Well, folks, I guess this is about as official as I'm ever going to get. I wrote to Eovia this morning from work, asking whether or not Carrara version 2 would have bones. Here's what their customer service guy wrote back: "Hi Dex, thanks for your inquiry regarding Bones in Carrara. As you know Carrara 1.1 already supports Inverse Kinematics (IK) but indeed a Bones system would be handy for more sophisticated character animation projects. I can't tell you too much about it yet, but in short: yes, Carrara 2 will have bones. I think you will be very positively impressed when it's released, based on what I've seen so far from the Alpha testing group. If you can attend the CITEA event (California Industrial and Technology Education Association) expo this week (Friday/Saturday) in Riverside, see us in booth #66 - www.citea.org for details. -Philip" Now, does anyone know when C2 comes out? - Dex

Well its nice to see that they are admitting to it now outside of the email group. Rumor has the release at a june/july time I think. The real question is how do I get in the beta?

Thanks for the info Dex, I think you should attend the expo & find out more!

Well, I live in San Francisco and the event is in Riverside -- about 5 hours' drive south. (If I had a car....) Ergo, I doubt I'll be popping in. If they were having an event up here, I'd be there in a heartbeat. I'm just excited to finally have confirmation that there will, in fact, be bones in C2. - Dex

I'm sorry guys, bones smones - lets get a better renderer and some better modeling tools! What good is a bones function if you can't model something decent to use with it and the rendering is only so-so. just my 2 cents.

If you want a better modeler there are alternatives. Check out amapi or just do what I do...www.wings3d.com. It does almost everything amapi does and its nicer (IMHO). Outside of bones I really want a better way to texture my stuff. I have high hopes for Carrara now. I think the merger with amapi will allow for a lot of the amapi tech to seap into carrara making a much nicer and more stable app.

What's wrong with C's renderer? Overall I'd have to say I think I often like what I see coming out of C better than what I see coming out of Lightwave (and even though I own both products I still feel like I can probably get something nicer looking out of C). Maybe it's just a personal taste thing but to me Lightwave renders can tend to seem cold/flat/muddy/lifeless relative to what I see coming out of C (or C4D for that matter). Or are you referring to the lack of features like caustics, radiosity, and HDRI?

I to have lightwave and the only hangup on it is the render time. Radiosity and antialiasing add a huge amount of time to a render, even for a simple scene. Now that I have lightwave, I still prefer to use Carrara because I am more familiar with it. Lighting and surfacing have their own little quirks in implementation that you must be aware of when rendering in any 3d package. Learning the quirks and all the features of a particular package takes time in order to master. This learning curve, the complexity of Lightwave and my familiarity with Carrera is what draws me back to Carrara. But trust me, I will dig into lightwave at some point, but right now it takes me, the LW newbie, too long to do anything in it, so I have put it on the back burner. Render wise, LW is a better renderer, technically, because of all of the features associated with it (subpatch/multi-pass rendering, etc). However, as I mentioned before, you must be fairly knowledgeable about these features, both theoretically and operationally, in order to use them well. As a matter of fact, I am now thinking of picking up a book I saw on the new algorithms and principles behind radiosity and raytracing, in order to better understand LW. Carrara, as I read in an interview the guy who runs Eovia, was meant to be accessible to everyone, not just professional graphics artists. This is what appeals to me, since I do not have a degree in graphics arts or any other kind of formal art training. All of this makes a package which is much more user friendly and allows for more opportunity to produce great images by beginners, without the learning curve associated with the "high end" stuff. .Painter

About a year ago I made a craggy, rusty texture and applied it to a fairly simple shape and rendered it in similar lighting situations in Ray Dream 5.5, Strata Studio 2.5, Bryce 4 and Lightwave 5.6 as a test for render quality. I worked in each program to get the best render possible at 175 dpi. Ray Dream's output was easily the worst, very plastic and the bump maps really looked fake, Bryce was a little better, Strata was considerably better than Bryce and Lightwave was easily the best render of all. Although I was a little surprised at the difference in quality, nothing surprised me as much as when I got Carrara and re-rendered the original RDS file. Not only was the rendering much richer and closer to the Strata/Lightwave benchmark, it was also faster. This is an added plus that Eovia should trumpet.