Hi folks After being a member here for some time, I have noticed a few things. One of these is the very very low level of activity in the forums and elsewhere on Carrara or Ray Dream Studio. Im amazed as how few items you see for these fine programs here. On the other hand, programs such as Poser and Bryce have at least 10 times the activity. It surprises me because these programs are powerful, inexpensive, and easy to use. I try and upload project images whenever I get the chance. It would be cool if we started sharing items like shaders, deformers etc.; that we create, maybe put up some models for others to play with, send up more images. This might attract some other people to try the software and result in benefits for the entire C4/RDS community. Well just my two cents worth. Sparrow

Eovia doesn't market their products at the same demographic as Fractal Designs and MetaCreations did in the past with Poser and Bryce or Curious Labs and DAZ 3D do now. Over the years, it begins to show on Renderosity what apps have become most used/popular.

Yeh its a shame too. I have other programs but use RDS and C4 most. Ive been using RDS since V3. Maybe if they actually marketed more the software would become more popular. I remember another company who had a superior product and didnt market. That company was named Atari, and look what happened to them in the 80s.

There was a very long time lag where Poser figures wouldn't import into RDS or Carrara very easily or well. And when Poser got a much improved renderer of its own, that severed any remaining ties Carrara may have had with Poser. For about a month, Carrara finally caught up with Poser 5 and could actually import its figures with hair. Maybe the next version of Carrara will import Poser 6 format? Meanwhile, Poser 6 has pretty much the same rendering quality that Carrara 4 has. And Shade 7 works with Poser 6 already.

I was thinking of taking a look at shade and vue to replace carrara and bryce. Im not sure but someone told me Corel had or is planning on cancelling Bryce. Knowing how Corel is, I wouldnt doubt it. I know what you mean about importing and file compatability between the different programs. Its a shame they can't come up with some unified file format standard for all 3D files. The closest we have is Obj files, and those have some limitations. The sad thing is that most of the 3D software out there with good capabilities like 3Ds Max and Maya cost so darn much you have to be a rockafella to afford it. This cuts a lot of very talented people out of the loop. Carrara could easily fill the void if they actually got it out on the store shelves.

Caligari used to sell truSpace on store shelves. But people won't buy 3D software off the shelf now without trying a demo first if it's not an industry buzzword like 3DMAX or MAYA or LIGHTWAVE. So stores don't carry that kind of software because it just sits there. So customers buy the 3D World mags instead and see all the wonderful things 3DMAX, MAYA, and LIGHTWAVE can do. If they are a student and are surious, they'll get the academic versions or they'll know someone who'll pirate the stuff for them. Carrara does not even enter their decision process. Meanwhile, they've heard legends about Bryce 5 and Poser 5 and snatch those up from the store for $80 each.

I know the CompUSA up where I used to live in Michigan used to carry RDS4 and 5 a few years back, Thats where I initially bought it. But that was back in the Metacreations hayday. Personally Maya and 3Ds may be powerful but I haven't foudn anything I have not been able to do it RDS or Carrara, and I like the interface a lot better than Maya or 3DS or Lightwave. I do like the free floating camera system in Carrara, I find it confusing working with three open windows or more most of the time like most folks do in the higher end software. And personally I dont think there is any excuse for charging what they do for those packages.

I initially bought RayDream3D off the shelf (about 10 yrs ago), but the manual was so poor I never really got into it. Interestingly the manual has been used almost in its entirety as the foundation of the Carrara manual! Maybe that's why the forum is so quiet!

Lol Who reads the manual. RDS was so simple and intuitive that you only needed it for a sort of reference to look up very advanced features. Your right about the carrara manual, I only have 1.1 and the manual is so inaccurate that its pretty useless. Again I had to learn it all from practice.

Well, if you want to see more activity, this isn't really the place to go, 3dxtract has more work posted to it, but the yahoo group has the most discussions by far. It's kind of annoying having to follow at least 3 discussion groups though, and from the looks of it there will be more in the near future.

Ive never been to 3dxtract, Ill have to check it out, I take it that its url is 3dxtract.com?

I wonder if the forum here is really slower than it used to be? Maybe Kix could tell us?

3dxtract a great idea gone bad. As soon as the community started backing the site big time and rallying behind it and it became popular with the user base...what happened? You got it! Lets charge everyone now; 3dxtract when commercial. I think I downloaded like 3 magazines and then I stopped visiting the site. If the activity is down it is probably due to the high cost of the program. I think it is outrageous for Eovia to raise the cost 50% from one version to the next. I refused even to pay the upgrade cost and still use 3. Someone would really have to seek counseling if they would plop down $600 for Carrara when they could get Cinema or XSI for about the same and for Softimage XSI $200 less and that includes the training videos! I think what Eovia needs to do is exactly what Curious Labs did with Poser 5; cut the price in half. I know this really irritated the users who paid the full asking price when it first came out but you have to do what you have to do.

