That's a neat tip, Eric, although obviously not ideal. I should have mentioned, by the way, how much I would pay for such a plugin: $0. I wouldn't want to pay for such simple functionality. So yeah, it's probably best sent to Eovia.

Ah... so if i simply want to put a colored gradient on an object, I have to actually apply it to a greyscale gradient. How, uh, obvious. :-| More importantly, thanks for the replies!

Personally, I like the "no details" look!

As an aside, I've used some Lynda.com training in the past, and although it's useful I find that some presenters have a very leisurely pace. So I found a shareware QuickTime player that let me speed up the video (sorry, I don't remember the name), and I blasted through the lessons at double or triple speed. You have to really concentrate to keep up with the action, but it's kind of a neat feeling to just pump information into your brain at hyper speed.

Along similar lines, when I use HDRI I wish I could tell Carrara to ignore the colors in the image. As someone else stated a while back, the sky is blue over our heads, and yet we don't all look like Smurfs. I'd like a colorful HDR backdrop and greyscale illumination from that same HDRI.

I can answer a couple of these: First I'll mention you can download a demo of Carrara from http://www.eovia.com/resources/download.asp 1. You could simulate symmetry the way you describe it, but it's not ideal because you always have to go into a separate modeling "room" to edit the master object. So you can't edit the master and see the instance update right next to it in real time. The lack of adequate symmetrical modeling is one of the great mysteries of Carrara. Digital Carvers' Guild http://digitalcarversguild.com offers a $30 plugin called Project Gemini that fills this void (although I haven't used it). Nearly every Carrara user has at least one Digital Carvers' Guild plugin - they're indispensible. The ShaderStyle bundle on Eovia's web site is all Digital Carvers' Guild pludins. But Project Gemini is not among them, so I digress. 2. You can set up mesh smoothing on a per-object basis. You can turn off smoothing for a polygon by creasing its edges, but you can't vary the amount of smoothing from one polygon to the next in a single mesh. In Carrara 5 you can specify a moderate level of smoothing in the modeler and higher-resolution smoothing for the renderer, which effectively makes the workspace much faster than it was in Carrara 4. This makes me happy. 3. Yes, you can perform multiple render passes, and in addition to alpha channels you can generate other "Gbuffers": Fragment Color (RPF) Fragment Distance Fragment Coverage (RPF) Object Index Surface Coordinates (UV) Normal Vector 3D Position I admit I don't know what most of these mean. But you can render all at once into a multichannel PSD image and compare them. 4. I'll skip this question 5. This too 6. Carrara's vector output requires a $99 / 99 Euro plugin (VectorStyle, http://www.eovia.com/products/carrara_addons/vectorstyle.asp ). I can't say how the results compare to Swift 3D's in terms of efficiency, but they look just as good to me, and more importantly Carrara is a really nice modeler, while Swift 3D is the worst modeler you can buy at any price. 7. Not sure what set-driven means; No scripting. 8. Particles can collide with objects; not sure about each other (someone else can pick up this question). -Joe

I can hear Kixum marching toward this thread, ready to shut it down like a firm parent. So in the interest of fanning the flames, I will also say how disappointed I am that C5 doesn't do symmetrical modeling. We've got Gordon surfaces (uh, thanks!) and an undockable properties panel (OK, then), but not this seemingly simple feature. - Joe

One question, though: PFHoe exports a variety of formats already, and Carrara imports a couple of matchmoving formats, so is it really necessary for PixelFarm to make a Carrara plugin? Couldn't they add support for Realviz or SynthEyes? Then they would satisfy lots of users, not just Carrara users. Or am I missing something important? (Highly probable, since I know nothing about matchmoving software)

Thanks, ren_mem. Things are looking good for Carrara. I guess I'll wait and see.

You certainly have all the ingredients of a great picture. Here are some other thoughts: You could darken the rest of the room so the lamp focuses attention on the card table. And you could have another light source peeking in through the open door as well. Consider adding some cigars and smoke for a little more atmosphere. I would make the leaves on the plants darker and less vivid in color.

Absolutely. An awesome upgrade. The lack of scripting may disappoint some people, but that's the nature of the software industry. Each new version pushes the product into a more professional category, and people begin to clamor for features offered by other products in that category. This also applies to integration with other software: as soon as Eovia created Transposer, people wanted it to support MORE Poser features, and they'll want MORE than that and MORE than that. Which is great, because that's what keeps Eovia in business. So as the product inches (or leaps) forward, users cheer and users complain and Eovia learns what the next step should be. - Joe

Well for my part, I'd like something based on JavaScript. I'll bet it's the best known scripting language of them all, and there have been a number of non-Web products out there that have successfully used JS as their scripting model (like Yahoo's Konfabulator). On the other hand, I know nothing about Python.

Speaking of those ships... they seem to be moving pretty quickly. Something tells me that there's going to be a big pileup at the glacier in a few seconds.

I had the same thoughts as Dex, and I have a few more ideas to add: First, I'd create a solid piece of glass which is visible just until the point of impact. Once the word hits the glass, I'd make that solid pane invisible and reveal the shattered (but initially flat) glass, ready to go. I also imagine that there should be small shards at the points of impact, and larger ones further out on the surface of the glass. The simplest way to make all these little pieces might be to draw them out in a program like Illustrator, and then import them and extrude them a bit to add thickness. If you use physics for the motion, you might consider adding a flow force (something I have never really used) to impart some extra spin to the shards. Plain old gravity won't be convincing. Finally, consider adding some depth cueing to the scene, so the pieces blur as they fly toward the camera. This might increase the sense of drama. - Joe

The refresh button is definitely there in the Mac version. I don't have Carrara on the computer I'm using now, so I can't give you a screenshot, but the icon looks like a folder with a circular arrow or something like that. It's one of the icons next to the image preview in the texture tree. That button is not the greatest tool, though, because if you change a texture map you have to go open your texture in the texture room, unfold the tree to see the mapping, and click that button. I wish that that there was a global texture refresh command, so that I could reload several textures at once. Or better yet, Carrara could automatically detect when textures are updated (lots of programs have this ability - the game authoring system Unity, for instance.) - Joe