buy much more Carrara content, but the dollars aren't there.
I can't really agree with you on this point. People who are having problems with the software are having problems with the software. People don't complain because things are going right,they complain because things are going wrong. If a person is having a good experience, that's GREAT! Makes me happy to see, but we shouldn't disparage someone who is struggling.
Now for my part, I love being able to use Daz/Poser content. I can take even a Gen1 prop into the Shader room (which I really don't know all that well) and do a few things and make it look like a brand new prop. I really hope we can get more Carrara specific stuff. I have purchased quite a bit and will hopefully pick up more during the PA sale (Hopefully, from Holyforest).
How is Daz opening up the Doors for new PA artists?
In order to get more artists we need to get the user base to fully understand how the software works.
Can't put the cart before the horse.
Kevin helped us with this reminder "Over 180 Carrara items just searching on Carrara. http://www.daz3d.com/shop/catalogsearch/result/?q=Carrara&x=8&y=9"
Yes , you are right Kevin. But how about if Daz would put that whole search item as one of the drop down menu items on the front page of store. . Right now ---If you just look at the drop down menu items and you click on software Carrara ---you will only see 34 items . If people do not think of of searching ---they miss out.
In merchandising --you have to get the product in the customer face . And that's just all I am saying. They don't with Carrara very well. In my opinion.
And I do not want to sound like I am negative to Carrara --I totally think its a wonderful application. It does a whole lot of things and On the last 8.1 production build for windows --its great. Working on a small personal project right now with it and its been solid.
So ----I am just one of those users who hopes for best.....but still Daz can be a little frustrating sometimes with how they handle Carrara so a little arm chair quarterbacking helps a little now and then to blow off some frustration while rendering. lol
I think most users hope for the best for Carrara and Daz.
Even if people search, some items come up, some come up that aren't even Carrara items. I searched for Carrara hair and found many items that weren't Carrara hair or even hair.
You're right, the product needs to be right in people's faces.
Once again, all of this discussion comes down to a simple arithmetic problem....
If you sell 200 copies at $400 a piece, that's $80,000.
That's it. That's the whole issue. That probably won't even pay for one developer to work for one year, much less some folks to work on marketing so that everyone will know how awesome Carrara is, or website designers to fix the website problems, or bug fixers to check and fix the bugs, or on and on.....
If you owned the company, would you take a chance and spend $500,000 (that you probably don't have and probably can't get) to make Carrara and its marketing and stability and awesomeness better than it is today, realizing that you'd have to sell at least five times as many copies just to break even? When everyone can download DAZ Studio and Hex and Bryce and Blender for free? At a time when the economy is sagging, and obtaining loans and investor $$ is extremely difficult, if not impossible, especially if you don't have a really, really good sales pitch to show how you're going to get that money back?
That's a huge risk, and one that I doubt anyone here would make. It's not about love for Carrara. It has absolutely nothing to do with love for Carrara. It's about running a business and trying to make money, and investing where you have a very good likelihood to make your money back, with a profit. And right now that's content. You may not like that answer, but it's a fact.
If they are really struggling, I agree. But I'm talking about those who obviously have system issues of some kind when everyone else can't duplicate their issues. Yet they go on blindly insisting their computer is wonderful meanwhile spreading a ton of negativity and venom, and at times blasting away at DAZ employees trying to help. I'd much rather see people calm way down before posting and then politely state what is wrong. It's even more grating when they blast away at people like Andy (3dage) when he's the most patient and helpful soul on the planet.
Seems very clear to me. And to keep Carrara rolling along at any kind of improving pace does require sales of content and software which I've been saying forever. A couple years ago some folks got all upset with me then for saying that. DAZ spends money on Studio because it helps sell content. If we could get the content folks interested in Carrara (buyers and makers) that could help keep it alive. It may just take some nice shiny pictures to get it rolling again like what happened when Howie's scenes hit the market.
The only way I can think of where we would see dramatic improvement, though (other than outstanding to die for plugins), would be if someone actually used it to make a film project and kicked in some development cash - that's where messiah's improvements have come from (granted slowly since it's mostly Fori doing the work - and use on multiple projects) and similarly with Animation:Master but with the owner of it trying to make a point in that instance. They each have much smaller developer staffs compared to DAZ. But that is a rarity these days to see someone with money to burn and it's not to be counted on.
I would really like to see Snaps in the assembly room / vertex modeler for Carrara, like Hexagon has.
They would be very useful and eliminate a lot of back and forth between views to check alignments when doing more Arch Vis type work.
DG
yeah, that would sure help a lot. However, after you get the big surge in sales from everyone seeing some awesome work from someone who really knew what they were doing, and bought and started using Carrara, suddenly the reality would set in, and people would start asking questions like, "hey, wait a minute, it doesn't even have fluids? And the fire is pretty suck. And the smoke sucks too. And no cloth?? And it doesn't even have a fancy renderer? Hell, Blender is free and it has all that stuff. And my stuff looks nowhere near as cool as that independent film looked. What they hell did I pay all that money for?"
