I'm sorry everyone but I have tried the spline head and relived nightmares about it. The same reason why I put Carrara down in the first place haunted me again. As I got into the complex procedure it crashed, and crashed again and crashed again. So to save myself anymore undue stress I have decided not to pursue this tutorial. I'm sorry serge but I just spent half my weekend pulling my hair out because of stability problems with the software. ALso I was at my sister's house and I was working on borrowed time. If you have any other questions I will try to answer them as best I can, other than that, I am not going within on lightyear of Carrara for the next 6 months

Yeah you can run about anything on an 800mhz P3. Actually I got my info from CGW. Several companies are testing the dual Athlon there are some real chipset issues there. I really don't know the in's and out of industry, that is just what I read so go easy on the messenger. RDRAM a joke. HEHEHEHEH that is funny. Do you know how much I hear that from people whom are not in the professional market. Well here was the lowdown that I was given about RDRAM. A nascar driver will make extreme changes to his car and engine just to shave 1/2 off his lap time. That 1/2 second will make little difference with only one lap but with 200, that is where the payoff lies. The same goes for RDRAM. A 16 to 20 production render will make little difference but when you are getting into a week or more of rendering, oh yes, then the RDRAM is starting to payoff because that overall 3-7% is steadily increasing with the more time it takes to render. So you are picking up a modest 5% per hour. Well over 200 hours has gone by and multiply that 5% by the amount of hours you have spent rendering. Big difference huh! It amazes me how most people fail to see that.

Most of your production rendering is handled by 4 main things. OS, Processor, Chipset and RAM. If you look at professional graphics workstations you will find that most of them run SGI, MAC, or Intel processors. That does not mean that other processors like AMD are not good processors, it just means that they don't have the industry support that the others have. I cannot think of any professional studio who runs the 95/98 series of OS's Most run Unix, Irix, Linux or NT. Reason being are threads and much better memory management than 95/98. And let us not forget stability and the option of TRUELY running real-time and tweaking the OS to one specific function. To drive graphics as hard as they can. Furthermore networking is also paramount. Like I stated before I run the Screamernet on my 3 machines. SN came with lightwave and it allows mean to use the processing power of as many machines that I want in order to more quickly render. This cannot be done in 95/98 so far as SN is concerned. Believe me, I tried. You have to NT for the particular version that I carry. Chipset/motherboard is very important. It is your chipset that can make you or break you. AMD athlon dual processors have many problems with chipset so they crash more often than not. Intel, SGI etc... have very stable dual processor systems and based on the OS and how you tweak it, you can get up to a 98% performance increase. I have never heard anyone getting beyond that however. Ram is very important because the faster your ram, the faster you past data. RD rams is very expensive but very fast and is used in many high end workstations. AMD processors cannot run with RD ram. At lease that is what I read. Also do any of you know what a render boxx is. For those of you who don't know, it is nothing more than a box full of processors. 30 or more. You will find render boxx hardware and many studios for production rendering. Voxels, Raytracing, Anti-aliasing are all very taxing and can make a simple render of 2 minutes frame last up to 1 hour plus per frame. I am not talking about Bryce or Carrara anti-aliasing I mean, 3rd part anti-aliasing and rendering engines that plug-in to existing software. So processors and ram are VERY important in production rendering because during production rendering, you won't even have a video output so what good is a video card at that stage! Vid cards are great in preproduction work but once you get into production rendering, it is all processing!

One more note about rendering. Your Video card does not dictate how fast you comp is going to render. You Vid card deals with the real-time active openGL/DirectDraw such as rotating your mesh etc... All of your rendering to AVI is done on the processor. (Please correct me if I am wrong!) But when I do my final render is lightwave, I use the screamer net on 3 machines in my workshop and I won't even see the scene until I am done. That is of course optional but it is faster. I have 2 400's and a dual 700 all rendering the same AVI. It is all processor once the rendering takes place so you can have the greatest video card in the world and it will not speed up your production rendering a bit.