I agree, The idea of percieved value seems to get a bit overdone with some companies. Im still using C1.1 because I simply cannot afford the high cost of C3 or C4. In the old days companies used to make the product as inexpensive as possible and go for large amounts of sales. But now companies get too greedy and then wonder why the product isnt selling. I sure as heck can't plop odwn hundreds of dollars for what is essentially a hobby for me. Maybe some day the companies putting out this software will stop being so darn greedy and give the average guy on the street a chance to have some of the cool toys. Sometimes I think Capitalism is a very bad idea...

"XSI for about the same and for Softimage XSI $200 less and that includes the training videos!" Numbers are off a little on this one: Carrara Pro $579.00(full price) XSI Foundation $495.00 Deal on the 5 xsi training DVDs is over. Add $199.00 if you want them (I have them - they are worth the cost). 579 - 495 = 84 wayne k

I've never heard of XSI. I gotta get out more. What is the interface like?

It is a very powerful program with a steep learning curve. Sub-d modeling & character animation tools as good as anything out there - high end or not. The $495.00 deal they are offering now was $1995.00 just last year. So it was way overpriced then or under priced now. Either way free market competition has brought the price down into the (serious) hobbyist user's level. If you drive a Mac you are out of luck. They have a demo so you can take a look at the gui for your self. It is nothing like RDS/Carrara. I have Carrara 4 and XSI - like and use both. wayne k guam usa

Ill check out the demo, I dont drive a mac, I custom build all my own PCs. I wonder how well it will render on an Athlon64.. :)

Interesting discussion guys. I had the feeling that the level of activity was falling off dramatically here in the Carrara section.

I think the prices on LightWave, 3DS Max and Maya are falling because each is jockeying for a larger share of the market and initial development costs have been re-couped. Now the race is on to see who will become the industry standard, and to do that [at least in part] is to have the biggest number of users out there who gravitate to your product as a first choice. [and...as for capitalism being a very bad idea, look how far Marxism got. At least for the Marxists, the price was right!:) and for you "3D Power To The People!", Maya is giving it away these days with their Personal Learning Edition. Can't ask for too much more than that.]

I'm pretty happy with Carrara, though I've never gotten quite at ease with the texturing system. [I came over from StrataVision]. I still wish I could project a texture onto one side and straight through the object.

But I've continued to hang out here because I find the UI to be the least cluttered, easiest to use, easiest on the eyes.

Yeh Im starting to hate the shader system in Carrara. Just when I think I have a skin texture set up to wrap properly onto an element, zap, its all skewed and warped. They should have a function to export some kind of template for a skin based on the shape of a given object, either that or build in a better 2D texture painting system. Student versions are great for saving money, thats IF you're a student, us poor working slobs however, still get overcharged.

Kelly, I think you can do what you want if you use "Flat mapping" in your shader and click "Ignore normals". Of course if it were in the manual it would be too easy:-)

Attached Link: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Carrara/

Well, here's my complaint. Yahoo's site is ugly, loaded with ads, demands that cookies be enabled for too many sites and there are no artists galleries. No matter what rendering software I use I will stick with RO.

Yeh the Yahoo groups do have a lot of limitations on what you can do. No offense Ringo. Image sizes for the galleries are so small that they are almost thumbnails, and there are other limitations. It's just the way yahoo is.

I have to agree with those points. I think the yahoo forum is growing in spite of yahoo and not because of it. Carrara has out grown yahoo and needs a better home. There was a thread or two on this same subject and it looks like options are coming on several fronts, including a company owned forum. We'll see who steps up first. wayne k guam usa

I was thinking of designing a site for it, I'm currently unemployed due to some medical issues, so I have a bit of spare time. I wish SBC would give me a static IP, then I would just host at home off my network; but Ill check into it and see what I can do to get some hosting. If I can find some decent hosting I might be able to do something.

