Hi,

New to the Carrara forum, typically I utilize Poser 8 and Wings3D as my work environments for creating and rendering models that I make.

I've had Carrara 8.1pro installed on my work station for quite a while but have only played about with it to a small degree (used to use Carrara 5 a bit also). What has renewed my interest in Carrara is the fact that my old Mac (a ppc powermac g5) which has faithfully served me for years cannot run the last 2 versions of poser as the old OS it's using is incompatible. Carrara 8.1 works fine on it though.

I would like to utilize SSS in my renders and learn how to weight map figures but these options are unavailable in Poser 8, not so with Carrara 8.1. I'm fair at rigging in Poser.

Anyway, how are these functions in Carrara as compared to Poser? Also, is there much demand for Carrara natively rigged figures?

Also, is there much demand for Carrara natively rigged figures?  

Not yet, but you might generate demand if your work is good enough! Demand is mainly for scenes and plugins and tutorials. 

As far as weight painting, I have heard that weight maps aren't saved, but don't quote me on that please.

Oh I guess I should say that poser figures work in Carrara (not the ones specific to Poser 2014) but legacy stuff, though Fenric might have a plug in to bring the new figures over.

Poser's rigging tools seem pretty robust btw 

Yeah, I like rigging in Poser alot... but it's the only application I've ever rigged in so not much to compare it to. The tutorials I've watched on rigging in Carrara seem pretty straight forward so intimidation isn't a factor. Would kinda suck if you couldn't save your weight maps though, I'll have to look into that. 

I have a ton of Poser content, some of which I've used in Carrara. I like Carrara's implementation of traditional 3d manipulators way more than the posing tools in Poser. Mostly nowadays I use Poser as a finishing environment for self made content, though. Modeling is my real interest in 3d, rather than the final render of appropriated pre-made content.

I am a little worried that esoteric information about the inner workings of Carrara might be more difficult to find than with Poser. Editing native Carrara files for example.

there's not much traffic on the carrara sdk forum

I don't use poser a lot but the morph tool's ability to fit to underlying target mesh/figure is definitely superior to any carrara's tools.

also the fitting room in poser 2014, Carrara has nothing to match that, nor the morph transfer ability from one figure to another

But Carrara has a reasonable modeller, and you you can both model in the mesh/vertex room and in the assembly room, so you can model cloths around an existing figure  

you can also uv quite well  in Carrara,

I guess it's what you are used to. For example Poser's cloth room is excellent for getting a cloth to fit a little better - Carrara has Bullet physics but you need a lot of work arounds to achieve anything like poser cloth room results.

Some Carrara people seem to be heading towards Studio's rigging tools as Daz is happy to develop studio over Carrara ... could only be for genesis stuff I think, not sure.

Not trying to talk you out of Carrara, Carrara is  my tool of choice, but I don't rig any more, and model seldom, I mainly do still images, Poser is a good plug in for Carrara as is Blender ;)  

Weight maps can only be saved for DAZ/Poser style figures, and perhaps only Gen4 or earlier. I don't know about the Triax figures. What this means, is that weight mapping on a custom rig or figure is saved with the figure as long as you don't detach the rig from the model. Once it is detached, if you re-attach it, you will need to weight paint it again.

It is an annoyance to be sure, but it sounds worse than it is. For instance, if I'm changing up my rig, chances are, I will need to re-weight it anyway. The easiest way to avoid having to re-weight paint the figure is to make sure the rig is correct before weight painting it.