I am planning on upgrading to Carrara from RDS 5.0 for Win95. Is there a noticeable increase in render speed with carrara? Also, most of my work involves modelling existing objects to exact measurements. Anyone think Carrara would be better for that? How about natural looking water -- typically a horizon to horizon ocean? Thanks for your opinions.

Raymen, The render speed seems to greatly increased. Carrara renders along really well. I havent done any benchmarks but I can visualy see a render speed increase. I think it renders a little better than RDS also. Now, As far as water...so so. I have created a lot of "Water" shaders and they look pretty good. I've never seen water from a MC product as good a Bryce. But Carrara does OK. The shader editor in Carrara is pretty much the same as RDS with a few new additions. For scale modeling I would recommend Rhino. That is the way to go for this type of modeling. I tried to use the RDS Vertex Modeler today and crashed it in about 2 minutes. That was the first time I tried to use it. I am working on a Anime figure and it has about 13k polygons right now. I tried a Detach Polygon command in the Vertex Modeler and Carrara freaked out and froze. So I dont know ... I went back to RDS right away for the modeling. If it were me I would use Rhino to model in and Carrara to render in. Carrara renders well. Check out the new Gallery here at Renderosity for a few images from Carrara. It under CG Gallery then Carrara/RDS on the right side bar. If you have anymore questions and/or comments - Post away. ;) Best regards, Clint PS - I like your image! Nice work.

There is a considerable improvement in the render times from RDS 5 to 5.5 and then a modest gain from 5.5 to CAR. If most on your work is built out of primarily geometric shapes as your example then the free form modeler should work fine. It seems you are already familiar with that. The disadvantage is if you need to convert them to obj or some other format for export, not easy to control unless you want to spend a lot of time at it. I'm not familiar with other 3d apps.