Bill, I should have asked if you were on a Mac or PC ... Opps! That narrows down the field a bit. I think your right that Amapi doesn't run on a Mac (awesome machine you have there). TrueSpace has a very unique interface, inviting, and doesn't have that sterile technical look. It has decent animation tools, and the facial animator which is a big plus for charater animation. I'd recommend getting something to run on your Mac. You'll love the dual processors when your rendering (with a multi threaded app)! A good machine makes a big difference. Does C4D CE run on OSX? I haven't paid attention to it since I'm a PC user. Lipsync in Carrara - that could be difficult. I use Mimic and Poser to lipsync. With Poser4 Propak, I can host my poser animations in 3D MAX if I need to use an external app for rendering. Mimic can export BHV motion files, but I don't think C3 supports BHV. I hope that the upcomming C3 plugin for Poser will support full animations - which will give me lipsync (in a round about way) in Carrara. Right now, the best way to lipsync in C3 would probably be to create morph targets for the major lips movements, and manually apply them. OUCH! Sounds painfull, and like a lot of work. Animation Master ($299 www.hash.com) runs on OSX and it may be an option if you are really interested in character animation and creation, but it doesn't play well with others (I don't believe there are any options for exporting the animations to other 3d apps). Poser 5 ($199 www.curiouslabs.com) is available for OSX, which in combination with either Mimic (www.daz3d.com) or TextPuppet can be user to easily create animations (I'm not sure if there are Mac versions for these). Actually anything that can create a BHV file can be used for animation in Poser or AM. The modeling capabilities of Poser are ... well .... VERY limited, so it is strictly a figure animation/posing app. AM has good modeling tools for organic forms, but is definitely lacking in other areas. Unfortunately, character animation is still a niche market, with few affordable options. Poser and Animation Master are the only easily affordable options (DAZ Studio, under development, might add one more option in the near future, and Greenbriar Studios has already annouced a DAZ Studio plugin for Carrara that will be available when DAZ Studio becomes available to the general public - it's currently in Alpha testing). In the "high end" apps, the character annimation tools are much better, but typically at a additional Premium price (and a big learning curve). For general purpose 3D and character animation, an affordable solution may be C3, Poser5, and the the C3/Poser plugin (which is supposed to be out at the end of Q1 this year), which would give you a lot of flexiblility. The bone tools in C3 are adequate, not as sophisticated as Character Studio (3DS MAX) or Mocca (C4D 8), but I have played with them, and you can get good results if your persistant(there just aren't a lot of good tutorials, so it's a lot of trial and error). Vue d'Esprit, Mover4(5), and Poser is another combination that would work, but you would need to have another app for modeling, since Vue is not a modeler. I hope I didn't add to the 3D confusion with all the options above. If you want to do some character animation, but really want to focus on general 3D, then Carrara is still a very good choice. You will learn a lot more about the nuts and bolts of charater animation with Carrara than with Poser or AM. If your focus is really on character animation, then AM might be a good choice (I haven't used it, but it seems to be a very good stand alone character animation app), or the combination of C3 and Poser 5 with the yet to be seen Carrara to Poser plugin, or C3 and DAZ Studio with the Greenbriar Studios plugin. Of course the last two options are dependent on software that hasn't been relased yet. A work around for getting Poser animations into C3 would be to export each frame of your animation from Poser to .obj format, then import each individual .obj file into C3, and animate the visiblilty of each model with key frames. Addmittedly a brute force approach, but it would work, as this is how it used to be done with C4D 6 (and may be the easiest way to lipsync until the poser transporter is available).

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