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Southwest Gaming ExpoWorkshop on Network and Systems Support for Games (NetGames 2009)ICIDS 2009 Interactive StorytellingGlobal Game Jam
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Jump to: Software All product reviews |
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Introduction
Carrara Studio is a bit of a foster child. It started out over at MetaCreations as merge of the features of their 3D software suites, Ray Dream Designer and Infini-D, only with a modern UI inspired by such "organic" software as Bryce. After MetaCreations divested themselves of most of their content creation products, it ended up in the hands of Eovia and was sold alongside the NURBS-based modeler Amapi. Finally it was purchased by DAZ 3D and is now sold on their site alongside Bryce and a fairly huge collection of 3D models.
The current version is 5.1, and there's a new version 6 announced with some new features mentioned at the DAZ3D forums. Hopefully I'll be able to post an updated review in a few weeks that'll show off the new stuff.
Like most 3D software, Carrara Studio exists in different tiers. The two tiers for Carrara are "Standard" ($249), and "Pro" ($549), although they're on sale at the time of this review pending the new release. There's a comparison chart here that shows the differences between 'em. Note that there's also a "Carrara Basics" available for $99, but it's built around Carrara 3, so I won't be reviewing that.
The Scene Wizard
One feature that I really like about Carrara Studio is the scene wizard. Unlike most 3D tools that just set up a default angle and a single camera for you when you start a scene, Carrara gives you that option or the choice of pre-made scenes. There are a few dozen, and they're very well done. You can choose from scenes that are indoors, outdoors, or in space.
The scene wizard showing several simple outdoor scenes with flat ground and a blue sky (click for full size)
For me, this was a terrific timesaver. One problem I always had with modeling something simple was that if I wanted to see how my item looked when rendered, I had to build a new ground-plane, skybox, and a distant light, lest I end up with the default "black background and ambient light" render that's not very helpful. With Carrara Studio, I could just click on a "wizarded" scene, drop in my model, and see if it looked reasonable outdoors or indoors.
The column of categories along the left allow you to choose from lots of different scenes, and you can add your own to the list if you have a particular ground-sky-lighting combination that you prefer.
Some desert scenes with more interesting ground textures.
The Carrara Studio UI
While the UI of Carrara Studio started out a bit like Bryce (and Amapi and now Quidam), it's grown a bit more conventional with each iteration. Here's my setup. It's not quite the default, as I moved some of the vertical toolbars up to the top to give myself a bit more room for my scene.
The Carrara Studio UI showing off one of the default interior scenes in the Assemble room.
As you can see, there's a lot there, but it's fairly well organized. Along the very top is a standard menubar. To the right of the menubar is a row of five icons and an "Assemble" label. Those are the "rooms". Rooms are a unique feature of Carrara Studio, so I'll spend a little time explaining 'em in a minute.
Underneath the menubar is a row of tools. Most of 'em are fairly standard, select, resize, rotate, etc. Some of the more interesting-looking buttons in the middle are for things like trees, terrains, volumetric clouds, and particle-effects. The buttons on the far right control how you can pan and rotate your scene.
The two panels along the right edge show the properties of the selected object (the back seat-cushion of the chair in this case) as well as the heirarchy of objects in the scene.
In the titlebar of the document (the one labeled "3DView of Doc2" in the screenshot) there are some further buttons to control things like your views (one big 3D view or the 2-angle or 3-angle view) as well as how much you want to render (bounding boxes, wireframe, surface shading, or full textures).
Along the bottom of the window is the animation timeline. Animation is quite simple to do in Carrara Studio. If you want to animate your scene, you simply move the current-frame slider (the blue triangle at the top of the timeline) to the point you want and make changes to your scene. Any objects you move or change at that time will have keyframes created automatically. This also applies to things like lights and cameras so making a camera fly-through animation is quite simple to do.
