Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=133037&Start=1&Sectionid=10&WhatsNew=Yes

I would really really like to do grass. The one in the link is rather incredible and the dudes in the lightwave forum hack on it because it could be BETTER! I want to be able to do stuff that's that BAD! So Litst, You're the current particle emitter master of streamers. Think you could do grass with it? -Kix

This is the reason I still keep RDS 5.5 and AFX's Furrific around. It does the same thing, plus has the ability to put flowers or other objects on the ends of the strands. Other options include making the strands disappear completely leaving only the tip objects. Plus, it's animatable. That's why I hope AFX ports that application to Carrara when v.2 comes out. I'm not holding my breath though.... :( Mark

I would like to see a render preview option in the assemble room, so that you don't have to keep doing test renders. Test renders are the biggest drag I have found in Carrera. Along with that, improving render speed and having better antialiasing with control over the parameters would definitely make this app a lot better! Is there any way to send these suggestions to Eovia (and have them listen)?

Can Furrific produce somewhat realistic-looking results? I couldn't really tell from the samples at www.afx.com Sasquatch for Lightwave seems to be making good progress in the realism dept.: http://www.worley.com/sasquatch/sasquatch.html#top Anyone know how a fur shader works? Does it somehow do displacement mapping to change geometry or just fancy procedural shading?

I'm getting mouse shoulder-itis (even had to put my wife's bursitis shoulder ice pack on the other evening!) from doing test renders in Carrara. I appreciate being able to do them but my mouse is definitely getting a workout. Maybe there could at least be a control key sequence to say "test render the same area I test rendered last time". You can do Ctrl-R but then you switch over to the Render Room and have to wait a bit for the full render. C4D handles this nicely in that you can Ctrl-R render from any view and at least for simple scenes the renderer is very fast (no need for area rendering at all).

LightWave 6.5 is on sale (dirt cheap) at http://www.newtek.com. I am very much tempted.

Lwave is amazing but I've found it to have one of the most unusual interfaces I've ever encountered (certainly doesn't try to follow any of the usual Mac/Win interface conventions). Even just selecting and pushing/pulling polygons in the modeler requires all sorts of mouse and keyboard gymastics. Even though lwave has a ton of features (the particle system alone is amazing) I've struggled sometimes to have it produce output that looks as nice as what I get from Carrara (lwave doesn't seem to texture map as well as C and I get the best results in lwave using procedural shaders). I'm starting to think that lwave has a render engine that produces very "cold" output (great for space scenes and cars) that lacks the "warmth" of other renderers like Carrara or C4D. Don't know if there's a technical explanation for this (or even if I'm right in my assessment). Plus lwave seems to have a tough time with soft shadows (there's even a plug-in being sold to work around this). Everything in the lightwave world costs more, too (plug-ins, add-ons, etc.) The Sasquatch fur shader is very cool (a lite version comes with 7b). I think there's a 7b for sale over at eBay right now as well. I've even thought of selling my lwave 7 and waiting to see if Carrara 2 and amapi have enough features to keep me from lusting after c4d (which does seem to be a bit of a bother when it comes to animation).

Lwave has subdivision surfaces for modeling (basically you make a chunky rectangular blob by pushing your mesh around and it makes it smooth and organic looking when you hit the TAB key!) but I find that the hypernurbs in C4D yields nicer-looking results (fewer artifacts, less smearing, and generally a smoother look). But if you're into subd supposedly Amapi has several different smoothing options and thus in some ways could be better than lwave or c4d.

Personally I'm looking forward to Carrara2 (with a few more features and its nice warm output C2 should be able to hold its little head up high).

If you're intent on leaving Carrara behind also take a look at Cinema 4D Art (v6 without the animation) and take a look at:
http://www.maxon-computer.com/deepshade/

Hope this hasn't been off-topic (or downright rude to Carrara) but as a recent Lightwave purchaser (who still loves C but is also lusting after c4d behind C's back) I thought I'd share my experience. Also, I'm a relative newbie so take everything I say with a grain of salt. Sometimes I've noticed that the beauty of high-end programs doesn't always become apparent until you've spent lots of time with them (or have to do a job on deadline for a client).

Here's a lawn tribble I did today in lwave7 with the built-in lite version of Worley's rather impressive Sasquatch (but Sasquatch itself costs more than C). Hopefully C2 will have a fur shader built-in (or at least someone will offer a fur plug-in soon for C or C2).

While we're talking about possible things for C2, how about the ability to use the full suite of procedural textures in conjunction with volumetric lighting (the light cone in C's case). Currently you can use your light's gel on the light cone fog but I haven't found a way to apply arbitrary procedural textures such as cellular (or something like noise factory). Interestingly, C appears to have more options for straight light gels than lightwave (which appears to call them projection images and only seems to allow texture maps but not any procedular textures for gels). There are several things like this I've found where C seems to be more advanced than lightwave. Here's a look at what you can do in a few minutes in lightwave with volumetric light and procedural textures.

what about edge manipulation? making bevels and radiused edges requires a good deal of planning in carrara, or atleast a lot of time. it seems like lightwave is able to quickly deal with edges. i think that carrara would be far more powerful if it had true edge manipulation. while i'm on my soap box, area lighting would be another feature that would make carrara amazing. for those who don't know, area lights creat diffuse light eminating from many points, where as point and spot lights eminate from a single point. the results with area lights are soft shadows that show transparency (shadow mapped soft shadows don't). combine these two requests with grass simulation and carrara would be an truly kick ass piece of software. or i could just sell everything i own and buy maya.

Yeah, Maya is a solution ;) ! For better soft shadows, i'd suggest you use an Environment Lightning on a vertex sphere . Disable "light smart sampling" and "smart sampling" in the render options : it will be slower but the rendering quality will be better .

Litst, I could never get shadows in environmental lighting to work. The new shadows came out as sharp as before. Can you repost your example and show us the size and shape of your lightsource compared to the sphere you are shadowing? Also could you re-explain it being a little more detailed? It would help me a lot. Thanks, -Kix

I'll answer you in another thread, Kix .