If your only response is, "yeah, but it has 180 plugins you can pay for, too", you're gonna have a problem.
It's like the cart before the horse. You can't advertise what you ain't got. So you need to make Carrara awesome first, somehow, then advertise it as being awesome using an awesome independent film or whatever.
It's a fairly impossible situation, and really that's why development and improvement of really complicated software like this is an extremely long term project that takes a lot of risk over a long time. Personally, I think Carrara is so far behind the times in terms of fancy features that everyone wants that it will likely never recover.
yeah, I tend to agree. If there's one thing that the PC version of Carrara has going for it, and historically (at least in the time I've been using it) has had going for it, is that it is pretty stable. Crashes are extremely rare, though with the lastest betas I'm getting some goofy error messages and an occasional lockup. But previous release versions have been surprisingly stable, IMO.
Sounds like the Mac versions are a different story, though.
This makes sense. There is a lot of content out there already for Poser/Daz. I approached a few vendors and offered to test in Carrara and make a few promo renders. To date I have approached about 4 or 5 vendors. Vendors who claimed their sales were not what they had hoped. Want to guess how many of them took me up on my offer? Hell, I didn't even hear back from them. I guess sales weren't that soft after all.
Over in Renderosity, there is so much content that no one has tested in Daz or Carrara. None of the people I approached had an interest.
Stupid thing is it couldn't help but boost sales. Even if they only sold a few extra items, it would be worth it.
True. The 3D Man has helped me out a good many times.
I guess I view it different. I see DAZ as creators of great content who bought up older software to run it. It's obvious the company is still in content sell mode.
Don't get me wrong, I like Carrara but I see it as a dead end. A platform for DAZ's content, nothing more. I always heard how bad Blender was in it's interface. Then you read how people use several programs to make up for what lacks in all the programs they use. Since digging into Blender, I love the "one program to do it all" aspect. As hard as it is to learn, it beats learning several, buying more plug ins to make up for what program A doesn't do..................
Do I loose out by not using Carrara? Sure. I miss the interface and ease of use. That's about it. I have no use for the DAZ Dollies. My interests are building content for simulators. With Carrara it's, build, add Baker for Normal Maps, export to Blender to get the game exporters I need........ May as well just use Blender and skip the added costs of plug ins. Rather use one hard to learn interface than several along with importing/exporting between them.
Just think DAZ's interests and cash flow are in content, not programs and some good programs are withering on the vine.
yeah, I tend to agree. If there's one thing that the PC version of Carrara has going for it, and historically (at least in the time I've been using it) has had going for it, is that it is pretty stable. Crashes are extremely rare, though with the lastest betas I'm getting some goofy error messages and an occasional lockup. But previous release versions have been surprisingly stable, IMO.
Sounds like the Mac versions are a different story, though.
I have to say that C7.2 Pro on my Mac has been pretty stable. Much more so than C5 was. I do run a fairly clean system, utility and application wise and I read up on the latest OS updates to see what gets broken or acts buggy.
I guess it's a matter of "to each, his own" sort of thing. Those of us who live in Carrara currently have already lurked around within much of what Carrara has to offer. Daz3d bringing version 8 Pro to the 64 bit table is a sign to me that this horse ain't dead!
We have some great plugin creators - and hopefully, once this whole update is done, they'll stay on board with us. We also have, in our Carrara community, some very impressive artists and adventurous physics and particles users. Are we really that tight a niche? I don't think so. You would think that, having the ability to add your own, custom morphs to your models - whether custom or store bought - would be a viable enough reason for the slight up-shift in price. But that barely touches the extra benefits that one can get with Carrara.
I'd also like to add, once again, just in case any Daz devs might read this thread, that I feel that they've done a remarkable job with version 8 - which was a large undertaking. But I also think that they're doing the right thing by working through this thing to make it work even better. They've taken the poll and made the decision to add Genesis compatibility to Carrara (I was one of the voters in favor). Instead of calling it quits, they're still working to make it better for D|S and Carrara and I can tell by the ride that it's not been easy on them. Hats off to you all. I think that Daz3d DOES have what it takes and that they do have the marketing insight to be able to bring our Carrara to the next level - should they so choose. In the meantime, it's doing exactly what I bought it to do - and in ways that far surpass my original intentions.
For suggestions toward the wishlist, I like Holly's plan.
I just want to buy a permenant serial number for the damned thing.
I like Genesis, I quite like the not quite the latest but quite stable version I am using, happy to update to next beta when the bugs are squashed, prepared to pay already just so I do not have to worry about expiry dates all the damned time.