You can upgrade to pI 3 from the purchased version of pI SE for 150 bucks, but not from the free version that comes with Digit. That's Alan's way of making those of us who bought SE not feel cheated. That said, pI SE is an amazing package, itself. It's truly awesome in combination with other packages like AfterEffects. There are also some export tools designed for use with 3DS and Lightwave for tracking pI effects into 3D packages, but nothing has been developed for Cararra as far as I know. Get it if you can; it's a very fun tool! (You may need to update the drivers for your video card, but you should probably do that anyway!)

Actually, Carrara can do a pretty good job of looking like an X-Box game if you render using one of the non-ray-tracing engines. It will significantly increase render speed, too. You're right; if you tell a story effectively, you're going to be able to get away with low-res animations. But I've been working on a little animation for a year, now, and am realizing that it's worth the extra time to tweak every shot to look its best. For me, it's a trade off -- instant gratification for quality of image. - Dex

Hey, Marc --

Yep, the light was really up to 2,000%. That's its max value, and I tried a couple area renders at lower levels; I decided to go with this much intensity to get some light really bouncing around in there.... I suspect the same effect might have been possible by using several lights pointing at the bounceboard at a normal intensity. I certainly could have used less intensity, but then the scene would have been much darker. (Would have rendered faster, though.)

I come at 3D from a traditional production background, so my setups often reflect what I might do if I were working in the real world. This kind of bounceboard effect (which wasn't available in Carrara or RDS until CS2 -- thank you Eovia!) is a standard kind of thing to do in film or video production. It results in some beautiful soft lighting effects.

As for negative light, I just tried it out and it doesn't seem to be available. Now, negative light; that's something I'd LOVE to have in the real world.... Until then, just use flags, cookies and gels!

• Dex

But, damn, GI looks good!

Wow. That's Anything Grows? not Anything Grooves? I guess I need to look at "grows" a little more closely. Nice work, and Nicholas, don't think it's going to get annoying; help in WIP's is one of the greatest uses for this forum!

You can fake a lens flare with Photoshop or some other image editing packages, as well, in post-render image manipulation. If it's an animation, you can render it as image sequences and add the flare in photoshop one frame at a time, or you can use an effects package like AfterEffects.... Unfortunately, Carrara's renderer doesn't realize that the lightbulb it's seeing through the transparent object (or reflected in a reflictive object, either) should also cause a lensflare....

Be sure you include a refraction value, and also rather than turning off cast shadows, try using light through transparency in your render settings. The model looks excellent!

Hey, Max -- I just spent my entire "professional development" time for the week cruising through Peter's site. It's incredible. His illustration style is amazing, and his matte pantings are awesome. What's astonishing is how quickly he works. His stuff really reminds me of Albert Whitlock's matte paintings; representational but photographic, all at the same time. Thanks so much for turning me on to that site. That said, nice job on this model. You've definitely done a respectable job of capturing this airship. Your play with the textures is interesting; I think I like his appraoch on the zeppelins' color, but that's a matter of personal taste. I think his blimps are also a little longer and thinner than you've built them here. But that's nit-picking. I'd love to see your model in a more atmospheric setting like the canyons that Baustaedter depicts his stuff in....

Bones aren't available in Version 1.1. You'd need Carrara Studio 2 for that. It was the bones that finally persuaded me to jump from RayDream Studio 5.5 to Carrara. They're worth it.... Cool model. Very exaggerated and cartoonlike.

I haven't come across this problem in Carrara, but haven't really done much with refraction. That said, in RayDream, if you had a refractive object in front of a refractive object, the foreground object's refraction would prevail, eliminating the refraction of the background object. This may be related to that effect. You might work around that by rendering scene without the glass in it, set that render as your backdrop, then render the glass with everything else invisible and with an alpha channel. Do a third render of the entire scene and composite all of them together and photoshop the hell out of it to get the reflections of the cherries and such all to work out. Not a pretty solution, but it would work. Hope that's helpful. It's an awesome model; the texture for the glass tabletop is awesome! - Dex

I don't play Halo, at all, but do like the colors and look of your render. One question, though; are those cloud objects behind the eye-sphere? If so, did you notice the straight edges that appear in them? I've had similar things happen in clouds in Carrara 2.1. Is this a known glitch? - Dex PS: Cool tank, Kix. It's really interesting to watch how you work.

You could also just set the camera's hot point to the center of the object you're orbiting and set the spin behavior on the camera. Then, you could animate the hotpoint of the camera which would allow you to alter the spinning path of the camera. Just a thought. - Dex

Great modeling -- wires, headphones, everything. My only comment would be that the window with the text in it appears to be stuck on -- isn't there a plate of plastic over it in the real i-pod? (I have only seen a couple briefly.) Maybe you could recess the place where the screen is and put a transparent plane over it? But I'm nitpicking. I really like the girraffe texture, too.... - Dex

It seems that the answer has been covered, but here's my take on it. It's not the file, nor is it your CD-R drive. It's either the speed your CD drive plays back at, or the speed your machine reads the file. I've used RayDream for years (still do, from time to time, though I've ported over to Carrara for the most part), and have produced animations for our TV station ID. I always render out uncompressed frames, knowing full well that it will never play back at full video frame rate (30 or 29.97 fps) on a PC, unless it's rendered into a codec that the machine is designed to handle at that frame rate. But for the station ID stuff, I render it uncompressed and archive it on CD-R's. Then I can take the AVI (huge as it may be) into Premiere, AfterEffects, or over to the Mac for Media 100 or Final Cut Pro, do whatever editing and compositing I want to do, then run it out at full-motion NTSC video speed. Bluetone is right in that once you've compressed a video file, you can never go back. Hope that's helpful. - Dex