I agree that the tools are secondary to the talent, but achieving astounding results in Carrara is very deficit and time consuming. I am day by day more disappointed with Carrara. Crashing on critical renders, the end result is good, but not astounding.

Maybe using plugins makes up the deference. But out of the box I am not to pleased or impressed with Carrara anymore. Some renders take way to much time, even on an 8 core MacPro. I thought Carrara had a very fast rendering engine, but now I realize that it really is not that fast compared to other packages.

Overall it being tied to DAZ and it's content disillusioned me further. Not that they didn't add cool features on this last version, but it seems that a lot more time was spent DAZ-ing it then making it stable. I know that all 3D applications crash on occasion, but I had already rendered this seen before. When the replication feature is used with transparent reflective objects is not very stable at all. Two deferent projects hampered by this short coming. I know if I reduce the number of instances inside the replicator, things work better, but at least it should have a warning about exceeding it's limits. I will report this as a bug. The curl thing about all this is that it crashes at 80% of completing the render.

My problem was repositioning the camera and having more of the replicator object show, then it crashes. Very disappointing.