Thought I might as well post for now.

[mykyl1966]

I will order my Carrara 5 and other tools beginning of january but thought I would test my most recent purchase which is Zbrush. (SOme folks will think I am mad. I will have enough cash to get Lightwave 3d which I had wanted for a long time but have decided I want Carrara 5, Poser 6 and an upgrade of my Photoshop to CS2 for the same price. No brainer really. ;)

I created the character in Zbrush from Zspheres then did some basic stuff to it and exported a pretty low poly character. Just under 2000 polys. Then I rendered and did some little tweaks in the vertex modeller. (Ignore the lumpy feet etc. . )

More of an experiment to see how to go back and forth between Carrara and Zbrush. Works perfectly in Carrara 3. I assume it works just as well in C5.

Looking forward to doing further testing when I get C5 Pro.

Cheers

Mike R

[Thomas]

I use Zbrush with Carrara 5 without any problems. It only miss one more subdivision smoothing level, but for most of the time, it's enough.
I'll also try to use Deeper plugin from inagony to add the normal map supports.

[mykyl1966]

I am trying to create a more fabric type material on my character but how would I go about giving the illusions of fuzzyness.

In C4d 6 I used to use a fresnel shader that sort of lightened the edges with whatever colour I chose.

I cant see how to use the fresnel side of things in C5 to do the same.

Here is what I have so far. (The logo thing is still to be redone as well as the eyes etc.)

Cheers

Mike R

[AWBenson]

The fuzziness doesn't look bad. There was a write-up on just this thing in CinemaFlex about the "fuzzy" robe that yoda wore in Star Wars III. It involved alot of custom made shaders to do that job.

However, I don't see why you cann't fake it or produce similar results with-out the massively extra work. Using Anything Grows Tip Objects or maybe the new replicator features, place a sphereical object textured and with transucency and have that the multipled all over the modeled sweater. If you have primavol, even better, because now you can make a more realistic clump of fuzzy. This would probablly be a nasty render-time hit, but is should work in theory...

Anyway, it's looking good so far and keep in mind that you do have a "toon" appearance so realism doesn't have to be extremely high.

[mykyl1966]

What I mean by fuzziness is this.

This is similar to what I mean. Notice how the edges change colour and almost give the illusion of a slightly fuzzy look.

I thought that maybe there was a way to do this in Carrara 5.

This is using the fresnel shader in C4D. I assumed that maybe there would be a way to do similar with C5 as it has a Fresnel Shader as well.

Cheers

Mike R

[are]

This is done with the Digital Carvers Guild Shader Ops - Although Carrara 5 does have a fresnel thingy* it appears (in my very limited experience) to be limited to the transparency and reflective channels. This was done by adding a "fake fresnel" to the glow channel.

*Yep I really know what I am talking about !

edit-
Here is another slightly higher quality image with the fresnel bit also copied from the glow to the colour channel.

also added the *.car.

[are]

Back again

Another example also with a Digital Carvers plugin.

This is just the basic shader + anything grows - nice effect but slow to render.

[AWBenson]

Anything Grows creates alot of geometry. If you plan on using it extensively, then I reconmend maxing out your RAM.

You can also play with the "tip" object in Anything Grows to make a replicator-like thing.

[mykyl1966]

I think that shader ops thing might be just waht I want. I think for really close up then actual hairs will be needed but for mid to long distance the fresnel thing is perfect. Can you adjust the falloff?

Cheers

Mike R

[are]

Originally Posted by mykyl1966

Can you adjust the falloff?

Yes and there is a demo version on the site that you can play around with - although the demo has some limitations and, from memory, the limitation on the fresnel is a fixed value.