I've read that some apps are having trouble coping with Panther (don't know about Carrara, though).

Softimage was recently on sale for $4,000 off the retail price (you could buy a lot of Eovia product for just the amount of the discount). I think one of the selling points for lightwave used to be that you could do most of what Maya does for much less but when Alias slashed the price of Maya (personally I think that was a brilliant marketing move) I think it pretty much took away that selling point.

Here in Salem, OR we often get flocks of canadian geese flying overheard honking their little hearts out. Plus they like to land near one of the prisons where there's a grassy knoll and a stream and the felon families to feed them (but then when they try to cross the busy road nearby things can get ugly!) A well-known lightwave artist hails from Alaska: http://timothy.artistnation.com/ My wife used to live in Anchorage and my mom dragged myself and my sister up the Alaskan highway to Fairbanks from Portland, OR (before it was paved!) I almost lit a Yukon forest on fire with a burning marshmallow, but that's another story ...

Attached Link: http://www.newtek.com/products/lightwave/lw-gallery/thumbnails.php?album=14

Maybe I'll hear it from Amapi NURBS users but I thought nurbs were sort of old school and that most people were modelling using polygons and sub-d these days? Lightwave has a polygon/sub-d modeller so in theory anything you could do with it you could do with Carrara's vertex modeller (albeit somewhat more slowly since the vertex modeller is missing some advanced features and lightwave also has lots of free third-party modeling plug-ins to make your life easier). I've seen lots of great cars done with lightwave (I've attached a URL with some examples). If you search on "lightwave car tutorials" at google you get things like: http://www.newtek.com/products/lightwave/tutorials/modeling/car/ Here's one that was done with c4d (which also has a polygon modeler with sub-d): http://www.maxoncomputer.com/images/gallery/h_sl500.jpg For movies these days it often seems like they first make a little physical real-world model and then do a fancy 3d trace on the model rather than trying to create the model by hand completely in the computer. I think similar things are happening with animation like the amazing motion capture work done for Gollum in LOTR.

Welcome flycatcher to the Carrara community. In addition to the various modellers (spline, vertex, text, metaball and terrain) you can also do some modeling right in the Assemble Room (the room you're in when Carrara starts up). You can throw down a sphere and add a Bulge modifier to make a quick barbell, for example (and this effect can be animated over time). Booleans used to be a faux pas but supposedly in C3 they work much better. Overlap a couple primitives and do an Edit/3D Boolean operation and then if you like you can double-click on the result to take it into the vertex modeler and do more work on it. If you have some dingbat fonts installed (they come with little shapes instead of letters) you can do some quick shapes in the Text modeller just adding bevels to a dingbat font letter. view/use collision detection can be handy for making sure that one object stacks neatly on top of another in the assemble room. anyway, hope you enjoy Carrra as much as I do.

How about one on how to do character animation using both FK and IK. I know Carrara's animation tools aren't super-deep but it does at least have some.

I think it would be best if the primary artwork on the Carrara box were both modeled and rendered in Carrara (and hopefully that was the case with c2 and c3). If non-Carrara objects are used (or any third-party plugins) then I think that should be clearly noted. A down-rev version of Amapi does ship with Carrara but it's not officially part of the base product. I guess it's a given that texture bitmaps will need to be created in an image editing program like Photoshop.

I've been watching the jeff lew videos and trying to decide which tool(s) to use for character animation. Hash Animation Master is inexpensive and seems to have a lot of features although I've heard it's unstable and I haven't seen a lot of realistic-looking renders from it (more cartoony stuff). Lightwave v7.5 has some character animation tools(with more to come in v8) but everybody seems to use Project Messiah but I've been playing with a demo of that and finding it a bit wonky in spots (although I do like the way it can pipeline into multiple programs). I guess Maya is the answer although I don't find that program easy to understand or use and it still costs $2k. TrueSpace seems to have lots of animation features but I just can't get my mind around all those tiny little icons. Hopefully Carrara v4 will have some more tools for character animation. Even though C3 introduced bones I haven't seen many examples yet of people doing cool character animation in Carrara.

I've used a number of other 3D products and I haven't seen anything quite like Carrara's spline modeller. It takes a bit of getting used to (and you may find it best to create your curves in a product like XaraX or Illustrator) but it can make creating certain types of objects really easy. The vertex modeller is a bit primitive but still useful (and enhanced for v3) and Carrara does have subdivision surface support. One of the main problems I had with the v2 vertex modeller is that it often creates triangles instead of quads and most of the tutorials and books want you to use quads (supposedly better for subdivision?) You can also model in the assemble room using primitives with Modifiers (like bulge or bend&twist). Plus Carrara has a nifty text modeller that makes it easy to do bevelled text (or more if you use dingbat-type fonts). There's also a metaballs modeller which I haven't used much but maybe could be used to simulate blobby liquids? So I'd say that Carrara packs a lot of punch in the modelling department even though the vertex modeller is no match for the modellers in C4D or Lightwave (yet). Supposedly www.luxology.net is working on a cool new modeler called Modo. It would be handy if Carrara could import objects in Lightwave format since there are so many of them out there in the world.

