I purchased Carrara 5 when DAZ had the sale and subsequently upgraded to 5 Pro. I've had it sitting around on my hard drive for quite some time and haven't used it. I got inmpatient trying to render my latest image in Poser Firefly because it was taking so long to complete. I was using a volumetric light, a V2 figure and an M3 figure along with a room from Poser World. I was rendering at 1500 x 1200 and 150 dpi in case I want to take the image to print. After 9 hours only about 1/4 of the image had rendered. From the part that I could see, the quality was excellent, but I just wasn't ready to tie up my computer for a whole weekend to render one image.

I'd been putting off using Carrara because I haven't really had the time to "dig" into the documentation and learn the new program. Having heard how fast the Carrara renderer was, I decided it was time. When I started Carrara 5 Pro, I was pleased to see that I was already familiar with the interface for the most part. Carrara had been Ray Dream once upon a time and I had used Ray Dream quite a bit. That made things a bit easier. I spent an hour browsing over the Manual to review cameras, tools, lights, and render settings, then took the plunge.

I loaded my .pz3  straight into Carrara thanks to Transposer and was very pleased to find that everything loaded without a hitch, including the lights. The only things that were missing were Poser specific shader settings. The first thing I did was check out the light that I had set as a volumetric light in Poser. Setting up the light for volumetrics in Carrara was a snap. One advantage that Carrara has in the controls to set up the light, is a mini renderer will show the effect any changes to the light have as you make them. I had the light set up in 15 minutes, something that took an hour or so in Poser. The room prop I was using had a window in it and I was able to quickly add a reflective glass shader to it in no time. Something I had a hard time doing in Poser.

All in all I spent a little over 2 1/2 hours getting familiar with Carrara and loading and setting up the scene, including test renders and tweaking settings. For the final render, I used the "realistic" renderer, set soft shadows, raytracing, indirect lighting, good antialiasing, increased object and shadow accuracy settings and set the output parameter to save the render to disk, and took the plunge!

The end result took a hair under 3 hours. I can say I was really pleased with the result. I had to do a bit of postwork in photoshop to clean up a few things, which I normally have to do anyway. I can recommend Carrara 5 as an alternative to Poser's rendering engines. I do have to say, I still love Poser's rendering engines and will not stop rendering in Poser; but, it is good to have an alternative choice that easily accepts Poser files, has advantages in speed, and offers some capabilities that Poser doesn't have.

Feel free to view Contemplating Killing Her Lover to see the end results for yourself. The resulting image is best viewed in full view to see the quality, although you can certainly get an idea by viewing the resized version. The image does contain nudity and implied violence which is why I set the Content Advisory on this post.

Yep, I love C5, been using it for a couple of years. Once you dig even more into it, you'll be able to cut your render times down even further. Regards, E

I'm more interested in figuring out how to duplicate Poser shaders in Carrara. I'd be willing to sacrifice a little speed to be able to do that.

I agree totally, I got carrera pro when they had the sale also and I can safely say, I will probably never render in poser again. Now if we could only pose in it, I wouldn't need Poser, LOL.

Quote - I'm more interested in figuring out how to duplicate Poser shaders in Carrara.

The answer is that except for basic setups, I doubt you can without using the SDK.
Displacement works differently, IIRC you can only have one map per object (perhaps master surface) not a map per material.