Carrara – Head Modeling for Beginners

I have been using Poser for the last year to generate 3D images for my articles and website. Recently however, I wanted to create some anime characters, but could not find the right face on DAZ or other 3D-model sites.

Therefore, I decided to model the look that I wanted using
Carrara.

You can see the results on the images used on this page.

The easiest way to quickly start creating your own character faces is to modify an existing high quality model. This tutorial describes how I modified the Michael 4 model that comes with Carrara 7.

You can use the same process to create any type of human head that you want.

This tutorial is written for Carrara beginners.

No pre-existing Carrara knowledge is required. To do figure modeling in Carrara you need at least the regular Carrara software (or Pro). Carrara Express does not support figure modeling.

1. Setup

• Start Carrara.
• Select File >> New. Create a new empty document.
• Select File >> Import and load in the Michael 4 figure from your Poser or DAZ Studio Runtime directories.

At this point, you should have the Michael 4 figure on your screen.

Carrara screenshot with Michael 4 figure

By default, you start in the Assembly room. This is represented by the highlighted hand on the top-right of your Carrara application. To get into the vertex modeling screen, look at the bottom right menu.

Highlighted hand representing the Assembly room (on the top right corner of your Carrara screen).

Click on 'Model' to get to the Vertex Modeling screen.

There should be a list of instances in your scene. Open up the Michael 4 instance, and double click on Model which is right below Michael 4.

This will put you into the vertex modeling screen with a wire-frame representation of the Michael 4 figure.

If all you get is an empty space, then you are likely using a version of Carrara that does not support figure modeling.

You will need to upgrade to regular Carrara 7 for figure modeling capabilities.

2. Group Relevant Vertices

Now the fun starts.

The first thing you want to do is set up some selection groups for relevant vertices. This is important because during vertex modeling you will want to isolate only certain parts of the Michael 4 model for editing.

Select the 'head' polygon by name.

Here are the vertex groups that I created –
a) Body

• Go into Selection >> Select By >> Name. A pop-up should appear.
• Choose Polygon, and a list of pre-saved polygons should appear to the right.
• Click on head and then select OK. The head of the figure should now be highlighted in red.
• Go into Selection >> Invert Selection. This selects everything else except the head.
• Go into Selection >> Name >> Vertices. Give your selection an appropriate name (e.g. Body) for easy retrieval later on.
• Select View >> Hide Selection. Now only the head of the figure will be visible.

Carrara screenshot - Only the head of the figure will be visible.

Now we want to just isolate the face and hide other head parts such as lashes, tear, and inner mouth.

b) Face Elements – Lashes, Tear, Inner Mouth

• Go to Selection >> Select By >> Shading Domain. Choose Lashes from the list.
• Do the same for Tear and Inner Mouth.
• Go to Selection >> Name. Type in Face Elements and click on OK.
• Go to View >> Hide Selection.

Now only the bare head should be showing.

Switch to the Top Camera (top left corner of Carrara screen.

c) Back Head

• Switch to the Top Camera. Do this by clicking on the camera selection area on the top left of the screen and selecting Top.
• Press Ctrl-A to select the whole head. Go to View >> Zoom >> Zoom to Selection. Alternatively, you can just press ‘0‘ (zero) to zoom to selection.
• Click on the Marquee selection tool on the left of the screen. Drag your selection rectangle so you select the back of the head.

Selecting the back of the head with the Marquee selection tool
• Go to Selection >> Name. Type in Back-Head and click on OK.
• Go to View >> Hide Selection.

Success! – Now only the front face should be showing.

Carrara screenshot - only the front face should be showing.

3. Set Up the Front and Side Backdrop Image

Click on the 'Global tab' to load a backdrop image.

• Switch to the Front Camera.
• There should be four tabs on the middle right menu saying Model, Morph, Bones, and Global. Click on the Global tab.
• Click on the Load image file button and load in the Front and Side images of the head you want to model.

  Note – For the images to work well make sure their width = height. This will ensure that the image aspect ratio is maintained in your Carrara working box.

• Click on Enable and the image should appear as a backdrop.

Unfortunately, the image fills the entire working box. To properly use the image to trace our 3D-head we need to resize the working box.

Carrara screenshot - the backdrop image fills the entire working box.

5. Set the Size and Position of the Working Box

• Make sure you are on the Front Camera.
• Go to View >> Grid.
• Set the Working Box size to whatever is appropriate for your image size. You may have to tweak this later on to get it exactly right. For now just set it to 1.
• At this point, your screen will jump to the new grid. Do Ctrl-A and then View >> Zoom >> Zoom to Selection (or hit ‘0’).
• Ctrl-Click on a vertex in the middle of the face. That will move the working box to that position.

