Hey Brad, if you're really interested in animation, check out what you can do with motion capture. Carrara is great and such, and I really admire the particle/physics utilization, but at the end of the day, frame by frame is still really, really taxing on both time and computer resources (where rendering is concerned).

I can't recall the site of the top off my head, but there used to be a company that went belly up some years ago and following, all of their mo-cap files went up on the net. The format was in .bvh which can be used with most modeling programs (and blender, if you ever try that).

Not withstanding, I happened to scoop up the iPi recorder program when it was free. I haven't tried it, but the idea is that you use the ps3 eye cam to record your own movements and translate them into daz-usable mo-cap animations. Sounded super slick, but I didn't have the eyecam to see if it worked. Just another option... 

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