I think Carrara was designed for a job matching your discription. I use Carrara @ work in a post house and @ home for entertainment. Carrara has very strong import/export capabilites which makes it very easy to work with industry standard software (adobe, avid, etc). Carrara is very very stable (on the pc anyway), but most of all its very reliable...things work in the way I think they should work...ie: I get consistant results. As long as you dont plan on doing any character animation you should find that carrara is actually the easiest to use of all full 3d suite packages...hence its easiest to get great results.

I havnt played with that model but I do know that I quit trying to use ik animation b/c carrara was always losing my hotpoints and constraints.

To me this is the most frustrating part of carrara and I am really hoping that UVMapper pro will fix this for me.

AzChip..I also was getting ready to purchase hash until AC mentioned on the list that bones & a few other character animation tools would be included. The final selling point was the fact the AM seems to be very very bad for video..IE very few file formats are supported and for the last 2 or 3 years it seems the program has lots of problems with alpha matte exports. I have to have good matting abilities...its to hard to key it in video otherwise...

At work I run @ 3200x1200 .. so willf2 Carrara does support 2 monitors quite nicely..I am using 2 monitors right now! U just have to enable it in the prefrences. At Home I have to run @ 1280x1024 ... stupid used triniton..I NEED MORE REZ!

Thank you!!!! hehehe..with me and carrara I always miss one little detail..weather its hold alt to zoom back out or having to pull out the sequence tray (how embarassing). Hold down control!!! Well I'll be using that little tidbit a lot! Thanks you both for you help!

robertzavala... I use carrara in TV all the time. When I first started working here they had lightwave and a $5k mac. know one in the company knew how to use it. I worked on lightwave for about 4 hours and said this is the stupid program I have ever used. I looked around at all the different types of 3d programs and figured Carrara was the easiest. I think I am right....when I work with other graphic artist from other post houses they all laugh at it, but just ask them to type in your name and spin it. We just have to go to the text modeler type it in and drag a texture on it. A light wave user has to type it in...extrude it...make the polys double sided so you can see the back..go thru a big menu system to add a texture...FORGET IT!!! I submitted a 3d animation to eovia for DVworld that they wanted to run, unfortunatly it jumbled up with lawyers on my end so it never made it there...but I was surprised how many people where using carrara in a professional aspect. I think someone on the yahoo list is using it @ espn...and someone else @ nickelodian is using for games.....

hehe..it always feels better knowing that someone else has to work on days like this! yawns So hows your new job working out? You still working in video?

WoW!!! That is a million times better. The model looked good before but it looks TONS nicer now. Its weird how little tiny things like that can change how I view a model. I would say the most appealing thing about your model is that its not poser. Every single image I see with a poser figure I immediately discount. Your picture is (IMHO) very unique & special b/c its 'yours' Anyway great job..its awesome when someone posts a complicated organic model like that..everything looks great to me.

Your stuff looks great man..good job! Something looks a bit off about the feet maybe? I cant wait to see what you come up with for Carrara 2...I want to see this lady walking around!

I'll try and email you some stuff over the next 48hours

From the way AC has been talking I dont think that they are going to hire a third party to take care of bones. The only thing that makes me nervous is he has been refering to bones as 'old technology'. I know nothing about the subject other than the fact that blender has done away with bones and now use 'armatures' beats me what that means tho b/c from reading the faq it looks excatly like bones to me.

Actually it makes all the difference with normals in a 3d game engine. I play with 3drad a lot and I determined you have to do is make sure in the scene properties that all poly's are doublesided (instead of smart). That way they will display correclty in a video game engine. Most engines are smart enough that they wont render the outside ones b/c you cant see them (lod algarithms and what not), but it does make the files bigger. Whats really cool is using carrara terrian generator..convert it to the VM...reduce poly's..apply texture..drag and drop on some obsticals...export..instant 3d scenery. Carrara will be awesome for amatuer 3d game makers when it gets some animation capabilites and .X support. ok..you can tell its time to go home..my grammer/sentence structure is worse then ever :)

I am working on 2 3d projects right now! I need a job where I dont do video/3d during the day so I am more motivated to do personal stuff at night :) btw: I cant wait for better animations...my projects aways seem to be very limited b/c they basically involve just swinging a camera around a scene :(

dude..you might get pissed off...2 days ago nvidia announced the geforce 3 titanium...you will be able to get a geforce 3 itanium for under 200bucks in like a week or two.... On the plus side the geforce 2 is a great card. Did you know that there is a hack on the net that turns it into a quadro card? its cool...lots of people are having great success with it.