Click on the 'Global tab' to load a backdrop image.
• Go to View >> Align Working Box. When you do this, your head will again disappear from view. This is likely a bug in Carrara but it is ok. Just do Ctrl-A again and View >> Zoom >> Zoom to Selection (or hit ‘0’).

Now your backdrop image should appear behind your 3D wireframe head.

You will need to repeat the process above to tweak the size and position of your working box so that your backdrop image exactly matches the size of your 3D-head.

6. Vertex Editing

Once you have your backdrop image aligned with your wireframe head, you can shift the appropriate vertices around based on your background 2D drawing.

Then, simply switch to the right and left cameras to edit the side view of your 3D-head.

When doing that, you may want to select and hide the side of the face you are not working on so that you do not accidentally move the wrong vertices.

To do this, select the Marquee tool at the left of your screen and drag your rectangle to select the side of the face you want to hide. Then, go to View >> Hide Selection.

Manipulator section on the right side of your Carrara screen.

When modifying your 3D-head, take note of the Manipulator section on the right side of your screen – just above the Global tab area.

Hidden allows you to hide the control arrows on a selected vertex. In general, you want to do this because the control arrows often occlude the vertices around your selection, making it difficult to select them.

Soft Select gives you the ability to easily reshape entire surfaces by just moving a single vertex.

• You can control the size of the surface area that it affects by changing the value on the left slider.
• Changing to a flat-shaded view of your model will enable you to quickly see the area of your soft selection. You can change your model view by going to the top right area of your screen and clicking on the Flat View cube.

Carrara screenshot - Soft selection area with a flat shaded view.

Finished modified head model using Carrara.

7. Have Fun with Head Modeling!

By modifying an existing high quality DAZ model, you can quickly create compelling content that also matches your character vision.

For example, the theme images used on this page were generated using the first head character I created on Carrara 7.

I just bought Carrara 7 about 1 week ago, and was able to create my first character in that time.

With this tutorial, you can probably do yours in a couple of days! Have fun!

Note – There are more than a few bugs in Carrara.

Sometimes, after shifting some vertices, your model surface may suddenly look extremely deformed. When that happens, just save your work to a temporary file (using the Save As option).

Restart Carrara and reopen your temporary file. The surface deformities should go away after you do this.

Also remember to save often as the Carrara application may sometimes freeze or crash.

My first Carrara modeled head.

There are lots and lots of 3D software that seem to do very similar things – but not quite – and it is really unclear which one is right for you.

To find the best 3D image software, you must first buy my
Shiba 3D-Software E-book!

Just Kidding!

Poser, Daz Studio, or Carrara? Scene above created and rendered in Daz Studio 4.6 Pro. Post-work in Photoshop.

Originally, my goal was to find something simple that I could use to quickly generate high quality 3D-images of figures and some simple backgrounds. In particular, I wanted to use these 3D-images for my online articles and blogs.

I started with Poser 7, got some great 3D-models from Daz3D and started having a lot of fun creating 3D-images. I chose Poser because I had used it briefly a few years back, and wanted to go with something I was familiar with.

Should you use Poser as well?

If I had to do it over again, at this time, I would not start with Poser. Instead, I would download a free version of Daz Studio and start generating images with that first.

Below, I will go through my experiences with Poser, Carrara, and Daz Studio, and talk about why I am currently back on Daz Studio.

Image rendered in Daz Studio 4.6 Pro with postwork in Photoshop.

Poser

Rendered in Poser 7, using Aiko 3 base.

One of the biggest advantages of Poser, in my opinion, is that it has been around for a long time, therefore, there is a lot of content for it. Many vendors are very familiar with Poser, and there are loads of 3D-products that are available for the platform. In addition, it has a powerful dynamic cloth system, and a great material room (i.e. shaders).

I moved away from Poser mainly because rendering time was really long. Anything more than a simple figure took a long time to render, and the direct manipulation interface (e.g. posing and navigation) slowed down significantly for me as well. It became extremely painful to create, pose, and render even fairly simple scenes. I really wanted something that would give me greater control of the object polygons, smoother interface control, as well as faster rendering.

Note though, that I haven’t used Poser in several years, therefore my Poser experiences are based on Poser 7 and 2008 computer hardware.

More recently, I decided not to move back to Poser, mainly because of the Genesis figure. One of the largest places for low cost 3D models is at Daz3D. More importantly, Daz also produces very popular human base models, such as their well known Victoria and Michael lines. Most of the outfits and accessories produced by 3D vendors support these two character lines. Earlier versions of Victoria and Michael are fully Poser compatible.

