I don't have Carrara available right now, but the basic options are these: 1. When you import the object, use the Options window to specify that you want to import it as vertex objects. OR 2. If you haven't imported the object as a vertex object, then you double-click it you'll get a little blank window that says there are no modeling tools for the object. When you have that little window on the screen, go to one of the menus (not sure which one) and choose the Convert to Other Modeler command, and then convert the object to a vertex object. - Joe

Well, that makes your purchasing decision easier. No, you won't buy it. This reminds me of something amazing I experienced years ago. There was a 3D program... I forgot the name, but it worked with RenderMan, and there was no demo available. You had to buy it. And if you didn't like it, you could NOT return it. And it was like $400. No smart person would accept that deal, and no one did. The product and the company are gone. Eovia isn't THAT dumb, but apparently they're not overly smart either.

I think you can also make grass wave by animating the texture that governs the orientation or the "gravity" setting of the grass. In fact, it occurs to me that you might be able to use Carrara's procedural water textures to get good fluid-like results, which might simulate currents of air nicely. You can find loads of architectural textures all over the Web, by the way. Just Google "architecture 3d textures free" and you'll find loads of good stuff. By the way, your work lends credence to my theory that everything's better when you add a dog to it.

I understand GWeb's question. I dismissed Hexagon immediately when I saw that it didn't have edge creasing (never mind edge weighting). And my demo expired. But I never really got to try out the workflow, and I wonder whether I might have liked it in general. GWeb, you should contact Eovia. Maybe they can extend your demo. I've done that with other software.

The wave distortion tool in conjunction with a little noise distortion might work nicely, but they'll both stretch the surface. If you were crushing the hood of a car, for instance, and the hood is 6000 square inches of metal, the crushed version might accordion into 20000 square inches, with a visibly incorrect stretching action in the animation. Then again, if the animation is quick and the damage is severe, it might look great anyway. By the way, the Anything Goos plug-in from Digital Carvers Guild might help to create a distressed metal look. I haven't used it, but for messed-up metal it looks great. http://www.digitalcarversguild.com

Attached Link: http://www.joeashear.com/carrara/laser.mov

I decided to take a whack at this problem. The link above goes to my solution. If you want a beam of light to bounce off a mirror and illuminate whatever it hits, there's no practical way to do it with a regular light source. The caustics system could theoritically do it, but to get the level of precision you need it would probably take years to render the thing. In my solution the beams of light are just long thin rods. Each one has a glow color and a halo, and an Anything Glows object assigned to it. The reflected beam (the one that moves) is a child of the mirror object, so it pivots relative to the surface of the mirror, but at a different rate (it wouldn't make sense for it to always be pointing straight out of the mirror - it needs to vary depending on the angle of the mirror. The animation has just two keyframes, one at the halfway point and one at the end. The result isn't perfect - for one thing, the reflected laser beam would be visible if you were to peek behind the wall. Also, that beam should really be hidden when the mirror is facing toward the side, as in the first frame. But this works as a general proof-of-principle. The scene itself is at: http://www.joeashear.com/carrara/laser.car.zip - Joe

Am I the only one who thinks the modeling rooms should be eliminated entirely? Back in, whatever, 1997, when our computers were a lot less powerful, it was kind of nice to be able to work on each piece of a scene in a separate, responsive workspace. Now it's just frustrating for me. One of my renderings in the gallery shows some thread looped through the holes of a button. What a pain to make that - working on the thread in the spline room without being able to see the button in the same place at the same time. Yes, you can look at that little preview in the corner, but that's sub-optimal to say the least.

Attached Link: http://dealmac.com/deals/Carrara-Studio-3-for-49-shipped/89153.html

I recently saw a deal where you can actually get Carrara Studio 3 for $49 shipped from Purplus software. Use the link above to see the details. The coupon may be expired, but even so, the regular price at Purplus is only $80, so it's still a good deal. Is Carrara Studio 3 a worthwhile purchase? Considering that most of us paid more like $300 for it, yes, it's a great purchase. It does depend somewhat on what you want to do with it, but at this price it's not a big risk.

Well, if they're not replying to your bug reports, then yeah, that's dissuasive.

I hope you've sent this list to Eovia as well. They may be unaware of some of those issues - or unaware that they're annoying to any users. If you want to see them fixed, try sending a really nice set of bug reports. For each item, say: 1. A simple set of instructions for how to make the problem occur. 2. A quick sentence describing what should have happened, and 3. A description of what happened instead. Developers hate vague, unstructured bug reports, so yours will probably get special attention. - Joe

In case anyone goes looking for that new version of Silo, you won't find it - it's still in development. What I wonder (and I've asked about this in the Silo forum) is why everyone is so into UV mapping, with all that unfolding business, instead of a more natural approach: drawing and painting right on the object, like Maxon's Body Paint. And while I'm dreaming, how about VECTOR drawing on an object, like Adobe Dimensions, so you don't have to worry about resolution when you're doing something geometric. Features like that are worth more than all the world's"U"s and "V"s put together.

My two cents: a straight beam is definitely preferable, since light from the sun would not produce a discernable cone. This is probably obvious to most of you, but someone reading this thread who is new to 3D might not have given the issue much thought.

I don't get it.

Great job! It looks like the Dell guy. Which makes me all the more delighted with his situation.

From a sort of academic standpoint, it really is the worst interface design ever. A primary tenet of interface development is creating "discoverability," - simply making things discoverable. A button is 100% discoverable. A menu item is perhaps 70% discoverable, because you have to go looking for it. This caps-lock thing is 0% discoverable. Numerically speaking, it's as bad as any design could ever be. That's pretty bad.