dr_bernie wrote: "

I don't expect Carrara to compete with a $5,000 package. But I expect it to at least compete with packages in its own price range like:

1. Shade, (www.mirye.net) which has a world-class renderer as good as VRay and supports Daz/Poser contents and sells for $499.- in its pro version.

2. Cheetah 3D (http://www.cheetah3D.com) which sells for only $99.- and has done right all the things that Carrara has done wrong,

3. Electric Image (http://www.eias3d.com) which sells for $900.- and is used by some prominent production studios”

These may be in the same price range, but they definitely don't have the same feature set or the same target audience.

1. Shade does have a very very good render engine, and some very good modeling and animation tools. However it has no landscape or plant creation tools - but you can export your shade models to Vue and animate/render there. It also doesn't have native Poser/DAZ content support, it has PoserFusion, which means you need to have Poser, and you do your posing, animation, etc. in Poser then host it in Shade for rendering. You can't pose or use Shades internal animation tools for Poser figures unless you want to import and re-rig them in Shade. For now, I'll stick with using Carrara.

2. Cheeta3D looks really nice, and I've heard a lot of good things about it. Unfortunately it's only for Macs - that means I'm out. It also means their cost of development and support is MUCH less than companies who support both Wn/Mac platforms. Once again, if you want to use Poser content in Cheetah 3D you'll have to import static obj files from Poser or DS, re-rig them there for use in Cheetah. Landscapes and plants will also need to be modeled or imported into Cheetah. I don't use Macs, so I'll stick with Carrara.

3. EIAS is and animation and rendering software - period. Bring your own modeler, because it doesn't have one. It has no Poser content support (other than static OBJ import - or maybe collada/fbx??), no landscape creation, no plant editor, and is what, $900? No thanks, I'll stick with Carrara.

Of the three applications listed, Shade is the only one that has any form of Poser support. Carrara had hosting with Transposer. It was nice because we could render Poser cloth in Carrara. but it was also a pain because you had to do everything in Poser. If you needed to adjust a pose, you had to do it in Poser and then update the scene in Carrara. Transposer died because Eovia, then DAZ could no longer get the SDK for Poser 7 or later.

If I was to go to a different application - you can't beat the bang for the buck of Blender. But for now I'm happy with Carrara, and be even happier when the Octane Render plugin comes out.

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