@ wendyvainity:

IClone is not a modeler, but it has built-in support for Sketchup and Google 3D Warehouse. Hexagon too works very nicely with IClone, for the price of an .obj export.

IClone 3 and 4 and 5 did not have much to write home about, but Reallusion, the maker of IClone, had the smarts to position it as a pre-viz product, ie. a tool to quickly preview complex scenes and animations, before deploying heavy artillery like 3DS Max.

This approach turned Reallusion into a stable company with some strong development abilities.

IClone 6 was the first version of IClone that I consider a full-fledged 3D/animationj app in its own right, not just a front-end to 3DS Max. And now, with IClone 7, we have a mature and easy to use product compared to which Carrara is several years behind in every respect, but more on that later.