@ DustRider:

I have read through your comments, and your points are well taken. So let me answer them here.

Shad3D is not dead. They have consistently released one new version every year since 2016. It's the English version that is lagging behind. Carrara OTOH is dead. No Carrara 9 will ever be released. Daz does not have the resources for it. End of the story.

I agree that Carrara's strong point is the built-in support for DAZ/Poser content. But the strength stops here. Once you have loaded the content, you must spend hours, if not days adjusting the Poser textures to make them look good in Carrara. Then you must spend an inordinate amount of time with Carrara's ipoor and naccurate lighting to get a render that looks like a photo shot with a cheap $19.99 camera equipped with a plastic lens.

With Shade3D one spends a little longer to build the scene in Poser and load it in Shade, but after that things happen very quickly, because Poser textures need very little adjustments in Shade, and Shade's superbly accurate lighting system has the potential, in the hands of an expert, to create jaw-dropping scenes quickly, for an output that looks like a photo shot with a professional $5,000.- camera.

So if you look at not just one strong point, but at the OVERALL cost of a project, Shade3D lets you finish a project a lot faster, a lot cheaper, and with a lot higher quality too, than Carrara.

What I said above applies equally well to Lightwave, IClone, and Cheetah3D, when compared to Carrara, but I will discuss them in separate threads.