Made some good progress tonight. I am going to post it in a new thread for more comments.

Making great progress based on the suggestions you guys have given me so far. Already have the glasses and the floor looking a lot better. Not enough to post yet, but hopefully I will have enough before I go to bed tonight and post something. Thanks a bunch everyone, you have been extremely helpful!!!

Again thanks for the comments guys, they're going to be really helpful tonight when I sit down to work on the scene. No offense taken at any of this also (I did post asking for what I could change). Hoborg, the axe is supposed to be rather large. It's concept came from a D&D game many years ago where it was weilded by a half giant.

These are all very good suggestions, and have gotten my mind rolling on about a million things I can do to make the scene better. One problem I am having is that I can never get glass to look right. This scene does have a background that should be reflecting in the glass but for some reason it's not (ironically the background I am using is a heavily blurred picture of Britany Spears). Any suggestions on how I can get my glass to look better would be welcomed.

Hmm, I was worried because the Windows Millennium upgrade I recently got had a little pamphlet that barely passed as a manual, and other than that and the cd there was nothing in the box. Is the Photoshop 6 upgrade available to people who have genuine versions of Photoshop 5.5 but never bothered to register them?

Essentially what it boils down to is this. Carrara does take advantage of OpenGL or Direct 3d hardware for rendering. Your 3d card is important, but you will mostly see the difference in preproduction. Despite what use Carrara may make of your video card, it still mostly uses the CPU for rendering. With a P3 800 and 256 megs of ram you're going to get some pretty good performance. Your system is going to be able to nicely handle what Carrara and the Corel software ask of it just nicely. Unless you're doing large professional quality animations you should be ok. Also, Tephladon, where are you getting your information about dual Athlons? Last I checked, which was just now, there haven't been any dual Athlon motherboards released. Dual Athlon has been a promise that AMD has been making that they have yet to keep as far as I know.

I currently have a p3 500 with 256 megs of ram and a GeForce 1 DDR, and I have never had a render take more than 15 minutes in Carrara.

You're thinking of Kai Kraus. He used to work for Metacreations, and was the person Kai's Power Tools were named after. He left Metacreations a while back and now they just call the software KPT. KPT has been sold to Corel along with Bryce. Not sure where he is on the web now. A search on AltaVista didn't come up with much.

I agree with that tip, I have had fine results exporting as an obj file, with all of the clothing and props where I left them.

Seems as though you have picked up Carrara's modeller much faster than I have. I got my modelling start in Rhino, which has proven so intuitive that switching to another modeller (specifically Carrara's) seems quite daunting.

That looks really great for your first try at Carrara! Did you do all the modelling in Carrara as well as the rendering?

wow, amazing! the display changed, and it was nifty!

I can't wait! Those look great Spike! (now that I actually have poser that is)

Thanks guys for all the tips! I've been playing with Poser a lot since I got it and in just a few more years I think I will understand what all the dials and menus do! Oh, and Darth, I've been using Renderosity for a couple of months now, and love it, that's why I came here first. I knew you folks could help!

My room mate just recently upgraded to a GeForce and had been previously running with 2 monitors. When he tried it with the GeForce it didn't work. To quote him "the GeForce doesn't like a second monitor". He didn't give me any other details at the time though.