it's on sale at daz right now? i mostly wouldn't be modelling, just rendering poser scenes and creating scenary - but i do want to do easy toon rendering. i have adobe illustrator too. do you think i would use it? i already have vue I. love esther

Attached Link: http://www.eovia.com/products/carrara/carrara.asp

It's a lot like Vue only with modeling capabilites/more addons ie fur/hair etc & more detailed skies etc. Wolf359 uses it extensivly, you could check with him over at Daz or the POser forums here. He swears by it.

Message edited on: 10/07/2005 20:56

that's good enough for me - not sure how much time is left before the sale ends. gonna go check my finances! love esther ps does it import poser 6 dynamics okay? it says poser 5 on the website for carrara

From what I've gathered from reading the forums, the answer would be NO as to P6...P5 works great. One of the Daz merchants is working on a P6 importer. SO if you buy, keep your links to the P5 libraries...Remember E-Frontier changed the .dyn(dynamics in p6) & Carrara has not updated yet.

Hope this helps :) I was hoping to win it in the raffle, to no avail :(

Message edited on: 10/07/2005 21:23

oh oh!

okay well sale almost over and i'm working extra shift tomorrow so i did it! hope they fix poser 6 problem very soon! i had no chance of winning the raffle as i didn't think of it till too late. love esther

Let me know how it works for you and Good luck :)

will do. i live in australia so it will be awhile before i see it i expect.

If you already have Vue Infinite and you don't want to do modeling, I am not sure you would want Carrara. Carrara needs an extra plugin to do Toon rendering. You can get a good Toon effect with Vue Infinite already. I have both applications by the way... but I am using Carrara mostly for modeling tools that Vue doesn't have.

Hi, I find the toon thingy in vue too difficult. It's fine for a single pic, but if I'm making a comic story and want to keep changing people and things in a scene and changing scenes it's just too difficult. I would buy a pluggin for vue for making easy toon stuff if there was one. You know like a comic renderer thingy cel shader type. Love esther

Digital Carvers Guild makes a great Toon Render Plug-in for Carrara: Toon Plug-on Check the gallery there for examples. I also have Vue 5 Infinite and Carrara 4 Pro and they compliment each other very well.

ooh I was so hoping that would be the case. Off to check the plug in - thanks! Lovee sther

Carrara Pro 4 imports Poser 4 objects. Poser 5 hair won't import, though. TransPoser 2 is an add-on for Carrara 4 that imports Poser 5 hair. Carrara (with add-on) renders Poser 5 hair better than Vue 5 Infinite renders, but takes a lot longer to render it.

Message edited on: 10/07/2005 23:46

i have poser 4, 5 and 6 but prefer 6. haven't really got into dynamic hair yet but i love dynamic clothes - so hopefully poser 6 will play nice with carrara soon. please, if anyone hears anything bout it -let me know!
love esther

What i found interesting was when i checked the Hot20 in the Carrara gallery at Renderosity. I did it because someone in the e-on registered user forum said how wonderful and easy the plant editor of Carrara is. There was no landscape - no landscape - in the Carrara Hot20 at that time. No plant and i think only one very basic background muntain. So obviously landscape creation is not a buzzing issue over there. What i found interesting as well is that there is an image in the Hot20 there (position 9), posted in June 2004 - with just one vote. I don't want to start a flame here about Carrara. Please don't start that! But for me it was always a good idea to look into real user results of software packages to see what is done with it from real people. Beside all the wonderful marketing stuff we see from each package. If that is close to what i want to do as well then i give it a try. Maybe you do that Esther and decide then.

too late, but good point. i ordered it whilst it was on sale. but you're right - gallery images tell all! love esther

To say that Carrara is "a lot like Vue" plus modeling, is quite rough. 1- Carrara has no ecosystem distribution; Vue has; 2- Carrara's atmosphere system (sky, fog, clouds) is much less realistic than Vue's; 3- As far as I know, Carrara shouldn't have procedural terrains; 4- Vue scenes are exportable to big applications such as Max or Maya or Cinema, I don't think that Carrara scenes can; 5- Vue supports Poser 6 (although not completely yet), while I'm not even sure that Carrara supports Poser 5 yet and anyway I think you have to get a plugin for that. 6- Vue has a built-in vegetation system while Carrara hasn't Carrara has a very nice modeler, but using it to complement Vue is, like, a big waste of resource. Now there's Hexagon (also by Eovia) which is an excellent modeler, much cheaper than Carrara, and it's the perfect companion for Vue IMHO.

