 Carrara 5 Pro supports both Macintosh and Windows platforms, takes advantage of OpenGL acceleration and network rendering, and provides superior interchange with industry-leading design applications like Adobe® Photoshop® and Illustrator®, web tools like Macromedia® Flash® and Shockwave®, and video editing and effects software like Apple® Final Cut Pro®, Adobe After Effects® and Autodesk® Combustion®.
Materials, Shaders and Rendering
Ambient Occlusion : Ambient occlusion is a technique that has been used in movies for years to simulate global illumination. By controlling the amount of ambient light that objects receive depending on their local configuration, ambient occlusion creates a very soft lighting solution that is similar to a global illumination solution but without its cost in rendering time. So you can render your scenes more quickly and accurately.
Translucency: Translucency is a new material channel that allows the surfaces which have the shader to let the light to pass though diffusely. With this feature, you can give a more realistic aspect to your tree leaves, grasses, and flower petals, create accurate paper shaders, and more.
Subsurface Scattering : Subsurface scattering is the light that scatters inside an object and filters through in a diffuse manner. This is absolutely necessary for creating realistic skin, marble, milk, and more. Your images will look more realistic than ever before with Carrara 5 software.
Microdisplacement or displacement mapping : The displacement mapping in Carrara 5 lets you deform the surface of an object using a shading function (texture map or procedural shader). The displacement creates actual geometry, as opposed to bump mapping which only modifies the lighting of the surface to simulate the change of the depth. With displacement mapping, shadows are correct and even the edge of the object is deformed. The import of 16-bit texture maps has been added for better compatibility with ZBrush, allowing to import easily ZBrush displacement mapped objects into Carrara 5.
Fresnel Effect : Carrara 5 delivers the capability to create realistic surface reflections thanks to the incorporation of the Fresnel effect. In a transparent material like glass, the reflection and transparency depends on the angle of view. For instance, if you are facing a window most of the light goes through and there is very little reflection. However at low angle, the glass becomes a very reflective surface. This is the Fresnel effect. This is very useful when creating transparent material such as glass, but also for water surfaces (ocean, lakes, etc.).
Anisotropic Lighting : The default lighting model of Carrara is well adapted materials that scatter light identically in all directions. However, light does not scatter uniformly on all materials, such as on the surface of a CD. The new Anisotropic lighting model of Carrara 5 lets you simulate some of those materials more accurately.
Fly Through Optimizations : Animating global illumination can be very difficult and slow. It also tends to have some flickering effects. The new fly through optimization in Carrara 5 is designed to let you animate your camera through your scene without recalculating the whole lighting solution at every frame. This leads to much faster rendering time (as much as five times faster or more) and an animation without flickering. This is very useful when animating a camera pass through a building or a landscape.
Redesigned Material Editor : The ergonomy of the Carrara 5 material editor has been greatly improved, allowing you to create complex materials easier and faster. Previews have been added at each level of the shading tree so that you can see the effect of each modification at each level.
Inclusions and Exclusions Lists for Lights : With this feature, you can determine which lights will affect which objects in your scenes, enabling you to build complex lighting for your 3D scenes much more easily. You can also create special effects with your lights in just a couple clicks!
Save/Load Irradiance Maps: Save the lighting solution that you obtained with global illumination or ambient occlusion and reuse it as many times as you want. This lets you render a scene from several points of view without recalculating the lighting solution for each new render.
Nature
Volumetric Clouds : In addition to the physical simulation of the sky of Carrara, you can now add volumetric 3D clouds that realistically scatter the light of the atmosphere. You can control their shape and appearance, place them in 3D and animate them.
Improved Particle Generator : The new particle generator in Carrara 5 allows you to create fluid and volumetric effects. New rendering options have been added allowing you to use splats (squares oriented towards the direction of view) or metaballs in addition to triangles and spheres. The particles now interact realistically with other objects and physical forces in your scene. The editor has been completely redesigned to make it easier to create beautiful effects. Particles can be generated directly from the surface of an object. Objects in your scene can be used as particles, allowing you to create bees swarms, falling leaves, bird flocks, and more quickly and easily.
Joint Orientation : You can now control the orientation of the joints in your skeleton so that that you can set up better constraints on your joints. To make it even easier, an automatic orientation is performed when you create the bones.
Skinning Weightmaps Painting : Paint the weights directly on the surface of your characters. This simple tool lets you quickly edit the influence of the bones on the deformation of the surface.
Bounding box display for skinned objects : Display your skinned models with bounding boxes to significantly speed up manipulation on heavy meshes and to adjust and improve your animation in real-time.
Graph Editor: Creating professional quality animation is now easier than ever with Carrara 5. The new graph editor gives you direct access to the motions curves of your objects as well as the animations of your parameters allowing you precise control of their animation.
Assembling
Replicator: Duplicate objects quickly along a grid, an arc or a circle, dramatically improving the speed of creation within Carrara 5.
