Thanks for all the suggestions here. I think I'm having trouble now with the video card as well - an ATI Radeon. It would not co-operate with Truespace either. Are there known issues wth this card and Carrara too?

Anyway, Ive tried quite a few combinations of importing 3ds and even obj models with little success in terms of sorting through the shaders. Mostly there are just no shaders in the sequencer tray - there are spaces and numbers for the surfs,just no shaders and none after I assign something from the browser or shaders room.....

Most strange of all - I 'select all' then de-select the default light in a new scene and then 'group' so that I can have some control over then many very small parts of the model by jumping in /out. When I group it, the bounding box is HUGE - much bigger than seems necessary and gets in the way of any other selections in the scene such as trees etc.

I'm just trying (finally getting around to) to use Carara as a renderer for some architectural projects. The interface works well for viewing for my purposes in (assemble room) sketch and rendered mode. But I cannot seem to get past these first few barriers. Unfortunately I have to import from other more precise architectural modeling programs and from Rhino.

Wonder if others have run into any of this or is it an ATI video card issue as well. (Mark B. ?)

Many thanks....Rivers