And another of one of the main characters, Ike Dow.

Here's a close up of the ship on page 2

Wow.

Hey Dex, this is really first rate stuff! I hope you are planning on making the textures just as meticulous as the modeling. Remember the magic word, DIRT.

I've been using Ray Dream/Carrara since Ray Dream Designer 3. My vote is to lose the Ray Dream tag. I don't really think that it's relevant.

Excellent work Ben, glad to see talented people making use of Carrara's vertex modeler.
I recently worked on a model of a helicopter in the VM and noticed that it would freeze up on me sometimes when I tried to move certain points. Did you ever run into that problem?

Message edited on: 01/08/2005 21:00

GWeb, working with N-gons is a high end feature, I was just pointing out how having the ability to work with them is a big selling point with programs costing much more than Carrara. Daigoro, this is good to hear, although I left the world of Lightwave about 6 months ago, I have a die-hard coworker who'd love to get this plug-in. Is it available for the Mac?

N-gons. Lightwave users wish they had them.
Cinema 4D's newest version just got them.
One of modo's big selling points is that it uses them.
We've had them since version 3.

Message edited on: 11/09/2004 12:14

If we are getting more people from the outside coming here, maybe it's because of a good reason. It seems like Eovia has been a lot more aggressive in their marketing lately. I see ads popping up on CG channel (a popular high-end 3D users forum) almost every day. Maybe Carrara is just getting more users.

Yay Mark.

Really cool work. Carrara's vertex modeler is much more powerful than it used to be. Glad to see someone pushing the envelope with it. Any chance of seein the unsubdivided model?

G5 dual at work, G4 Powerbook and G4 iMac at home. No problem.

Tunesy is right about the reviewers feelings on the GUI. I try and read every review I can get my hands on concerning 3D tools and this opinion is common.
I like the interface but I've used it since day one, so that makes it tougher for me to be objective.
As far as the interface over-complicating the simplest of tasks, well, maybe so, but maybe not in all cases.
I have a co-worker who has been a devout Lightwave user and has produced an impressive body of work in the last 4 or 5 years using this fine, well- thought-out software. A couple of weeks ago we needed a small illustration done in a relatively short time so he decided to tackle it and let me watch him from start to finish. It was to be an image of a school bell sitting on top of a closed sign to go with a story on a recent Catholic school closing. As he created each aspect of the model, texture maps and final render I watched with great interest. I know enough about Lightwave to have done this illustration, but not enough to have done it in a short time. When he was finished, an hour and a half had transpired. Although he made the deadline with room to spare, it seemed to me that my co-worker had to take a lot of steps that I would not have taken if I had used Carrara.
Later that night I tried replicating the same illustration and finished in about 20 minutes.
Now, understand, I don't do animation, so I'll not make any claims in that area and I work with this program daily so I am keenly aware of it's limitations but I think that GUI may be different from norm but not inherently bad. The fact is though, that maybe, enough people are intially put off by the interface that it hurts sales, maybe Eovia will address this.

Message edited on: 07/05/2004 14:18

Message edited on: 07/05/2004 14:20

Well, here I go again. If you look at the Zbrush site for a while and really read up on what it can do, I think that for certain 3d artists, this is manna from heaven. There's really nothing out there that's in the same ballpark. The price for the Windows 2.0 version is $489, the Mac 2.0 version hasn't shipped yet, so you can pay $399 for 1.55 and they will give you 2.0 for free when it's released. I know that you were looking for an app in the $200 range but since someone else brought it up, I figured I'd add my 2. By the way, Z brush (as opposed to Bodypaint) is not just a 3d paint program, it also is a fantastic 3D sculpting tool. The attached image is a hand modeled in it.

I'd like to see one done in Carrara 3. If you don't have a copy , you could pass the scene to me and I could render it. I could also do a render in Strata.