Hey that's pretty good. How does Carrara deal with high poly count. It did not do a good job for me, not even on my dual pentium. I am not one who likes to reduce polygons so I don't do so very often. You seem to have gotten good results. I commend you. Great Work!

This from based on a previous posting/tutorial by elgeneralisimo called "Quick and Dirty Mech". He has good technique, Oh... there he is! I incorporated his technique and mind for a more efficient way of modeling. It is partly spline, partly vertex. The Madcat's elbow is lathed and the barrels on the vulture are lathed as well. You can learn alot from many of the people here. The madcat cockpit and the jiant shins are spline objects and the rest are based on primitives. Only before reading elgener's posting, I would never have thought about using splines in a mechanical model.

Thanx elgeneralisimo. I knew I was forgetting something ;-)

HMMMM.... That looks like it was lathed which can be done without a spline. Spline modeling is great especially for doing human faces and body parts or anything that requires many smoothe curves. That is one the short-comings many poser users have that I deal with. They use their poser characters and neglet many of the more difficult points in modelling like building their own human/animal models. Many out there do build models for poser but the bulk of the people that I interact with are dumb-founded when it comes to splines, nurbs, and patches

Carrara is a funny program which is why I dropped it all together. The only way that I even got an export to go into the modelling room was to import it as an .obj file. Use the import as a vertex primative. (Not the facet option) and use first names as ID. I cannot remember the other settings as I have not touched the program in months. Also, another way I did it was to use a .3ds file, and I promoted it to master and then switched to the modeller room and it was there. Carrara is too frustrated to be effective as it is incomplete.

Carrara sucks because there is NO support. It would be a fine program if it had support. The future is not certain and should program fall through the cracks! Which I think it will with the new standards that Newtek and Kinetix have set! Then owners are stuck with a 3D app that half works hoping for a miracle of ownership to come falling out of the sky. In worst cases, what if someone does buy Carrara and they decide to restructure the entire program based on the existing framework, make it as good a Max or LW and sell for a Few Thousand retail as a profession level and not an entry level 3D app under a new name. No patches for current owners either! Well you are still in the same boat.

Ugh!

Thanks Clint. I got turned on to NT about 4 years ago and never looked back. I am not a big gamer and if I buy a game, it will have to work in NT or it is no dice. I just love the stability that I get with the OS even though it has it share of bugs as well, most of them have been addressed with the service packs. NT is a workhorse but these are things that I am sure you already know. Now that I am moving up in the world, I am looking at IRIX 6.5 I hear that is an awesome OS for graphics and soon I will have upgraded to Lightwave 6. I have been doing a lot of reading at SGI's website on 6.5 and many professionals swear by it. Maybe next year I'll be able to afford the OS but right now, I am thinking about upgrading to either a dual Xeon or waiting until the P4 Willamat(sp?) is released. I really want to be a professional artist and I will do anything that gives me even a slight edge over my competition.

You are absolutely right Clint, and I have addressed many of those issues. My system complete config is as follows: Dual PII 400 256 mb ram Oxygen VX1 vid card Asus P2B-D mobo WiNT 4.0 (SP6) I generally try to commit all of my resources to the task at hand so I do turn off all background programs prior to running my 3D apps as 3D apps are taxing on the system. I bought Lightwave just over a year ago today and I have not had a single hang-up or let-down since I had and tell it has pushed my machine and both of its processors to the limits and has not crashed yet. Poser also run without a hitch. The level of stability that I get from Poser and Lightwave; I feel that Carrara should be equally stable. I don't get that stability and functionality and that frustrates me because I don't like work-arounds personally. I want the app to do what I paid it to do. Lastly I found that Carrara cannot handle the workload that I request from it. I am high poly-count modeller so I expect alot from my 3D app. If I offended anyone here, I am apologizing in advanced. I noticed that people a these forums get flamed alot for having a different opinion. I have not seen it in this forum yet but in others however, oh yeah, all stops were pulled. I am voicing my opinion on what I think is a bad app. If Carrara had a support system to address all of the problems that exist, It would probably be more forgiving but it seems that part of the support infrastructure stage of the program release was ignored and that is bad on the end-user.

Good Luck with Carrara. I personally hate that program and I think that you will find yourself more frustrated as you use it. -Many of the key features in Carrara simply don't work. -It crashes alot when you try to perform specific boolean operations. -It crashes for no known reason at all many times. -The IK system does not use an object skeleton which is unheard of because that means that you cannot animate a solid mesh using IK. -Welding vertices sometime causes it to crash. -After the program has been running for about an hour, it runs like shit, and crashes again. -Support for Carrara is non-existant so you are left in the wind. -If it has not crashed or pissed you off to no end yet, it will, and then it will crash again. -The rendering engine straight sucks -The threads are crap! You could say that I need to check my machine but later I found that many others were having the same hangups. The problem with this program is that it was abandoned by Metacreations before it was complete so many of the features that would otherwise "make sense!" are not implemented. Why they even released it is beyond me other than to rake in every dollar they could get from the poor souls whom bought it. There are some very clever people whom has learned to work around all of its short-comings had have done some very good work with it. I think that the things that they have to work around are things that should have been addressed prior to release. I STRONGLY urge you to return this title and get something else because Carrara was thrown together at the end, lacks support and has a very uncertain future.

Termatton, The only dumb question there is is the one that is NOT asked. 8-) Keep asking my friend

I would really like to know more about this because I am trying to become a professional myself. Right now I am focusing on my modelling techniques and the mathematics of modelling and animation but I would really love to be my own boss. So anyone please, tell me more about the professional 3D market.

Nearly every day I see people at auctions selling copies of Lightwave and 3DS max for extremely low prices and I hate it. I will never buy hack-ware because of lack of support, and with lightwave owners, which I am sure is the same with 3DSmax, there are Newtek Sponsored User groups all over the country in most of the more densely populated states. The Benefits of buying a liscensed copy of one of the higher priced 3D solutions go far beyond the pleasure of just having a great piece of software.

There are many models of porsches out there. In fact 3D cafe has several porsche models in various formats. I have one that came with my lightwave CD but I don't think can distribute it without violating the rights of Newtek. Go to 3Dcafe.com if you don't find one here, I garauntee you will get one there.

Inventive, Innovative, easy, broad across platform and application, I LOVE IT!