My e-bay purchase of RDS 4 showed up in the mail today, everything is legit (including manuals and all the stuff that came with it), and I just got done purchasing the upgrade copy of Carrara online for a grand total of $173.31... Now I just have to scrounge up enough patience to endure 3-day Ground shipping from UPS. (happy happy joy joy, happy happy joy joy...) Life is goooooooood. /P

Congrats. I think you'll find it a pretty fun program, and this forum full of helpful people. Not me, of course -- I'm a big ol' jerk. I'm really looking forward to the Anything Grows plug-in. I'll probably get that, along with Anything Grooves when it comes out, now that I know bones are gonna be included in the next Carrara.

When do you think the next version will come out? I played with RDS 4 last night, and in spite of it being a bit old, it works real well... it'll take awhile for me to get used to the new environment (I've been using AC3D to toss vertices about), but I like what I see so far. /P

My suggestion Penguin is to work on one modeller at a time. I started with the vertex modeller, went to spline and then went to metaball (which I still need to work on a lot!) Anyway, the biggest challenge I have found is the shaders, they are very complex, but when you get the hang of them, they are very powerful too. I think you will really like Carrera, my only real beef so far is the 3D boolean, it annoys me to no end the mess I get sometimes when I use that function. The render engine seems really good too. JDexter