I know that Carrera has a new home... I was just wondering if anyone knew wether or not RayDream Stuio has been picked up by anyone with plan to develope it further, and if so, by whom?

MetaCremations turned RDS and InfiniD into Carrara, which is basically an upgrade to RDS. RDS is dead, I think.

Also, from the Eovia site: "Eovia will offer upgrades to ALL Ray Dream, Infini-D and Carrara Users."

Bummer, I guess. I'm not in the least familiar with Carrera... does it have all of the same features as Ray Drams Stuido 5, only moreso? Such as: the free form extrusion, metaballs, etc... I've been using RDS4.0 for a lot of my basic modeling/extrusion needs. I've had a lot of fun playing with thr RDS5.0 demo, but found it frustrating because it's save/export disabled. Would you reccommend Carrera as a purchase, if I'm unable to upgrade from 4.0? On the off chance my purchase of 4.0 is too old for them to upgrade. [Never registered - I'm horrible about remembering to send in those registry cards before they get lost.]

Carrara has all the goodies of RDS. The interface is different and it crashes less often. I really don't use it (or any of my apps), so I really can't tell you all the details. From what I see posted in this forum, it is a good program. You should contact Eovia about upgrading from your version 4. I doubt if they got the registration database from Meta anyway. Eovia isn't selling Carrara yet, but you can still find it on line. Probably not as an upgrade, though. FYI, for me to go from RDS 5 to Carrara was $100. Meta sold the 5.5 upgrade for $100 with a free "next upgrade", which was only a few months behind the release of RDS 5.5. I think Big Serge is still selling his copy of Carrara for a good price. He has a thread in here somewhere.

Cool, thanks. Once I get a bit ahead of my bills... I'll look into it. Whenever I get a bit ahead of my bills that is. ;] Crashes less often? And doesn't need to be re-installed once a month wether it needs it or not? Kewlness.

As wyrwulf said, Eovia didn't explain in details what will be their upgrade policy . All we know is that there will be upgrades for RDS, Infinity-D and Carrara 1 users to Carrara 2 . If i'd recommend Carrara ? Yes, if you can find it at a low price ! It's still buggy but a patch release is planned . Even if Eovia allows you to upgrade from RDS 4 to Carrara 1 ( low chance, IMO ...), the upgrade price will probably be quite high, so ... litst

Understood. I'll stick with RD4 and rhino for now till I save up a bit.

If you are going from RDS 4 to Carrara you will notice major improvements, especially in the render engin & some environmental controls. Going fom RDS 5.5 to Carrara is somewhat a trade-off, you gain a few features & a little better speed but you also loose some features that were available in Infini-D & RDS 5.5. Overall it's a pretty good app.

You can still find RDS 5.5 on the internet fairly cheap; I bought mine for about eighty bucks. It seems that Carrara is basically RDS 5.5 with a new face. I haven't jumped over to C because I've been waiting for all the politics to stabilize. RDS has been able to do what I need, so I've stuck with it. Good luck!

Thanks... that's basically why I never upgraded 4.0 for such a long time, untill recently it did what I needed. Now my modleing skills are at a point where I can make use of slightly more features.

My 2 cents: You don't say if you are on a Mac or PC, but if you are using the Mac version, I would recommend not going to Carrara until Eovia comes out with a fix. The Mac version of Carrara has some serious stability problems. Apparently, PC users got a better product and weren't as happy with RDS. I have been a long time user of Ray Dream and have always been happy with its performance and stability, with the exception of the vertex modeler which is intolerable in my opinion. If you use that feature in RDS, you'll really love the Carrara implementation. I recently purchased a new Dual-processor G-4/500 with 1.2gigabyte RAM and the new NVidia card. As an experiment, since I can never keep Carrara running reliably on anything else, I gave the application 1 full gigabyte of RAM and still had the same crashes and freezes as before; especially when using physics or complex procedural shaders. In spite of all the problems, I will jump on the "new and improved" Carrara when it comes out because the program is just plain cool! mclarsen

The stability of Carrara depends a lot of the OS you're using, from what i've heard . If i remember well, i've read the PC version was develloped to run on win2K . So if you got win9x, it will crash and bug a lot more until a good patch is released . Don't know for the Mac ... Also, Carrara doesn't really use the graphic cards :( litst

Er... PC. No offense, but I build custom PC's - wouldn't own a Mac. ;] [Sorry, jest a pc snob at heart] I'm afraid that the lack of taking advantage of graphics accelerators and videoram is endemic to all of the former metacreations products. Hopefully the new owners will take care of that in future releases. On my main worksation, I have no problems with running a dual win98/win2k boot for programs that work better on win2k.