Velarde: Right on both questions. GI with spotlight was used in this render and this will be a newspaper infographic. It may also be used as a web graphic too. Do you think any specific texture is blurry or is it over-all? TOXE: I think the texture I've seen you do is really great and the lighting set-ups that you employ are maybe the best I've seen used in Carrara. I only hope that my lighting on this project will come close. If the texturing on this project looks any good at all, it's probably because of the time I've put into them, probably just as much time as the modelling. By the way, some of the texturing on the above image still needs to be worked on.

Thanks Kix, yeah the texture maps were generated in Photoshop from a ton of pictures I took. I work about a block from the Alamo so if I need a reference shot I just run over there and grab a few. One of our photographers went to the movie set north of Austin and brought back some shots about a month ago, so I have those to compare it to. I initially started this project in Lightwave but when I saw the improvements made in Carrara 3 I decided to switch gears. My experience in Lightwave's subdivision modeler carried over nicely to Carrara's and with this project I'm really digging deeper into Carrara's texturing system, it really seems heavy duty.

Just got new Dual G5s at work and rendered the global illumination file with the trumpet at 300 dpi. Rendered in 4min. 32 sec compared to my 733 G4 which did the same file in 20 min 35 sec. NICE

Yep, still took me a while to understand how to implement it but I got it. Thanks

Beautiful work, are you planning on texturing it?

Got 4 copies in yesterday morning

About a year ago I made a craggy, rusty texture and applied it to a fairly simple shape and rendered it in similar lighting situations in Ray Dream 5.5, Strata Studio 2.5, Bryce 4 and Lightwave 5.6 as a test for render quality. I worked in each program to get the best render possible at 175 dpi. Ray Dream's output was easily the worst, very plastic and the bump maps really looked fake, Bryce was a little better, Strata was considerably better than Bryce and Lightwave was easily the best render of all. Although I was a little surprised at the difference in quality, nothing surprised me as much as when I got Carrara and re-rendered the original RDS file. Not only was the rendering much richer and closer to the Strata/Lightwave benchmark, it was also faster. This is an added plus that Eovia should trumpet.

According to MacQuarium, Eovia says Carrara will ship in June

I work as a graphics guy at a newspaper and do a lot of informational graphics and illustrations so I can't speak much to the question about animation. But here's the deal on doing STILL pictures: For doing anything mechanical and/or tech oriented I think Carrara blows everything else out of the water that I've used(Lightwave, Strata). Carrara's renderer is good, not as good as say,Lightwave but then Light wave costs about 8 times as much. Believe me, Lightwave's renderer may be better but I'll be damned if it's 8 times better. Strata makes a good product too but it costs over twice as much as Carrara and without Carrara's walls and projections it's a real pain to assemble stuff. You will spend a LOT of time assembling stuff in 3D. Also Strata doesn't ship with hundreds of premade models like C. You can get a lot of use out of those. AND Strata's modeler isn't quite as strong as Carrara's The only other app I think you should check into is the DVgarage's 3D toolkit which features Electric Image 2.9 and a training DVD for $199.00. I can't recommend it completely because I've never used it, but it sounds promising. Carrara plays well with FreeHand, Illustrator and Photoshop and its learning curve is a little tough but no where near as tough as most 3D apps. Don't let anybody lie to you, all 3D apps are difficult to learn and they all advertise how easy they are.

So do you use Carrara at all in video production or is it all higher end stuff?

Looks great

I wish that I knew a better way. One of the best things about upgrading to Carrara was getting usage of 3DS models

I have a complete basketball goal and net if you need it.

Bought version 5 about a year ago and struggled with it. About 3 months ago I used it on a large project and about an hour into it everything clicked. Once you get into this modeler it is very addictive. Once you understand the basic rules, it starts becoming more and more intuitive. Someone put a lot of thought into the interface.