Yes, I still use Hex and Carrara! I just built a new machine with an I7 12 core chipset and GTX 1080 video card and 32 gigs of ddr 4000 ram. Rendering is fast and easy. I'm toying with some Christmas stuff, the Erzgebirge is animated but I'll just upload a still shot.

Like learning piano, modeling demands that you start with simple things. Do the absolute easiest things on your coffee table or in your house. Cups, vases, plates and then speakers, T.V.'s  Chairs, tables and then an entire room. Keep doing simple things and you'll run into problems that you will need to learn to solve and this will help you master the toolset/ Once it becomes second nature to you, then you can start working on a technique. You can create any model starting with a single straight polyline and rough out the forms and work in details as you go. Google up some images of a wrought Iron fence or a plant and just keep solving the "how do I do that"? puzzles and pretty soon you'll be making whatever you like.

Holly, 
     When you run dynamics in Poser-5 it creates frames and naturally in Carrara it will import at frame 1. So the dynamic cloth imported is often mistaken for "not working" when in actuality the draped cloth is at frame 32 in Carrara... I know it sounds kind of obvious and goofy, but a lot of people overlook it. 

Steven

Not only is every image different (or scene) but every camera angle is different too, so what may be good lighting from one camera angle can suddenly and dramatically turn bad from another. Lighting has always been my nemesis, i'm too impatient to get it right, but I'm trying. :) good tips here.

Wow, strikes me as odd that I remember when the only "resource" was the IOW (Image of the week) website in the days of Carrara 1 and 2. Times have changed, but my nostalgia hasn't left me, I miss that site, clean blank white web pages with some great renders and that was it. Now there's a ton of stuff! :) Don't forget eovia3d.net Thomas did a great job on it.

I doubt it. If you registered and saved your info you sb able to get the mac version. Ask eovia.

Did someone say; Make art? :) Erm, make omellette, make job done, make phone calls go away, make employees happy, make family shuddup, make bills paid, make model have perfect mesh, make plug-ins free... Oh, how I miss my Commodore 64 and the days when colored or blinking type made you giggle. Whatever happenned to the lite-brite? State-of-the-art graphics application for every 7 year old with NO BUGS! The only problem with that application was you ran out of black background paper. : When you turned 9 it was time for the Photoshop of Graphics apps, an Etch-a-Sketch. Cute thread. :)

select ONLY figure 1 in the tree. ;)

I keep an extra folder of shaders in my documents folder so I can copy them in and out to my desktop real fast. I've toyed with the idea of making a free online library for upload and download, but there's two problems with that. One is coming up with a good sorting or naming convention.. For instance, if i made a website where you could upload ten of your favorite shaders and browse and download 1 thousand other free ones donated by community folks, there would no doubt be 100 of them called "wood". lol okay, so 5 thousand users might be trying to upload "wood" shader and getting rejected because overwrite is turned off... See what I mean? Plus people would be renaming to weird stuff all the time so they wouldn't get blocked and then you'd have a nightmare trying to find what you want. Plus, taking any security concerns out of it, there's no good way to export a shader with a preview of it unless you make your own thumbnail, which isn't hard, but not time efficient either when you want to upload and download stuff quick. I did ask for a shader export button for c6 so the community could have a very simple way to share shaders. I think in theory it's a good idea, but who knows if its really practical. Lastly, you can buy shader cd's and they are nice usually, but Carrara is different than poser and doesn't have or really "need" a content store like poser or daz do. Plug-ins are one thing, but shaders in my mind are a little iffy. I'd rather make a fair one than buy a great one, but that's just me.

Kinda, but there's workarounds,... Use transposer if you can and stuff stays put. If you have to use native, try not to conform the stuff in poser first.

Well, for simple short animations, poser 5 and carrara 5 are pretty easy to go with. Can do the animating in Poser 5 and then just render it in C5 standard or pro, I think thet're both the same as far as poser is concerned, but if you have C4 already, i'd upgrade to C5Pro, (Just me) cause it really is a lot richer overall for the upgrade price. Transposer works just fine with clothes and props and dynamic hair etc... No apparent disassociations that I have seen , but all your animating needs to be done in poser and then exported to C5P, native importer can alter the placement of shoes etc if you conform them in poser and import to carrara, but you can repose in Carrara and control orphs etc. I still use transposer more because it's easier for me. If you're not worried about 169 bucks go with c5 pro...better upgrade, more capability overall.

What do you have now? I have poser 5 and Carrara 5 so I use transposer and just keep poser 5 open to modify or tweak the puppets and then just update "live" to Carrara, this is a fast and simple workflow in most cases.

For city scapes and stuff there are a lot of different ways to skin the cat too, you can use photos or backdrops and just build the geometry that you need to for the 3d effect and often times this can produce some stunningly nice renders. Also, if you get C4 or C5 you can model the stuff yourself and do some nice shader work to make them convincing without a whole lot of hassle. p.s. I think C4 reads max. (I think)

To follow up on waynes post, if you bring in natively, you can adjust morphs, if you are finding swords and other props getting "misplaced" on import you can do two things, use transposer and they won't get displaced OR do not conform them in poser, just place the shoes on the feet or the sword in the hand and save as is and they won't shift or move about. For stills this is fine, if you want to pose them you do have a conform in native carrara import although I havn't tested it yet. I stick to transposer mostly and do all the rest in pozer.

Ya, that's the best place around probably, but also don't hesitate to ask questions here or there or on yahoo, because you'll get answers, good, bad, fair quicker that way than anything else prolly. Quite a jump from 1.1 to 5! Have you been elsewhere in 3d or just off the map altogether?