Wed 19th May 2010 | News
Carrara is known for providing the necessary tools that allow artists to deliver high-caliber results at a cost-effective price point. Today, DAZ 3D-Gizmoz expands these possibilities through the availability of Carrara 8 and Carrara 8 Pro, providing improved animation tools, enhanced lighting, new vegetation tools and optimized rendering.
Professional artists using the Carrara 8 Pro toolset will gain access to 64-bit compatibility for Mac and Windows, as well as the Bullet Physics Library. This open-source, advanced physics toolkit allows artists to use cutting edge rigid and soft body dynamics. Combined with the speed improvements achieved from the new support for multi-threading and 64-bit hardware, Carrara 8 Pro drastically improves productivity.
Additionally, updated export capabilities allow game developers to transfer custom figures, environments and/or animations directly into the Unity game engine via the FBX file format.
"Carrara 8 Pro's FBX export capabilities are beyond compare," said Carrara user and Unity developer, William Bell. "For months I had worked with several high-end 3D suites trying to transport my animated models into the Unity game engine with no success. It wasn't until I installed Carrara 8 Pro that I experienced a completely seamless export, directly into the engine, on the very first try."
In addition to the above improvements, Carrara 8 artists will experience:
• Improved Plants & Vegetation: Users may add custom models and textures for unique leaves, flowers, fruit and more. Artists may also use a variety of different leaf objects per plant for increased natural variation.
Editing of Posed Meshes: Now users can complete important clean-up and detail work on conforming objects while the model is posed or conformed. This allows the user to see immediate results as they work.
Enhanced Lighting Tools: Not only will Carrara 8 users experience an improved user interface, they will enjoy negative lights, God rays, barn doors on spotlights, and the much-requested capability of photometric (IES) lighting.
Improved Animation Tools: DAZ Studio's Puppeteer has been added to the Carrara 8 toolset, enhancing animators' ability to quickly create realistic animated figures that may be recorded and used as animation clips. This once tedious process has now been simplified by blending between saved poses, shapes and expressions.
Optimized Network Rendering: Users will enjoy greater control over their render farm as they easily add and remove nodes via their master machine, render frames or buckets as desired for greater safeguarding against lost render data.
The full version of Carrara 8 Pro is available in both Macintosh and Windows formats via the DAZ 3D-Gizmoz website, and is regularly priced at US$549. Licenses for the standard version Carrara 8 are available for US$249.95. Special discount pricing is available for a limited time in the www.DAZ3D.com online store.
