I'll bet that lots (most?) of the people who use Maya / Lightwave / Poser are using pirated software, and those communities have grown because of that large - if dubious - userbase. And if you're going to pirate your software, why pirate Carrara, of all things? Go for the expensive stuff! That may be part of the reason why Carrara is less visible. Maybe Eovia should give away Carrara 2 or Carrara 3 for free, to help build the community. Once people have invested time and effort in building elaborate scenes, they won't want to jump to another program so readily. And when and if they decide to buy something, they may decide to leverage their investment (in effort) and stick with Carrara. - Joe

Also known as, "the worst human interface design ever."

Message edited on: 04/04/2005 13:26

... or you can use the profiles in the opposite direction, by sweeping a circle along a path that makes it get bigger and smaller. The torus preset is lame in many ways, not the least of which is that it's not round.

I put my "likes" above, so now I've earned two feature requests: 1. Better (or total) integration between the modelers and the assembly room. It's unnecessarily painful to make two objects that fit together when you can't adjust the modeling right in the assembly environment. Would anyone disagree with this? 2. Now that Amapi is part of Carrara, so to speak, I'd say that Carrara's other weakness is the slowness of Amapi. The menus are so sluggish I just can't use it. My computer is farily old so I can understand slow modeling and slow rednering, but not a slow interface. So for me this is 500 great tools out the window.

1. It runs on the Mac. 2. Price. I'm a hobbyist, so more than a couple of hundred dollars would be out of the question (although I've since spent a bit more on upgrades and plug-ins :-) ) 3. Render quality and effects. Amazingly beautiful renderings - again, particularly in light of the price. 4. Fit and finish. In a world of antagonistic interfaces like Blender's and Lightwave's I appreciate the effort that goes into Carrara's. 5. Something else. Can't think of it.

I haven't tried the tutorial yet, but it is certainly greatly appreciated. Thanks!

There are 10 times as many posts about Poser in this forum than there are posts about RDS. Ray Dream is a non-product. It was a venerable tool for, but it'sreally just a cousin to Carrara at this point. I say this should be the Carrara forum. If there's a real outcry, then maybe Renderosity can make a Raydream forum.

Wow, beautiful work! I love the detail in the brow area especially. It really has the feeling of a classical bust. My only suggestion is to maybe render it again with shadows, just so that there's darkness inside the nostrils.

Neat project. My only suggestion would be to adjust the color of the leaves on those plants - they're kind of nuclear at the moment.

I agree that the price is too high for me to buy this plug-in without at least trying a demo. But I also happen to think that most of Julien's plugins seem a bit too expensive for me. If I were to get Baker, Deeper, Replica and Primivol, I would spend $130, or about half the price of Carrara itself. For a hobbyist it's just a little steep - but I think a lot of us are hobbyists.

It sounds like you need a background or a sky. If there's no background or sky, then the sky is just black, and that's what gets reflected in your metal objects. Unlike in the real world, you have to specifically put something up there to be reflected.

This would be a fun contest - who can slice up this guy in the meanest and funniest way. :-D

I don't know how much this contributes to your problem, but I do see one CPU-eater: when you save as QuickTime, saving each frame takes successively longer, until it's really dragging along. I've seen it even with low resolutions like yours (although I have a much slower machine). For me the solution was to render to sequenced TIFFs and then re-save the finished animation as QuickTime. One other thing: if you're using blurry reflections those can also be a major CPU hit.

Well you can certainly forget about the tree generator altogether. You'll have to build it yourself. I would use the vertex modeler. One thing you can try is to make a long bent-up bough and then break pieces off of it to construct the various parts of the tree, so you don't have to start each branch and root from scratch. After that, great textures will be the key. You might be able to do the leaves with a texture, so you don't have to model them. This is true in C4 especially, because you can use the alpha feature to cut a single polygon into a spray of needles (or whatever those are), which would save a lot of modeling.

Wow, I had no idea you could split the preview window. That's great. Not a great as a normal modeling environment would be, but great in its own way.