Hey all, I allready own 3d studio max and im interested in buying carrara. What im wonderin, is carrara as good, or nearly as good as 3dmax. Also can it work along with 3dmax poser bryce and photoshop 5.5. So is it worth buying if I allready own these 4 applications? Thanx

Hmmm........ If you can't afford Max, then Carrara is an excellent choice, that's why I use it and love it. If you already own Max, I don't really think you would need Carrara. But having extra useful tools never hurts. It will work with all of the programs you mentioned above. But If you have Max and know it and like it, I don't think you would need Carrara. But if you want and extra,easy to use, versatile piece of software then Carrara is a good choice. Right now if you buy it from eovia you get Carrara Studio 1.1, Amapi 5, and all the major plugins for Carrara for $399. That's a serious bargain, and for someone who couldn't spend the big bucks on Max is an unbeatable alternative. I wouldn't say that Carrara is the same as Max, but it gives it a run for it's money in some areas, especially when you consider the price difference. No it's not technically as good as Max, but again; it does do a good job of trying to be the poor-mans Max,as I put it. If you do get it, it would be a welcome friendly useful 3D application that won't disappoint you, and could be a very useful tool in the 3D toolbox. Go check out the Carrara galleries here, you will see some truly amazing work, regardless of what it was done in, an ssome of it it top notch professional stuff, proving that it's the artist and not the paintbrush that creates a masterpiece. Just my 3 cents worth. kaom

Attached Link: http://www.eovia.com

uh...what kaom said! I own both 3DS Max R4 and Carrara 1.1. They are both excellent programs! Max has some added tools that Carrara doesn't and there is an abundance of plugins for max. You can do ALMOST every thing that you can do in Carrara that you can do in Max. Max (for me) is easier and with all of the tools it is also much faster. The render engine on carrara is wonderful! Especially for that price! It's fast and has excellent quality! As far as working with other programs Carrara works GREAT with Bryce, I've never used it with poser (hell, I've never used Poser!) And it works well with Photoshop too. As far as working with Max, they're almost one in the same. Both are Modellers/renders and they both import and export the stardards (obj, 3ds, lightwave, etc...) The interface is a little more like poser (from what I've seen of poser 4) It's pretty easy to get the hang of it and creating images is really easy with it too. One thing that I REALLY like about C is the metaballs, they're excellent! They are a bit "rougher" than Bryce 5, which is what I like about them, more of an organic feel... So if you have the $$$ and you're looking to add another modeller/render to your arsenal, then grab Carrara too. I've rambled enough...hope this helps...check out the eovia site for more info. Jared

I have MAX and Carrara too, and Carrara is just collecting dust. The one thing I like about it is the speed of the hybrid renderer. You can get some really fantastic results in almost no time. But since MAX has Brazil, Lightscape, finalRender (almost), MaxMAN, and Mental Ray, you can find the right renderer for you. I don't think I've used Carrara since I got MAX. The interface for Carrara is just not powerful enough (for me). I don't want to flame Carrara, it does a great job for the price, but MAX outshines it everywhere. You paid for it; might as well use it! I find it works fine with Poser and Bryce anyway.

I own both as well. Started with Carrara and still look in here to see how it's doing out of curiosity, but I don't use it much now. It's an excellent starter prog and can do a lot (now that many bugs have been addressed). But Max's bones, scripting language, and the hundreds of incredible plugins available for it make it superior by a pretty enormous margin (hence the cost). As everyone says though, Carrara's a great value for the low cost, esp. with helpers like Digital Carver's & others.