billhdz,

Excellent questions, made me think a little more.
Hmmm, which one is more complete, that's a tough one. In many ways, the modeler, and the work flow in Cinema 4dXL 6 is more robust than Carrara, and obviously aimed at the high end commercial market (sweat house?). I think it was designed for people like me who really don't know where they are going until they get there. Cinema has a lot of flexibility, in that many of the modifiers are "non destructive" and can be changed or removed at any time. Cinema 4D has a very good set of snapping tools also.

If you look at some of the reviews on 4D XL 6/7 you'll see a lot on how good the render engine is. Which it is quite nice, but out of the box, C3 beats it hands down! C3 also has a very powerfull and flexible spline modeler. C3 has a very nice smoothing option when importing models, it's a big plus if you have to import some low polygon count models. Of course C3 has the tree modeler, which I think could be used to create just about any "woody" plant. The trees aren't as good as Xfrog or Onyx without tweaking, but what a great bonus to have it available.

Shaders and texturing are about the same in the two, which again shows Carrara's value for the money. Carrara has a UV mapper which has received mixed reviews, but it's there if you need it. There are a lot of free plugins for Cinema 6, and some commercial. There aren't as many free plugins for Carrara, but to be honest, many of the free plugins for Cinema were developed to improve the workflow and speed in preforming repetative or complex tasks. There are several very good commercial plugins available for C3, including one that can make hair (or fields of flowers, or "anything that grows"). Like Carrara, the plugins for it won't break the bank either.

The user interface is completely cutomizable in Cinema 4D, which some people really like. Carrara kinda takes over your desk top, which some people really dislike. To me, it is a little annoying when I want to switch apps, but nothing I can't live with. I do like the implementation of the "sliding trays" in Carrara, and the reduction of the control icon sizes in C3 is a big plus over the earlier versions.

The render engine in C3 has caustics, global illumination (GI), indirect lighting (which is GI, but some vendors fake it), volumetrics, and supports HDR lighting for photo-realistic results. Cinema CE doesn't have caustics (in case you couldn't tell, I just love caustic effects), doesn't have HDR support (except with V8), but does have GI.

I could go on, but I'm seeing a real trend here. Bang for the buck, I think that Carrara 3 is really impressive, is more complete than C4D CE, and hands down has a better renderer (oh, C4D does have multipass rendering, and C3 daoesn't). If you can afford C3, then I'd say go for it, right now I don't think there is anything comparable in the same price range (Carrara 2 got 5 out of 5 stars from Digit, and Carrara 3 got 4.5 out of 5, these are really high ratings from Digit - 3DS Max 6 only got 4.5). Cinema 4D CE+ for $99 is a great deal, and a good way to get into 3D, but you may end up spending more to get an app with HDR and caustics. I don't think anyone mentioned this, but you also get dedicated modeling app with Carrara - Amapi 5.1. I haven't really used it, but Amapi users do some really impressive work.

If you can afford it - get Carrara 3, I honestly don't think you'll be disappointed. If your interested in Cinema 4D, get the magazine freebee on the cover of 3D World, Computer Arts, Digit, or "The Complete 3D Collection 2" from 3D World (you can usually get them at Barns and Nobel, sometimes Hastings and CompUSA). You could then learn one of the mid range "pro" apps for modeling, and export your models to Carrara for beautiful renders. But I think you'll find Carrara 3 will do just about anything you could want, except for things like complex control particle emitters streams with multiple particle types all with unigue physics reactor properties (Hmmm ... controlled chaos)- the stuff you pay the big bucks to get the plugin to get the desired effect in the big buck apps (like XSI).

Good Luck! Let us know what you decide.

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