Actually, with the Geforce 2, it is a fast card however, there are broken polygons, poor anti-aliasing and texture errors when running professional 3D apps. These events do not occur with the Oxygen line of boards so that is something to consider. Of course Carrara was not one of the apps that was tested for this problem also, If you are not a HELL-BENT HARDCORE 3D artist, these problems would not even bother you and may not even notice. I for one have to look at my screen for up to 18 hours a day and errors like that stand out. Geforce 2 is a good all around card for games and 3D. I personally would not buy one as I am not a gamer. I am more in tuned with cards like the Oxygen GVXII or Intense 3D wildcat. That is because they were made to run with heavy 3D apps like Lightwave, Maya etc....

Thats right serge. Convert, Mirror, Weld Identical Vertices. Depending on how close you got to what you wanted in the spline room, you may or may not have to do clean-up on your model to move polygons and points into your desired position. Brenthomer, every time you add a point on the cross-section, you automatically add a line to the y axis. You just don't see the line until you begin to free-form and then you will see a green line, and blue line. Note that you can also modify the pink spline on the Y axis the get a better shape. You can choose point to point surfacing or shape to shape surfacing to make it easier for you. You have to work with it. You will get it, believe and once you do, it will be awesome. Okay Okay, I will go to my sister's hows and write a head tutorial for you guys. Expect it here in a couple of days. It's the weekend and I am off with no plans other than my private projects. I think this next tutorial will explain everything.

Thanx Abcarter. You will create the entire face the same way that your created the Nose. Also when I did use Carrara in the past, I used a pipeline extrusion method. As you probably not, your cross-section will always be aligned with the spline. That makes it much easier to do complex organics like faces. For this tutorial I kept everything default for reasons of simplicity. To do the rest of the face simply profile the entire face and start shaping out your face using the cross-sections. Take the second cross-section on the nose for example. You would not just stop at the nose, you would extend it around the cheek and finally up the jaw and stop at the ear. It is not hard to do or visualize once you get started especially when you start seeing your face take shape. You would do this all the way down to the base of the neck. If done correctly, everything from lips to head, nose neck etc... will be very smooth and you will have an organic that will rival any model created by more expensive programs. One good thing I need to say about Splines. If you are doing morph targets say facial expressions or even jiggling breast or muscular contractions, the spline modeler is the way to go because once you have your first object done, it is all a matter of moving your points at key areas to change the shape. This is perfect as you will always have the same number of points provided that you don't add any more cross-sections. This is imperative when morphing and the outcome is quite stunning but I doubt I will do a Carrara tutorial on that.

I will put up some carrara examples tommorrow to better show how I splined using carrara. I just get it back from my sister and reload it on my comp. Stay Tuned!

Are you modifying your spline in the Spline Room or the Vertex room???? I need to know so that I can better understand what you are asking

Oh my god, this is the old argument that I run into all of the time. Ghost, no one is trying to insult you or your kind, however, how you get there is as in important as what you get when you get there. Art is life. I want a million dollars!, But if I stole it to get there, then I am nothing more than a theif. If I toiled and worked to get on my own ideas from the ground up! Then I truely earned what I got. 3D art is just the next step in Sculpturing with stone. Our raw material are primatives, lines and vertices just as a sculpturist's tools are rock and stone. You said you were not a modeller. That is fine. I love poser artist because you take the meshes that we create to newer levels that we never thought about using them for. It is a symbiotic relationship. You are not any less a 3D artist. You are a Poser/Animator who works with the meshes that the modeller creates. Our argument one of getting the jist of what 3D art is. Modelling is very rewarding and I one would like you to experience creating a great mesh from the ground up, then animating or posing it. It is a very exilerating experience and it gives you a deeper understanding to what modellers and animators are and where their mindset is. Also, if you create your own mesh, then you don't have to worry about royaly rights or credit to someone else which is not a bad thing, but just something that some of us would like to do without. Editing a model that already exist is your thing so fine, you continue to that. 1000faces and myself will continue to dazzle with our complete scenes built from the ground up.