Actually, the animation "drawer" along the bottom of the screen does double-duty. Along the left edge is a vertical tab marked "browser". The browser tab contains a big library of handy stuff. In addition to all of the scenes from the opening scene-wizard, there are lots of common objects (trees, cars, landmarks) shaders (glass, metal, plastic) and effects (lens flare, explode) that you can drag into your scene.
The browser tab showing the standard metallic textures. If you need a metal-textured object, just drag one of these textured spheres on it and you're done.
The browser is bar-none one of the handiest features for a 3D noob such as myself. Rather than spend quite some time fiddling with the settings of the standard "opaque nonreflective white" texture until I get something realistic, I can just dig through the browser until I find something close to what I want and then fiddle with its properties until it's just right. The items in Carrara's "library" are very well-chosen, and the browser is a great way to rough out a 3D scene.
Carrara's Rooms
The rooms are places where you can get a closer look at various aspects of your scene. The currently-selected room is the Assemble room, and that's where you assemble your scene from the objects you have available. If you need to make a new object (assembled out of simple shapes or metaballs or lathes or a few other fill-in-the-blank primitives), you can double-click and the object will be taken into the Model room, which is the room with the wrench icon.
The chair's seat cushion shown in the vertex modeler in the Model room.
The Model room doesn't look much different from the Assemble room, although the tools along the top are now changed to ones designed for editing the vertices of my object, in this case a roundy rectangular block. I can edit the vertices and faces and such until my object looks the way I need it to look. There's a little preview of my scene in the lower-right corner so I don't have to switch back and forth between the Assemble and Model rooms to see if my object looks right in my complete scene.
The vertex modeler in Carrara Studio is very complete. In addition to the standard vertex and face manipulaters, there's a modeler for lathed objects (like the standard wine-glass) as well as creases, extrusions, fillets and booleans.
There are a few other modelers available in addition to the vertex modeler. There's a metaball modeler (where you can make organic-looking figures by sticking together primitives that act like they're made of magnetic glue. There's a spline modeler where you can build 3D objects out of vector cross-sections. And there's a formula modeler where you can make dynamic objects out of X-Y-Z mathematical formulas.
The Remaining Rooms
The Storyboard room, which is where I can view my scenes as a filmstrip or storyboard, so I can see how my scene will look animated without actually having to render the animation.
The Storyboard room showing nothing particularly interesting, mainly because my scene isn't animated.
The Texture room, where I can create or edit the textures for my scene. Note that textures can exist on several levels. For example, all of the seat cushions in the Assemble room were colored with the same shader (a beige fabric). When I took my seat-cushion into the Texture room, Carrara asked me if I wanted to edit the master-texture (thus changing all of the cushions) or if I wanted to create a new master-texture that was based on the original master but just applied to the selected cushion. In my case, I decided to edit the original master-texture and change all the seat cushions to red.
The Texture room, which is where I'm editing the texture for my seat cushions.
And finally there is the Render room, which is where you can render your scene as either a static picture or as an animation. Note that this particular scene has loads of soft lighting and shadows and such, so it wasn't the fastest thing in the world to render. If you wanted to render a scene like this as an animation, you'll probably want lots of cores (renders are broken into threads so more than one processor is helpful) or do a network render. Carrara 5 Pro works as a server for network renders, and the install disc comes an installer for client nodes so you can build your own "render farm" fairly easily.
The render room showing my completed scene with updated cranberry chair-cushions
Carrara can output static frames (like this one) in several common lossless or lossy bitmap formats. It can output animated scenes as AVI or QuickTime or as a series of static frames, again lossy or lossless. You also have a plugin that allows you to output a movie to Adobe After Effects for further postprocessing.
Carrara's renders are beautiful, and you have loads of options available so you can balance your output to somewhere between "looks okay and renders fast" and "looks sharper than a photo but renders like an ox pulling a U-Haul trailer".
