Thanks maxxxmodelz for your comments.

I can understand your frustrations with Carrara's modeler. I agree it is somewhat limited. It's certainly adequate to model a chair or a desk or a sofa or a simple building. But if you want to design a realistic model of the entire US fleet in the Persian Gulf you should look at something else.

I'm surprised that your associate did not use Hexagon. It certainly is a lot better than Carrara's modeler, and has support for native .car file format, so you can model in Hexagon then texture, rig, animate and render in Carrara. Hexagon is not in the same league as, say, Modo but at a price tag of $19.95 it is a very good deal.

Carrara's animation tools aren't that bad. The timeline and graph editor are quite capable and its NLA clip system is surprisingly well-thought and bug-free, although the blending between 2 clips is occasionally problematic. If you use Daz Studio's Animate 2 plugin (which is often referred to as the poorman's Motion Builder) then you can create some very believable animations in Carrara at a very low cost.

I don't have benchmarks for Shade's renderer. I only compared its speed visually against the render speeds of trial versions of Lightwave and Cinema 4D on the same Poser scenes and it holds its own against these two particularly fast renderers.

Shade is currently priced at $499.- in the US. At this price its renderer is a solid match to renderers in $5,000.- 3D apps, and this is what makes Shade a remarkable product.

As I mentioned in my previous posts, the best thing that could happen to Carrara is a renderer like Shade's. If Daz is smart enough to implement such a renderer, it could boost Carrara's sale to a point that Carrara could well become Daz's main source of revenues.