As I cant find any Carrara trial / demo (is there any?!), I would like to ask a naive question: what is in fact the relationship between these DAZ apps? Seems one is sth ~analogous to Vue, the other resembles Poser, but what about Carrara? Is it a modeling app required to create your own content for Daz / Bryce (i.e. are Daz & Bryce devoid of Carraras tools), or a system that fuses all their functionality into one app, giving just the convenience of having all the functionality "under one roof"? Browsed the respective galleries, but the contents seems rather comparable, so really can`t grasp the relationship between these three.

Would be glad to see any re:, and pls don`t kill;) 

Dont know why, but theres only a trial for the version 6.1:

http://www.daz3d.com/i/support/downloads?product=car_down&_m=d

Carrara have a lot of tools from Poser and Bryce. At same time it cant do a lot of things that Bryce or Vue can easy, but you can do a lot of things with it without need Bryce or Vue.
The main goal for Carrara is that you can build your own content and control many things inside it in the mesh (because you cna model, texture and rig in it).
You can export OBJ files from any software to use in Carrara too. I thinki the trial version can answer better your questions.

Hi Silgrin,

Daz has over the years acquired different packages, Bryce from MetaCreations and Carrara from Eovea (SP?)

Poser in my opinion is for modeling humans and creatures is what I've used it in the past.  I stopped using Poser around version 4.0  Just not my thing.

Bryce is looked at as this terrain, sky water render software, but it can do a lot more and has matured over the years, the great interface comes from MetaCreation days.  But you can do a lot with it.  The price is great, and although I dont use it as much or to its full potential I've upgraded to the latest edition.  I like supporting software that I like.

Carrara is just amazing, I can maybe use 1% of what it is capable of.  I can easily animate and you can quickly create some neat effects with the physics engine without knowing much about it.

3D Magazines time to time include free copies of both with coupons to upgrade towards new versions.

Thats how I started my upgrade path to the latest versions.

Thanks. Would definitely give them a try, though they don`t "want" to work on my machine. Some driver / card incompatibility, I think. Will maybe give them a try later...

Carrara, IMHO, is closer to 3DMax, lightwave, blender etc.  It can create photo realistic furniture, homes, aircraft, electronic equipment (everything hard body).  It can create walls, windows window, door framing etc.  It can create temples, castles, planets etc.

It can do all of this because it has a spline and extremely powerful vertex room where the only shapes that you can't create are those you can't imagine.

It also has a powerful texture room that rivals most industrial standard texturing.

You can also create uv maps on each part for precise placement of decals, textures etc.

Additionally, you can group and export your creation as an .obj into any program that accepts .objs.

It also has a conversion process strickly for Pose that retains all textures.

It has an excellent picture preview mode where you just rectangular trace around the object and a photo realistic picture is generated.  That is great for checking your textures, shadowing etc.

Oh yes, it also has a scene creation function where you can generate terrain and landscape it and texturize it with the encluded textures or your own.

How it compares to Bryce for modeling--Carrara is lightyears ahead,  for scene generation, a toss up. 

Ease of getting your head around it.  Fairly easy compared to Maya, 3DStudio, Lightwave,  Zbrush etc.  Not as easy as Poser which is just dial flipping.

It's sister software is called Hexagon (which is strictly modelling and you have to bring up the model in Carrara for proper viewing.  Jan