1st, I created my outline, 3D of course, then I patched my quads, or tri's if that is what you choose. After I finished patching the one side, I mirrored the mesh to get the other side. Very simple process. This is an example of lightwave splining. In carrara, you can make the outline in the spline room and not even have to patch it as it does patches as you work. That is a very good tool to have as you are not limit to tri's and quads so you will have instantly smooth cross sections, but it gets confusing when creating you outline because there will be patches in the way, also the axis in Carrara can throw you off. Just make sure you stay oriented. Now in the modeller room, there is a patch command, but I have never gotten it to work. It always crashed the program. I have not used Carrara in a while but see if you can create your outline without polygoning your spline 1st. If you can, it will make creating the outline alot easier. The turn on the polygons when you are done and WALA! instant splined organics.

Spline modeling is basically the same across the board for most apps, however there are some distinct differences from Carrara to 3D studio max, to lightwave but the process is basically the same. For instance. For Lightwave, you create patches for existing splines when you are manually splining. 3DS max, you use patch grids and nurbs grids which is also great but I find it tedious. Carrara already patches your splines for you in the spline room so there is no patching to it. All you are doing is making a 3D outline of the object you are trying to spline. Like if you are doing a face, then you would outline your face as though it were a 3D wireframe object. It is better shown than told so I will post an example for you.

It all depends on your Mobo. I am using an Asus P2B-DS with the 100 mhz bus so. It does not allow overclocking so all that I had to do was plug in the processors and it did the rest. But then Asus is renown for making great motherboards. I have an incredibly fast and stable system as well so I cannot complain at all. If you are running a good motherboard, I think Asus, Soyo, Abit, then you should not have a problem with the upgrade. Just make sure your mobo supports the bus speed. You know the newer intels come in 133 and 100 mhz bus speeds. I am still not that hip on the AMD dual processor system as I hear there are alot of stability and chipset issues, however the AMD alone is great. I am not a tech head so I cannot tell you much but I have a very fast a stable system which cruches polygons as though they were not there. I do suffer speed decreases when I get around 250,00+ polygons. I also net render which is pretty fast. I am too afraid to try internet rendering yet as I don't have broadband. I won't run anything but NT and Linux. I don't like the 95/98 series of OS's so that also says alot about why I have a stable system. Also ECC memory is well worth the extra that you pay for it. So when I talk about ram, I wont do anything but ECC.

Oh I have long sense put carrara down. In fact I gave it to my sister about a month ago. I am running a dual pIII 700 with 512mb ram. I just recently upgraded the proccessors ;-) now that you can get 700's for just over 200 bucks. I was running it when I had my two 450's in with 256 mb ram and it sucked! I am running the same card as you. The Oxygen VX1 powerthreads drivers for dual processors are awesome. Great performance increase not just noticable difference. I run lightwave now and that runs without a hitch. Even when I was using version 5 it was very stable on my system. I am very glad to see that you are not have any problems with Carrara but many of my friends and colleagues rue the day that they bought it and just put it down for something with more stability and power.

I'm game for this challenge. I know what you mean when you say you are tired of seeing edited models and not many originally modeled models. A friend of mine got flamed really bad here, well in the complaint room when he was complaining about people using poser models and not modeling their own objects. I kept my mouth shut. I am a lightwave user. I just upgraded to version 6.0 so I will take you up on this challenge. I doubt that many others will however. I have never seen any extremely high polygoned & complexed models come out of the Carrara/Raydream crowd. I have seen good work but never anything that I would consider elite and never have I seen a complete scene with organics set in an evironment that was completely modeled by the artist. I know that I am going to get flamed for that last statement but that is okay. So bring on your challenge and let us dazzle! One thing about this pic, the lights on the wall are lighting but are not luminating enough to acount for the light that they are putting off. And the shadows are misleading based on lighting position. Just an observation