Quote - if adobe bought carrara, they'd hafta raise the price to $999 to pay for their
workers' monster homes and hummers :roflmao: CS3E has a rudimentary
3d function that can cut as much as 0.5 second outta the workflow of a 3d user,
but if they hype it enuff, it may get various 2d users to buy maya or max or
even carrara.

That just it, CS3 3D feature is for the 2D designer, not the other way around.

 Adobe has had the chance to get in to 3D in the past. They actually have licensed code from Eovia for use in Photoshop. Now comparing Adobe to DAZ ? Adobe is a publicly traded company worth $24,198,781,026. Adobe holds a monopoly as far as prepress, 2D graphic, Web, Photography and Illustration goes. This aside of their video and post production tools. They own Postscript and PDF, and now Flash. They cater to the professional market. DAZ has a nitch within a nitch market. This market is so small that Adobe would only lose focus if it attempted to get in to it. Not to mention that Carrara, for all it's wonderful tools, is at best considered semi-pro package, and as of recently, it's turning more in to a hobbits tool. Adobe does cater a bit to the hobbits, but their main meat and potatoes is the professional market.

I did want them to pick up Painter at one time. I would much rather see Painter under Adobe then under Corel, but to each is own. I also would have preferred to see Eovia flourish as opposed to this DAZ merger, but you can't always get what you want.

I think if anything Modo would be a better fit for Adobe then Carrara. But if Adobe wanted to be in this market, they probably would have already done something about it. Just look how they gobbled up their only competition with the acquisition of Macromedia.

 I don't think it's Mark's voice per say. I get groggy every time I do video tutorials. I guess the best time for me is after having a good cup of joe.

 You are not the only one experiencing weird problems. I am saddened to that fact that my fears have materialized. I always thought that Carrara was not a good fit for DAZ. I gave them the benefit of the doubt but to me, it is increasingly apparent that DAZ direction with Carrara and that of all the RayDream/InfiniD users of old is not entirely compatible. DAZ seems to have prioritized making Carrara compatible with their content at the expense of stability.

I am with you 100% when you state that DAZ ought to fix the prevailing bugs in Carrara as opposed to adding more features. Stability and usability should be paramount. I am not even sure if the traditional DAZ customer base is even that interested in Carrara that much, since they don't commonly produce their own content. DS also seems to more then adequately serve this customer base. Some can't even realize what benefit Carrara might have over DS.

I bought Modo, and I am on the process of learning it. Very impressive so far. I will still use Carrara, but it certainly will not be my main 3D program like it has been since before it was even called Carrara.

Hexagon seems to be yet another causality from the DAZ/Eovia acquisition. Even more so then Carrara because it's development has been stifled completely by DAZ, du to the fact of not keeping the original development team on the payroll. Sad, because even against Modo, Hexagon does have advantages in usability. I do not blame DAZ for not wanting to keep a french based development team overseas, but still Hexagon will probably never reach it's full potential now do to these circumstances. DAZ promised informally that they would have a bug free new version by last November, well we are reaching the one year anniversary of that date and what we got was a half baked patch that broke more then what it fixed.

I still hold a bit of hope for Carrara since the original development team is still on board. Also it seems to be at the very least patched more frequently then Hexagon. Hexagon is the one that I have lost all hope. I will still keep an eye on it's development, but now my time is used learning Modo.

 You can also add a "cellular" effect to the bump channel. For the forested part.

 I develop web sites. IE is infamous for having to force developers in to using "workarounds" to get pages to display correctly. The problem is how Microsoft has persistently ignored open standers in the past, like CSS for example, in place attempting to enforce it's own proprietary code. Now they are finally realizing the error of their ways and they are back peddling  to conform to such open standards with new versions of Explorer.

The problem is that so much of the web has been already developed to conform to Explorer exclusively that the newer versions of Explorer need to interpret this old code too, mixed with the new code, in effect creating a slower browsing buggy internet environment.

I read somewhere that Explorer has in fact three layers of interpreter code. One for legacy web sites, the other for transitional sites (when they finally figured out they were making a mess out of the web), the last for full modern open web standards. That is why it's so slow compared to it's competition.

This problem will be with all of us for quite some time. Thanks to MS. Ever wondered why some web sites simply don't work on any other browser then IE? These web sites will ultimately have to be redeveloped to conform to the rest of the industry. A lot of work that will take more then a couple of weekends.

Add to it all the extra inherit insecurity that it brings to the table and you are simply better off using Firefox or some other true open standard compliant browser.

 I have had Carrara do this on a couple of files. Try opening a blank document and importing your file. This might work.

 I agree that the tools are secondary to the talent, but achieving astounding results in Carrara is very deficit and time consuming. I am day by day more disappointed with Carrara. Crashing on critical renders, the end result is good, but not astounding.

Maybe using plugins makes up the deference. But out of the box I am not to pleased or impressed with Carrara anymore. Some renders take way to much time, even on an 8 core MacPro. I thought Carrara had a very fast rendering engine, but now I realize that it really is not that fast compared to other packages.

Overall it being tied to DAZ and it's content disillusioned me further. Not that they didn't add cool features on this last version, but it seems that a lot more time was spent DAZ-ing it then making it stable. I know that all 3D applications crash on occasion, but I had already rendered this seen before. When the replication feature is used with transparent reflective objects is not very stable at all. Two deferent projects hampered by this short coming. I know if I reduce the number of instances inside the replicator, things work better, but at least it should have a warning about exceeding it's limits. I will report this as a bug. The curl thing about all this is that it crashes at 80% of completing the render.

My problem was repositioning the camera and having more of the replicator object show, then it crashes. Very disappointing.

 Them water molecules sure enhance sound, don't they?

 Thanks Mark!
You posses very good communication skills, your voice has the quality of a professional broadcaster. Have you done voice over work? or Radio? If not, you should.

 arrow1:
Carrara is really not meant for this. Unless you model and texture the entire house. What you are looking for is kind of what Apple had a few years ago called QuckTime VR. VR standing in for virtual reality.

I don't now much about this subject but from what little I learned you get a tripod with a wide angle lens. You shoot a picture and you move the tripod. If I recall, they have specialized computerized tripods that you hook to a laptop and it dose the moving. But it can also be achieved by a crafty person.

After acquiring the photographs, their is software that helps you seem them in to a cohesive pattern that would simulate the inside of a sphere, with your photos perfectly seemed. This might be that software that you say costs $50, but I am speculating.

Again, Carrara is not designed for this, but I guess it could be done by texturing the inside of a sphere, if it is even possible. The problem would be to get the correct output file that could be read by a web browser.

 I am not sure, but what you can do is convert them to a vertex model and handle it that way. i can not test right now. I am currently rendering something, but give that a try.

 swordman10:

I hope you mean 1.7 Gb, because 1.7MB is extremely little, even for a circa 386 computer. :)