I do feel your pain. I have a long list of things I miss. However, many other things are much higher on the list than Eovia.

I would say receiving a free copy of C7Pro as a present is indeed a nice gift. Maybe that isn't what you meant.

The beta has expired. The program has been released. I am sure there will be a demo. There is also a 30day guarantee. It does work similar to hex. You go into the modeling and choose the UV button. There you can make your seams and add pins to to unwrap it.

Intro,
Obviously you are entitled to your prefs, but we have a digital economy now and it is becoming increasingly common to not have manuals or boxes. Particularly the manuals. You can pay plenty of money and still get a box with a disk, at best. I think if portable readers were less expensive and more prevalent it wouldn't be a big issue to have paper, just something easy to use and hold in your hands.

Quote - "The one that is useful and which no other program can replace for you is the Multi-Pass rendering."

Actually ren_mem Poser has had Render passes for a long time now.  It's under "Scripts".  I only have Poser Pro on this computer, but it even allows you to select how you want your shadows handled (ie separtate passes).

I've used it for a few things, it is a handy little feature.

I didn't mean no other program had multi-pass. That would be silly to say. I meant that if you are using Carrara as your renderer then a multi-pass feature isn't something another program can do for you. It needs to come from the rendering program not outside the rendering program.

Regarding the poser shaders. I agree. In fact, the more you do in Carrara, the happier you will be. It's a paradigm shift. Anytime you have to go back and forth between programs it can be a pain. Integrated program suites like adobe's are a good example of making that much easier.

Thanks. I am aware of that one, but looking for export.

Many of the Pro features people may be using another program for so I can't entirely agree with Mark's assessment. The one that is useful and which no other program can replace for you is the Multi-Pass rendering. The modeling in assembly room has some unique advantages also. As far as bugs and polishing that I really think you should personally evaluate. You don't want to take someone else's word for that kind of thing.

The brushes are just images, so yes you can add your own. Not sure what you mean by pelt mode. It does basically work like a pelt uv editor rather than an automatic unwrapper or lscm editor. You can mark seams and pins and unwrap it. Don't know if that is specifically what you wanted answered or not.

PBM,
I know you didn't include these, but honestly I think hex is one of the easiest to use modeling tools. You might try to get a copy of  the issue of 3D world where they gave away hex 1.2. 3D World

I recommend you wait for a demo or you got the 30 day window. It is really a personal decision whether you think it's worth it to upgrade. The pro has more than standard of course. It just came out and supposedly many of the beta bugs are supposed to be fixed, but you are better off determining that for yourself. They list the features they have added so that you can see.

Sparrow,
I am very sorry to hear that. Lot of that going around. I hope things will be ok for you.

For windows people. http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=101670

Your issue maybe the program u r opening them in doesn't support channels so you can't see them. The alpha is a channel not a layer. Gimp is free and it reads channels and easily converts a channel to a layer.

Carrara can load tiffs. Maybe an index issue. There was an index change made to the tiff format not long ago. Maybe more bits than it can handle also. It can load most tiffs fine tho. If u try and load a C tiff in gimp u will get an error also.

Yeah, both C5 and C6 have it.

The little sphere test I just did I got no alpha channel w/ targa and one w/ tif. hmmm.
Didn't have the 32bit option for targa checked. That did it. I actually did get an alpha channel for both formats tho.

Are you on a mac or pc? I suppose it is possible the mac tiff format doesn't support alpha. This is on a pc.