Subtitles of the Movie

So, what exactly is bright, shiny, and new with Carrara 7? When Carrara 6 launched it had a whole long laundry list of new additions to the program. Well, Carrara 7 doesn't have quite as an extensive a list, but what has been added to Carrara has been added to really enhanced the ability of advanced users and professional users to utilize the program. Whether you're new to the program or whether you're new to 3D in general, that's very good because it means that Carrara can simply do more for you and you probably won't be outgrowing it. So, let's take a look at some of the things that have been added to this program. Fundamentally everything that's been added is to increase some really sophisticated usage of things you can do in Carrara. One of my favorites that have been added to the program is 3D painting. That means when you're working in the Assembly Room you can actually use paint brushes with brushes just like you do in Photoshop and paint directly on your models. Now this is true for models that you create; it's also true for models that you import. Not only can you paint on them, but you can control Layers in the paintings just like you do in Photoshop. Inside of Carrara you can add multiple Layers, you can control Blending effects from both Color, Bump, Specularity, that is, how shiny it is, and a host of other options that make detailing up models so much easier and faster to do. Something else that has been a long-awaited feature is the ability to work on different vertex or polygon models in one room without having to have the model in all its complexity as a single object. Specifically, this is useful for people making clothes and wanting to put the clothes on characters. Having the characters and the clothes in the same model is really memory-intensive on the computer because the models themselves are so high resolution. Well, a great work-around for that is this ability now to model and work with the vertex models directly in the actual Assembly Room so you can see how they relate to the other objects in the scene. Something kind of related to the two, between the modeling and the painting, is the ability to go ahead and do some UV unwrapping and unfolding. UV's are the coordinates given to the computer system to tell Carrara where to place the textures or the colors you're working with. Now Carrara has always has UV mapping. The difference to this enhancement is, is that now you can do specific model builds and then unwrap the geometry into a flat plane very accurately to better control how you work with your texture maps. This is true for texture maps you export and build completely in an outside program like Photoshop, or ones that you start working on directly inside Carrara later on. Another Pro level feature that has been added and is a great enhancement is the ability to do multi-task rendering. What this allows for is not only having an image render out of the program, but additional layers of information that come out with it. So, after the render has been done you also have information about where ambient lighting is, how far away things are from the camera, and many other items that you can import into programs like Photoshop to control the image later, or more importantly, for people using video editors, you can load these separate channels in to control ambient light, to actually change the entire color of the lighting afterwards, or to add additional lighting all without having to re-render the file out of Carrara. For a single image, that's not such a big deal, but when you're working with an animation that may have, oh, 2500, 3000 frames, that is a huge time-saver. Another important little feature that's been added is levels of detail. For people that utilize DAZ content, and that's animals, or people-figures, you now have the ability to control how much detail is displayed depending on how close the object is to the camera. This is a huge computer resource saver, meaning that if you've got multiple people in your scene you're not going to bring your computer to its knees trying to manage all the detail. The levels of detail that you give instructions to specific objects, telling how much detail needs to be represented on the screen while you're working with it, and how much detail's to be rendered when your render the file out. Something else very nice for people doing animations is the ability now not only to use non-linear editing, the ability to create animation and clips you can drag around and change the time on super fast with no keyframing, but now you can also layer and nest these non-linear groups which gives you the ability to create very sophisticated animation but very easily and controllably with the ability to fold up and unfold the groups you work with. Another important thing I want to bring up is that this tutorial. series is being completed in Carrara 7.1.1, the most recent release when this tutorial series was begun. The reason I bring that up is that if you don't have it, it should be a free download if you purchased the program directly from DAZ. There have been some additional items in Carrara 7.1 that are worth noting. One of those are some render optimizations that allow for more accurate renderings with less issues sometimes in certain unique instances where shadows are called upon to be fuzzy or anything like that. Also, a big favorite of mine, is that there are tremendous improvements in caustic rendering, and that is rendering that causes reflections through water, light passing through glass, that type of thing. Carrara's been good at that, now it's really good at that. Also, Collada Export has been improved. That is a standard created by Sony, actually, for passing 3D information between 3D programs and gaming applications. It's becoming quickly the standard for how to pass especially game-development animations or objects back and forth between different programs, and of course, there are many, many bug fixes, some of them have been laying in wait for a long time and some are new. Carrara 7.1.1 is a very, very solid application to begin working with. So, with that, let's jump into our next section and start looking at the interface of Cararra Pro.