I just picked up a magazine at Borders that has Carrara 1.1 free, along with a demo of the latest version 4. It's a nice program for creating Poser morphs as well as creating full-fledged 3D meshes. It may be the best modeling program that's being given away.

Heh - Cripes... I think I still have mine (paid-for, Win32 platform) version stashed around the house somewhere... Nice render engine on it too, but transparencies are a bitch to wrangle. /P

Are the Carara- Poser import on that version? It is posible to iport Poser animations? Are there some limitations?

There's an Obj import, but there isn't a Poser import along the lines of DAZ Bryce or Vue D'Esprit that readily imports textures, bumps, and transparencies, let alone animations. For the price of a magazine, with a free Adobe calendar, it's still a good deal. It's in Digital Creative Arts Magazine #15.

I tried it. Its weird. The Y axis is where the Z axis should be and the Z axis is the Y axis. Go figure. Now with version 4 and still haven't corrected the coordinate system.

Imagine uses that system of the y and z axis being swapped too.

I've seen something about axis swapping in some utility that translates between formats. It's a buisance, but no worse than Poser using such small numeric values compared to othe programs. Issue 16 haas been out for a while in the UK: Amapi 3D v6.1 and some DAZ models -- nothing startling but if you want Aiko 3.0 Base, now that DAZ have stopped the free offer on that...

Speaking of Amapi... has anyone been able to install it? I tried with the version that came with Computer Arts a few months ago, and I tried with this one. Both failed to install in exactly the same way: a few seconds after starting, I got a tiny little error message "TGSFront.ini file bad or missing" or something like that. There is a file TGSFront.ini in the installation folder, and it seems to be perfectly all right.

As usual, CA fobbed me off with an excuse, I haven't had a chance to contact DCA yet. Has anyone else had this error? My system is well over the minimum PC specs for v6.1, in fact it's comfortably in the recommended specs.

Ideas, anyone?

Oh yes, I hit that problem, and figured the work around. There's a two-stage installer. The first stage, which just presents some options and neat buttons on-screen, is what it broken. Go to the directory contentsoftwareamapi3d and you'll see the first-stage installer there, with a file called TGSFront.ini Go into the Amapi3D directory and run the setup.exe you find there. There's a couple of plugins in other directories for 3DStudioMax and 3space. I suspect that there's some cort of messup over EOL sequences.

FUBAR'd the same way in both magazine CDs? Ah well, I found the other setup, I'll try it after I go offline. Thanks for the pointer.

I don't believe it. I got another error message -- this time it "can't find a section [0009] in the file lang.dat".

For the sake of my sanity, does anyone know what's going on? I'm beginning to suspect Amapi is too snooty to run on my pedestrian little computer... augh!

That's a new one on me. I can't say it's good advertising...

Just to add, Carrara 1.1 has been given away with several British magazines over the past year. The disk I have was with PC Pro of May '04. "Online registration required", which is quite common.