Hey Donnie, I was a Ray Dream user and moved to Carrara when Metacreations put it up for sale and it's future seemed uncertain. I figured I needed to switch and tried out Strata for a few months. Ease of use, great textures included, great rendering, weak modeler. I then switched over to Lightwave for about a year and although its power in all aspects is undeniable, I never warmed to the interface. For a person who does still pictures, Lightwave seems overly complex. Carrara 3's improvements in its vertex modeler and renderer pulled me back. I haven't opened Lightwave in a few months now but I am grateful that it gave me insight into polygonal modeling, something which has carried over to Carrara's vertex modeler.

Sweet. How about an HDRI render to really make it pop?

How would I get this to Eovia?

I just used the 200mm camera. As a side-note, the entire image all 3 map/models- were built as seperate models by me and co-worker James Hendricks over a two week period. When it came time to render, I thought that I would render them as seperate files and composite the results but after the third try I gave up because the perspectives never matched up. So I brought all 3 models into one file and rendered everything at once. We just got new computers last month (dual 2-ghz G5, 3 gigs of ram, fastest Radeon card they make for the Mac) so I figure, no problem. Wrong. This file brought my machine to it's knees. Moving objects around became a test of patience but rendering went okay.

Thanks, yeah, this ran in the San Antonio Express-News April 9th to coincide with the movie's opening.

Excellent, excellent. Thanks so much Eric. Really good information.

Hey Eric, Can you give us a price/feature breakdown of the similar Mac and PC you are comparing. This is a question I've thought about myself and the one thing I keep hearing is that PC's can cost less but by the time you get them up to the same specs (videocard, DVD, firewire) as a Mac then the pricing isn't all that different. I know a lot of Mac guys and I know a lot of PC guys but what I don't know is someone who uses both on a daily basis. I know that some of the things that I mentioned-DVD, firewire- don't really come into play when working in Carrara, so I'll keep that in mind. Also, how do the PCs compare with ease of use?

Could we see the wireframe?

Thanks for the info. Hey Mark, the Alamo graphic got pushed back when the movie's premiere got changed. We also changed the focus of the graphic so I won't be doing the detailed version that I posted here a few months ago. Instead, we're showing the original Alamo compound's footprint in relation to present day San Antonio.

The current version is $399 with a free upgrade to 2. After the release it goes up to $489. Not cheap by anybody's standards but consider this: WETA is a company with huge resources who can not only buy any program they want but could probably just hire programmers to build their own custom programs and this is what they chose. The organic modelling power of this program looks so much better than the mega-buck competition (Lightwave, Maya, Softimage, Studiomax) that I can't possibly see the other big studios not following WETA's example. AND it seems to play well with other programs. Just imagine modelling something like the above image in a relatively short time that would take a monstrous amount of man-hours normally and then rendering it in Carrara. Yeah, I know. I'm gushing. And no, I don't own stock in the company, yet.

I started out in Ray Dream Designer back in 1995. Switched over to Lightwave about a year and a half ago because I needed a better modeler and loved LW's renderer. Got the Carrara 3 upgrade when it came out and noticed that the rendering engine was great and the vertex modeler was much improved. I now find myself working in Carrara constantly. Haven't opened Lightwave in a while.

I agree, Eovia has done a remarkable job on making booleans better. I made the rounds at Siggraph last year to all the software vendors booths and found out that booleans are a pretty dicey operation for Maya, Lightwave, Cinema 4D and all the other 3D programs out there, regardless of price. the only one that had no problems was Form-Z and that's because it's a solids modeler and all the rest are surface modelers. Carrara also falls into the surface modeler catagory.

Great work guys, Velarde, could you give us some info on your lighting/render setup?

memaci: the main wall is one Photoshop texture with a bump map

Mateo, I'm not at the computer where I did the rendering right now, otherwise I'd post a screen-shot. I do remember turning on global illumination and indirect lighting and there was a long rendering time. I'm not sure you can get away with short rendering times and use global illumination.