What's the key differences between these two? Obviously Anything Grooves is available in C3,C4 and C5

C5 is the first with render-time micro displacement built-in. As people are keen to open old files, Eric has updated it to be backward compatible. I think the new displacement is a giant step forward. I don't think there is any need to buy Anything Grooves when you have C5. The new function in C5 does, what AGrooves provided before, but faster and smoother (and with 16-bit grayscale compatibility, which gives you much more than the old 256 shades of gray to define your heights).

Displacement in Carrara5 is a tab in the shader tree. This means you can adjust the the displacement map and the shader together and apply them together.... AnythingGrooves is an object Modifier. It uses a second shader as the b/w displacement map. I was curious so I compared the two side-by-side (AGrooves is on the right). The interfaces are quite different, but I think i got them looking similar, altho Displace looks a bit sharper.... Render times for these shapes are almost the same, but I'm using the AGr primitives (plane, sphere, etc) which render faster than the AGr modifier. I suggest you spend your money on one of the other DCG plugins ;^D Holly

The C5's built in displacement is much easier to use. Much more straight forward.

I failed to get my desired effect of a cylinder with a slot on one side using either technique. I am attempting to model a projector screen.

Something like this?

Your post took me down memory lane back to the days when I made Super-8 movies and projected them for my friends in high-school. So, I decided to attack a projection screen, but couldn't spend more than 15 minutes at it. This is what I came up with.

The thing that holds the screen when rolled up is a spline object -- a "C" shape that I extruded. I built the end caps in the spline modeler, too. The rest of the stuff was quick and dirty vertex models or primitives.

I'd be happy to send you the Carrara file, not that it's anything all that detailed.

Hope this is helpful!

• dEX

The sphere appeared to be rotated. Could you please repost it with same alignments and position so that we may compare the differences. Thank you