I think it's mostly for post processing but I suppose you could also use it as a generator to create some video or a still that could then be imported into C as a texture map or scene background or something along those lines. This technology has also been incorporated into Discreet's Combustion compositing product.

Compared to Lightwave 7.5 and C4DXL7 I would say that Carrara 2.1 WIN98SE has been somewhat less stable (I also have a dual-boot with WIN2K and Carrara didn't seem any more stable on that OS); I can't recall the last time I had a crash in either Lightwave or C4D but Carrara crashes (or just gets weird to the point where I have to shut down and sometimes even have to revert to a previous version of a scene or sometimes even start over from scratch) with some regularity. I tend to use a lot of third-party plug-ins and sometimes I wonder if those might be the culprit although it's hard to know for sure. Carrara has gotten more robust over time and hopefully C3 will be even better in this regard than C2. I would imagine that robustness/stability are particularly important for those trying to make money using Carrara (vs. hobbyists who might be willing to put up with more weirdness in exchange for cost-effectiveness and useful features).

Another thing I've noticed about the big boy apps is that they typically have tools geared toward dealing with large scenes with lots of objects (and/or with very complex objects). Lightwave has both a scene editor and spreadsheet tool for this purpose. Its modeler supports layers so you can distribute a complex object across multiple layers. Carrara does have an "Edit/Master Light" feature that can help with managing many lights.

Between lightwave, c4d and Carrara I've found that caustics and global illumination are easier to work with (and get good results with) in Carrara. Personally I think the best thing about Carrara is that it makes relatively advanced features accessible/affordable for the unwashed masses. Carrara is an interesting app in that in some ways it's ahead of the competition and in other ways it's still lagging behind. Another way to think about the apps is whether you're likely to be successful trying to use them on your own or as part of a small studio vs. working at ILM or Digital Domain where you'd have lots of help if you get stuck and probably a lot of workflow issues would already have been worked out for you (and maybe you'd even be working in a totally customized mel-driven interface instead of having to learn Maya at all). Another thing that's happening is workflows that combine multiple 3D apps (such as Maya-Lightwave or vice-versa). Personally I like to model in c4d (because it has tools that the carrara vm is missing) and then finish up in Carrara. So maybe it's becoming more mix&match than trying to get one tool that does everything. I think there are some other 3d apps like blender and merlin and wings3d but I don't have experience with them.

Is 3D Toolkit really a good choice for newbies? Even with the dvgarage tutorials it seems like Electric Image is a more advanced app along the lines of Lightwave, Maya, SoftImage and Max. Newbies maybe should be thinking Carrara, Strata, TrueSpace, Animation Master, Cool 3D Studio, Swift 3D or even Xara3D, etc. C4D seems to fall somewhere in the middle. Seems like a two-tiered world where maybe you want to cut your teeth on something less complicated before you dive into one of the big boys. Supposedly Maya has been revamped to make it more newbie-friendly (and I think the forthcoming lwave 8 may have some of this as well) but I tried the Maya demo and couldn't make any sense out of it. And, if you aren't doing character animation (and especially if you're just doing stills) then maybe the big boys are gross overkill.

Lightwave has a steep learning curve (especially for a newbie) but it does have very powerful animation features and with the project messiah plug-in can do things like Jimmy Neutron (I don't think someone would even attempt such a thing in Carrara). Animation Master is supposed to have the best character animation tools in the biz (killer bean is amazing) but I've never read a review where they didn't talk about the program constantly crashing (not that Carrara is perfect either but Lightwave by comparison seems quite stable). And then of course there's Maya which seems to have most of the buzz these days but I get the sense that much of the appeal of Maya lies in the fact that it can be Mel-scripted and basically turned into something very customized. Don't know much about SoftImage. Carrara's bones seem like a nice way to get started with characer animation but I don't think they're on par (at least yet) with the type of features you get in some of the other programs. The physics module is handy but it seems like perhaps the new version isn't quite as good as the old version. I guess it all depends on what you're hoping to accomplish. If nothing else, Carrara seems like a nice set of training wheels for learning about advanced features like boning, caustics, global illumination, polygon/vertex modeling, spline modeling, etc. If you've never done anything in 3D before, jumping right into Lightwave might be a bit overwhelming (I can attest to that since I tried to learn 3D using Inspire and didn't get very far until I fired up Carrara).