Sorry, I somehow missed the entire first part of your post. It would definitely be useful to be able to shift key frames that way. Something to nock the first two off the list, and something I have yet to get use to myself, is the animate button. It might also be nice if you could set the state of it in preferences. EMC

You can do that. The arrow at the beginning of the time line can be moved in the same way as the one at the end (see image). EMC

I still think posing should happen in the main scene room, but I think it would be a good idea to have a rigging room, so you could set up models for animation without a lot of visual garbage from the scene they are in. EMC

I didn't say that the modeling room was useless, I said the animation room was. I find the modeling room very useful, and I have had people who use programs like 3d Studio Max comment on the fact that this one small interface concept is very, very nice. It allows you to separate logically different tasks. Why would you want to have all your other models around when you are edit one of them. This concept is easier for beginners to grasp too: I put together a scene in one place, I edit individual components in another. The modeling room is just a container for all tasks having to do with modeling. Adding more tabs to the top window, would just make the interface more confusing to the majority of people. I don't think the workspace should be spread across many specific "rooms". I do admit that the way these rooms are handled, however, could be better. What I could see is this: Lump the basic concepts: modeling, rendering, assembling, into these general categories. Then have sub categories under that: Modeling->Vertex, Modeling->Spline, Modeling->Tree, Modeling->Terrain... Have the ability in the assembling room to double click on any model and jump into its' native editing environment, and add the ability to select specific types of models to edit from the modeling "sub-rooms". That, I think, would be the most intelligent way of doing it. EMC

The way I see it is this: Bryce is a very good program for people who like it, and like everything else, not so good for people who don't. The only reason for Eovia to buy it would be to buy its' user base, which I perceive is pretty large. However, I am not entirely sure that Eovia hasn't already bitten off more than they can chew with all the new plugins, Amapi, and Carrara in development.

-"I am thinking maybe Eovia should make separated interferes for each environment"

Sorry, but I very much disagree on this one. The reason that Bryce is pretty much a landscape renderer is that it was split up like this, and becomes more specific instead of general. I am all for separating different general tasks, but in the current interface I only use Assembly, Modeling, and Render rooms, Animation is pretty much useless. I can model terrain without trepidation in the modeling room, and I can edit the atmosphere easily enough from the assembly room. I fail to see the need for either to move. As for posing, I think it is easier to pose objects if you can see what's around them, so the Assembly room works just fine for that.

One room that I could see adding would be a morph room, which would allow you to control not how the morph object currently looks (that would be done in the assembly room), but the collection, naming, and modeling (by linking to the model room) of all of the child morph objects-- and therefore keep them from needlessly littering the assembly room. Of course they would need to add the morphing features to make any sense of the room, which I hope they do.

EMC

Also, if you look at the beginning of the time line bar, there is a little arrow pointing forward, opposite the one at the end of the animation pointing back. It took me too long to notice this first one, which you can use to move the beginning of an animation forward, so it will start rendering at n seconds. This is really nice if your using a particle system, or anything else that needs a space of time to get aligned/working properly. EMC

You could try using the procedural fire shader that comes with CS [see image]. It seems to animate well no matter how long your animation is (go to the first frame in the time line, and set the completion parameter to 0%, skip to the end and set it to 100%). Using ctrl+drag-drop, you can copy the fire shader from one channel to another really easily. You can then put it on a plane, or use the billboard primitive if you have Anything Grows. You'll want to remember to set highlight to 0, and turn on "no light interactions when fully transparent".

I find that the particle systems are good for doing the sparkers, but i've never really had any luck with the volumetric fire.

Alternatively-- though I've never used it-- ZMorphics [ http://www.zmorphics.com/ ] sells PPEx, which has a plugin for particle sprites, allowing you to use the billboard technique on individual particles.

EMC

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=403252&Start=1&Artist=EMC&ByArtist=Yes

I don't know when 4 is coming, but I should imagine sometime in the fall-- it won't have any significant advances in any of the things your talking about (I think). The only reason I said you might want to wait, was because it sounds like you don't really think you need it, and if you don't, it should be cheaper to buy the one than to upgrade twice within half a year. Would you get the difference in cost out of having Studio half a year earlier? If you would then buy it.

Global Illumination is excellent. The gist is this: in the real world light bounces off objects. If the sun is shining in the window, the ceiling is partially lit. This is because the light coming through the window is bouncing off the floor, and lighting the ceiling.

