I've been doing the Small World Tutorial on the Eovia web site. All was going well until I tried to render the sphere with street lights including spotlights with the light cone effect. The rendering freezes no matter what settings I use. I'm using Windows 2000, 654 megs RAM, 27 gig hard drive free, 1.4 gig CPU, 128 meg graphics card. So far, I've found that a lot of things Carrara claims it can do, it will only do in very limited circumstances if at all. Perhaps I don't have everything configured correctly but I'm at a loss for what to do to solve this problem. I'm using Carrara Studio 1. I had been thinking of upgrading but, so far, that's been a waste of money. I would like to at least be able to replicate the tutorial successfully.

You may want to contace Eovia about it. If it's some kind of bug you've found in the code, they should know about it or they could potentially tell you how to fix it. -Kix

Thanks for your reply. That was the first thing I did and we are working on it but I hoped that maybe somebody else had encountered this problem and knew how to deal with it. If it's a bug, it's hard to believe that I'm the only one who has encountered it, but I've had no other trouble with my setup. I did replace the graphics card yesterday but called their tech support today and spent a good deal of time today reviewing the installation, and changed some settings but that did not affect this rendering problem at all.

you might want to try more troubleshooting on your own. for instance, try rendering the tutorial with a subset of the features and effects. if it works, add more and see if it crashes. if it doesn't work, simplify more and see what happens. through trial and error, you should be able to find out if the problem is your configuration of the scene. also, try taking your scene to a friend's machine to see if the problem is your box. as far as carrara 2 goes, it seems to be much more stable than 1. there were some great useability enhancements in the realm of selecting, moving and rotating objects that make the software far more enjoyable. i found carrara 1 to be barely tolerable, 2 is much nicer.

I've tried on two of my computers and on my brother's computer with about every variation I could think of in terms of image size, final file type, compression, color depth, etc.. It renders fine with just the sphere, vehicle, street lights, and distance lights. The spot lights are the problem. The tutorial suggests adding light cones, wind, and turbulence. The spot lights and light cones render well in the assembly room but even one spot light alone freezes the program when the rendering progresses to the point where it shows. The capacities of the different computers affect the rendering speed but all freeze at the same point in the process. Ctrl-Alt-Delete still works but nothing much else and waiting doesn't produce any changes--it's not just suddenly going super-slow. Maybe Studio 2 is the answer but I've spent a lot of money upgrading already and seen very little benefit most of the time. I'd like to get control of the basics.

Light cones (any visible light effects) do not play well with any of the g-buffers in the render settings. All of them should be off (un-checked) except pixel color. Another thing that can kill a movie render are problems with the compression codecs. Some codecs need specific frame sizes to work (divided evenly by 4 - both height & width) Try rendering to avi with no compression. A better way to do any movie render in Carrara is render to sequenced frames with any of the lossless compression options. Putting the movie together outside of C gives you a whole world of other options and if Carrara should crash in the middle of a render it is very easy to pick up with the last frame rendered instead of starting the whole thing over. Carrara 2.1 adds alot of value and does make the program much easier to live with. mdc my 2 cents worth of (non-spell-ckecked) comments

Thank you, you've given me a workable strategy. Can you recommend a program for putting the movie together? Adobe Premiere? Something cheaper???? Has anyone out there successfully completed the Small World Tutorial and rendered it into an AVI or QuickTime movie in either Studio 1 or Studio 2? I'll gladly upgrade if I've got some assurance that it'll really solve this problem.

Eovia tech support confirmed that the problem was due to a bug in Studio 1.1 that has been fixed in Studio 2.1 so I guess upgrading is the way to go.

I dont have a real good answer for this, I dont do a lot of animation so I use the really cheap (& free) stuff. I found a copy of Lumiere on the net for about $29.00. It used to be a Corel program but is out of development now. It is easy to use and has a bunch of features. But it does not support some of the latest video formats. I end up building the movie there and saving it as an uncompressed avi then encoding it with something else, like the free encoder from Microsoft. It works but takes that extra step. mdc

Thank you all for your help! I'm back on track again. I see that Shadow Catcher is indeed listed in the index--I must have been too frustrated and cross-eyed from staring at my computer to see it last night. Perhaps the reverse shadow effect will come in handy in its own right sometime.