I am working on a new forum and will be moving the Yahoo list member to the new place. Later Ringo

ditto

Steps into the conversation I don't think discussion is down. I mean if you want to rate programs on that, check out the Softimage forum here. listens to crickets This site started out as a poser community, and as such still is very focused on that crowd. As stated the community of Carrara is fair and it is growing. Yahoo list-an image list and a user list Eovia is developing a company owned forum which is rumored to be quite nice 3dxtract releases bimonthly magazines that are VERY cheap, along with supplemental issues that are smaller but free. Plus the fact you can buy the whole collection on CD for $15, which comparing that to other learning resources its very inexpensive. As far as favorite software, to each his own. I love Carrara, and have watched it grow and continually improve. Each version makes it better and better. Give it time. In its price range it contains an incredible feature set. And upgrade pricing I think is very reasonable. But these are all my opinions, and I welcome others opinions as well. Brian

Yeh in most ways Carrara is better than Ray Dream Studio, lighting effects a mo0re complex shader system etc, but I really wish they had not taken out the wizard modeler for skinned objects, I ifnd it much easier to work with than the free form modeler in Carrara for simple objects. If you look at most of my images, the sculpted curved elements are all done in RDS wizard skin modeler. Then I bring it into C4 to finish, light, sskin and render. I checked out 3dXtract, not bad. I think they have more here though.

Not sure why we need still more Carrara forums when there is already 3Dxtract and this very fine one.

I'll bet that lots (most?) of the people who use Maya / Lightwave / Poser are using pirated software, and those communities have grown because of that large - if dubious - userbase. And if you're going to pirate your software, why pirate Carrara, of all things? Go for the expensive stuff! That may be part of the reason why Carrara is less visible. Maybe Eovia should give away Carrara 2 or Carrara 3 for free, to help build the community. Once people have invested time and effort in building elaborate scenes, they won't want to jump to another program so readily. And when and if they decide to buy something, they may decide to leverage their investment (in effort) and stick with Carrara. - Joe

That would be nice, then I could get rid of buggy 1.1. Is there really that big a difference between 3 and 4, or 2 and 4 for that matter? I've never gotten a good look at 3 or 4, or even 2. :)

Carrara 4 is miles above Carrara 1.1, plus it comes with Amapi Designer 7 for free. If you want to model organic or mechanical shapes, Amapi D7 is great. You should download the demos and see what you're missing. Patrick Tuten

Yeh but then my mouth will be watering too much. I recently had a few major medical problems, and Im currently unemployed as a result, so buying even version 2 is gonna be a stretch, so Ill just stick with 1.1 and RDS for now.Maybe in the next life it will be affordable.

I've been working away from my computer for the last two days and have finally gotten back. This is a fascinating discussion! 1.) In terms of activity, this forum holds a relatively steady amount of business. It doesn't change if we do contests or have other little programs running or such. It just keeps on keeping on about the same rate. 2.) I notice that this site isn't listed as one of the Carrara communities on the Eovia site. This is frustrating for me because this site is well known to Eovia but not advertised there like other sites. 3.) Activity does wax and wane. The summer months (at least in the Northern Hemisphere) are low times. So low that I've stopped having contests during the summers. Low business in the summer is true for Renderosity as a whole so this is no surprise. People aren't in school and they're vacationing and working on their yards more. There is also a flurry of activity from all the kids who are bored the first weeks of summer break who come in and spam the forums with junk for a little while. Then we ban them and move on. 4.) We've had a type of freebies program here where users could share stuff on a resource CD. That was a program I ran for three years and it did cost some money to run (and turned out to not be free, very disappointing). I do agree that freebies are a great deal! You can post tutorials here at Renderosity for free. We now have a great tutorial engine that users can use! People can still post freebies but they have to host it on their site. 5.) I wrote articles for about seven months. Those articles are up in the backroom now. They were part of the Renderosity magazine. Nobody has mentioned anything about them though. 6.) Renderosity offers quite a large range of services including a great gallery and the pros and well skilled hobbyists who live on this forum are of great help. Ultimately, I don't know what the reasons are that Carrara isn't growing like we would like it. Activity on this forum isn't down. The gallery is getting WAY more images in it than EVER before. I think there are more newer users than we've had in the last two years. I do think there are some things that Carrara could do to seriously get up to speed but so far, I'm not seeing them from Eovia yet. On a side note, I think the other 3D packages are coming down in price because of packages like Carrara. I think that's a good sign (at least I'm deluding myself into that line of thinking). -Kix

lol, I just discovered the backroom. Right before the last post. Cool stuff, I have to make allowances since I only have 1.1 but it is still very useful.

Hi, sorry, haven't been following this thread, but on the XSI, Maya, Max and Lightwave discussion. XSI is becoming the next industry standard for film 3d, and has been used in a lot of feature films (ILM uses it, so you can imagine). XSI is also becoming popular for games (Half-Life 2 especially), and has released a free version for making non-commercial stuff for mods, but it can do a lot more than that. XSI Mod Tool, which used to be XSI|EXP, is basically the same thing as Maya PLE. Maya was and still is an industry standard for film 3d and for feature animations (ILM uses it, the people who made effects for LOTR uses it, dreamworks animations, I think also Pixar uses it), and is loved by all Unix users because of its powers when it comes to batches and scripts and such. 3DSMax is very popular for games, but has been used for other stuff as well. I would say Discreet is more famous for Combustion though, and Apple has their Shake, but Combustion is cheaper (have a look at those Linux version prices on Apple's pages, eeeeew, also notice that Combustion 3 and Combustion 4 both sell for the same price, uhm, HUH?). Looking at the discreet website, they've made a new compositing program called Toxik, which seems to be especially aimed at film, and has support for HDRI. Lightwave I really know nothing about, so I really can't say. Sparrow, when you said student versions are great for students, were you referring to Maya Personal Learning Edition? It's not a student version, but a free version, but it has watermarks, and cannot be used for commercial purposes.

