I've not had much chance to work with Carrara yet but, as I have a week off soon, I was planning to put that right. I was wondering about getting a month's subscription for $25 and taking the training at lynda.com - has anyone else tried it yet and, if you have, what did you think?

I got the CD set and was very pleased with it. Everything was clear and there were exercise files on the CD's so you could follow along. I feel very comfortable with Carrara now.

I think it is a very good idea. As you might be finding out, the user guide leaves something to be desired. Carrara has some good capability, but the practical uses of the functions are buried and difficult to get to unless you have little to do but test render for days on end. This training could save you very considerable time in deciding how well Carrara works for you. By the way, your gallery has some really nice work in it that I very much appreciate. Congratulations. Carrara might be just the renderer you want! good luck, wb

I checked out the Carrara Tutorials at Lynda and found Jack's descriptions and examples a great, fast primer on learning Carrara. I'm a big believer in "show me" and those tutorials do just that. Like most of the tutorials on Lynda.com, they are a very good introduction into a basic, working understanding. However, Carrara, like other programs featured on the site are capable of much more than the initial tutorials let on though. So, don't go into the tutorials with the expectations of "knowing all there is to know" about Carrara when you're done. But that's the fun of exploring, isn't it! :D Mark

Just in case anyone is still interested in this thread.... I too have been interested in these tutorials and did get around to checking them out for myself instead of taking another's word for it. These are very, very basic tutorials and they have some limited usefulness - introductory, basic - just as MarkBremmer says above. They left me with the same questions I had before looking at them and I've been working with Carrara intermittently only about 3 or 4 weeks. If you are absolutely new to Carrara, then they might be somewhat helpful to you - or help you decide whether you want to purchase. No mistake, what is there is well done, just very limited. wb

As an aside, I've used some Lynda.com training in the past, and although it's useful I find that some presenters have a very leisurely pace. So I found a shareware QuickTime player that let me speed up the video (sorry, I don't remember the name), and I blasted through the lessons at double or triple speed. You have to really concentrate to keep up with the action, but it's kind of a neat feeling to just pump information into your brain at hyper speed.