Help for your Carrara - to - Blender - Cycles adventures
 Introduction Elsewhere on this wen site you can find a script which lets Daz Studio users export scenes and render them in Blender, including the use of the Blender Cycles renderer the Daz script exports the scene as an .obj file and create a python script which is then used by Blender to load the .obj (scene) and do all the tedious chores needed to make the scene render correctly. Since Carrara users also want to render scenes in Blender/Cycles i wrote a blender-python script which uses the same services ( scripts) as the Daz Studio version Later in 2013 i'll probably improve on this since the results are not as good as the Daz Studio version Discussion Thread at Daz3D
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/17967/rendering-carrara-and-poser-scenes-using-blender-cycles-some-time-saving-tools
How to use it Today October 31st 2015 i did succesfull tests using the mcjBlendBotForCarrara included in version 3 of mcjBlendBot
my tests were done with the current version of mcjBlendBot : https://sites.google.com/site/mcasualsdazscripts4/mcjteleblender3
For the rare case where you use much Older Versions Of Blender maybe you'll have to use ---> mcjteleblender-for-ds1-2-3-4
as of today it contains a new script named mcjBlendBotForCarrara.py
Unzip this file in your Blender modules folder On a typical Windows PC that's something like C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.60\scripts\modules Use Carrara's Export menu to export your scene as an .obj file ( note that other formats may work ) Important note you should read November 29th 2017 Starting with Blender 2.79, if your the currently selected Blender Renderer is "Blender Cycles" then when you import an obj/mtl scene-file, Blender's onj/mtl importer will create Blender Material node-trees
This in turn will prevent mcjBlendBotForCarrara from creating it's own node trees
so before doing the obj/mtl import, set the current Blender Renderer to "Blender Render"
Use Blender's import / Wavefront menu to import the .obj file if you try to render the scene using Blender cycles right now, the materials will look wrong because Cycles expects "node based materials" and the .obj import doesn't create them ( but this changes in Blender 2.79 ) Important note you should read November 29th 2017
now that we imported our obj/mtl scene file while in Blender Renderer mode
it's time to change the current renderer to Blender Cycles
in the next step, mcjBlendBotForCarrara will see that no Blender Cycles materials were created, so it will create them
Blender usually has more than one "pane" click on the upper-Left button of a panel, and change the Editor type to "Text Editor" it should look like this now  Use the "Text" / "Open Text Block" menu and load mcjBlendBotForCarrara.py which should be found in C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.64\scripts\modules if you installed the mcjBlendBot kit properly  Click on the "Run Script" now mcjBlendBotForCarrara went through all objects in the scene, makes them look smooth it goes through all the materials in the scene and builds node-based materials ( the material-library system nay also work but i did not test it ... refer to mcjTeleblender's manual ) ---- now there's a sad fact : the way Carrara exports materials in obj/mtl files is faulty - Diffuse colors for surfaces with texture-images are not correct, they seem to be modified to look like the texture-image colors. The color seems to be picked at random from the texture-image -------- here's is a carrara scene, imported in Blender as an obj file, then processed using mcjBlendBotForCarrara since Carrara's scene was so gigantic it prevented Blender from displaying it correctly immediately after loading the obj file, all objects were selected, so i typed "S" for scale and typed 0.05 which had the effect of scaling the scene down to a manageable size. I had to change the Diffuse color for the hair since it was dark gray For the Mirror effect, i deleted the materials, and created a BSDF-Glossy material with the "Sharp" type of glossiness. Materials for Aiko3's LCornea and RCornea surfaces were replaced by BSDF-Transparent materials in the "World" panel, i created a Background / Environment Texture / Equirectangular world and applied an equirectangular environment map from http://www.hdrlabs.com/sibl/archive.html  How to avoid the scary "white eyes" syndrome
Aiko3's Cornea material is meant to be transparent or glass
if this material's transparency in Carrara is obtained using the "Alpha" channel, then the transparency wont work in Blender
and your figure will have scary white eyes
so, before exporting the scene from Carrara, find the lCornea and rCornea materials
and set the transparency using the 'transparency' property as shown here
  Eyelashes and Eyebrows and other opacity map bases transparencies
unfortunately i was not able to trick carrara into exporting image-maps attached to the Alpha or Transparency channels
if you are nerdy enough you can apply the opacity map to the diffuse color channel of the surface
then using notepad, after exporting the scene as obj/mtl, locate the eyelashes material
you will see an item named map_Kd
newmtl Eyelashes
Ns 0
d 1
Ni 0.001
illum 2
Ka 0 0 0
Kd 0 0 0
Ks 0 0 0
map_Kd I:\z\datpose\Aiko3TrLo.jpg
change this to
map_D I:\z\datpose\Aiko3TrLo.jpg
since Map_D corresponds to the opacity map , Blender's importer will treat it as such
then mcjBlendBotForCarrara will create a neat little Blender Cycles node-tree for it
-
else you will need to 'manually' create this material tree using Blender
Here's the material tree created after using the map_kd to map_D trick
 and the render of the eyelashes
 When a texture comes out all black !!! When you apply a texture image to a surface, and export that object as obj/mtl, Carrara has that strange habit of setting the Diffuse color to the color of the upper-left pixel of that image. For instance here, you see that the upper left pixel of the texture-image is black, so we get an all black surface. Changing the upper-left pixel of the image to white solves the problem. |