Attached Link: http://www.betabites.com

I havnt tried that one yet but if you head over to www.betabites.com and look around you will find @ least 5 other mem defraggers that are freeware.

Well I'll go try that next..else I am going to see if I can maybe work something out with a mandlebrot set of some type. The problem is that in a still setting I can always get it to work...but by frame 3 its starting to get pretty messed up. I hope these primitive errors are addressed in the next patch.

Well I found out how to fix the earth...remove its weather. I learned an important lesson about Carrara over the last couple of projects. This lesson is that Carrara primitives such as fire, clouds, fog, land, etc are unusable for animations. The above picture was a nice globe that everyone liked, but annoying little black dots kept popping up. The only way I could get it to work was to remove the clouds. In fact I have noticed that you cannot intersect any carrara primitive with a regular model or another primitive or you will generate render errors. This is unfortuante as these tools where what attracted me to Carrara in the first place. I will definately stick with carrara until I try out C2...but I cant recommend this program to anyone until this error is fixed. This is like haveing a Viper and then finding out that its been governed to go no faster than 65mph. Well now that I know this I can at least work around it...anyone have an ideal on how I can get a nice cloud layer? :) BTW: Thanks for looking at the project Mark..it @ least made me feel good knowing that it wasnt something completely obvious....

OK that 7 minutes was on my computer @ work..p3 500 with 256megs of ram. HOWEVER..for some reason that computer keept giving me a nil pointer error after it rendered frame 2 of the animation. I went home and reinstalled it on my home pc and it works..dont know why..but @ home on an athlon tb 900 with 128megs of ram its takeing just under 3min a frame. I bought another 128megs of ram this week but I guess I have to wait for this animation to finish rendering tomorrow b4 I can use it :) btw: in my new tiger direct catalog pc133 256meg ram sticks are only 125bucks......makes me mad I just bought a 128megs....

Attached Link: http://www.xdsoft.com/

http://www.xdsoft.com/ this is the best one I have found..it does about everything and is updated a TON. As to what I was talking about before with randomness...I was wondering about the whole seed thing. This method of land generation has been in games since back in the games of Mule on the c-64. Its popular b/c if you change the seed from 500 to 900 and then back to 500 then 500 will stay the same. What the problem is, is that the worlds dont appear very diverse after you visit the first couple 100. I was just wondering if you found an actual random command like 6*(rnd)+1 for the formula modeler...I bet you could use something like that to generate some cool stuff.

Go check out a a shareware program called 3dexplorer...it will let you have TOTAL control over your exports..for what it does its amazing. I feel bad for useing it almost a year w/out regeristering yet but I will soon..its the greatest when it comes to that stuff. BTW: is your globe set up to actually randomly generate the landscape? What I mean is just b/c you change a seed value and you get a different landmass doesnt make it random..but I was wondering if you actually used some sort of mathmatical formula that produced a random result or if you where just changeing a seed value.

Excellent Model! I like the fact that it looks fairly detailed already. When you do your final composition try to have lander a bit large and towards the front! I hate it when someone does a cool model and its far off in the distance...you have all that cool detail...show it off! :)

Well its good to read some solid news..I didnt see any of this @ the web site. Thats the nice thing about trade shows and talking to the owners of course :) If Amapi is capable of low poly obj then I hope that AC will start putting in support of .X with animation. I own and play with 3drad and a few other game engines. All engines appear to only support .3ds or .X animated models and textures. If AC could let us have full .X support than I would bet it could be worth 1,000's of sales to amatuer game designers and mod authors. Lots of this target audiance would love to have legitimate software but the price of MAX makes it hard for that to happen. With .X it would be fairly easy to get the models into the engine.

Very nice. I like how the suit case has a couble of inside bevels and such..makes it look a bit more interesting than just a plain cookie tin :) I am curious to see how amapi fits in with Carrara. Everyone on the list makes it sound like its a done deal that carrara and amapi will remain seperate...is that a for sure thing? If Amapi is extra I dont know if I would pay more than 100 bucks for it. I know it has a large retail price tag, but it doesnt offer anything more than what max, maya, or lightwave have to offer from what I understand. I would like to try amapi out but I guess I'll wait to see how it fits into Carrara's future.

I was playing with scaling before. I'll post up what I find out. I made a big earth and then scaled a building really small and put it on the earth...Carrara doesnt scale things very small :) the geometry was all messed up...I am thinking of doing it in two shots and useing after effects to blend them....first going from space to atmosphere, and then from atmosphere (ie clouds) I ll zoom to a house.

well its a matter of scale...Carrara seems to poop out when you start modeling in anything bigger than inches. I have been useing the p3 500 with 500megs of ram @ work and it just dogs out with a large sphere. @ home I have an athlon 900 with 256megs of ram...maybe I can retry it there. I think the computer here only has an 8meg video card while I have the Geforce at home...

Oddly enough I am in a similiar situation to you litst. I am working on a project where a camera looks at the earth from space and then needs to zoom into the USA and stop and a house, go thru the window and look at a texture mapped tv. I am trying to figure out a good way to accomplish this. Any takers?

Is this a real motion blur or is it a post process? I hate Carrara's motion blur b/c it puts it on after the image is rendered. When it does it this way, its not very accurate. I spent the last two weeks deciding if I wanted to 'upgrade' to RDS or TrueSpace. I was totally impressed with some of the stuff that RDS has. Lucky for me the new Carrara replacement will be announced tomorrow so now I dont have too choose. Hopefully the development community will get behind this new version and we will start seeing Carrara plug-inns.

'wahoo!'

In college I listened to music all the time when I worked on creative things. Problem was someone presented a paper on musical influences and art and ever since then I have quit listening to music when I am creating personal things. It may sound weird but I noticed a trend with my own work and how different music affects me. I am FAR from being an artsy farsty type of guy but I believe that a lot of true creativity comes from inside you. And when I listen to music it can change my mood and my thinking process. On the other side, when I do work for clients (more so with video type stuff) I always ask for musical influences and try to listen to that type of music when I do the projects. When I do listen to music I like groups like prodigy, fluke, fatboy slim etc....I find electronic music rather fascinating.