Ok I am getting totally mad @ carrara. I made the earth out of 2 sphere primatives and a cloud primitive. I animate and let it render for 48+ hours. Well I look @ the render and there are little dots about 1 pixel big that periodically pop up. WHY???? They look like the dots you get on the horizon when you use an infinate plane. Ok I think maybe its just b/c I used primitives..so I convert them to Vertex objects...NOPE.. I still get those little dots. WHATS GOING ON? I am not a professional animator but its the little stuff like this that is makeing me really disappointed with this product. This little error = real money lost. I am starting to feel like I should go download blender accept I hate its intereface. AC needs to get his act together!!!! BTW: Mark I have about 10 things to post up in free stuff but 3 spots I am working on are awaiting client approval or runtimes to end...Im not posting the stuff while its being aired :)

I think I remember reading some posts about 'Smart Sampling' occasionally causing that to happen and the the solution was to disable it in the Render Room if it's a problem on any given render. I'd scrub the track to the frames that you were getting the 'sparkels' on and try a single frame render with Smart Sampling disabled to see if that helps out. Hope that fixes it. Looking forward to seeing your posts! Mark

Well I found out how to fix the earth...remove its weather. I learned an important lesson about Carrara over the last couple of projects. This lesson is that Carrara primitives such as fire, clouds, fog, land, etc are unusable for animations. The above picture was a nice globe that everyone liked, but annoying little black dots kept popping up. The only way I could get it to work was to remove the clouds. In fact I have noticed that you cannot intersect any carrara primitive with a regular model or another primitive or you will generate render errors. This is unfortuante as these tools where what attracted me to Carrara in the first place. I will definately stick with carrara until I try out C2...but I cant recommend this program to anyone until this error is fixed. This is like haveing a Viper and then finding out that its been governed to go no faster than 65mph. Well now that I know this I can at least work around it...anyone have an ideal on how I can get a nice cloud layer? :) BTW: Thanks for looking at the project Mark..it @ least made me feel good knowing that it wasnt something completely obvious....

I've used Fog (I think) in a sphere just a little bigger than the Earth sphere... Worked pretty darn nice. Brent is that what you were doing? Clint

Well I'll go try that next..else I am going to see if I can maybe work something out with a mandlebrot set of some type. The problem is that in a still setting I can always get it to work...but by frame 3 its starting to get pretty messed up. I hope these primitive errors are addressed in the next patch.