Hello Renderositians,
Im in the process of researching 3D software for use at the company where I work. Ive been messing about with the Carrara demo for the past few days and I do like what I see so far. I am by no means a 3D expert, Ive been working as a graphic designer for a few years now and until now have done mostly traditional print design, page layout etc. Ive played around though with Infini-D, Bryce, Poser. Ive also played a bit with Animation Master but I cant say I enjoyed AM much, I found the interface a little clumsy (and Im already clumsy by nature). I work for a fiber-optics equipment company and we have this guy (Dr.G) who spends his time making presentations at seminars and stuff like that. We want tu use 3D illustrations and animations to spruce up his presentations and also to include in training DVDs. I also cant afford to spend much considereing the economic context these days for tech companies. Any comments about the software would be most welcome as I want to urge my supervisor to make a move on this soon enough to take advantage of the Macworld-30% discount offer that ends on the 25th.
Im mostly concerned with the issue of stability. That seems to have been a major gripe from what Ive read so far, but then again most of the reviews Ive seen have been of version 1.0.
Ill be using this on a Mac G4//400 with 512 megs of ram and several gigs of available disk space.

Thanks in advance for your help folks.
Max

I think Carrara was designed for a job matching your discription. I use Carrara @ work in a post house and @ home for entertainment. Carrara has very strong import/export capabilites which makes it very easy to work with industry standard software (adobe, avid, etc). Carrara is very very stable (on the pc anyway), but most of all its very reliable...things work in the way I think they should work...ie: I get consistant results. As long as you dont plan on doing any character animation you should find that carrara is actually the easiest to use of all full 3d suite packages...hence its easiest to get great results.

I am using 1.1 and ... no complaints. (so far)

Carrara's the best program for the price - you really get a super bang for the buck. It's easy and quick to learn.

From what I have read, the original Metacreations release of Carrara was rushed because they new of the impending sale of the software to other companies. Everything I have read said that Eovia's version fixed the bugs that were prevalent before. So that really shouldn't be the issue. I think Carrara offers a lot of bang for the bucks and I think that it is just a matter of getting used to the interface and different types of modeling for you to feel comfortable. You should also get a free copy of Amapi 5.4 with the software, which may suite your needs better. With 2 for one you can't loose.

I work as a graphics guy at a newspaper and do a lot of informational graphics and illustrations so I can't speak much to the question about animation. But here's the deal on doing STILL pictures: For doing anything mechanical and/or tech oriented I think Carrara blows everything else out of the water that I've used(Lightwave, Strata). Carrara's renderer is good, not as good as say,Lightwave but then Light wave costs about 8 times as much. Believe me, Lightwave's renderer may be better but I'll be damned if it's 8 times better. Strata makes a good product too but it costs over twice as much as Carrara and without Carrara's walls and projections it's a real pain to assemble stuff. You will spend a LOT of time assembling stuff in 3D. Also Strata doesn't ship with hundreds of premade models like C. You can get a lot of use out of those. AND Strata's modeler isn't quite as strong as Carrara's The only other app I think you should check into is the DVgarage's 3D toolkit which features Electric Image 2.9 and a training DVD for $199.00. I can't recommend it completely because I've never used it, but it sounds promising. Carrara plays well with FreeHand, Illustrator and Photoshop and its learning curve is a little tough but no where near as tough as most 3D apps. Don't let anybody lie to you, all 3D apps are difficult to learn and they all advertise how easy they are.

I use Carrara on a G3 400 Pismo, OS 9.0.4 & it is pretty stable. Another "thing" to consider is the available resources available on the "net" and user support. Carrara has outstanding support in that area. I use C also for quick concept sketches for outside photo shoots. It's a great help for photographers to do "rael" photographs.

I own Lightwave 7 and Carrara and even though Carrara is lacking certain features (such as fresnel effects and utilities for dealing with large scenes with lots of objects) I think Carrara tends to generate more beautiful results out-of-the-box. Lightwave's particle system is amazing, though. I'm running v1.1 on the PC and unfortunately I do tend to get a lot of rendering errors (and when that happens the scene I'm working on is basically kaput). This seems to happen more often if I'm using some of the nifty plug-ins like Anything Glows/Grooves. I've also needed to repeatedly discard my .ini file in order to keep going (but then I have to reload all my shaders into the browser). Lightwave isn't totally stable, either, but Carrara definitely crashes more often. If nothing else, Carrara is a friendly and fun way to learn the ins and outs of 3D (and the spline modeler is pretty cool). Lightwave is clearly very powerful but often leaves me dazed and confused! Maybe Carrara version 2 will add some helpful features like caustics, true volumetric lighting, and the ability to do things based on the incidence angle to the camera (for fresnel effects, etc). The program that has impressed me most is Maxon's Cinema 4DXL7. The BodyPaint add-on blows my mind (although I gather that RayDream had a 3d paint feature). If you can find someone with the Carrara v1.0 cd you can get some cool physical dynamics stuff happening as well (if you apply the v1.1 upgrade to v1.0 the physics features remain).

Thanks to everyone who took the time to answer my question. I spent several days last week playing around with the demo. And I must say that I really do enjoy working with Carrara. I cant really comment on final rendering since thats disabled in the demo version, but I do fing it to be a well organized piece of software. Its pretty easy to find what youre looking for and to just basically find your way around. I also find it easier to visualize what Im doing in the modelling room compared to other software Ive tried before. Thats not to say that its perfect, theres always stuff that can be improved. In any case, I (well, the company) missed out on the 30% discount (unless its been extended again). My supervisor is okay with spending the money, but for the last month pretty much every single little expenditure is put under the microscope, so the expense has yet to be approved by the higher-ups. Hopefully business will start picking up soon or well end up having to bring pencils from home. : ) Thanks again for the input folks.

Try to get a few $ in the budget for some plug-ins like Anything Grooves (www.digitalcarversguild.com) which adds displacement mapping (an improvement over bump mapping). There's also Thor and Tree Druid at www.zenstar.com http://www.losthorizonsoftware.com/ supposedly has a v2 version of their power pack coming soon (I think v1 is bundled with Carrara v1.1).