Carrara Pro Changelog

What's new in Carrara Pro 8.1.1.12

• New Features:
• Puppeteer for Carrara (New for 8.0!) - The same great node-based parameter control you enjoy in DAZ Studio comes to Carrara 8! Create animations, modify morphs, control parameters across time-lines, and even record your inputs as an animation time-line with this versatile and powerful tool.
• Plant Editor (New for 8.0!) - Have more control than ever over plants, vegetation, and trees with the intuitive plant-editor tool. Mix leaves, add fruit, or even add your own custom flowers to any plant type. You can even control the shape of plants with spline-based tools. Save your creations as presets, and take control of your scenes like never before.
• Inmproved Multi-Threading (New for 8.0!) - Carrara can take advantage of new CPUs and hardware with improved multi-threading support. Carrara's internal rendering engine has been completely overhauled to take advantage of multi-core CPUs, with multi-threaded support for rendering, lighting, and many other internal calculations. Watch your renders complete even faster than ever before, and take advantage of complete support for networked multi-core render farms.
• Improved FBX Export (New for 8.0!) - Carrara supports export in FBX, and the export library underwent a complete review and rewrite. Export FBX animations, rigging, and many other parameters for a world of new options for moving content into game engines and other 3d applications.
• God Rays (New for 8.0!) - Experience the power of nature as streams of light filter down from the skies above. God rays let you add drama and impact to your artwork with powerful options to create and control the shafts of light radiating from above.
• 64-Bit Mac Support (New for 8.0!) - The creative platform of choice for graphics professionals gets support for the 64-bit Mac. Have larger scenes, experience faster renders, and break the limits of what you imagined was possible.
• Edit in Vertex Modeler (New for 8.0!) - Edit conformed clothing in-place inside the vertex modeler without having to zero the figure.
• Network Rendering Improvements (New for 8.0!) - Carrara has been optimized heavily for multi-computer networked rendering environments, with support for multiple-CPUs out of the box. Add the optional "Grid" plug-in for support of render farms of up to 200 cores. The power of movie studios comes to your desktop, and render movies faster than ever before.
• Negative Lights (New for 8.0!) - Utilize Carrara's incredibly powerful light tools in a whole new way with negative lights. Use lighting tools to strategically remove lights from your scene, create dramatic shadows at-will, and even create negative lights in color to remove hues from your lighting.
• IES Lighting (New for 8.0!) - Download millions of free IES Lighting templates from lighting manufacturers around the world to use to control the shape, pattrern, and color of your lights. Use IES lighting with directional, area, and spot lights to take your scenes to the next level or realism and drama. Now, the actual look of real lights direct from the manufacturers is at your total control.
• Normal Maps (New for 8.0!) - Create normal maps for your objects to enhance the detail and realism of your objects, while increaseing render and work speeds.
• Bullet Physics (New for 8.0!) - Utilize the powerful Bullet Physics engine to create dramatic, stunning animations in real-time. Watch objects bounce, spin, drop, collide, and deform in real time. Creating physics-based animations was never faster, and using Carrara's lighting and rendering environment to render these animations in realistic (or even cartoony) glory! You have never had so much fun with real-world physics and animations until now.
• 3D Paint - Includes a new 3D Paint Tool that enables textures to be selected, edited and "painted" directly onto an object. The 3D paint tool provides a variety of painting modes including brushing with a variety of brushes, airbrushing, stamping, and support for lines, an eyedropper, and an eraser. Custom brush settings can be saved and later reused. 3D Paint also supports layers, image stamping, and tablet support. Real-time display of bump maps and specularity has also been added to the 3D paint tool.
• UV Editing/Unfolding - Includes a new UV Editor that shows a 3D view of the polygon mesh, a 2D display of the UV values on the polygon mesh vertices, and a set of tools to manipulate them. You can choose from 4 different projection methods to use for custom mapping. The UV editor "Unfold" function allows you to define seams and pinpoints where the UV template will be unfolded and later stitched. The relax seam tool helps a you selectively reduce the dense areas of the UV for a more uniform map.
• LOD support for Content Figures - Includes support for Content Figures that have multiple Levels of Detail (LOD). You can use lower resolution LOD figures in your viewport to enhance performance and then render with a higher resolution LOD figure for the best quality. If you have multiple figures in the scene you can enhance performance by reducing the mesh resolution on those figures that are further away from the camera and don't require as much detail. Carrara 8.0 provides advanced auto-switching capabilities that will automatically switch between higher and lower LOD figures based on distance from the camera. As the figure or the camera is moved within the scene, the system determines which figure to use based on user determined preference settings.
• Vertex Modeling in Assembly Room - The Vertex Modeling capabilities that were previously only available in the "Modeling" room are now available in the "Assembly" room. This enhancement saves time by allowing you to perform modeling functions in the assembly room where other objects can also be seen.
• Transparency Optimizations for Rendering - Time consuming and complex transparency rendering operations have been optimized in Carrara 8.0 to provide better and faster results.
• Multi-pass Rendering - Provides the ability to render multiple passes and save these off to separate image files. These render passes or layers (multi-pass render layers) can be edited in another application like Photoshop to increase contrast in the rendered image, change a reflection color, make an edit to a shadow map, or even swap out a background color. This tool will make it faster to make changes to a rendering which if you needed to re-render to see the changes it could take hours and hours. The edits to layers can be changed in minutes.
• Larger Textures in OpenGL Display - Provides the ability to increase the texture size that is displayed in the Open Graphics Library (OpenGL) or viewport. The settings are based on what texture size your graphics board will support and can be adjusted for performance or quality (up to 4096x4096).
• Bump & Specularity in OpenGL Display - Provides the ability to view bump and specularity while in OpenGL display (if your video card supports these options).
• NLA Track Groups - When using Carrara for creating animations, this new grouping tool provides an improved interface to create groups of tracks then collapse or expand the tracks in those groups. This new tool helps you optimize the screen space so you can focus on your animation.
• COLLADA Export - Figures and scenes can now be exported in COLLADA format. Currently only available for PCs.
• DAZ Studio Content Support Improvements - Includes enhanced the handling of .DAZ scene files being loaded into Carrara 8.0. Requires DAZ Studio Build 2.3.3.138 or higher.
• Resolved Issues:
• Sound clips and Mimic animation is limited to just over 24 seconds each.
• Sound Track/Clips Delete using right click menu doesn't work.
• Playing a 12/16 bit aiff on windows causes an error.
• Importing some IGES files crashes Carrara.
• Weight Painting display is broken on the Mac in some cases.
• Image maps in leaves don't render at full resolution.
• Feature size slider is inoperable on mountain filter.