I have been doing some experimenting with animating in carrara regarding character animation and have noticed a couple of things: 1) I was able to use the bend & twist deformation modifier to make wings flap on the eagle contained on the carrara content cd by applying the limits at the end where the wing attaches to the body. So I thought, this may be a solution to character animation until a bones plugin is available for carrara - wrong!. I noticed quickly when I tried the same trick on the head of the eagle that it would work when the beak did not follow the head. I attempted the same technique on the model of the man and found two things 1) I could still see he seams of the segments and 2) In an attempt to work around this I created a hierarchieral structure and when using the bend & twist modifier carrara appears to ignore parent & child relationships. This was proven when I attached all the parts of the arem and attempted to bend the shoulder with only the shoulder bending. If anyone may have some suggestions please reply. One more note: I believe that carrara would be one of the most complete 3d packages out on the market for the price if it had a bones plugin. I am a little upset at metacreations for two reasons 1) I called them before purchasing carrara because I was deciding between carrara and truespace 4.2, and they stated that carrara would have bones capabilties. By the way carrara's interface is so mush easier to use than truespace 4. & 2) They would have a superior product with the inclusion of bones. I know that many people are anxiously awaiting the poser plugin as I am too because I am also a poser user, but I would much rather have both and my priority would go to purchasing a bones plugin. So if any out there is listening program me a bones plugin and you have my money. If I knew how to do it I would do it myself. Thanks for your time in reading this long message.

dragonheart, Pretty much my feelings also. I sure hope a Poser plug-in comes out soon. That would be sooo nice. Regards, Clint

I have toyed with the idea of creating a Poser plug-in myself. I have started some work on it. Problem is, Larry (Poser's creator) seems to think it will be a LOT of work, especially getting morph targets to work. I'm afraid I'll put in all this time on it, and Poser/Carrara's new owner(s) will release theirs before I'm done with mine. After all, they have a BIG head-start on me. For now, I'm excited about the Carrara patch. After I do some rendering, maybe I'll get back to work on a Poser importer ;) Jeff Lanham

Or, if a bunch of people want to send me money, I'll quit my day job (as a programmer) and work on the Poser plug-in full time! My wife would love that.... Jeff

Jeff, Morph Targets are easy to do! My morph target plug-in pretty much emulates Poser mt's. It was a relatively easy process. I too would love a Poser plug-in, the major problem the way I see it is emulating the Poser 'bone' system. In order to make a poser plug-in, as far as I can tell, one would almost need access to the Poser source code. This and reading in the cr2 format AND the pz4 format would be the hard part, IMHO. If Larry wanted to provide one of us with the source code(yeah, right....) Brian Retford Carrara Extensions www.losthorizonsoftware.com

I think Larry's method involves using Poser as a 'server' to perform the animations in Carrara. Anyway, my plan was to simply import the poser objects and then create keyframes for the changes, not recreate all of Poser's functionality in Carrara. You're right, I am having trouble deciphering some of the stuff in the Poser files. I, too, see that as the hard part! I have your extensions, and think they're great! I am planning on using your morph targets to do a simple animation of a Poser figure. Should work, since it's a simple walk and the camera will be far away. Jeff

Ahh Jeff, that would work, I see what you are trying to do. I thought you wanted a whole Poser inside RDS like the RDS/Poser patch - this task seems very hard. However, importing a poser file and using key frames probably isn't that as bad, good luck! If you need any help, feel free to ask.