Import and Export
This is all about game development, and making nice renders is only one facet of what you'll need to be doing with a 3D modeler. Since it's not a good bet that your 3D middleware directly supports .CAR files, you'll probably need some exports. Carrara Studio Pro exports 3DS (3D Studio), 3DMF (QuickTime 3D), OBJ (Alias), DXF, VRML, VET (Viewpoint 3D viewer), W3D (shockwave/Director model), FBX (Kaydara), and CAE (After Effects). Note that .X export isn't supported directly, so if you want that you'll have to plan to use something to convert from one of the above formats (like 3DS) to .X.
Also note that, far as I can tell, those above formats only export the model and the textures, but not the bones. This is a pretty significant deficiency if you plan to use Carrara Studio in a 3D project and you need something other than Carrara to handle some or all of the animation. There are extra-cost add-ons for Poser and Quidam that allow you to move rigged characters from those programs, but you should still take a close look at Carrara Studio's capabilities just to make sure you don't hit a dead-end in your 3D pipeline.
Documentation and Tutorials
Carrara Studio comes with a huge 900-page manual. Since I got the download-only version of the program, I got the manual as a PDF. This PDF also doubles as the online "press F1" help in the program. The documentation is very well done, although all of the screenshots are black & white (which makes paper manuals cheaper, but not PDFs). All of the expected Acrobat stuff, like text-search, works just fine.
On the obligatory second "Goodies" CD, there are a few sample models along with a "QuickTour", which consists of 14 QuickTime movies linked together with an HTML-based menu. The tutorial is well-produced but is fairly short, so you should expect to spend some time with the manual.
VectorStyle
VectorStyle is an extra-cost ($99) plugin to Carrara Studio that's worth mentioning because it's cool. Basically it allows you to export your renders (static or animated) as vector drawings as a series of EPS files or as a single Flash SWF. Mind you, Flash can import fully rendered animations in AVI or QuickTime, but they tend to be on the large side. Flash was really intended to be a vector sort of tool, so you probably should be dealing with vectors if possible. One popular standalone tool for making 3D Flash animations is Swift3D. Only problem is that Swift3D isn't really a fully-featured modeler. At least it doesn't have all of the capabilities you're used to seeing nowadays. From what I've seen, Carrara's VectorStyle plugin can make animations as good as Swift3D, but with Carrara's fully-featured modeler.
As an example, here's a quick vector render I made in about two minutes by exporting a model from Quidam to Carrara, then rendering the model as a vector-based object with VectorStyle.
Yes, it's pretty far from photorealistic. VectorStyle does have a lot of options for shading ranging from flat 2-color stuff all the way to full color polygon-reduced models, so you can experiment for the best trade-off between the quality of animation and the size of the resulting file.
The only really odd thing about VectorStyle is that it's a mite confusing to use the first time. While every other animation is exported from the Render room (which makes sense), VectorStyle animations are rendered by choosing "Save As..." then choosing SWF for the output of you render.
A Flash SWF of a figure imported from Quidam with 3-color toon-shading.
Conclusion
Honestly, I run hot and cold with Carrara Studio. On the one hand, it's a terrific modeler that's very easy and intuitive to use, is very polished, renders beautifully, and is reasonably priced. On the other hand, it could do a much better job of playing well with other programs (i.e. more and better import and export).
I guess it would have been one thing if DAZ 3D had stated "Hey folks, we just purchased a second-tier 3D tool that could be a market leader if it had some resources put into it, and that's just what we plan to do", but I don't get that impression. The product has only gotten a minor point-update (and an Intel-native version on OSX) since its release almost two years ago 2005. According to the forums, version 6 is gonna have some impressive stuff. Hopefully it won't just be new plugins and will address some places where it needs to improve to be a first-class tool (like improved import/export).
I guess time will tell. Now that DAZ 3D owns Bryce, Carrara, DAZ|Studio, Hexagon, and Mimic, it'll be interesting to see if some of these products merge or at least start sharing features.
