Can anyone recommend good plugins for Carrara to help me make the following (since I'm an animator, stand-alone products won't work): -Realistic fully-texturable trees that bend and sway and ripple in the wind, and are highly customizable. -Other plants, such as flowers and shrubs, that also animate with wind and growth and such. -Waves, rain and fire that crash, rip, ripple, and burn. I'll be waiting

Check out Tree Druid and Thor at zenstar.com. They might be a little of what you are looking for. As far as fire etc. what about the one in Carrera? I have made fire with it, but have'nt tried animating it yet.

Fire is IN Carrara... you'll have to goof with it a lot to get any specific look you're after. Tree Druid is very good, as noted elsewhere. Worth the money. For rain, use Carrara's particle system. There's even a rain pre-set. Again, you'll have to play with it a lot to get the look the way you want it. Waves can be very hard, if you're talking about photorealistic ones with foam, churn, and spray. Making gentle waves within Carrara is easy -- but curling, crashing waves will likely need to be a combination of FX composited together. At the end of this month, the movie "The Perfect Storm" will be released... soon after, several of the FX magazines will probably have articles that talk a little bit about how the ocean FX were done. I'd look into that. --

I STRONGLY suggest you move on to another 3D solution because right now Carrara's future is uncertain. There are better products out there with much more support and a far less degree of frustration

Beats me, I myself hav'nt had the problems others have complained about. Can't explain why, I'm only on a 233 iMac w/160 real Ram/240 virtual.

Thanks for the comments, everybody. I haven't purchased Carrara yet, and wanted to make sure I can do the things I need to do before I buy it. I'd looked up Tree Druid, but ended up on Dynamic-Realities website rather than Zenstar's. They said it was available only for Lightwave, yet I'd heard people here talking about using it as a plugin with Carrara, so I needed clarification. The waves I was talking about were "photorealistic," and the type you'd see in a violent storm. I really need that for a project I'm starting, so I wanted to see if there were plugins to make it easier. I've considered Maya, 3D Studio Max, Electric Image, Carrara, Truespace, and others, but Carrara looks like it has the power I need, and it's the least expensive of all of those anyhow (EI's over $2000). On top of that, Maya, 3DSM, and EI would all require a brand-new and more powerful PC (not to mention expen$ive) than I've got. I'll have to continue to do lots more research too. I saw that one of the other programs (I think it was EI) had a built in "Mr. Nitro," where you just drag an icon onto an object and it does a full explosion, complete with gas and burn volumetric effects and throwing split-up parts everywhere. Is that what Carrara's "explosion" preset is like? Can someone answer another question: are Bryce and Poser-animated-files easily imported into Carrara, or is that a pain in the ---- to do?

Very few of the pre-sets in Carrara will deliver "finished goods" like the explosion you refer to. However, with work, practice and cleverness, you can get it to do a lot. The explosion effect in Carrara simply breaks an obj into polygons and scatters them -- you'd have to add your own glows, smoke, sparks, & fire -- but that's do-able. Frankly, I'm skeptical of a pre-packaged effect that DOESN'T require customizing, since you want to be able to control the look on a per-case basis. Importing Poser animations is the "Holy Grail" plugin around here. I think everyone on this list would jump at it if it existed. Right now, it's all a variety of workarounds, including morph-amations, compositing, and other tricks. I can sympathize; I've got Maya on an SGI workstation at work, and it's a tough transition to work with Carrara on my PC at home, but I'm still very impressed with things it can do for the low price. I wish I had time to work with it more -- I've yet to do anything meaningful or woth posting yet due to workload and time constraints.