I meant like the 3Ds ed8ucational discount version someone told me about.

I like this forum too- I see a few issues that I think prevent it from being the "main" forum- ie getting critical mass. 1) Perception of being Poser-centric 2) Some find the advertising offensive 3) No email option 4) Threads are not marked to indicate new messages 1 and 2 can't easily be changed as they are personal. 3- I'm waiting to see how Ringo pulls this one off. There are still quite a few members at Yahoo that will only be dragged kicking and screamming into the 90's. ;-) Closing the yahoo group might be the only way. 4- This one is a personal peeve. Am I missing something here? I've never found a good way to browse the newest posts. Topics, yes, but not posts. If the traffic were higher, I have a feeling I'd get frustrated.

Attached Link: http://www.sharbor.com/products/SOFN0300010.html

I see your point, if Softimage is as good as I have been hearing, then I tink Eovia needs to rethink their pricing policies.

Attached Link: http://www.alias.com/eng/products-services/maya/maya_ple/index.shtml

I see your point, if Softimage is as good as I have been hearing, then I think Eovia needs to >rethink their pricing policies. I almost purchased the upgrade to Carrara 4 Pro when Eovia got so cheep the stopped giving away the t-shirt and booklet deal (that's another story in itself). So not being in a hurry I ran across the XSI deal a couple of days later and my eyes were open to the fact the prices were dropping on 3D apps all around me and I realized that the investment was best spent elsewhere. More bang for the buck if you know what I mean? CArrara was no longer a good deal, it was overpriced for the current market. "...in 2002 Alias stunned the computer graphics industry by dropping the price of Maya Complete by 73% and Maya Unlimited by 56%. And while the price is now more affordable to creative professionals then ever, users never have to compromise their creative intent: Maya is the best value for the 3D content creator's dollar." Alias And SoftImage followed shortly after dropping Foundation from $2000 to $500. Around this time is where Eovia, I guess, thought it would be a great idea to raise their price on Carrara by 50%. What's wrong with this picture? Is it any wonder why activity has dropped off? Eovia, give us users here a break; at least on the upgrade price.

Doesn't Maya PLE have a big watermark over everything. Thats not much use for anything but a demo.

Yeh I read the fin print on the site. It has a watermark, dumb idea... I think tey are just doing it to ty and sucker folks in to learn it then charge for the full version.

I just bought Poser 6 and opened the box. In it were glossy flyers from different companies marketing their Poser plug-ins for 3DMax, Maya, Cinema 4D, Vue, etc. Carrara ads were no where to be seen in the box. Eovia missed the boat again on this one. But then they aren't really after getting new customers. They're just trying to keep existing customers from leaving by offering them cheap prices on upgrades.

If I were in charge at eovia, Id either fire the guy whos in charge of marketing, or send him on a ski trip into an active volcano :) The same thing for whoever is fixing their price points.

"It has a watermark" But hey for only around $2000.00 you can remove the watermark by getting Maya Complete. Seems reasonable to me. For $2k I'll bet you get a nice Maya polo shirt. :>) mdc

They'd have to throw in a shirt and a pair of socks with gold plated stripes for that price. I suppose as long as their are people out there willing to pay overinflated prices for software, they will continue to overinflate the prices, and the rest of us will suffer.

But then they aren't really after getting new customers. They're just trying to keep existing customers from >leaving by offering them cheap prices on upgrades. >SHONNER I have to disagree here. I don't think Eovia is trying to keep their existing customers. I don't know what they are thinking. What was with that whole Carrara 4 pre-release t-shit and booklet fiasco. Why would you do that to your loyal user base? And the upgrade prices are anything but cheap! They may seek cheep compared to the new high prices on the new user base. That is if there is a new user base to stiff. When I bought MotionBuilder 5 it cost $1,000. Now the cost of version 6 is.....still $1,000. I can upgrade to version 6 for $250. That's means I will pay 25% of base price to upgrade. If Eovia followed the same route, I would be paying about the same amount or a little less than what it cost me to upgrade to Poser 6.