I'm not here to complain, but it seems to me that creative, dynamic plugins have not been coming out as fast as they once were - 

I like the direction Akura's plugins were going - the swarm and the mesh displacement.  
The gears and wheels, belts, and track plugins ( sorry, I forget who is working on these) - I guess I like the model and animation plugins, vs. the material/ shader ones - although I have several shader plugins and use them often.

I would like to see a magnet for the hair in Carrara - something that could act as wind.  I'd also like to attach different tips to the Carrara hair, like AG has.  It could allow for animated fire, flowers, what have you.  

Okay, a question about bones/ rigs:  When I bring a figure from Poser, it comes in with bones.  It doesn't have these bones in Poser.  If I take the skeleton off / detach so I can add something to the figure in vertex room - spikes or another clothing article, or adjust the clothing, then when I reattach the bones, I loose the easy dials... and the morphs are gone too, I think...  

Is there a way around this?  Is there a way to bring in the figure and have it be native in Carrara, keeping the morphs even after detaching the skeleton?  

I'm just thinking and asking aloud.  Creds to all the developers out there, my fist part of the this post is just to get feedback on the climate of plugins - not to complain.
R

Never Give Up!

 Knowing what most of the plug-in developer do for a "real" job, many of them have been very, very busy with there work leaving little time for additional development for the Carrara folks.

This is always a fine line to walk. To make it more worth the developers time, they need to earn more money. The plug-ins for Carrara are EXTREMELY low priced when compared to the plugs for other 3D software. Of course, when you charge more you loose clients. 

Additionally, because of the heritage of Carrara and it's price-point, a large portion of the Carrara user base are hobbyists that aren't willing to pay as much as pro studios. The Carrara market is really growing rapidly now though so who knows.

I'm just happy to have most of the plugs ported over to the Mac side now! 

These things take time. Not like you have big name studios driving the development, but then again they tend not to use the bargain budget software either.

I guess there's also a different time table for free vs. purchase plugins. Just be glad the free ones are as remarkably good as they are. Only other thing to do is provide occasional useful feedback on what plugins there are so they can be fine tuned and made even better in the future.

Also note DAZ has been juggling a lot of stuff lately. So the climate for official plugins probably isn't the best it could be right now. (Priorities are probably making the software more reliable and easier to use, rather than developing neat add-ons.)

---

Barbequed Pixels?

Your friendly neighborhood Wings3D nut.
Also feel free to browse my freebies at ShareCG.
There might be something worth downloading.

 Ha, DCG just release a cool update for Anything Goos!

I think that a large number of needs could be solved if DAZ put a script language in the next release of carrara. Lightwave have millions of plugins based on scripting.

-TOXE

 

Quote -  Ha, DCG just release a cool update for Anything Goos!

That was my fault.  :)

I started playing around with Shading Domains for the first time last week (I've used Carrara since the RayDream days and I'm still only using 10% of what Carrara can do).  So of course I had to tell Eric about Anything Goos (my most-used plugin) ignoring Shading Domains the minute I noticed it not working the way I wanted it to.  He updated the plugin the next day.

The more we push these plugins (and Carrara's features) the more ideas we can give to the software programmers for updates.  Otherwise, they don't get updated.

www.youtube.com/user/ShawnDriscollCG

Quote -  I'm not here to complain, but it seems to me that creative, dynamic plugins have not been coming out as fast as they once were

...

I'm just thinking and asking aloud.  Creds to all the developers out there, my fist part of the this post is just to get feedback on the climate of plugins - not to complain.
R

You're absolutely right, but from a DCG perspective things are starting to ramp back up again.

Toon! Pro is deep in a big update, some of which I've shown off in one of the threads at the DAZ forums. Shading domain level control of lines, colors, etc., massive decrease in memory usage, better management of Cell shading especially for DAZ style content, and a few other things.

Anything Goos got its update this weekend. The quick turn around was actually due to some of the work I had finished on the Toon! Pro update. One of the shared tools I use in TP and AGoos had recently been updated to support the very thing I needed to help with Shonner's request. It's always fun to leverage code that way.

There are two new Shaders Plus tools in the can, I just need to get around to posting them to the beta testers for some validation.

And finally, I've started design work on a new bundle of shader operators which will probably be named More Shader Ops, Shader Ops Too, Shader Ops Reloaded, or something along those lines.

Regards,

Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
Carrara and LightWave plug-ins

Thanks Eric.
(But!!--will I ever fully grasp the full potentials of the wonderful Enhance C plugin?---what a WOW!)

bwtr

 Bwtr, you keep touting the praises of Enhance C - one of these days I'm going to have to break down and buy it.  

Never Give Up!

OP. try out the demos version--really, I think it is by far the most comprehensive plugin ever for Carrara. I dont think I will ever fully grasp or utilise its full potentials. I just play around the edges with it!

bwtr

It's great for rivits.

www.youtube.com/user/ShawnDriscollCG