thanks for the info... no i haven't tried dragging to and from the browser. i'll give that a shot tomorrow. - thanks. i was afraid that it would be a problem with the new os, but i have a solution to the jagaur issue... when i first got my new machine at work, i just gutted my old one, taking the ata drives out and sticking them in the new box. when i turned the machine on, it booted in 10.1.5 off of my old disk. i didn't even notice it for a couple of minutes. everything worked fine, although jaguar is much faster. so if you load 10.1.5 on another disk, or a partition of a disk, you could select a different start-up drive and still use carrara in osx and still be able to take advantage of multi-processing. plus, since near as i can tell, c2 is still about as unstable as c1, it sure pays to be running in x, since you don't have to restart after every crash. hopefully the new patch will come out soon. has anyone got any idea as to the time table?

fine. duplicate doesn't work. at least i can copy and paste, it makes the file take longer to render, but atleast i don't have to model duplicate objects. right? wrong! copy crashes carrara just the same. i think i'm going to be down-grading to carrara 1 and using it in classic. i guess i'll just use version 2 for final renders in osX so i can use SMP. so annoying.

jealous? i guess i forgot to mention that they also bought us the nvidia titanium card! and it is all kinds of sick. i have so much processing power at my finger tips that i spent the first week pretty much in shock. it is quite a change from the g3 266 i have at home. i'm glad to here that there is a noticeable speed boost on the mac, because the performance i was getting was very similar to that of the 1ghz pentium 4 that i played with c2 on. i was a little depressed. hopefully the patch puts my mac back on top. -scott

i'm also getting the menu bar error in 10.2 but i haven't had too much time to play since getting the patch, so i didn't mention it earlier. but like paul said, cmd-tab, and dock cause the error. i have another way: i have two monitors set up, but carrara is only configured for one. i can then click in the other monitor to access the desktop. (if i hold option while clicking, it hides carrara.) but when i come back to carrara, i get the white osx menu bar over top. (one neat thing about the dual monitor setup i have is that i can use the process viewer and cpu monitor to see how many resources carrara is consuming.) in respect to pauls comment that it isn't the os, i have to say that i haven't seen this kind of error in any other program running natively or in classic, for that matter. but then in respect to charles, i don't run any other programs that replace the desktop and menu bar with customized UI like carrara does. so i don't see how the os can be ruled out yet. on a side note, i just wanted to share with you mac heads that work has finally upgraded our machines to the dual 1ghz with 167mhz bus. and the other night i rendered my kitchen donut scene at 3840x2400 (twice hd res) in the background in under a half hour... while i was burning a cd at 16x. i just thought that was pretty cool. on tuesday i'm going to try rendering my personal carrara stuff in the background while i use photoshop for work. work is so much more exciting all of a sudden. -scott

i always turn those handles off. (the button is in the properties tab ... a cube with angles around it.) that seems to make moving and aiming the lights easier. then i just adjust the settings parametrically. i just can't remember what all the handles control. -scott

i agree with litst. stability is most important. but i was also glad to see that you improved rendering speeds with osx. -scott

great work! the model looks well detailed and the rendering looks amazing.

that is a nice render. the dof really locks your eye on the sphere. i have some questions about your machine, just to help me get a better idea of the amount of time the GI adds to the scene. what was the original render size in pixels of the image? how many megs of ram are on your graphics card? and how many megs of ram are alloted to carrara (if you're using os9)? -pix

oh now, be nice. i rather enjoyed laughing my butt off reading all the responses terran got. it put me in a great mood. even with all the polite well thought out responses and suggestions, terran still can't post anything remotely professional. if i were him i would spend the next two days deleting all of my forum postings that reference that thread.

since it is a work in progress, i have a few suggestions to make. the horizon lines up with the top of the fence. this causes the image to flatten a bit. try give it some overlap. that will make a big difference. also, dark sides of the objects seem too dark for the amount of ambient light that the atmosphere would be diffusing.

particularily on the lighthouse. if you look at cylinders with matte surfaces, they look more like the image that i've attached. if you used a fill light to soften the harshness of the shadows, it would better simulate ambient lighting.

these are nit-picky suggestions. on the whole, it is really looking good.

-pix

bh404, great job on the contest. i'm sorry that i haven't been able to congratulate you until now. i was very impressed with your images. -scott

litst was saying a while back that the hybrid renderer miscalculates the location of objects slightly when rendering (my interpretation of his post) and that this problem is most visible with terrains. using the ray tracer can solve this problem. you could also convert the terrain to a vertex object if you want to still use the hybrid. i don't know what to say about the box around the tree. -pix

i'm glad you mentioned this problem before i spent my money on a dual g4. i'll save may cash for a while i guess.

it has pretty darn good light quality coming off of the blade. i like it. -pix

i don't know what to tell you. i never use rds, but your image is lookin' good. you had better be preparing this for the contest. in fact, no one should be allowed to work on anything right now but the contest. : )

-pix