When you use the GI renderer, it will do all the calculations as to what needs to be lit by this bounced light. I might also add that caustic effects (light intensified though a lens, for instance), can be done with the GI render. If you want to do anything photo-realistic, the GI render comes in handy.

Smarmy means: sleek, or unctuously or fulsomely flattering-- sorry, I just sort of enjoy words like that...

The link is to a render I did a while ago, when I was starting to play with the GI renderer-- the middle one is probably the best.

EMC

For animated text and logos, there may not be a good reason. However, when you get around to logos, a new feature in Carrara 3 is bevels in the spline modeler, which will help make smarmy logos. If you can afford it, you can make sense of it. The Global Illumination (GI) renderer is really nice (probably the best on the market for the price), and I've pretty much stopped making images that don't use GI.

You should check out the spline modeler in Basics. In it you make a cross section, and extrude it along a path to make a shape. The vertex modeler, which you get in Carrara Studio, will allow you to make objects by creating points in 3d space, and linking them to create a mesh. Basically, it makes modeling much easier once you've got your head around the idea.

You might also want to wait and see what features Carrara Studio 4 has... They are supposedly making improvements to the animation features.

If you render using a movie in the backdrop, I'm pretty sure you'll loose any sound it has.

EMC

Falconperigot is correct. As far as I know, you can do this with 3d Basics. In the properties tab (I assume 3dB has one) in the assembly room, follow the steps from the image: 1) click the drop-down 2) select "scene" 3) click the drop-down on "backdrop", and select "map" 4) click the open button, and open the source you want to use (it can be a bitmap or movie) This will allow you to rotoscope, which is nice when you are trying to match camera movements. For low quality video, it may even work for the final, but using an video editor probably will get better results. As to whether to upgrade 3d Basics to Studio, once you've realized that the spline modeler doesn't do all it should-- took me about a week back when I was using Raydream 3d (that was about four versions ago)-- Carrara Studio will pretty much buy itself. Hope this helps. EMC

You use shadow catchers-- the catch is, in C2 at least, and I think in C3 too, shadow catching doesn't work with anything but standard light sources (spot, bulb...). You create a rough approximation of the environment in 3d, on the properties tab, switch 'shadow catcher' on for every object that simulates a surface, and set the textures on the objects to be black with no highlight-- else the shadows will look odd. You can get a pretty nice composite with it, but as I said, I don't think it will work with the HDRI lighting. The image shows a composite I did entirely in Carrara, which turned out decent-- a wire frame of the scene, the background image, and the result.

EMC

JPG's and BMP's have three channels (RGB), with values between 0 and 255 (0 being black, and 255 being red, green, or blue). The GI in C2 uses 24bit images only. In a JPG or BMP or PNG, or whatever other 24 bit image type, clouds and the sun wil most likely both be white. The GI is done using the color values of the pixels, so the white clouds will cast as much light as the white sun. In HDRI, instead of a value between 0 and 255, the format supports a value between 0 and a one followed by 38 zeros (someone correct me if I'm wrong as to the actual number, but still, it's basically a really big number). This means that the clouds can look white, and the sun can also, but the suns actual value in the HDRI image can be much greater then that of the clouds, and therefore it will actually cast much more light. The only real difference between JPG's and BMP's is that JPG's have better compression, so that the files are smaller. EMC

kaom: As to the size of the image, it was pretty small (maybe 800x800), and is my default GI sky light source image. The reflection in only half the sphere come from the entire lack of light in the scene. With no light, the objects will be reflected as black. This technique basically will only boost the brightness of the sky in reflections. EMC

Here is a quick experiment I did. I don't know if it fits the bill at all, but here is how I got it (mind, the whole thing wants some work, I did it in a couple minutes). First I did a render with the GI and such, that looked nice, but not very crisp. Then I turned the backdrop to black (so it overwrites the background image I was using), and turned all the lights to zero, and removed all ambient light, etcetera. I then rendered it, and got just the reflections of the background, everything else was black. I took this image, and placed it over the first in Corel PP 9, using additive, so that it boosted the reflections, while adding nothing to the rest. As I said, it was a quick thought.

EMC

If it is the sky plane, you can set the size of the atmosphere, with maximum altitude setting on the properties tab... Don't know if that's the problem though... I've had some problems with it when rendering high altitude images. EMC