Carrara 7.0 pro

Unity Engine
1

Hello

Is anybody using Carrara 7.0 pro to create animated skinned models for Unity3d ?

I am aware that Carrara can export the geometry only in FBX format but it can export animated .x files

Any problem with the Carrara exporter and / or with .x / FBX converters such as UltimeUnwrap ?

Thanks in advance

2

As a side note the forth coming Carrara 8 has animation export options for FBX files.

I’ve only tried it out with texturing at the moment and my model imported perfectly into Unity.

Once I get to try animations I’ll post again.

3

Just a quick follow up to say that Carrara 8 Pro does indeed export animations in FBX format for Unity.

Here’s what I did to test:
I created a simple cylinder vertex object and added 3 bones to it. I then attached the bones to the vertex object and set up a small animation.

The first export didn’t give me any animations (in fact the skeleton was missing), so I went back to carrara 8 pro and found that I had to move the Bones hierarchy onto the Vertex object. This time it exported the skeleton and animation frames and I was able to watch the model animate in Unity.

Hurrah!

As of May 4th there are a few outstanding bugs in Carrara 8 Pro, but Daz expects to release it at some point this month.

4

Are you using Windows or Mac? In the past Carrara’s Mac exporter didn’t have all the capabilities of its Windows version.

5

I’m using the 64bit Windows version, I have been reading that the Mac version is quite a bit more buggy than the Windows beta at present, but they are working hard.

6

Carrara 8 launched yesterday.

7

I got a free upgrade to Carrara 8 Pro and I’ll say it’s absolutely fab.

And best of all it exports skinned, animated meshes to fbx properly.

8

Many beta testers were left mouths agape at the sudden release of version 8. Apparently daz stopped development in mid-beta and skipped the QC cycle entirely to get some quick cash over the Memorial Day weekend. Mac version has missing icon, half the menus don’t work, viewport is messed up, window resizing and aborting renders crashes the app. Windows version not too much better. No docs, really a complete mess.

We updated to Carrara Pro 8 mostly for back compatibility reasons, but I still filed 10 serious bugs (think crash) in just 30 minutes of using it. This must be the worst software build I ever paid for. Luckily we don’t depend on it.

I am thinking this might be the last version of Carrara we are going to see. Daz did something similar to Hexagon which has seen a release 2.5, which was then actually pulled. Hexagon has since been laid to rest. Hopefully they’ll fix some of the show-stopper issues in Carrara before it goes away. Pity - been using this program forever starting when it was still called RayDream Designer.

9

bad news
It is a shame because the DAZ suite may be the ideal set of tool for Unity users
As I wrote in an other thread DAZ supply also an application(Digimi) to convert the highpolys DAZ Models in low polys models in a format suitable to be used with game engines and in particular with Unity
One question
Did you come across such bugs even in animation ?
I am not intersted in modeling and texturing
I just want to import prefabricated models, to make animation and to export the FBX files into unity

I was so happy to hear from Amon that the finally we have a reliable FBX exporter to Unity

10

Sorry - didn’t have a chance to test animation. Maybe just bite the bullet and pony up the $40.00 to upgrade to the standard version and see for yourself, although I seriously recommend moving on. We did once it became apparent that the fbx exporter in Carrara Pro 7 to which we had just upgraded wouldn’t be fixed anytime soon. Took them close to a year IIRC. Right now it is just painful.
There is for example a known bug carried over since version 5 which will on occasion flip your render settings to a 96 frame qt movie. That now becomes more than an annoyance since the program gets completely trashed if you abort a render. Not recoverable. So you can either wait for hours or lose all your changes when that hits you. Quite ridiculous.

11

Haven’t had a chance to test the new FBX export from C8Pro but if I have a chance I’ll give it a whirl - I’d like to use C8P for unity content - and that Digami plugin for DS sounds promising as well – just waiting to see if anyone has had promising results.