Surface Replicator : Quickly and easily distribute objects on a surface or terrain. With the surface replicator, you can create forests of trees, meadows of flowers, or buildings across an urban landscape in seconds. The new surface replicator in Carrara 5 gives you full control of the distribution of your objects, allowing for more accurate placement. And now you can even replicate objects such as volumetric clouds, fire and more
Polygonal Modeling : Borrowing from the technologies within our Eovia Hexagon 3D modeling software, the Polygonal Modeler (Vertex Modeler) has been greatly improved. A
number of new tools have been added:
New Selection Tools : The new paint, lasso, loop, rings, between, inverse, shrink and grow tools will allow you to quickly create a complex selection of points, edges and polygons.
Soft Selection : Manipulate all the points in a given radius of the current selection. The soft selection is very useful to manipulate complex surfaces since it allows you to move several points at the same time with an amplitude that depends on the distance to your selections.
New 3D Manipulators : New 3D manipulators allow you to move, rotate and scale your objects quickly and precisely. The addition of the universal manipulator allows you to perform these actions even faster by combining all 3 tools into one simple manipulator.
Smoothing (Subdivision Surfaces): The subdivision surfaces in Carrara 5 have been greatly optimized and are now up to seven times faster! You can specify a different accuracy for modeling and rendering, allowing you to model quickly and still get the best precision at render time. You can also model directly on the surface.
New Tools
2D Curves tools : Polyline, curves, interpolated curves, circles (three types), Arc Circle (three types).
Booleans : A new Boolean tool has been included in Carrara 5. It is more robust and provides more options.
Cut tool : Cut any surface by a line.
Bevel tool : Add rounded edges to your objects.
Edges tools : Extract Along, Extract Around, Bevel, Move Along.
Surfaces tools: Ruled surfaces, Double sweep, Coons surfaces, Gordon Surfaces.
General
Redesigned User Interface : The Carrara 5 user interface has been completely redesigned to increase productivity and maximize the working space. Toolbars can now be docked and windows maximized so that you can focus on the creation process.
Redisigned Browser/Wizard : Building on an improved workflow theme for Carrara 5, the Browser and Preset Wizards have been merged so that you can easily access presets from everywhere in the application. A new display mode has been added enabling you to browse your 3D content faster.
New Presets : A number of new presets have been added to Carrara to let you start faster.
Special Content DAZ Models : A bundle of characters is included absolutely free of charge. Use this great content to start your creation with the help of the new Native Poser Importer, or the TransPoser 2 plug-in.
Custom Keyboard Shortcuts : Work the way you’re most comfortable. You can now customize any of the keyboard shortcuts of the application for maximum productivity.
Camera Navigation with three-button mouse : Another workflow improvement in Carrara 5 is the enabling of access to easy shortcuts with any three-button mouse to navigate efficiently through your scene.
Improved OpenGL Rendering : Speed is everything in 3D, and the new OpenGL rendering engine in Carrara 5 allows you to manipulate larger scenes faster. New lightmaps and support for reflections have also been added to improve the quality of the display.
Smoothing of Multiple Objects : With Carrara 5 it is no longer necessary to switch from the assembly to the model room to smooth your objects. This new time-saving feature enables you to smooth geometry and smooth or crease edges of a singleor multi-selection.
Update Notification : Carrara 5 lets you know as soon as a new update is available so that you can easily keep your software up-to-date.
Tips and Tricks: On startup, a new window pop-up provides valuable tips and tricks about Carrara 5, such as how to improve your workflow, optimize your work, and more.
Imports / Exports
Poser Native Import, Now With Poser 6 Support: Carrara 5 is now able to natively import Poser characters (with bones, morph targets and skinning info), cloth (not dynamic) and props. Poser figures are imported with Carrara bones and morph targets, allowing you to animate them directly inside Carrara, rather than requiring you to go back to Poser. You can import a character and then add clothes, morph targets or another hair prop. This import does not require the presence of Poser so you can now directly use Poser content in Carrara (for instance, characters from DAZ). The following formats are supported: CR2, CRZ, PP2, PPZ, PZ3, OBZ and PZZ). The animation is also imported.
NOTE: The Eovia TransPoser 2 plug-in is required to import dynamic cloth and dynamic hair.
Eovia Transposer 2, Now With Poser 6 Support : The Eovia TransPoser plug-in included in the Pro version of Carrara 5 has been upgraded to version 2. TransPoser 2 now supports all versions through Poser 6, in addition to network rendering, dynamic cloth and hair and the update button.
FBX Export, with Support for FBX 6 : Export all your object’s geometry to FBX so that you can animate them with Motion Builder and then reimport them in Carrara 5.
RPF Export : RPF export lets you add 3D information (depth buffer, fragment coverage and color, object ID, texture coordinates, velocity) to your movies so that you can use them with professional compositing applications (such Adobe® After Effects® or Autodesk® Combustion®) to tweak your 3D images or animations.
After Effects Camera Export: This plug-in for Adobe After Effects lets you import camera animations, lights and planes into After Effects software.
Windows : Compatible with After Effects 5, 6 and 6.5
Macintosh : Compatible with After Effects 6.5
Match Moving and Tracking: Carrara lets you import Match Moving information (Camera position and trackers) from MatchMover Pro and Syntheyes®. This lets you synchronize video with your 3D rendering so that you can add special effects to your movies. |
