This is just a note that I hope will be of use to new Carrara users on PCs. Often Carrara appears to lock up: no hour glass, not responsive to mouse clicks and so on. Often times you have simply asked it to do something very demanding. It is worthwhile to do a CTRL-ALT-DEL and check things in Task Manager. The Programs tab may show Carrara as "not responding" but a check of the Process tab may show that Carrara is actually chugging away. If the memory usage figures are high and changing chances are that if you give it enough time it will get done with whatever it is about. Of course then you must decide if what you just asked Carrara to do was worth the wait! HTH

Like importing a terrain mesh from Bryce 5 (obj or 3ds) that you increased to 100% accuracy first and now Carrara has 10,000,000 triangles to sort though every time you rotate it just a hair.

yaaa.. that happens on Macs too :)

I remember back in 1994 I used to use Sculpt 3D, and I had some major scenes that had up to 35,000 triangles. It was brutal on my Mac IIci. Now I can throw around hundreds of thousands of triangles pretty smoothly, on a machine that's much newer than the IIci, but still about 5 years old. Carrara sometimes locks up for me, too, but overall I'm totally amazed at how fast things have become. It's all relative, I guess.

Well...that's one of the reasons why I tossed Amapi 3 off my machine (no hourglass, no thermometer, just a dead interface; you couldn't tell if it was locked up or just busy.) I've had a couple legitimate lock-ups with Carrara but I forgive it; I'm on an underpowered machine with a legacy OS. I'll give it two-three minutes -- it can take that long to do a "weld" operation over a nearly completed model. I've also had an abrupt quit or two (usually when naming polys), but unlike its un-mourned ancestor, it has yet to corrupt a file on me. I just start it up again, re-save the file, and am off and running.