I'm a Carrara owner but got a RayDream book on eBay. It seems like a bunch of nifty RayDream features got left out when they built Carrara (3D paint, Thinkfish exporter, plug-ins from www.afx.com). Does anyone find that they still need to do things in RayDream or is it better just to keep moving forward with Carrara? I believe www.rustboy.com is rendered with Infini-D (not Carrara) but I've heard that the renderer in Carrara is straight from Infini-D (or is it the RayDream renderer?) Supposedly the RayDream system was dumbed down a bit for beginners (like the way transparency was handled).

Let's see, where to begin?... Philip Staiger (Carrara evangelist) indicated on a post at the Yahoo Carrara List that current movie renders from Rust Boy were being done in Carrara. I'm not completely sure that is true in all cases though. The Carrara Renderer may be from InfiniD but it is a much faster version. By comparison on identitical files I've found it to be 5 times faster than Raydream and others have indicated that it is faster than the InfiniD renderer too. The Thinkfish software was absorbed by Metacreations/Viewpoint. I used to be a software capability that Viewpoint sold but has now languished. Toon by Eric Winemiller at DigitalCarversGuild.com works very well as a replacement though. AFX elected not to support Carrara because they were abused and misled by Metacreations I believe. Until Carrara is considered to be more of a serious contender with Version 2, I don't know if AFX will repurpose any of their capabilities. Furrific and it's Tip Objects is an outstanding plug-in so I hope it becomes a Carrara contender again. I still use Raydream, but only for the AFX plug-in. Everything works better and faster in Carrara. That's all I know... Mark Bremmer www.markbremmer.com

There are quite a few things that are different I miss. 1.) Saveable customizeable workspaces! 2.) The Physics model. 3.) The RD soft shadaws was LOTS better. 4.) Transparency was easier but with some work, you can learn around it. 5.) Shape numbers no longer appear in the spline modeler the same way. Only one shape number is displayed at a time in one of the pallette windows. 6.) The depth of field doo dad in RD was a lot easier to use. I still haven't gotten it figured out in C and I'm VERY frustrated with it! I never had my hands on Furrific so I'm not feeling like I'm missing it. I'd like to see something that uses it so I'd know more about it. I've ported over completely to C now. There are LOTS and LOTS of good reasons to go to C. The list of things I put up above are significantly outweighed by the ways and things that C has which are new or improved. Check out the particle generator postings as another single awesome example of something RD can't do like C. The rendering speed all by itself is a major big deal. I still have single images that take an hour to crunch on my heavy duty new computer. I don't even want to know how long that would take in RD. An example would be the Jelly Fish I just posted in the gallery. That's a 48 minute render. Some of my animations are days long so speed is a major deal. I also really like the new shader tree. I can say with confidence that I know about 1% about shaders and the new shader tree is powerful enough to do almost anything I can think up. The shader part of C is so huge in its capability that I'll be learning it for a LONG LONG time which is good for me to keep my interest. If you know and can run the RD shader stuff, it will be a snap to use the C stuff, they're the same on the front side but you can keep on digging and digging and digging and opening it up more and more for more power and capability. I use the smart pack that came with C studio LOTS and LOTS because it has LOTS of good magic tricks in it. The pod racer I just posted was done strictly with procedurals. I'm waiting for the next version of C to come out because I want more which RD never had. Going to C was a significant step but it was worth it for my stuff. -Kix

v1.0 included a Physics module extension. If you know someone who has the v1.0 CD you might be able to just grab the Physics.dta and Physics.mcx files from them. I'm running v1.1 and the physics stuff still seems to work just fine (I can make balls bounce of each other like there's no tomorrow!)

Attached Link: http://www.concentric.net/~Franzs/cdp/index.html

If you contact Eovia, they will help you get the physics stuff plugged in... Also, if you do a search, there was a thread on doing it here or at the yahoo group.

I think I just installed v1.1 over the top of v1.0 (or at least v1.0 was already installed when I installed v1.1). I don't recall having to do anything special after installing v1.1 that way in order to make the physics stuff work (it was just there and waiting to be used). In Cinema 4D-land you have to pay an extra $495 for their physics plug-in (to be fair it probably does more than what Carrara has).

I remember that Ray Dream Studio used to have a spherical camera for creating panoramic scenes. I used it a few times and thought it was a pretty good tool. Now that the Anything Glows environmentally lighting feature uses panoramas it would be nice to have that back again. Digital Carvers Guild suggests using Bryce to create the panoramas to insert into C but not all of us have the budget to buy all these good programs out there.