davidstoolie posted at 10:41PM Fri, 04 September 2015 - #4223849

Well, I was hoping to export the trees and vegetation, to render in Cycles. Cycles is probably a more powerful render engine, and I think the results will appear more realistic. I know this stuff is meant to be done in Carrara, like making forrests and stuff, but I was thinking to use the instancing with Cycles to get the same kind of duplication. I was hoping I wouldn't have to render very much in Carrara, but for outdoor stuff, I might have to.

Edit to say, I really like this plant editor, but I can see exporting this stuff might e a problem.

Carrara's renderer is one of the best biased render engines I've seen, but if you prefer the realism of an unbiased render engine than Cycles is going to be preferable. However do bear in mind that Carrara has unbiased render options too, including Luxus and Luxcore (Luxcore is currently free in beta, check out the Daz.com Carrara forums to pick it up and give it a whirl) and of course Octane for Carrara, which is truly excellent in terms of speed and realism (and also can render Carrara hair).

You can certainly turn a Carrara tree into a real object that can be exported, but it's going to be very memory heavy and though Carrara has no trouble at all handling tons of trees, replicated into thousands more, I think most other apps would choke because they will handle them differently than Carrara does.