Good luck dude! Interested in how it'll evolve.

Planks could work, but I'd be careful about adding plates -- they could overwhelm the composition and distract from the fairies. Unless you want that o'course. Maybe the drinking fairy could be sitting on a book of matches? That would give an additional size cue and echo the window shape in the background. just a thought.

IBox: The dolly cam is pretty much unchanged from C2.x. I have a button on my trackball that makes the Dolly work, so it's not a problem for me. The preview window is now in the properties tray, and when I mouse over that and hold the "d" key, it dollies just fine. The add vertex tool is improved, it will now connect the newly added points. I'm still getting the hang of the extrusion tool(s), they're new and I fear a bit wonky, that should be fixed (hopefully) by the time of the final release in Sept. The property tray has some improvements/refinements. When the select tool is chosen, and a vertex (or polyline/s or polygon) is selected, you can enter in a numeric amt to move it/them in X,Y, and/or Z direction. Same thing happens with you use the resize tool. One big thing for me, is that in the main 3D window, yaw, pitch and roll's been replaced by X,Y and Z! Even though it may seem to you that Carrara is "going down the same road" -- in my opinion that road's now paved and widened. You may enjoy some of the rendering improvements, too. The GI is now part of the RayTracer engine. You can use something called HDRI for enviromental lighting and it gives some pretty impressive results. Think there's a thread here somewhere with some examples. Although I've been recently laid off, this upgrade impressed me so much that I ordered it and having been playing around with the beta, I don't regret it one iota.

Neat concept for a pix. Wonder if there's faery AA? Nice execution. Just have one suggestion about the composition. The fairie's elbow is right on the lip of the glass. Imho, moving the fairy so the elbow is either clearly "over" or "close" to the glass' lip would improve the picture a bit (by moving the fairy, the wing would be more clearly behind the glass.) by giving it more visual clues as to depth. Although 3D renders do help a lot with this illusion, it's still a 2D picture and any cues we can give the viewer about depth will make it seem more 'real.' just my opinion. Like the drop of wine on the fingers, the expression on both fairies. And overall, the compostion works, imho, with the exception I mentioned above. Thanks for posting, good picture.

Overall, I'm quite pleased with this model. It's a bit "seamy" because the models themselves are half-models and instances are mirrored. (Can't wait for Gemini to be updated for C3! September is so far away...) The eyes will be changed, as they are they're okay. I'm trying to adapt Litst's eye tutorial to C3 -- using one vertex object with multiple meshes and shading domains...and at that point C3Beta crashes on me. Reported it. The 'tude of the feline carried over from my sketch to the model (didn't use backdrop for it) pretty well. Interested in feedback or comments.

Works like a charm on my system, too -- OS X 10.2.6, dual monitors, 1.25 gig ram, yadda yadda yadda. Backdrop is great, now all that's really needed is to be able to have each of the ortho-views have their own backdrop. Or at least have Left-Right, Top-bottom and Front-back have their own b-d. But, good feature in any case.

Mark -- the screen captures helped out a great deal! I think I got it kinda figgured out. I think the issue I had was pre-selecting and having the "link" check box checked. I was able to do something like what you posted here in no time. Thanks for the reply, now it's back to C3 playtime...

Oh, about the copy-paste, what do you have the object preveiw set to? Make sure it's either gourand or flat. Screen capture of that would help too.

do you have any modifiers on the objects? That could account for the "missing objects." Also, go back to frame one, and see if the objects are still there. Are the objects still listed in the list(left side of the time line). If so, then I wouldn't worry. Especially if I did a save as, so I would have the original file. If you could post a screen capture of a view of the scene and the timeline before and after that could give some clues (as my natural state is cluelessness ;> ). I would just make sure that the triangle is "selected" and use only the trashcan icon on the time line to delete the keyframes (I was mistaken, hitting the delete key will delete the object. Sorry about that, I claim not-enough-coffee as my excuse). hth

Properties tray, they have the X Y and Z coords for the selected object. Both Center and Hot Point are listed. In the middle of this tray, is where you can choose how to rotate the object (it doesn't do the rotation, btw) whether by the center or hot point. If you're moving the hotpoint, do it in the 4-views. it'll be a helluva lot easier.

It would be helpful if you would include the version of Carrara you're using. I'm going to assume you have Carrara 2...everything but the bones (which is new with version 2) should also work in Carrara 1.x... here's what I do, first I do a save as. This way I have the original, in case i really screw-up. So if my orginal file is "Batman.car" the saved as version would be "Batman a.car" By deleting animation, I think deleting keyframes would work. On the time line, they are the little upwards pointing black triangles. Click on one and it should become "hollow", i.e. filled with white with the Carrara yellow selection color around it. At the top of the timeline is a series of buttons, click on the one with the little trash can icon. That'll delete the keframe. Shift-clicking allows you to select more than one keyframe and you can also hit your delete key to eliminate keyframes. Another way to get rid of keyframes on objects is to select an object and in the properties tray, select "Still" on the Animation Parameter area. You'll be given a dialog box, if there's a slider, set it to zero, if there isn't, it'll saysomething about all the animation being deleted, click okay. If you're working with bones, the delete all keyframes manually and then select the skeleton and in the skinning menu choose send bones to reference position. That should get you back to a starting point where you can create a new animation. As far as copy-pasting objects, Have no problems with that. But I have gig of RAM, so it could depend on how large/intricate the objects you're copying are. First I would save my file and then select the object and then choose copy from the edit menu and then go over to the file and make that the active window and choose paste from the edit menu. You could also close the file you copied from, and then open the file you're be pasting into. hth

Thanks for the comments, Pinklet. I feel like I'm in the "Vertex Zone" as fine meshes (lots of polys) don't freak me out. I see it, much like Neo sees "code" in the Matrix. I"m modeling a cat next. Mateo Sancarlos -- Thanx squared for the tech info on making of the xmas films. I think that with the HDRI abilities that's coming in version 3, there may be a way to use GI and have those intense lights you described, and still have some interesting shadows.

Works on this Mac, also, thanks to the url that dogbreath gave.

nice animation. Like the eyes on the 'bot. Looking forward to the next installment.