I don't know whether C5 uses real SSS or not... but now I'm curious: do you know which commercial programs do use "real" SSS? I see that the image you linked to was made by a researcher with software he wrote, so are there any commercial products that do it the "real" way?

Thanks for the replies. Now I just have to scare up the cash for the upgrade.

Wow, this is a much better looking upgrade than Carrara 4 was. C5 has so many things I've wished for... it just looks awesome. And the separation of Pro vs. Standard is more reasonable this time, I think. The Pro features are pretty Pro in nature. Last time you had to get the Pro version to get something pretty universally useful like blurry reflections. Very psyched.

Renderosity has a poll feature (there's a link there on the right, although there's nothing much in there). Maybe we can run a poll to settle the Ray Dream issue in a somewhat organized fashion? Do you know how to create a poll, Kixum?

I certainly agree about marketing. I've received... maybe... 25 marketing emails from them in the last 3 years. They seem to think that if someone tries Hexagon and doesn't buy it, then that person should be hammered with emails until any lingering affinity for the product is extinguished. And at the same time I've waited over 10 months for a solution to a crashing problem I had with a certain scene. (It would be nice to be able to render it someday) - Joe

This is a fun idea... "write a caption for this image" Here's mine: "I told him, there's a reason why they call it break dancing! But did he listen? Nooooo."

There's an HDRI background, but no sky light because I ran into the problem where sky light doesn't pass through transparent objects. The main hunk of ketchup in the bottle is an object, not a texture, and when I turn on Sky Light the ketchup turns black. Kind of a bummer.

I'll sell you my Carrara 3 handbook if you want. Let's say US$15. Click my name above this message and you can send me an instant message if you're interested.

You, sir, are my new best friend. The key was the inheritance issue you described. Once I put values into the transparency, refraction, etc. for the label, everything started to fall into place. In fact, after some tinkering I discovered as you can see that Carrara did honor the alpha channel in the PNG texture, and I was able to eliminate the opacity mask altogether. This may be partly due to the fact that I am applying the label to a shading domain, not to the whole object. I don't really know - there are still some grey areas in this process for me. I also turned on "premultiplied alpha" in the texture map, which gives the ketchup smears on the glass a nice thinned-out edge. Thanks very much for your help. - Joe

By the way, I use Silo and I find that it works nicely with Carrara. I often make a model in Silo, then turn off the smoothing and export it as an obj file, which Carrara imports perfectly. Then I smooth it again in Carrara and it's just as good as if I had made it in Carrara in the first place. The smoothing algorithms are very similar if not identical, so this works well. The only drawback is that if I had creased some edges in Silo I have to re-crease them in Carrara, but this is not usually a big deal. I don't use Hexagon, but I would assume that it works at least as smoothly with Carrara as Silo does, or maybe much more smoothly. But it's worth mentioning that Silo does work well. As an aside, I must say I've always been very pleased with Carrara's importing tools. I've brought in all kinds of stuff from unknown sources, and the results are almost always perfect. Years ago when DXF was the standard you'd sometimes try to import a spaceship and end up with nothing but three triangles and a vertex floating in nowhereland. - Joe

TOXE, what do you use the Silo topology brush for? It seems to be mainly meant for reducing the complexity of imported objects, and since I don't import a lot of objects I haven't looked at it much. Is it useful on an everyday basis? - Joe

I think the subject of your message should have been "Carrara 5 release?" rather than "Carrara 5 release!" -- I got kind of excited there, thinking Christmas came a little early this year.

Why only people with Hexagon licenses? Maybe people who don't own Hexagon can provide some valid insights as well. You might learn something about why they didn't buy Hexagon, for one thing.

I think that highlight is coming from the light on the left. The head isn't casting a shadow, so the light is free to pass through the head and illuminate the underside of the hat.

It is indeed a very impressive and ambitious project. Great job! Is that YOUR voice acting, by any chance? -Joe