Welcome to the Poser 4 to Carrara 3 tutorial. The following steps are what I use when rendering a Poser scene in Carrara. Word on the net is that there is a plug in development to handle this sort of operation, but until then, I will do it this way. Im sure there are other ways of reaching the same goal, some use the grouper tool, but I have had a rather unsuccessful attempt at it. Others do not. If that seems to work for you, by all means, go for it. When setting up your scene, remember where your texture files are, you will need to reference them later. So here we go.

Fig 01 set up your scene up in poser. Once you are ready, select File Export Wavefront Obj

Fig 02 Export range Single Frame

Fig 03 Heres where you select what is going to be exported. I usually leave this alone unless there is something in my scene that I dont want to use.

Fig 04 Select a location for you Obj file and give it a name. Remember where you save it.

Fig 05 I leave this setting alone. There is an option of checking Include body part names in polygon groups. I leave this unchecked This keeps the figure as one whole instance as opposed to breaking the object down into its multiple parts and provides less of a hassle when retexturing everything.

We are now done with poser. Launch Carrara. Fig 06 Start a new scene.

Fig 07 Select import

Fig 09 Here are the options for importing. This is the setting I use. Im sure there is a rhyme and reason for this, but I wont go into that here, this is what works for me and this tutorial. Feel free to experiment on your own.

Fig 10 Carrara now wants to know where all the textures are. Head over to your poser/ runtime/ textures folder (or where ever you keep the textures for Poser) and load them in the order that it asks for. This may take some time at first, but the more you do imports, the faster you become. Im relatively quick at finding the textures that I need.

Fig 11 Once all the textures have been loaded, Victoria appears. She will be very small at first, so I just scale her up to what I feel I can work with.

Fig 12 Victoria needs some work.

Fig 13 Now I select Victoria. She is identified in Carrara as Figure 1. I click on edit, and the material room opens.

Fig 14 My first step is to work on the skin tone. Because I use a tone in Poser other than white underneath the skin texture, I change mine in Carrara as well to match. Change COLOR from Texture Map to Operators / Multiply. Source 1 should be the texture map for Victoria; Source 2 I change to color and using the RGB slider option, I match what I had in Poser.

Fig 15 I repeat the same process for the Head Texture.

Fig 16 UpperEyebrows I make these transparent and set all the options to none My figure is incorrect. Make sure that you are editing the UpperEyebrows. The regular Eyebrows material zone, I apply the same options as in Fig 14.

Fig 17 Lips I apply the same texturing that I had done in Fig 14. If you have a bump map for lips that you like to use, this would be a good time to apply it. For the sake of this tutorial, I am going to move one with out one.

Fig 18 Eyelashes Here is where it gets fun. Im going to nail two birds with one stone here, as the same steps apply to the hair. 1- I change Highlight Shininess and Refraction to none 2- Under transparency load your Transmap that you use in Poser, and select Invert Color 3- Check No light interactions when fully transparent 4- Click the plus sign at the lower left of the Parametric Mapping object we are editing, be careful not to select the plus that is all the way down at the bottom of the list, and select Cover All Layer 5- Set Shader to Value = 0% 6- Opacity Mask will have the same settings as in Transparency

Fig 19 Here is where I have noted a large amount of topic. I use a two-step process. Others may disagree, but this is what I use. 1- Eyeballs Set transparency to 100% 2- Check No Light Interactions When Fully Transparent

Fig 20 Hair Repeat the steps in Fig 18

Fig 21 When it comes time to render, dont forget to check Light Through Transparency this isnt set as a default.

The only thing left really is to apply any bump maps that you may want. This about wraps up the tutorial. Im sure there is more than one-way to do this. The Grouper tool being one of them, others have a different way of doing transparency and the eyes. This is just I do things. It may seem daunting at first, and you may be frustrated by the amount of steps, but once you do this a few times, things begin to move rather quickly. I nail the above 20 steps in a matter of 2 minuets because I know what my next step will be. If you have ANY questions, please IM me. Now get out there and start rendering. Regards E871

I think you did a great job on this. Your method for the upper-eyebrow material is one option, but you might also consider using the head texture as a transparency map.

