Amapi 7 has been out for a few months now. How well does the bridge to C2 work? What do folks think of Amapi 7 in general? Worth the step from 5.1 or 6? Thanks, Marc

I've got nothing against amapi (except that it constantly crashes my computer!) but personally I would prefer to see Eovia add some muscle to the built-in Carrara vertex modeler (things like beveling/rounding, interactive extrude, knife tool, etc. to bring the VM more in line with other polygon modelers). Lightwave has the separation between modeller and layout and at least for simpler projects that can be a bit of a pain. I've only played briefly with the amapi 7 demo so I can't speak to how well the bridge works. One thing I'd wonder about is how the bridge works when it comes to texturing objects inside Carrara and how does it interact with third-party uv mappers. It seems like most complex texturing is done in conjunction with these uvmapper programs.

it lets you import Amapi files to Carrara. I haven't had the real need to use it much as I tend to export to either OBJ or C2 format from Amapi (because most stuff I do in Amapi is headed for OBJ format and Poser anyway)

I do a lot of uvmapping, but only for Poser models really, where the uvmapping is important. lately I am doing a lot of very complex procedural shaders in Carrara, that are much more complicated than any uvmapping I have done (for crystal, gemstones, metals, etc) and I never bother to uvmap items using those shaders unless I'm going to import it to Poser. I use Carrara to generate decent reflecton mapping and textures for transparent objects in Poser too. Works very well.