The pics on the carrara webpage looked soooo beautiful! Oh well, I'll let ya'll know if I get much use out of it. Love esther

I shelled out for Carrara 4 Pro a while back and have been very disapointed with it overall. It does a lot of different things, but nothing very "in depth". You'd be much better off buying a specialized modeler like Orio suggested. You might like to consider Silo also.

To wabe's point - the Hot 20 is not really a measure of what is being done in a tool, especially in galleries that do not have a lot of people. Look at the Lightwave, 3DS Max, Softimage and Maya galleries / Hot 20. You are not going to see some of the amazing things people can do with these softs.

for modeling you could try wings or blender they are good and free.

Well, I get my one in here...I'm using Modo for modelling at the moment and Vue even converts any N-Gons I may have in a model as well. With Modo 201 coming out soon with 3d painting it is just about all I want in a modeller. Cheers

Carrara is aimed more at illustration artists.

Attached Link: http://www.informatix.co.uk/piranesi/gallery.shtml

Attached Link: http://www.informatix.co.uk/piranesi/downloads/windows/demo.shtml

For $299 you can buy the Hexagon/Carrara 4 bundle from Eovia/Element5 store.

but i think carrara pro comes with transposer which is normally 90Euro

is there anything akin to ecosystems in carrara?

You'll need TransPoser 2 anyway for Poser 5 stuff. It will work with Carrara 4 standard.

The basic point Estherau in my opinion is: If you are mainly interested in landscapes and in poser people in a landscape, then spending hundreds of dollars in Carrara is a total waste. Get a small but dedicated modeler instead (like Hexagon or Silo or the more inexpensive Wings3D etc.), and save a lot of money. If you instead plan to make also design and industrial/commercial renderings, Carrara can be good - although in my opinion, for the money it costs, I would add some more and buy the much more powerful and industry-standard Cinema4D or 3DSMax. I don't like to say this, because I have been a Carrara user and I really like the interface, but it seems to me that it's currently a misplaced product: - too expensive to be a low-end application - too poor in environmental features to be an alternative to landscaping programs (such as Vue, Mojo etc.) - and not powerful enough (and by no means no "standard" enough in the business world) to be a competition for the "big guys" (Cinema, Max and the likes). I see Carrara is currently struggling to find it's place somewhere in the middle of all this but it's a place that I don't think has really a future. In my opinion, either Carrara loses this ridiculous Standard/Pro distinction (cause it's "pro" it's not even by far something that real "pros" would use), and makes one single product (the current Pro), and sell it considerably cheaper, I mean in the $250 range - and this would make it a real and worthy alternative in the low end market, OR, it is going to progressively shrink and disappear, because of its unclear and somehow ambiguous position in the market.

http://www.renderosity.com/gallery.ez?ByArtist=Yes&Artist=cajomi has lots of Carrara made terrains. http://www.digitalcarversguild.com sells a Carrara plugin for growing objects.

I bought Carrara 4 pro, I like it. I also have Cinema4D, Truespace 5, Vue 5I, Poser 5/6 as well as other programs I have purchased over the years, I started with Bryce 3 and raydream Studio you have to start somewhere is 3D and Carrara will give you lots of option. Yea there are apps out there that will give you more features or do different things this all a part of doing 3D - there is no one perfect app out there. Carrara is a great entry level product it has a great render engine and is fairly quick. Remember art is only as good as the artist, tools make the task easier but it wont make the art better. Good luck to you with what ever program you go with. Happy rendering :)

Estherau, I am a Carrara user with an interest in Vue but don't own Vue , I just look in on the Vue forum every once in awhile. I am sure you will be happy with carrara . By the sounds of it you got the Carrara pro version , which does have the Transposer in it although I don't do much with poser figures . I can model almost anything I want in Carrara but the Pro version also comes with Amapi which is a more specialized modeler. So Carrara is definitely not lacking in the modeling. There is a toon renderer and Non photoreal renderer that comes with the carrara package , although the toon plugin is better. There isn't anything exactly like ecosystems although there is a plugin called Replica by Julien Chaplier which can be used to replicate trees etc which works very well. I played with this a while back and did some images using it a while back . I use Carrara to create my nature type scenes and the plant editor that comes with carrara is pretty good once you get your own textures on the trees. You can check out my gallery everything in it was done in Carrara . Cajomi's gallery in carrara shows some great terrain work

Wow! mmoir, those are really great pics! WEll if I can do pics anything near that good I'll be very happy. I do lots with poser figures so I'll be happy if transposer works well. Can't wait to get my software although as yet it hasn't arrived. I live in Australia so I won't start panicking just yet. Love esther