A positive spin would be this: Eovia wants to reward those who don't just use Carrara, but have also joined the active Carrara community. Regular Carrara users don't get the discounts, but the really "involved" users do. If you look at it that way, Eovia is rewarding their best customers. The ones who have not just helped their bottom line, but who also endorse the product and show off its capabilities to the broader 3D community.

If a pile of cash happens to fall in your lap, one nice thing on the Mac side is that Carrara works well with dual processor machines. When you're rendering, the yellow block that moves across the image is joined by a red block, each showing what a single processor is doing. I don't know what dual-processor PCs cost, but if they're affordable, you might want to spring for that boost.

I did not mean for the cherry to be so downright terrifying, but there you have it. This chocolate has been not so much bitten as eviscerated, and taught a very stern lesson.

I'm almost tempted to check off "violence" in the Adult Content section of this upload form.

I would like to take part in this challenge...but amazingly, I seem never to have 10 minutes to spare. Maybe in the next couple of days. As for your confection, it looks very... chocolatey. I would certainly eat it. :-)

Great tip!

I would expect that network rendering is actually pretty tough to develop. The host computer has to keep track of all kinds of stuff: what if a remote computer disappears from the network? What if one of the computers runs out of disk space? That kind of thing. Not to mention dealing with a hybrid Mac/PC network. It's certainly a major, legitimate feature to hope for, but also probably a big job. On the other hand, didn't Infini-D have network rendering? You'd think they could cannibalize that code base.

I hadn't noticed the contest at all. That banner looked like an ad for the Carrara Raydream Resource CD since it doesn't mention the contest except in the less snazzy text below. I'd definitely like to enter one of these contests when I have the time, so I'll be more attentive.

Very nice work from all involved. Congratulations, FWTempest!

I have no idea what this is. But I thought I'd reply so that at least you know someone has read your message. :-

The stars around the border are a huge improvement by themselves. Those original ones were just brutal.

As a Mac user I can just look on from the sidelines... but I do appreciate that you mentioned the PC-only nature of the product up front. I know not to get too excited :-). It's nice to see a new developer contributing to the Carrara community. What's good for Carrara is good for all who have sprung for it.

I remember back in 1994 I used to use Sculpt 3D, and I had some major scenes that had up to 35,000 triangles. It was brutal on my Mac IIci. Now I can throw around hundreds of thousands of triangles pretty smoothly, on a machine that's much newer than the IIci, but still about 5 years old. Carrara sometimes locks up for me, too, but overall I'm totally amazed at how fast things have become. It's all relative, I guess.

That's curious. I always assumed that full raytracing meant higher quality and thus slower rendering. Am I just wrong?

You mean your piece about sophisticated primitives? I just read it - good advice! I always mean to work the way you describe, "roughing in" a model before I get into heavy detail, but it's hard to resist getting into textures and lighting effects. But I think Carrara is well suited to this kind of workflow thanks to the "Jump In" feature and the ability to promote a group to a master. You can make a rough object out of several components, group it (and perhaps promote it) and then populate your scene with the roughs. Later you can "jump in" to add detail, clean up mis-aligned objects, etc. without the clutter of other objects getting in your way.

Which brings up a related question: what do you think of the Zmorphics plugins? I'm particularly interested in the blurry reflections plugin. How does it affect rendering speed? And are you happy with the results? I've also wondered whether Eovia might add this feature to C4, but I guess that's the risk you run with any plugin.