Attached Link: http://www.maxwellrender.com/

This new multiprocessor renderer is supposed to have Vue 5 and Bryce 5 plugin support in the future. Why not Carrara? it would be nice! the price is high though $495 :(

That's cheap for the best renderer out there.

Arghh i know i know, not carrara but i've already bought it one month ago. BTW, no truespace, no electric image and others. -TOXE

So you bought it TOXE? Will you show us an image? I have heard it is very slow. Also - and this doesn't apply to you TOXE ;-) - the best renderer in the world won't make indifferent modeling look good. The Maxwell site has some nice shiny kitchens but the nature stuff looks very ordinary, IMHO.

Mark, the standalone beta version will came out today. It will be 4 time faster than the the alpha. I don't have renderings to show for now. You're right about nature images on the site, but i don't know why they are so ordinary. But if you look in the forum you will find some nice things that can change your idea:-) BTW, i'm in period of great changes regarding softwares, i'll keep you informed... -TOXE

So you're leaving us are you TOXE ? ;-) You must tell all, of course!

If TOXE quits Carrara, I'll quit! . . . . . . . well maybe I'll think about it. -Kix

NOOO MY FRIENDSSSSSS, i will never leave you:-) But the matter is simple, and i have said this a lot of times, here and in the carrara list. At this point in my professional carreer i need the best technology for my job, because the competition is very aggressive and the life cost in Italy grow day by day. I can't wait Carrara 6 to have a professional UV editor or a character animation tool that work. Some technologies in carrara are actually the same of infini d 4.5 (particle for example). But we know that Eovia is a small company, the miracles are impossible and they have made a really good work in the last years (but, Charles why we can't have a refresh button for the texture map in the shader tree?;-). BTW now we are three guys at toxedesign and we really need to work at best without any limitations. We are working on very complex projects and i have totally squeezed carrara in the last months, there are millions of polygons that need a bigger home. I don't know what 3d pack we'll buy in the next weeks. For sure we'll add Zbrush, Maxwell, Solid Thinking to the arsenal. Maybe Lightwave, i don't like too much cinema 4d and Maya, so with a Mac you don't have other possibilities, maybe Electric Image, but they have killed the modeler. BTW, every time i can use carrara for my job i'm very happy. It's the perfect app for me, but at this point there are really too much limits and the best plug ins in the market don't have a carrara version:-( BTW, i'll be glad if you have to give me some good advices and opinions. -TOXE

It's so sad ... But it's also true, carrara's not sufficient for real pro work (millions of polys for example...) BTW don't let us alone TOXE, pleeaasssee !!!!

Hey TOXE,
Good to know you will still be around here. Good luck with which 3d app to add to your toolset, that would be a tough one for me too make . I would be testing out those demos in my spare time.
Let us know what program you chose and how its working out. Good Luck.

Message edited on: 06/16/2005 07:52

NewTek had a fantastic competitive upgrade price on Lightwave for under $500 I believe, but it has ended. I know of quite a few people who jumped on that offer. Perhaps they will offer it again soon. I'm pretty sure I posted that offer here when it came out...

Anyway, this offer was not relevant for Carrara Users, as far as i've seen (Otherwise i would have take it !) !!! Seems that it's not considered as a major product...

Message edited on: 06/17/2005 03:11

I agree, is not fantastic if you don't have one of the listed applications:-) -TOXE

Attached Link: http://www.nevercenter.com/

I think you are right. Strange, it did include owners of TrueSpace and Animation Master but not Carrara. Who knows? Someone here mentioned Silo as being a very good program and real reasonable on the price side. I just read that there is a new version of Silo it no includes texture mapping and displacement painting. Not bad for a program that cost $109.

Truespace and A:M have probably the same portion of market of carrara, but looking at the forum and gallery at renderosity seems that carrara have more users... I prefer Hexagon to Silo, but i prefer Wings on both. BTW you're right, $ 109 it's a great price. -TOXE

In case anyone goes looking for that new version of Silo, you won't find it - it's still in development. What I wonder (and I've asked about this in the Silo forum) is why everyone is so into UV mapping, with all that unfolding business, instead of a more natural approach: drawing and painting right on the object, like Maxon's Body Paint. And while I'm dreaming, how about VECTOR drawing on an object, like Adobe Dimensions, so you don't have to worry about resolution when you're doing something geometric. Features like that are worth more than all the world's"U"s and "V"s put together.

Attached Link: http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?t=250061

Maxwell Render isn't necessarily all its cracked up to be. So says quite a few people in the graphics community. Conflicting opinions at the attached link to Cgtalk. I've been thinking of leaving Carrara as well. I do feel a degree of dedication to them for all the years I have used Raydream--Carrara. Toxe have you looked at Blender? It has a great interexchange of file types, and its pretty damn powerful. Plus its free. I'm sure with a little prodding you could get someone to write up a plugin to intergrate blender with Maxwell for rendering. Really I couldn't have gotten myself to buy a standalone renderer, what with all the powerful free opensource versions available. Brian

Attached Link: http://www.hash.com/VM/

The Animation Master forum is dead here on Renderosity because everyone is on Hash's Forum. The program has a built in Forum palet that keeps all users up to date on the forums everytime you open up the program. Nice? If you want to see what it can do then check out the link...

Attached Link: http://amfilms.hash.com/

Then again, if you want to get some ideas for a project or just want to see want others are animating you can check out the online Film Festival at this link.

Attached Link: http://www.e-frontier.com/imagecatalogue/image/list/15/?sbss=405

And don't forget about Shade! I remember back several months ago saying on this forum I thought Shade was really about to take off. If you look at the Shade forum you will find that it has become one of the most active forums. The price is right and the renderings are superb.

I think the activity of Shade is due to its linkage to Poser, more then it being an awesome program.

It is what it is and it is the #1 3D program in Japan and growing rapidly here in the West. I think the gallary shows some pretty impressive renderings. The price is certainly reasonable. I certainly agree that the push is coming from Poser users. This is what I said would happen when Poser 6 got released because it came with a copy of Shade which has a Poser importer built in. This is why E-Frontier bought Curious Labs in the first place; to market Shade. And it is working!

Nicholas, you're right Blender is a great piece of software, i've tried it with yafray, also it have a good conjunction with wings files. The community is very active and i can have only good words on Blender. But, my problem is: can i be competitive on the 3d market with it? The answer is no, because all the best plug ins and new technologies are not available for Blender, because it's a free open source software. The only pro software on the market (in no particular order) now are: -3DS Max (probably the best of all, but i'm on a mac) -lightwave -maya -cinema 4d -XSI It's possible that during a years of work i need a fluid effects plug in, so i will buy realflow for example. If i need an advanced character tool, i can find something good for all these software. Same thing regarding body paint that is also a plug in for lightwave or maya. Blender is very good, but is out of the professional market. The mentioned softwares can resolve the problems that you can encounter in every situation. As always, you need the right tool for your needs. Now i really need the best on the planet (earth, don't know on mars for example) for my work;-) -TOXE

Shade is over price for what it does. Better products are out there like C4D with does alot more than Shade and is a very sold application. I C4D and been using it sense version 5 now it is at version 9 and it goes head to head agains LW, XSI and Maya. I have also beta tested C4D. I recommend C4D forget Shade. Later Ringo

I just bought C4D 9XL last month and then when to Amazon and ordered the tutorial books. As soon as they arrive I will dive in! Looking forward to it. I know most of the studios I seen presentations on all say they use C4D, LW, and some Maya. I would give the edge to C4D because of BodyPaint. But for learning higher end apps I would say LW has more training available hands down. Just do a search on amazon.com and compare.