Clint, Just turn on light through transparancy on the renderer. It will give you what you are looking for. Eric Winemiller Digital Carvers Guild Freeware and commercial 3D extensions http://digitalcarversguild.com

Carrara doesn't support caustics, so you won't see the light amplification you're looking for. Of course, you can fake it with some gels and strategically placed spot lights. Eric Winemiller Digital Carvers Guild Freeware and commercial 3D extensions http://digitalcarversguild.com

I've refined him a little since that render, but haven't had much time to finish him up and get him into poser, keeping busy with those extensions. Eric Winemiller Digital Carvers Guild Freeware and commercial 3D extensions http://digitalcarversguild.com

How about this, 100% Carrara Vertex modeler. http://www.digitalcarversguild.com/linked/body.jpg Eric Winemiller Digital Carvers Guild Freeware and commercial 3D extensions http://digitalcarversguild.com

Mark, The trick is lots of lights. In the image you have above, I would start by putting a few medium intensity spots in your lit circle pointing up and out to "fake" the reflection of the light from the floor and fountain. Next take a few very low intensity spots and put them around the room to illuminate the back of the columns. Everything should have soft shadows. Another thing that sometimes helps is a couple of dark dark blue (almost black) distance lights with shadows turned off can help open up the shadow areas without the same washout you get from turning up the ambient light. You might want to use a medium intensity light to illuminate the birds. Place it close to the water of the fountain, it will look like reflection off the water. Good Luck, Eric Winemiller Digital Carvers Guild Freeware and commercial 3D extensions http://digitalcarversguild.com

MC has a patch on their website to fix the OS9 problem.

Douglas, The presets aren't there for Carrara, which is part of why I said it wasn't as easy as Bryce. You'd have to build up your own library of skys, objects, and shaders, but it does have a way to do that. About the website, not sure why you couldn't open it. As far as I know there hasn't been any downtime in the last few days. If it still doesn't come up then it might be something your firewall is blocking. Eric Winemiller Digital Carvers Guild Freeware and commercial 3D extensions http://digitalcarversguild.com

Ray Dream doesn't do that kind of light automatically, but you can fake it! The most common way is create a texture with light and dark spots in the pattern you want and then use a strategically placed spot light with the texture as a gell. Good Luck, Eric Winemiller Digital Carvers Guild Freeware and commercial 3D extensions http://digitalcarversguild.com

Douglas, I doubt that the size of the model will be a problem. I've pushed Ray Dream up to about 3.5 million polys without any problems and Carrara is supposed to handle it even better. I'd try that 3.5 mil scene out, but a couple of the extensions I used aren't available yet for Carrara. One large scene I did open without any problems was about a million polys and Carrara had no problems. Large exterior shots like this probably won't benefit from Carrara's soft shadows. Soft shadows don't work with the infinite lights you would used to illuminate exterior shots. Interiors where you are using spots and bulbs, or DCG's own freeware Tube and Shape lights look great with soft shadows. Carrara's renderer feels a lot snappier than Bryce's but I don't have any objective measurements to back that up. The sky and terrain stuff for Carrara is not as quick and easy as Bryce's but I think you can get results just as good. I often use Bryce's terrain generator and then cut and paste the height map into RD's. I'm sure you can do the same with Carrara. I know one guy working on some volumetric clouds for Carrara that give very nice results. Eric Winemiller Digital Carvers Guild Freeware and commercial 3D extensions http://digitalcarversguild.com