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Octane Render v2 plugin for Carrara has just been released. Some of you probably own Carrara as I do. Genesis works with Carrara as does most of the DAZ and Poser content. With the current state of the DAZ plugin, sad to say, you can see where I'm going with this...

Scenes saved as duf wih Daz studio will open in Carrara however you may have to re-map some octane textures

The Carrara plugin is fantastic .... and very stable!! Just like with the internal render engine in Carrara, some of your materials/shaders will need to be redone. If you have certain shaders that you want to use more than once, you can just save them to your Carrara shader library and re-apply them as needed (all Octane shaders intact). You can also export the entire scene to .ocx or .orbx for use in Octane stand alone.

The interface/workflow is a lot different than the DS plugin, but it's pretty easy to get used to (it's similar to Luxus for Carrara if you have that). I really like it, but at the same time there are still some things that work better in DS (i.e. some Genesis content has issue in Carrara), so I won't be ditching the DS plugin completely. However, if push came to shove, and I could only have one, I'd go with the Carrara plugin hands down. The rate at which Sighman fixed some of the issues during the closed beta was truly amazing.

Sighman posted in the DAZ 3D Carrara forum that he hopes to have a demo version available by this weekend, so I'd say give it a good test drive when the demo becomes available. There might be some things in the Carrara plugin that you simply hate, or you might find that it is a great fit. But if your wondering about support, just like the DS plugin, it's a single developer product. However, the rate at which Sighman works is fantastic, and his communication is also top notch.

edited and removed by user

linvanchene wrote:But since this is the DAZ $tudio subforum and the Carrara plugin beta testers more or less jumped in to run some viral marketing some thoughts on this:

Actually neither Tugspx nor I "jumped in to run some viral marketing".

I came to this forum to see if there was any news on an update to the DS plugin - which I also own, and would really like to see a V2 update for (I check to see if there is any news once or twice a week). I saw the question about the Carrara plugin and offered information I thought might be relevant for Spectrails to evaluate his options with respect to his original post (Spectrails was not on the beta team). You will also note that I made reference to the fact that I plan on continuing to use the DS plugin, and that if Spectrails was interested in the Carrara plugin then he should give the demo a thorough test drive once it is available.

Spectrails, if you have any other questions about the Carrara plugin feel free to post your query in either the Carrara sub forum here, or the DAZ 3D Carrara Forum.

Thanks for the very detailed replies.

We've had no DS plugin news or software updates for ages. Estimated schedules have been and gone. Meanwhile nearly every other plugin, including those of both Poser and Carrara, have reached v2. That is the context in which I asked if the Carrara plugin might offer an alternative until v2 of the DS plugin is eventually released.

I'm definitely going to buy the Carrara plugin, not least because DS and Carrara are both pretty well integrated as far as content is concerned. The reason I posted about the Carrara plugin here is because, as others have stated, us DS plugin users have been more than patient regarding the DS plugin development and now at least there's the possibility of an alternative that we can use all our content with. As dustrider points out, we have been very loyal to DS plugin development and have willed it to catch up with the rest of the OTOY range but I'm not going to limit myself out of some false sense of loyalty to one product.

Any future questions I have about the Carrara plugin will be posted on the Carrara plugin forum.

Other than the fact that Carrara currently seems to be more of a dead end product than the OcDS, the major show stopper for me, is that from what I can see in the manual and other info, it doesn't seem to have node based material editing, if I can't have my spaghetti materials what's the point?

At the moment, exporting from DS into standalone seems like the best option to me, gives you all of the features and not that much extra work, thought I'm not yet read to go that patch full time yet, but I have been trying it out.

SiliconAya wrote:Other than the fact that Carrara currently seems to be more of a dead end product than the OcDS, the major show stopper for me, is that from what I can see in the manual and other info, it doesn't seem to have node based material editing, if I can't have my spaghetti materials what's the point?

At the moment, exporting from DS into standalone seems like the best option to me, gives you all of the features and not that much extra work, thought I'm not yet read to go that patch full time yet, but I have been trying it out.

That's an interesting point. How does not having node editing differ from the DS plugin? Does that mean I can't change a glossy into a diffuse material for example? I only have a limited understanding about this sort of thing.

From looking at http://render.otoy.com/manuals/Carrara/?page_id=483 it appears to be the same as editing a normal Carrara material, as mentioned above like Luxus works for Carrara and DS, which I never really liked all the much (but that's more a DS surface interface thing, than Luxus's).

SiliconAya wrote:From looking at http://render.otoy.com/manuals/Carrara/?page_id=483 it appears to be the same as editing a normal Carrara material, as mentioned above like Luxus works for Carrara and DS, which I never really liked all the much (but that's more a DS surface interface thing, than Luxus's).

Ok, thanks. I'v posted a thread on the Carrara forum asking about the differences between the Carrara and DS plugins. It may help identify any differences and how to adapt to them.