Attached Link: Carrara On-List

If you arent a memeber of the on-list for Carrara and you use Carrara you should join. This was another post to the list. I havent tried this yet but it sounded good. "1/6/00 7:10am Hello everyone: Some of you may not know that there are 3 small Easter Eggs in Carrara that I personally find quite useful. - Frame-rate display : hit the '0' key on your numerical keypad on the right of your keyboard. The frame rate will be displayed in the main view when you use the camera controls (dolly tool, etc.). Quite useful when you play with the Interactive Renderer settings dialog, trying to figure out which combination of options works the best for your hardware/software configuration. Hit '0' again to turn it off. Note : the frame rate will be unreadable if a palette or another window covers partially the main view. Make sure all the view is visible. - Normals display : hit the '7' key on your numerical keypad, and the FACETS normals will be displayed next time the main view is redrawn. I call a "facet normal" the normal of a triangular facet computed thru a cross-product. This gives you the orientation of the facet. Among other things, this is used by the "Backfaces visibility" settings located in the Properties palette. For optimization, the Interactive Renderer disregards facets with a normal that does point to the viewer. This makes sense for closed objects, since if a facet does not "look" to the user, then there is a good chance that this is a facet "in the back" of the object, and that it will be covered by one in the front. Of course, some surfaces are NOT closed, but Carrara knows about them (hence the "smart Backfaces" mode). Soooo, if you have a surface that does not show up properly in the main view and that you suspect a normal issue, just hit 7 to check your idea, and turn "Show backfaces" on.

"Hit '7' again, and the VERTICES normals will be displayed. A triangle has a normal stored at each vertex. This normal is very important, because it is the one used for the Phong/Ray-tracing shading. When modeling some objects in the Spline of Vertex modeler, you may get shading artefacts and not understand why, simply because of a small modeling mistake. These shading artefacts are often sharp changes in the shading (the surface does not appear smooth at a specific spot). This is usually caused by a normal discontinuity : two adjacent facets would have different normals. This mode helps a lot to solve these cases ! I find it very useful. Hit '7' again and you will go back to normal display. Note : to see all facets, switch to wireframe mode, and make sure that you checked the "Draw Hidden" check box in the Interactive Renderer settings dialog. - Frame Buffer update area : you will probably never use this last Easter Egg, but since people are going to find it and ask about it... Hit '9' on the numerical keypad, and it will draw a white rectangle around the part that is being redrawn. Try moving a small object to test it. Do not use the camera controls, since they force a complete redraw. This can help understanding changes in the frame rate, or update problems. But this is more an internal debugging tool rather than something users may find useful. Hit '9' again to turn this off Have fun, Yann. ________________________________ Yann Corno Director of Engineering for Europe MetaCreations Europe" Enjoy, Clint

Its early and I'm still half asleep. DOH! Clint