Hi, after having read and seen about C5, I am seriously considering to upgrade. I mean seriously. There are, anyway, some things that are very important for me, on which I would like to have some enlightening from those who are using the beta version (or even better, made it): 1- Is translucency in materials supported in C5? I know subsurface scattering is, which some consider to be the same thing - I am not technical enough to know if this difference/identity is true or not, BUT, what I am really interested, for professional reason, is the typical translucency that you have with very thin materials, such as a leaf, or a curtain - much thinner than marble or wax. 2- Would any of you C5 beta users be so kind to render a tree for me, with translucency applied to the leaf material, so that the thinner part of the leaf becomes lightened by the sun. I need a very simple backlighted scene, with a tree, a sky, and sun in front or camera (or anyway hitting the leaves so that translucency can be visible. Don't be afraid - push the effect hard - I want to see what happens. If you don't have a suitable tree model, you can download this free sample: http://www.xfrog.com/samples/BL02_Betula_lenta_Sweet_Birch_OBJ.zip or http://www.xfrog.com/samples/BL02_Betula_lenta_Sweet_Birch_3DS.zip It is a very important test for me - if I see good enough results in this, I am sold on C5. And - I would like to see as much C5 beta renders as possible, particularly with HDRI. Is there a C5 beta gallery somewhere to look at? Thank you VERY much to the kind who will want to help.

ok, I forgot to mention and maybe it's important: leaves need to be trans-mapped planes, not full geometry figures. Therefore, the translucency must be material-based, not physical-based - this is why I have a doubt, that SSS may not work with leaf maps - if it works with volumes, it may be useless for flat, transmapped object planes. Orio

Spend the next few hours (days!) visiting FULLY all that is available at eovia.com and eovia3d.net. Note that, at Eovia, many of the images on the Carrara5 info page download as movies. Lots of Tutorials - even if for Carrara 4--will answer most of your questions.

Whew!. Your .obj files of unshaped leaves vary between 4.69-13.5MB! Whole Carrara complete trees with shaped leaves are in the 3-14KB range. And the leaves can be shaded with adjustable levels of transparency. You sound like you must spend a lot of time waiting while things render--is the end result really that good? Can we see one of your examples please. Perhaps someone can emulate in Carrara and quote file sizes and rendering times.

"1- Is translucency in materials supported in C5? I know subsurface scattering is, which some consider to be the same thing - I am not technical enough to know if this difference/identity is true or not, BUT, what I am really interested, for professional reason, is the typical translucency that you have with very thin materials, such as a leaf, or a curtain - much thinner than marble or wax." Translucency is not currently available. But according to Eovia during the chat event they stated it would make it in the final release.