Hi folks.

Well.  I have been trying out Carrara 7 over at my friend's house before deciding whether to buy it or not.  Unfortunately  he doesn't have the 7.1.1 upgrade and doesn't want to do it until he gets more input on what if anything it has fixed.  In the meantime, I have gone back to using my 6.2.1 pro due to some pretty serious stability issues and such.  I built his machine last year and it's very similar to mine including software and OS.  So I can pretty much say it's an accurate test bed to see if 7 will behave the same on mine.  Right now I am not very happy with 7.  It crashes at the drop of a hat while rendering.  It's shader room is buggier than Cujo at a flea convention, and in general, it's just not behaving very well.  I can't tell you if it was that bad from the beginning because I didn't install it for him; Although he assures me that the install went without incident.

What I would like to ask is...

1.  Has there been a major increase in stability?
2.  Has the issue in the shader room been fixed (The error reads An error has occured in module ShadingModule.ccp Line 736)  After which the whole application gets progressively more unstable and finally crashes.  This happens about 75% of the time when editing shaders.

3.  Has the issue with the application hanging on exit been fixed?

I did notice one interesting thing that didn't happen with 6.2.1...

If doing a resource or time intensive operation, carrara will take so long that windows will think it crashed and pop up a close app window.  The odd thing is that the application hasn't really locked up, but it makes windows think it has.  If you just close the close app window, it goes away and then the same thing will happen multiple times until Carrara is finished with whatever the operation was.

Honestly, from what I have seen on his system, I doubt I will be buying 7 until it's a LOT more stable.  And yes I have tried it on Windows XP SP3, Vista Ultimate 32Bit, and Vista Ultimate in XP compatability mode.

Any info appreciated .

Typos included at no extra charge.

 Well, for me it works fine.  Ican render over night and see everything is still working. The windows thinking that Carrara is not repsonding issue I saw last year with C 6 on Vista. 

Yet  I have almost no trouble at all wiht Carrara, and hair behaves better there aslo ;) 

I am currently trying to render a file I created in 7 on 6.2.1 because after about 40 failed attempts on 7, I just gave up. :)  I usually run Vista at home, and I never saw the lockup problem with 6.2.1  Maybe 7 just doesn't like something in his system...  I usually have to render overnight since I sometimes use a high DPI setting because I like to get poster prints of some of my better renders.

Running vista and 7.1 while I haven't done extensive overnight renders I haven't been having those issues

 it might be dep0endant on Vista. I am running Windows 7 and I msut say it is way better than Vista on the performance  and I am able to do things with Carrara that on Vista used to end with frozen application. Yet I don;t know what you are doing, maybe you touched the aspects of C7 that still need to be fixed and I maybe never did anything that would need the failing feature that should work. But5 I am satisfied with C7.1 so far. 

I should say I am running Vista 64 and have turned off most of the vista stuff like there pretty video overlay stuff that runs all the time.  I run it as administrator (or I guess you could turn of UAC as well)

I am getting pretty sick of Vista's slow performance.  I can hardly wait for W7.  I normally don't change OS for about a year after release, but Vista has me ready to drop it now.  I don't do anything fancy with Carrara.  It's just very unstable on my friends vista.

 well I rendered 3minute long animation with no flaws. Well it was actually in clips but in the batch rendering wiht almost none stop. it works well on my computer and on WIn 7 beta. I find Win 7 beta be more useful and stable than Vista would ever be so far. So this might be the issue of Carrara being on Vista, since Vista is resource heavy and stuff. 

I tell ya.  Vista is so bad, Mickeysloth ought to give us free credit for it towards 7...  Not like Billy boy and company will every pry their wallets out of their aft ends to do it.......

 I think Vista had to be after win 7. It is heavy and need more powerful computers and it is only for 64 bit machines. 32 its is too small for Vista. My friends who run Vista on 64 bit machines with 8 or more gigs of RAm are happy wiht Vista. The ones who is 32 bits and 4 Gb of RAM - all hate Vista. I think they dind't make good marketing target with Vista. or well if they did a publick beta wiht Vista, their mistakes would have been fixed before tha actual release. Like DAZ3D amde with C7, the public beta did pay off. I mean so far, Carrara is one of the best releases ever made by DAZ3D. They didn;t make it perfect and didn't fix all of the bugs, but they really made many things way better. Now if I would have to choose which ne ot buy, C6 or C7, I would take C7. And of course pro version. I dind't ever think that 3D paint can be so useful to have. Model mode in assemble room is very useful, Multi pass rendering is good addition. Yet I would lek to be able to render passes on their own with no need to render whole image as well. What I would liek to see more is render layers or well scene layers, clothsoftbody dynamics, 64 bits (even though I am 32 bits and wont get 64 bit machene anytime soon) everything else are good enough. Someone say C7 is a bit rushed release, yet in my eyes it is quite good and way better release than C6 was. all developers for public software should do public beta versions to be tested before releases. To make everything perfect is impossible but to make quite good this is the best way. and C7 works very well on Win 7 ;)  

I have a Phenom Quad core system, which is technically 64Bit, but I haven't been able to upgrade my memory just yet.  I normally run Vista Ultimate 32Bit, but I also have Ultimate 64Bit and XP Pro SP2 32Bit installed for triple booting.  I have major memory issues with the 64Bit vista and I have problems running some things under XP.

I have the latest C7pro update running on windows XP. No crashes. Shaders work beautifully.
The program is still slow to close. Sometimes it takes a full minute, but it always does close. Eventually.
There have not been any more temp file build-ups.

My problem with C7Pro is when I render it will almost finish an intense and heavy poly scene then throws the "Memory Allocation Error" up and will not finish rendering. I am running an overclocked 3.2 GHz Intel 2 Duo with 4 GBs of RAM and XP Pro32. C6 Pro works circles around C7 Pro on my machine and amost never never gives me Memory Allocation Errors!!!

to get round the mem allocation errors, in preferences set your scratch disc to 100meg, then save your scene and close C7, this will clear all memory.

Open C7 and go straight to the render room and use the batch render function, to render your scene, this will not use as much memory as the scene uses up memory while open in the assembly room.

If Daz would just make Carrara 64 bit like all the other 3D apps seem to be most of us wouldn't get this mem errors anyway

Currently I have my Scratch Disk set to 1 Gig. Should I set it to less at 100 Mb???
I agree with the 64 Bit part. Carrara would rule in a 64 Bit format.

all the replies i have seen else where all say to have it as 100meg or near the 100meg mark, another thing you can do is to go to edit and use the remove unused shaders and unused objects options, this will remove things not in use and also drop the the memory use and size of the file down.

Having a 100meg scratch disk and using the batch render option i haven't had a single memory allocation error in ages

I will give a try now, Thanks SO Much!!!

Your welcome - i just hope it helps :D