Howdy, everyone -- I recently wrote to Autonomous Effects asking about their Bone-Bender and Furrific plugs that were built for RDS. They'd announced on their website that due to the uncertain future of Carrara, they had no plans to translate these plugs from RDS to C. I wrote, asking that now that the dust has settled, had they thought about porting them over to C? One of the reasons I'm sticking with RDS this long is that there are bones available.... Read below for their answer: Hi Dex, We have thouhgt about it, but we are swamped with development on other projects (we're small)... so we are looking into selling the rights to someone who could get to it more quickly than we can... hopefully we'll have an announcement soon, thanks for your email, Monnett Let's all keep our fingers crossed, eh? - Dex

By the way -- thanks to Kolschey for the inspired title of this thread.... :o)

This might just be wishful thinking, but may be C2 will have bones? I sure hope so. I am just hanging on to see what will C2 bring to the table. Unfortunately, Eovia is being to secretive about the features the are planning on C. But this is a double edge sword because on one side you get your competition guessing on what to expect. But on the other side you get potential customers fling to other packages that already have all the features you want, but probably are more expensive. What I think give Carrara on edge is price-feature set balance, but I think that balance is starting to bend, so they need to move on C2. Now if they would at least do what Quark did with there soon to be released 5.0 is let the people know what's coming. That way at least you build up anticipation for you product. Granted Quark is king in it's market and we can hardly say that about Carrara but at least a possible feature list would be nice, with out commitment, that way you know whether to stick around or jump ship.

Damn I hate Eovia! You're right cristianr, almost every other software manuf. tells you what's upcoming in the next release of their products. I'm convinced it's a ploy just to keep us on the hook - or that they don't know what the hell they're doing. I love Carrara but let's get on the ball and release a decent version of it, enough is enough.

I posted this in the hopes that someone -- maybe someone from Eovia or maybe somebody like Eric Winemiller -- might take the info and get in touch with AFX. I just want Bones! If they're part of C2, great, if not, well, then somebody needs to develop the plug.... I hope that Carrara becomes all it should be. RayDream was (and still is) an amazing piece of software; I'm glad I'm in that pipeline, but I'd really love to see it evolve to its full potential.

konan was talking about doing a bones plug for Carrara so you may want to ask him about it. He had a couple other projects to do also so he wasn't sure what was more worthwhile.

'AIST' company has a demo of a modeling/animation program that does some pretty nice stuff, including bones. I've been trying out the demo for a few days, and the modeling tools are great. It's a lite version of "Realsoft 3D". They call it Movie3D. They are selling it for $200.00 until the END OF THIS MONTH. After that it will cost somthing like $500.00

If you want to check the kind of stuff that can be done with the program, goto
http://www.realsoft.fi/gallery/contents.html

The demo is at:
http://www.aistinc.com/download/demo.asp

Hi, On the Carrara list, Antoine Clappier has stated that bones will be part of CS2. He did this over a month ago. later Ringo

Ringo, I'd be very very happy to learn that bones are part of CS2. I'm keeping my fingers crossed! And NOrbert -- thanks for the info on Movie3D. It looks cool, but I'm not looking to learn yet another interface. I already have trouble keeping RDS straight in my poor, confused little head.... And I've been thinking about Animation:Master for character work, but if bones come about in CS2, I'll not have to worry so much about that....

I recommend that you pass on getting Animation Master. It seems like Hash and Co. treat it it's in constant beta form, and for a lot of people, it's not very stable. Their version of patch modeling (the only kind there is in that program) is kind of a drag. Maybe you can try out the Movie3D demo and some of the turorials that are in the HTML manual? I think that once you understand how their SDS (subdivision surface) modeling works, you'll be pretty thrilled while imagining all the things you could quickly make with it.

AzChip..I also was getting ready to purchase hash until AC mentioned on the list that bones & a few other character animation tools would be included. The final selling point was the fact the AM seems to be very very bad for video..IE very few file formats are supported and for the last 2 or 3 years it seems the program has lots of problems with alpha matte exports. I have to have good matting abilities...its to hard to key it in video otherwise...

I have seen some amazing things come from Animation:Master, but it'd a new interface for me, a new logic, and every program has bugs. I happen to already know the bugs I'll be facing with Carrara, so maybe it'll be a little less frustrating. (I'm hoping, anyway....)