Yes, there are other options, Ill try that one. Thanks. Just a note that "Fig 16" is incorrect. In the picture, I should be editing the "UpperEyebrow" and not "eyebrow" as shown in the picture. Thanks again, E

This is great and would make an excellent tutorial for the Carrara section, here on Renderosity and possibly for the Carrara Back Room. Excellent job. This makes it tons easier then other tuts I have read on the subject. Most of the others use grouper, which is not available on the Mac. Your tutorial is Mac friendly too! Thank You! regards, Paul

Cool. I'd normally point people to the tutorial at castironflamingo but this one is easier to follow and won't confuse people w/o Grouper. :)

Thanks, This makes it all nice & simple, running Grouper on a Mac in virtual PC is a pain in the virtual A**. Because of the Macs handy Print-to-PDF feature I have saved this as PDF. Cheers, Grav.

Anytime I see something screech across a room and latch onto someone's neck, and the guy screams and tries to get it off, I have to laugh, because what is that thing?

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=555043&Start=1&Artist=agiel&ByArtist=Yes

Nice tutorial to follow. I followed the same approach to make this picture (see the link), although I did not know about the tutorial beforehand. I picked up a couple of tricks here that I will surely apply next time. Thanks

• agiel - www.linfa.net

Nice work, agiel. I see you used the upper eyebrow transmap, too.

thanks Echo! that looks a lot easier than my current technique using grouper. thanks again!! =) this tut is going under my bookmarked pages

Thanks to my handy Adobe Acrobat 6 Pro I was able to simply save your tutorial using the standard print to PDF printer. Thanks, I'll have to give this a try.

Most of this tutorial can be used in Carrara 5 but there is no choosing "upper eyebrow".  Can anyone tell me how I can do this??  The Edit room layout seems to be a bit different than this tutorials layout and more options. 

I have trouble getting the meshes eyebrows to become invisible as the eyebrows are painted onto the texture already!! 

HELP??

Thanks much

Richard ;-)~

---Wolff On The Prowl---

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A screen shot for the eyebrows was not done but this is just showing what my layout looks like in the Edit room and I really would love to know what I need to do to make the eyebrows that are part of V3 invisible so the texture map mapped to the main face mesh can show through properly! 

Thanks again

Richard ;-)~

---Wolff On The Prowl---

My Store is HERE

My Freebies are HERE  

OK, got it figured out.  "Light Through Transparency" checked off in the Rendering room does the trick but my lord does it slow down the rendering time!!   Any way to speed it up and still have that ticked off so I get the full effect?? 

Thanks

Richard ;-)~

---Wolff On The Prowl---

My Store is HERE

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Thank you this is very helpfull even out of poser..

"Luck comes and goes...Knowledge Stays Forever!"

Jennifer

www.3dtraining.ch

WOW! You dug this post up from December 2004!!! I had forgotten all about it. It was originally for V2, so thats why there is some difference. When you say "long rendering time", thats very relative to other settings. For me a "long render time" constitutes anything around an hour. The posted image, full onslaught of the highest settings at an resolution of 1280x800 was about 45 min. (and i still dont like it) What settings are you using? Regards, E

There are so many settings.  Not sure what you need to see?? 

Raytracing

(unchecked)
Full Raytracing
Gamma Correction

(checked)
Shadows
Reflections
Refraction
Depth of Field
Bump
Transparency
Light through Trans

I have 3 lights in the scene, I have only one of them checked for shadows and have Soft Shadows checked in the Effects tab set to Fast

Let me know if there are any other settings you need in order to get this as optimized as possible.  I don't mind a slow render if it's for the full on render but the "spot" render is really taking allot of time as I think it works off of the current settings for full rendering.  It took about 10 minutes to get that little screen capture I posted! 

Richard ;-)~

---Wolff On The Prowl---

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Soft shadows will slow the render down. I never turn them on until I actually render. When you want to do a spot render, i would turn the settings down (soft shadows, GI, AO and such). E

Thanks so much for the tips!! :-)

All the best

Richard ;-)~

---Wolff On The Prowl---

My Store is HERE

My Freebies are HERE