Hi I don't mean to complain but... I just spent 2 hours in the assemble room trying to practice and get a grip on Carrara and had one "rendering failed" after another. I would close down the scene and reopen. And this is simple stuff! I'm not capable of hurting this program yet! LOL! It would be alright for a few minutes before it hit me with the same message again. You add that to the crappy documentation, the unability to do simple booleans and other problems and I'm getting down right discouraged, I'm afraid I'm getting the opinion that Carrara is garbage! But I see the great stuff that you guys are doing! I don't get it! I've got the update, I've tried reinstalling, I've babied it through the simplest operations and it is still the buggiest piece of software I've ever seen! There I feel a little better..needed to rant a bit. I'll keep trying but..geez! Thanks! Back to the assemble room....

There are definetly certain things that cause the errors, but I don't get them that often. As far as booleans go, I would avoid them as much as possible; Carrara actually alters the polygons (as opposed to Bryce, which uses raytracing to define booleans), even the best of algorithms for doing this can have bugs; though I will say I'm certain Carrara's could be much bettter. We should know what Adobe plans to do with Carrara in the next few weeks - hopefully they will put out some patches. Brian P. Retford Carrara Extensions www.losthorizonsoftware.com

Thanks Brian- I feel a little better today- I was able to get some practice in without any misbehaving by Carrara! Got the "Carrara Bible" today- so much more informative than the user guide! Daf