Nice work! I'll see what I can do on those negative values. Easy shapes like these are a real time saver!

Sorry, meant to say found this pretty decent discussion... :) .Painter

Thanks for all your help! Vue is a great app, and I hope that these issues can be fixed. Thanks!

Congrats all! I actually felt that these 2 would definitely be the top contenders when I saw them! Definetely quite detailed and very well done!

Good luck Rob, hope you enjoy the wave! Boy, I got lightwave and I can never give up carrara. Since it is my first 3d app, I have grown close to it and can never let her go......

I have a test I did a little while back, when I asked the same question. The key to it is using either double sided surface shaders or two objects, one with the normals reversed. The opposing layer provides the specular highligts seen inside the diamond. I will whip out that old scene and try it again.

Looks great to me! Now to get it walking :)

Thanks for the information. I tried all of the suggestions you gave me and still I have the same problem. This is what I got with only 1 light and no atmosphere. The object was repositioned near the light and still the same problem. I think this has something to do with the object itself, because if you look closely at the counter or top of the microwave, you can see a subtle fish eye effect where the surface is perfectly flat and should not cause such a reflection. One of the worst examples of this problem occured within a room I created. The walls had a circle of light in the center and black around the edges. I had to recreate the flat walls as spline objects to get rid of these shadow artifacts after initially using a plane object.

Thanks. I'll try that.

The only problem with that is that the "shadow artifacts", as I mentioned earlier, are more pronounced. This is strange and causes much heartache when trying to simulate radiosity on an indoor scene.

Dual processor systems are perfect for the stuff that we do, rendering. I also read an article on Tom's Hardware guide that stated that there is no need to buy the latest dual 1.6 Ghz system from AMD unless you are doing 3d CGI and rendering. In certain situations, a 2+ Ghz Pentium will outperform such a system. Generally though, the next batch of processors from both AMD and INTEL (2.0 -3.0 Ghz) will be PLEEENTY fast, even for rendering, especially when using 2-3 Ghz of PC 2400/2700 DDR memory. I to want to upgrade my system, but I want to wait until AMD comes out with MP chips faster than 1.9 Ghz and maybe with faster memory speeds. It is a well known fact that many professional graphics studios run dual processors in their render farms. The 3d CGI community is one of the largest customers in the dual processor consumer market. As for the Athlon overheating, there are two possible solutions: 1) Software monitoring/BIOS or 2) Next Gen Athlon.Some motherboards makers supply software with their products that will monitor the temperature of the system, including the CPU within windows. This is in addition to support for monitoring in the BIOS. They may also include options in the BIOS or the S/W that will shutdown the system or send alarms if the CPU gets to hot. Also, the next Gen Athlon is possibly going to do what Intel does now in their CPUs... .Painter

I to have lightwave and the only hangup on it is the render time. Radiosity and antialiasing add a huge amount of time to a render, even for a simple scene. Now that I have lightwave, I still prefer to use Carrara because I am more familiar with it. Lighting and surfacing have their own little quirks in implementation that you must be aware of when rendering in any 3d package. Learning the quirks and all the features of a particular package takes time in order to master. This learning curve, the complexity of Lightwave and my familiarity with Carrera is what draws me back to Carrara. But trust me, I will dig into lightwave at some point, but right now it takes me, the LW newbie, too long to do anything in it, so I have put it on the back burner. Render wise, LW is a better renderer, technically, because of all of the features associated with it (subpatch/multi-pass rendering, etc). However, as I mentioned before, you must be fairly knowledgeable about these features, both theoretically and operationally, in order to use them well. As a matter of fact, I am now thinking of picking up a book I saw on the new algorithms and principles behind radiosity and raytracing, in order to better understand LW. Carrara, as I read in an interview the guy who runs Eovia, was meant to be accessible to everyone, not just professional graphics artists. This is what appeals to me, since I do not have a degree in graphics arts or any other kind of formal art training. All of this makes a package which is much more user friendly and allows for more opportunity to produce great images by beginners, without the learning curve associated with the "high end" stuff. .Painter

I thought it would be nice to do an informal wish list which would give some of us dedicated Carrera users the opportunity to express their thoughts in the open. Who knows, someone at eovia may see these ideas and add them, either now or somewhere down the road. I feel every company should be at least aware of how the customers feel about their products. That is critical to producing products that are capable of maintaining a stable user base and expanding it. But, then again, that is just an opinion... I also forgot something that seems to be simple but is a pain to replicate otherwise: lens flares on sunlight or moonlight type distant lights. They dont exist. Just a thought. .Painter

I don't even know what the eyedropper tool is. LOL.

Great image. Why not give some info on how you did it.... :)