Just wanted to show you what I have been working on for the past month. I work for an NBC affiliate in Kansas and we recently redesigned our on-air look which debuted this past Monday. One of our other artists was building the animated open for the News in Lightwave, but it just wasn't coming together the way we wanted. So, I offered to take a crack at it in Carrara. The turnaround deadline was quick and I am very proud of the results I was able to achieve. Other than the bug that produces "jaggies" when using lightcones, Carrara produced broadcast quality animations in a very short amount of time! Hopefully I will be able to post the animation soon, but for now here are some still shots from this 3 scene animation. (Progression is left to right.)

The images looks great! Congrats on the save! Hopefully, when the animation gallery is approved and figured out, you can post the full thing there.

Excellent work. The colors and lens flares are superb!

Very nice! I've been using RayDream Studio to do braodcast quality graphics for California's internal Court Television network for about a year, now, and was doing similar work in Arizona before that; RDS and Carrara are amply up to the task of Television graphic work -- particularly this kind of stuff. Did you do the lens flare in AfterEffects? Or was that an internal Carrara flare? If it's Carrara, the flares have been greatly improved over RDS! - Dex

Dex - The lens flares were all done in Carrara... I had been using RDS as far back as Version 2.5 (before there even was a "Studio") and finally switched to Carrara last year. The lighting options in Carrara are quite nice in my opinion, giving you a lot of control over the color, brightness, rotation, flare length, etc.

Great work! We'll be interested in seeing the animation.

This is outstanding! I really like all the clouds/smoke/puffy stuff and all the colors are excellent. Could you let us in on how long this took you? Thanks, -Kix

Looks beautiful! Seeing your shots and reading this thread really re-affirms my decision to invest in Carrara Studio 2. Can't wait to see the animation!

Very nice...nothings better then when a consumer piece of software shows up it's 'high end' counter parts. I am doing a few 3d pieces for a client, no one in the area can compete with me b/c they all think they need 2k + a year in school to get a handle on it. I want to tell them about Carrara but I am far to selfish :)

Thanks for posting this. I was thinking about placing an order for the C2 upgrade (along with VectorStyle for Flash output) and seeing this work has helped me make up my mind to do so. I took a detour from C1.1 into Lightwave and Cinema 4D but seeing the great new features in C2 (the caustics look great, for example) and missing the friendly Carrara user community (not to mention the friendly old Carrara GUI) am now coming back to the fold. I've seen some very positive reviews of Carrara recently (just read one tonight in EFX magazine as a matter of fact) and am looking forward to seeing what Eovia comes up with next.

brent, When I was studying geology I was told never to give out my knowedge of geology for free. That isn't selfish, it's self preservation. chuckerii, Very beautiful. I've always liked the NBC peacock. I'm gonna look into the lens flare idea. On Bryce Forum, lens flares are becoming really popular. I'm consistantly amazed at what people are doing in Carrara. I look forward to seeing the animation in the not too distant future. - TJ

Thanks to everyone for the positive feedback! A few behind the scenes comments: The animation was broken down into three scenes, The Peacock, KSN, and The Show Title. The Peacock scene is basically the Peacock, two volumetric clouds and four lights. Due to the jaggies bug with lightcones, I rendered the scene at double size and scaled down to smooth it out. I also figured out half way through rendering all scenes that "Good" anti-alias works very well vs. "Best" and cuts your rendering time down. :-) The last two scenes contain no volumetric clouds... I used texture maps to create color and clouds. Using Photoshop, I created cloudy color maps that I flat mapped on a large rectangle plane placed at the very back of the scene. To create movement, I slowly animated the retangle rotating and moving back and forth. As far as how long it took... aside from the rendering, I would say about two weeks total. Building all three scenes total took about 3-4 days... pretty easy. It was tweeking the lights and effects that took some time to get the right results. My advice, don't give up too soon. I had shadows and reflections in strange places I didn't want and it was frustrating, but I worked it through and finally got there. Take advantage of the built in lighting effects, there's some really cool stuff in there that I stumbled upon by accident and produced some nice results. Sorry to ramble, I am just proud and thrilled at what Carrara was able to produce! Chuck

Dear Chuck, Your are right to be proud! This is a very nice work. I am impressed. Please contact me directly at antoinec@eovia.com. I would like to know more about your animation. Best regards, Antoine Clappier President & CEO ......................................... Eovia Corporation 888 Villa Street, Suite 430 Mountain View, CA 94041 antoine@eovia.com http://www.eovia.com .........................................

Nice work! You not only saved the news you got a response from Antoine too. I would like to see the animation when you post it.

It seems really cool ! Thanks for sharing that with us. Freid