However, recently, Daz released a new generation of models based on their Genesis technology. In particular, generation 5 and above Victoria and Michael figures are now based on this new technology. While there is a format transfer solution for Poser, these figures and the clothing autofit tool that gives it a lot of flexibility, work best in Daz Studio.

Rendered in Poser 7.

Carrara

After using Poser for several months, I decided to make the switch to Carrara at the end of 2009. As I described earlier, I wanted a faster renderer and more control of my object polygons. While on sale, Carrara 7 was comparable in price to Poser, and at the time I liked it a lot better than Poser.

Why?

• Carrara was much faster than Poser.
• I liked Carrara’s posing controls more than Poser’s. Carrara runs more smoothly than Poser on my computer, which makes it significantly easier to pose figures and clothing. I had difficulty using Poser’s direct manipulation controls because of the significant time lag.
• I liked Carrara’s rendering quality a lot more than Poser’s. Rendering speed is also much faster in Carrara compared to Poser. For example, the image below is generated using Carrara 7 with post-work in Photoshop.

Figures rendered in Carrara. Backgrounds from Sveva at Renderosity.
• Because of lag, doing more complex backgrounds in Poser is difficult and unpleasant. In contrast, Carrara is much better at handling backgrounds, as well as supports terrains and environmental effects.
• Carrara has good support for shaders (e.g., character, object, and clothing textures). In addition, there are a variety of pre-built shaders in Carrara and you can purchase more from Daz. With better textures, you can generate higher quality, and more realistic looking 3D images.
• Carrara supports a much larger range of functions compared to Poser. The biggest one for me is the ability to do vertex editing. You may think that you do not want to mess around with vertices, but it is very nice to have the ability to tweak little things such as making a shirt slightly longer or shorter, slightly changing the shape of an object, etc.
  Ultimately I really wanted the ability to change the faces of my characters.

I figured that Carrara will easily grow with me as I gain more 3D experience, and want to do more with 3D art.

One of the key weaknesses of Carrara (as of Carrara 8.5) is that it does not support dynamic cloth (which is supported by Poser and Daz Studio). However, you can drape the clothing within Daz Studio and import that into Carrara.

** I am not sure how well it will work when animated within Carrara because it will no longer be dynamic.

I liked Carrara’s rendering quality a lot more than Poser’s.

Daz Studio

However, at the end of 2013, I decided it was time for a switch to Daz Studio. One of the key reasons for this is that Daz is no longer putting much effort into developing Carrara. It took more than a year after the release of Genesis, before it was supported in Carrara (version 8.5). In addition, the autofit tool which really gives the Genesis figures its super powers does not work well in Carrara 8.5.

In addition to all this, it seems like Daz is focusing their main software efforts on Daz Studio, which now has some great global illumination options, sub-surface scattering, scene instancing, collision detection, sub-division surfaces, and more. In addition, Daz Studio has since collected a fairly large following, and there are now a lot of vendor products available for it. This is in contrast to Carrara which has very slow updates, limited new features, and a lot fewer vendor offerings.

In addition, Daz Studio is currently free, so I decided to make the leap.

Rendered in Daz Studio 4.6 Pro, postwork in Photoshop.

I could not be happier with that decision. In addition to the new features, tools, and greater amount of vendor content,

• I found that doing lights in Daz Studio is much easier than in Poser or Carrara. I was able to get up and running really quickly because of the awesome light primitives that come with Daz Studio 4.6 (which I got for free!).
• The Daz Studio 3Delight renderer is nice and fast. In addition, if we want to use an unbiased renderer later on, to produce more realistic looking results, there are plugins for those in Daz Studio.
• The Daz Studio interface is smooth and easy to learn. I am able to navigate my scenes well, even with more complex background scenes and elements.

Rendered in Daz Studio 4.6 Pro, with post-work in Photoshop.

Previously in Carrara, I would render each figure separately and then compose them with various backgrounds in Photoshop. However, since switching to Daz Studio, I am now rendering the entire scene together. The faster rendering speed, simple interface, and great lighting system has allowed me to start doing this fairly quickly. Rendering the entire scene is best because it allows for more interesting camera angles as well as lighting.

Here is my Daz Gallery, which contains many of the recent renders that I made using Daz Studio 4.6 Pro. In contrast, my Renderosity gallery contains my older renders that I did in Carrara. Even just from the renders included in this article, it is clear, I think, that there is a big improvement in what I can create.

If you are new to Daz Studio, I have just written a few tutorials for beginners based on my recent experiences –

• How to Create Fantasy Art in Daz Studio.
• Tips and Tricks for Daz Studio Beginners.
• How to Combine Multiple Poses in Daz Studio.

Rendered in Daz Studio 4.6 Pro, with post-work in Photoshop. This image also uses the Look at My Hair free player.