Quote - One thing that seems to be seriously lacking from Carrara is the auto-updating mini-preview that is such a useful feature of both Vue and Bryce. It means that you can't see the effect of, for instance, changes to the atmosphere until you do a render.

Actually, I find the tiny update windows on Vue and Bryce to be pretty usless on anything except very simple scenes.  I just do a quick render with Carrara, as its renderer -- on lower settings, is generally much faster and far more usefull than the Vue or Bryce preview windows.  When doing complex scenes in Vue, I often simply do a quick render rather than w-a-i-t for the tiny window to update.