Thanks Jon for your comments.

Shade is an all-in-one 3D app, just like Carrara. Its UI is a bit quirky and does not offer the 'level of comfort' that Carrara does. Its modeler is certainly better than Carrara and I would rate it a notch above Hexagon. Its texturing system is very easy to learn and use. But what sets Shade apart is its absolutely breathtaking jaw-dropping super-fast renderer which surpasses anything that I have seen, including Lightwave, Modo, C4D, Maya and alike. You can see an example of Shade's renderer here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=D0HyVyd0Thw

Shade Professional is currently priced at $499.- in the US, which sets it in the same price range as Carrara. Shade has a very limited audience outside of Japan, and that is precisely why I think a 'marriage' between Carrara and Shade would benefit both products without them competing with each other in the same geographic area.

I would really love to see a renderer like Shade's in Carrara. I don't believe that Genesis contributes the slightest in making Carrara a world-class product. While I do seriously think that a renderer like Shade's will propel Carrara into the rank of Big Boys at a fraction of what they cost.

But enough of this talk about Shade. I don't want to turn this thread into a Carrara vs. Shade debate.

I think Carrara has very limited time to 'make or break'. The reason is simple: Poser Pro 2016 is only 2 years away. Already Poser Pro 2014 introduced some very significant functionalities and improvements, including (among other things) a surprisingly bug-free implementation of Bullet physics engine, and significant speed boosts to both its OpenGL preview screen and its FireFly renderer.

What Poser lacks to beat Carrara is 1) Even faster preview and renderer, 2) A true scene tree instead of the simplistic mile-long list of objects, 3) Get rid of those non-sensical 'left-hand right-hand posing face dolly' cameras and 4) A particle system.

With the features I mentioned PoserPro 2016 will be more than a match for Carrara and will even surpass it. I don't consider the lack of a modeler in Poser to be a handicap. One can always use an external modeler like Hexagon and import the model in Poser for texturing and rigging.

To sum it all up, Daz3D has now 2 choices: either add some functionalities in Carrara to make it a world-class product worth using, and do it fast, or just kill Carrara.

Because otherwise Poser Pro 2016 will pack enough punch to send Carrara into oblivion.

Quote - That is why I don't argue politics. That is it's own little world, with it's own populess that exist out side of reality.

You know we have the master light option in the edit menu, isn't it about time we had one for shaders? I know I am not the only one, and a lot of people have wanted this for ages, a master shader where you could a set spicific channel on all shaders. Solve the color in the highlight channel real quick. I'd love it to turn off SSS  or displacement on all the shaders in a scene. That would be a big help to getting fast renders from a Howie scene.

I'm on this because in this scene I am working on I have one shader on one character with SSS on and it brings my render to a scretching hault when it hits it. So now I have to play blood hound to find that one shader. But yes, it is a PITA when you have 40 shaders to reset. Then you have to deal with the shader list role back, an issue that should have been solved long ago.

I mean really how difficult is it to stop the list from jumping back to the top after you select a shader to work with? Just one of those minor things that can get aggrivating fast when you are working on something with a lot of shader domains.

I fully support your both requests. I continuously run into the shader list rollback and it's a real annoyance. The global SSS enable/disable was also a feature request I posted on the old Mantis bug tracker.

These are simple features, or actually featurettes, that souldn't take more than a few hours to implement, yet they are ignored in favor of a multi-year port of Genesis into Carrara.