Forum: Carrara


Subject: Carrara 5 Pro Poser Import/Export

Angelouscuitry opened this issue on Sep 09, 2006 ยท 12 posts


nomuse posted Sun, 10 September 2006 at 3:25 PM

Couple things on making Poser morphs; Poser's worldspace is extremely small. Without any adjustment, Poser figures are essentially invisible in Carrara. Fortunately, they can be scaled up, worked on, then scaled down with no ill-effect -- but I have noticed a frequent Y-axis displacement, to an amount of about a quarter of a Poser unit, on many of the times I have done so. For the simplest morph workflow, start by zeroing the figure in the Poser window. That is, turn off IK, open Joint Editor, hit "zero figure," then go to hip and BODY channels and make sure there is no displacement. Now you can export the figure's geometry, one body part at a time. I list this method because it is also the best method to build clothing for a morphed figure. However, I presume it is possible to open Carrara, navigate to Runtime:Geometries, and take the base figure geometry from there. That skips the zeroing step. I believe that with the right import settings in Carrara you could split up the body parts during the import (and save having to do it during the Poser export stage). As a rule I disable "automatic position" and "scale to workspace" (I forget what the exact names of these options are, and my copy of Carrara is tied up in a render at the moment). I use "vertex" as the mode, "One polymesh" (not "polymesh for each material") and "One group." As of Carrara 5 pro, this imports a correct Poser figure with named groups and materials groups intact. Also as of Carrara 5 pro, it will export the same way. Not important for morph targets but essential for other projects! Oh...the Poser settings are "Use existing groups" and "Use bodpart names" -- I think everything else is unchecked. IF during the morph work in Carrara the object file didn't get disturbed in position, it is as easy as exporting -- from the Modeling Room, NOT from the Assembly Room. Open Poser, open the figure to add the morph to, double-click the body part and navigate to that exported object file. IF, however, you are getting a fly-away morph, what I do is Import to Poser...with everything unchecked....switch to ortho camera and wireframe view, zoom in close and align the thing by hand. When done, I export obj again from Poser, with the same defaults as before. NOW I open the figure, double-click on body part et al to navigate to my "repaired" morph file. Which is why a lot of my project files tend to have names like "shirtLo_polyDrapedSubbedPoser_scaledUV_fixed.obj"