Hello, I just bought Carrara 1.1. I am using it on a Powerbook G3 Pismo and have given the program over 200 megs of Ram. It freezes and crashes. It does the same on my g4 733. I have turned off the most obvious possible extension conflicts. I am running 9.2.2. Is the program stable? I need to make some animations for a Alternative Energy video for schools: turbines turning, a rocket ship taking off (part of the story line) cars circling the earth like satellites and more. Will Carrara do all this well and relatively easily? I have tried having a rocket lift off using the "atmosphere>wind" settings (which is the "sky" settings in 2.0) and the horizon does not move even when the camera tilts? any suggestions? And the settings for the particle generator seem difficult. I play with them and they don't work the way i think they should. anyone know of a good tutorial for those. I need to make fire shoot out of the rocket. I need to have the rocket fly over a barren land. Will the terrain generator work well for that? Thank you for any and all help, John

I still use C1.1 and run it on a Mac G3. The only problem that seems to happen to me frequently is when I jump to the modeling room. The program boots me out of Carrara and back to the desktop. This seems to happen more frequently the longer I am working on a particualr model. It's a nuisance but if I save before the modeling room it does little damage other than irritating me. I don't understand how you are using the "atmosphere wind" to apply a vertical take off for a rocket. Are you lowering the ground level? I'm not sure that animates. You can have the rocket lift off simply by moving it through the 3-D space along the time line. Have the camera point at the rocket and your done. Two of the particle settings I have used for rocket blasts are big bonfire and smoke, with very little tweaks. Just add a glow to the texture channel and whatever other colors you want and it seems to work great. You will have to coordinate this with your timeline so the fire erupts when you need it to. Just remember to invert the cone of the particle generator or you will fry your rocket. I think Carrara can do all the things you want it to do but there is a bit of a learning curve, especially animation. Good luck. memaci

Must be a Mac problem, I use 1.1 still here and there (on PC), and I've really never had any "crashes", the only problem I've had is the opengl screwing up here and there. I'd suggest first dropping the amount of RAM allocated to Carrara, programs tend to like to crash and eat all the memory completely if you give them to much;) You might want to change you video settings to software Aufde, that has been a woo of many users, 1.1 had much video problems, like I said thats the only problem I get. Do a quick search of the forum looking for "crashes" and you'll likely find some tips to keep things running smoothly. Brian

In general, the atmosphere wind stuff can be clumsy. It's good for certain kinds of scenes but has many limitations for lighting and ground kinds of settings. Carrara can do everything you've mentioned and I think you have a reasonable grasp of the concepts and rudimentary mechanics of what you're trying to do. There is somewhat of a learning curve for what you're after but a lot of it is pretty easy. Cars and satellites are pretty straight forward. I've done rockets taking off before and that's not super hard. Flying over a terrain could be interesting because the terrain in C could be better but I think it's a pretty manageable thing. -Kix

I run Carrara 1.1 on a 400mgz Pismo with 512 ram (250 allocated to C), OS 9.1 and No Virtual memory. I don't have any problems with crashes at all. Do use the software renser for your scenes, it's better than OpenGL. I believe that once upon a time there was a problem/conflict with the "Color Picker" extension but don't know exactly waht it was.

i've used c2 briefly on my g3 266 with os9.2.2 and it seemed stable, but i mainly work in 10.2.1 and that is pretty rock solid. i get a crash in the texture room every once in a while. also i found 10.2.3 to give me problems with carrara, so i'm avoiding it for now. are you sure that you're using the most recent version of carrara? should say 2.1 on the splash screen when you launch it. btw, i really don't think you should give the app less ram. 200-500MB seems like what the program wants on a normal basis (i figured this by watching the process viewer in osx while rendering)