I'm impressed with the native Poser import option in Carrara 5! It seems like the figures have even better bending and rigging than they did in Poser itself! Very cool stuff! Now if I could just learn how to animate the rig, I'll be in business! Quick question: does Carrara allow you to link helper objects to groups of bones for faster, more efficient animating? Some apps, like the 3dsmax demo I used a while ago, allowed groups of bones to be linked to a "dummy" object, and when I moved the dummy object, it moved those bones with proper IK, etc. It made posing/animating hands, spine, and things like that easier.

jimbo, when you begin working with your scene in Carrara, I'd welcome some feedback on your impression of the slider...is it more or less sluggish than in Poser. "better bending and rigging than they did in Poser" when you import thru native, does Carrara make "Carrara bones" in its own style, as opposed to imitating the Poser-style rig? ::::: Opera :::::

Attached Link: http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/profcards/1review-3dlabs-wildcats.html

Operaguy, so far I've only imported Jessi HiRes, and it rigged her nicely. I'm not sure if it's trying to immitate Poser's rigging. I think it does put the same bone structure to the model that Poser uses, but there does seem to be a difference in the bending, which has to do with better envelopes or weighting or whatever it is called. The way the bones are set up really doesn't matter to me, it's the weight mapping and skinning that makes the mesh bend.

The slider definitely seems more sluggish to me, but I expected that. It was the same in 3dsmax demo. I was told this has everything to do with your graphics card. Some of these higher end apps require a specific type of card to get the most out of your viewport experience, one with accellerated polygon redraw rates. Most of us are using graphics cards that are geared more toward gaming, not geometry optimization. For instance, the 3dlabs Wildcat is a graphics card made specifically for polygon redraw, and was tested on apps like Lightwave and 3dsmax. You don't see many graphics cards off the shelf that show you benchmarks for anything other than games, because that's what most people want to use them for.

Here's a page showing an example of how some cards, in this case the Wildcat and Nvidia Quadro 4, are specifically optimized to enhance 3d apps.

Message edited on: 03/02/2006 08:51

Attached Link: http://www.adriansrojakpot.com/Reviews/3Dlabs_Permedia3/3Dlabs_Permedia3_01.htm

Here's some good reading on the differences between professional 3D graphics cards made for 3D applications, and those made for 3D gaming. Quote: "3D gaming cards have basically one goal in mind - the rendering of the 3D environment as fast as possible. Thus, the fillrate of the card is very important. Professional 3D cards, however, do not need the high fillrate that gaming cards need. They rely more on the polygon throughput instead. Still, many gaming cards like the RIVA TNT2 already have polygon throughputs as high as 9 million polygons / sec. The clincher however is that the 9 million polygons / sec. polygon throughput that the RIVA TNT2 is so proud of is only its peak throughput. Its sustained throughput, in reality, is much lower. On the other hand, professional 3D cards have very high sustained polygon throughputs. That's because professional applications like 3D Studio MAX rely heavily on polygon throughput. Because gaming cards have low sustained polygon throughput, they make very poor professional 3D cards."

I'd think both Poser and Carrara would benefit in the viewport experience from such cards as this. Right now, my Poser reaction time is terrific, especially after trial of Carrara. I get really snappy performance with the slider, etc., and I am only on a NVIDIA GeForce 5600, 256MB I wish I could get a satisfactory "look" in the preview window, so I could render animation preview in Poser. ::::: Opera :::::

You would think so, Operaguy, but guess what? That's not always the case!

For instance, in terms of gaming cards, my nVidia displays Doom 3 great, but isn't as good for HalfLife. While my friend's ATI is just the opposite!

Same is probably true for workstation graphics cards, like the Wildcat or Quadro. In fact, I recommended Poser to a guy a work, and he couldn't even get the application to open. It kept crashing when he launched it, and this was due to his video card. Workstation-level cards have hardware acceleration for things like multiple clipping planes, generally larger memory reserves, more pipelines and pixel shaders, more registers, and are optimized for larger amounts of data. I wouldn't be suprised if you couldn't even get Poser running if you used a Wildcat card.

Message edited on: 03/02/2006 09:55

Attached Link: http://www.eovia3d.net/showthread.php?t=5426

jimbo90125, You need to check this tut out. A must have for rigging in Carrara (Thomas is brilliant). Love Carrara, but it's opengl preview needs improvement.I know half-life is directx performance, don't know about doom. Nvidia tends to support more opengl features. My ati9600xt(OG2.0) does ok in carrara, but superb in DS, which is not supposed to support ati as readily as nvidia.I know of several people who had to turn off acceleration on their video for Poser 6 to work.Eovia says they use ATI9800pros so I assume that works well for them, but who knows.They may use other cards, as well.

No need to think outside the box....
    Just make it invisible.

I am getting closer every day to a Carrara descision. If I pull the trigger, I'll be purchaseing a Carrara-optimal rig, and will whant to understand this issue of the card at that time. As posted above, however, I realize that unless/until OpenGL support in Carrara is ramped up, it might not matter too much, whereas dual processor/core might. ::::: Opera :::::

Carrara offers a scinning tool,right?Is it possible to fix joint issues on Poser figures with it?

The cpu will matter more all over. The opengl could improve abit performance-wise, but the previews aren't very accurate, but improved appearance-wise over previous versions.

No need to think outside the box....
    Just make it invisible.

Timber wolf yes there are skinning tools.

No need to think outside the box....
    Just make it invisible.

I am on an AMD Athlon 3500+ now, and the recent benchmark post in this forum offers the possibility of much faster results with a high-end processor: Dual Opteron 275 6 mn 34 Athlon 64 3500+ 17 :mn 41 ::::: Opera :::::

You might want to ask the guys/gals at Eovia about the OGL card issue. Performance of consumer vs pro OGL cards is VERY dependent on the OGL implementation (focus) of the individual application.

An interesting factoid: Consumer (Gaming) cards almost always beat the performance of Pro OGL cards under "gaming" conditions, but the consumer cards don't even come close on performance in some "Pro" specific OGL functions.

So, armed with the above knowledge, the following inferences can be made. If a 3d application is looking to run on a consumer card, then it will be written to optimise OGL performance on that type of card (my guess is that OGL in Poser is optimised for consumer cards). If the developer is looking for high end OGL performance, then performance on a consumer card may not be that good, but the pro cards will have excellent performance. The big question here, what is Eovia focusing on in their OGL development since they are definitely trying to bridge the gap between "mid and high end" 3D. The best people to answer this would be those implementing OGL at Eovia.

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Message edited on: 03/03/2006 10:28

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Thanks, DustRider... that explains a lot. Poser probably runs smoother because it's looking for consumer level implimentation of OGL, while other apps that seem sluggish are looking for other implimentations. That's what I gathered. As I mentioned, Poser crashes on certain pro cards completely, while others need to reduce their acceleration rates to get it to run. Meanwhile, most cards handle it fine. It's a tricky thing this OGL.

Coding counts for alot. I sound like a broken record by now, but D|S has wonderful OGL. The preview modes and performance are just exceptional.

No need to think outside the box....
    Just make it invisible.