greetings all- i'm considering buying carrara. i bought lightwave 6.5 and it's modeler is so buggy it's unusable. tho i'm in constant contact with their tech support. they can replicate my problems, but can't fix them. i bought it primarily for it's particle effects and vertex mapping, but i'll never use them until the program is stabalized. eovia has an attractive upgrade program now. i like amapi's modeler very much, and can get a copy of carrara for $200. i want to produce some animations to print to video and ideally dvd. i'd like to avoid more frustrations with unreliable software. so my question are: is carrara stable enough for you to recommend? are there any reviews around? does anyone have experience using the particle effects? how is the final rendering speed? how close to photorealistic does it get? does carrara have the quality to produce a demo reel? currently i'm using a g3 233/500, 768mb ram, radeon card. all input welcome. thanx loads rick

If you can get Carrara for $200, then get it. It's 89% more stable than it was 3 weeks ago, due to the new patch. It can do some pretty realistic renders if you do it right. Demo Reel? No problem! I think you would be pleasantly suprised at what you'll get for your $200, considering Lightwave costs 10 times more, I've heard bad things about Lightwave on the Mac platform, being that it was really designed and meant for Windows, they havn't smoothed out the Mac version yet. Definately buy Carrara, you will love it, and you'll find all the support you need right in here at Renderosity. just my 3 cents worth. Good luck! kaom

The particle system in Carrara is really simple, and can't do much things . But Brian Retford from Lost Horizons Software plans to devellop another one . Good luck Brian ! :) litst litst.@freesbee.fr

For what Carrara does, you can't beat the price. Very good render engine that is fast. I'm fairly new to Amapi but am really liking it a bunch for vertex modeling. From an earlier post, someone indicated that they actually preferred the Amapi modeler to the LW modeler because it has more effective tools, i.e. several processes that took multiple steps in LW could be done with a single tool in Amapi. Amapi does have a learning curve associated with the interface. Mark

Like is said above, Carrara is MUCH more stable that it used to be! I haven't had it crash or a "render failed" error since installing the patch. The interface is very friendly and easy to get used to (I'm pretty used to the Metacreations stuff...cursing in the background.) The render engine is pretty fast! Along the same lines as 3DS Max, but not true caustics. All in all, if you can get it for $200, get it! Jared

thanks, all, for your help. i'm just learning amapi 5x and like the feel of it very much. it's seems about as close to working with real world hands tools as you can get, and that's my background. litst, when you say the particle system in carrara can't do much, could you elaborate? i understand carrara doesn't have a physics engine. is this so? thanks again

Hi Ricbot, From what i've understood, the physics engine included in Metacreations' Carrara was licensed from another company . Now, Eovia needs to license it again to include it to the next version of CS . So currently, Carrara Studio doesn't have physics, but it's planned . But users of the first Carrara that was released by Metacreations can still use the physics engine with CS . The particle emitter is very limited . There's a lot of reasons . The particles are not free so if you move the emitter, all the particles move with it . They can bounce only on the floor, not on an object of the scene . Also, we're stuck with limited shapes of 3D particles, and can't use 2D particles or objects . One last thing, it's hard to set shading properties that change with the time, for simulating a fading particle, for example . With all these limitations, you can't simulate much things with the particle emitter . Snow ? Sometimes your flakes will appear flat . Rain ? If you don't need the rain to bounce on a leave or something . Fire ? The flames at the top of the fire dissapear suddenly . Bubbles ? No way to make a particle look like a sphere . A flame thrower ? Don't even think about it ... You see . Very limited, as i said :( litst

thanks, litst so.... is there a way to get the old particle emitter from the old metacreations version of carrara and plug it into 1.1? in carrara studio 1.1, can you create a null object and set it on a motion path? could you then get spheres to track the null and make bubbles that way by cloning them? in my innocence, i can imagine work-arounds to the issues you address, which i really appreciate. could you turn the scene so the leaf is the floor and then turn it around in after effects? well, you needn't respond to all this- just pondering... if it's stable and quick to learn, i can find these answers for myself.

The particle emitter is included in 1.1 . It's just the physics plug-in that is not . Of course, there are workarounds for the particle emitter . I said it was hard to make some snow, but i've done some before with good results ( check my gallery ) . In fact, i think all the workarounds you described could work :) And for the fire, there is a fire primitive wich isn't bad at all . To answer your last question, it is stable ( some few remaining bugs, though ) and really easy to learn . litst

I agree that carrara is a good buy at the price and the current version works well on MAC OS. I've tried Amapi, Strata & Pixels3D & C has the best U.I & overall features (at least for stills). Pixels3D is also very intuative and its shaders are somewhat similar to Carrara. You can get version 3.6 (full) for free at : http://www.pixels.net/newweb2/support/downloads.html You can also get a copy of ElectricImage EAIS and Modeler for $200.00 at: http://www.dvgarage.com/

Attached Link: http://botonmultimedia.com/

Well, for what I understood you want Video out. I render the animations in Carrara using Matrox DV/DVCAM codec on a machine without the board easily(MVT3) . Then I send it to Premiere 6.I don't know what are using for producing DVDs but this is our setup here. Carrara is easy even for a 3Dum like me. 3D menus can be rendered on top of Frames exported from your video and it also alows you to export video with even/odd field dominance. From my knowldege(not big...) there is no internal colour correction fro broadcast colours in Carrara. But you can apply a Broadcast filter in Premiere anyway. I have it since ver 1.0 and I upgraded to the full 1.1 from Eovia. This is how it happens here in Australia. Beto Boton Boton Multimedia Australia

hi all- thanx for your help. thanx willf, i downloaded pixel3d and will check it out after work tonight. boton- yeah, i plan on using premiere and after effects to composite and print it. 'it' being a demo reel. i'm not looking to be a production artist, so i figure it's not important to build it in 3d max, which is 'the standard' in the states. your using matrox is helpful.

thanks all for responding i did get carrara. when things settle down at work, i'll plunge into it!