I just got mine. C4 Pro, not a pre-order - I ordered it about 6 days ago.

I agree. It's odd that they relegated this one feature to Pro. And it's implemented oddly, as an effect you apply to an object, rather than just a parameter within the texture. That's not a big deal, although I guess it does mean that if you have 30 objects with the blurry texture on them you have to apply the effect 30 times (or can you apply an effect to multiple objects now? I don't have C4 in front of me so I can't check). But the fact is, this was a big feature for me, and part of the reason I bit the bullet and went for Pro. Amapi was the main reason I went for it, though.

I just got C4 yesterday, and the new IK is definitely a vast improvement. I'm not into character animation, but I whipped up a chain (literally, a chain made of linked rings) and used the IK tool to make it work, and it was really nice! The links intersected each other, of course, because I hadn't set up contstraints, but when I dragged around the end of the chain it moved very nicely without the hangups and freakouts I'd sen in C3. I'm not much into character animation, or at least I wasn't with C3, but I just may give it a shot now.

(Windows only, by the way)

I actually had a dream last night that my C4 arrived and they had sent the regular version, not the pro version. The odd thing is, I haven't even actually ordered it yet. I am one pathetic dude.

Shonner, if you post your Carrara scene here I'll have a crack at it. It does seem doable.

So how can I use Photosphere to convert an existing HDR image to greyscale? I assume I have to export it somehow and convert it in Photoshop, but can someone tell me the "best" way to do it? Is it possible to keep the high dynamic range of the image throughout the conversion or do I have to sacrifice the range?

Hey, Nicholas86, I love yours! I don't know what exactly I'm looking it, but I know what I like.

Right. If 10% of your light bounces off the object, then you have only 90% left to either be absorbed by the surface, or to continue through the surface by transparency. To use an extreme example, you can't have an object that's 100% transparent and 100% reflective. That would mean that all of the light is passing through and all of the light is also bouncing off. I was never a Ray Dream user, but I played with it years ago and it handled this issue nicely - if I remember correctly, reflection and transparency were handled with a single slider control with two little arrows, one for transparency and one for reflection, Since they couldn't pass each other on the slider, it was impossible to get the percentages to overlap unrealisticallly. If you wanted more transparency you'd have to reduce the reflectivity. It was slick. I'm sure many of you are more familiar with this feature of Ray Dream. Still, in a more-strict physical model I would think that absorption of light should be handled in the same way, but as I recall it wasn't. - Joe

Can you attach your .car file to a message? This is a curious challenge.

Attached Link: http://julien.chaplier.free.fr/Main.html

I understand the difference between a normal map and a regular bump map, and I can appreciate why a normal map is faster to render, because the renderer doesn't have to sample the surrounding pixels to determine the correct normal... but couldn't Eovia (or some other kind of plugin) just do some kind of pre-processing on a regular bump map to turn it into a normal map? Then the first time you render an image it would be slow, but after that Carrara could use the cached normal map and render more quickly. Then you wouldn't have to go through the extra step of making a normal map from geometry.

Is Amapi 6 Mac OS X native? (And is the Mac version on the disk?)

Thanks, Mark, for the reply. I wish Eovia had included some comparative images on the Carrara CD to show how these options affect image quality and render time. Maybe if I'm feeling industrious one of these days I'll put something together for the Carrara community.

Speaking of which, what is the difference between "full raytracing" and not full raytracing?