JLovesart2: It's right on thier website. Here's the path: RDNA freestuff link, on the freestuff page there's a "Freebie Sections" under that is a RDNA lights link. On the 4th page of that section are two lights that could fit what you're asking for: Softlight and Whitelight vol. 2. Xena: there's a pretty good tute on basic lighting on RDNA that may be good for ya. buh-bye m!ke

I was at Runtime DNA and in their freestuf section was a P6 interior light set. It looked pretty good from what I could see. hth

Attached Link: http://www.inagoni.com/comment.php?comment.news.18

Notefinger: don't forget that on the web site for Inagoni, there's a download page that has many free d/l that work with Architools. I linked to the page on this reply. And there's a forum on the Inagoni site where you can get questions answered and such. Check it out! Have fun!

they're not quite the best pals you'd expect. Unfortunetly. However you can get positive results if you make sure that you disable the use external binary morph and the use compression options in the misc pref tab in the Poser Preferences. Also, if you use anything like WyrmMaster's Stand-Alone Dynamic Deformers, they will mess up the import of Poser files into Carrara, unless you want to have invisible people :D hth

And Eovia has a new vertex modeler called Hexagon, it's download only right now and I'm pretty happy with it. I've been using Carrara for years and am really happy with it. There's a plug in for it (It's extra and if you buy the Carrara Pro version you'll get a discount on it when you order) called ArchiTools that enables you to construct a house, interior or exterior, create holes for windows and doors and place the preset doors/windows or you can create custom doors/windows. Pretty darn cool. The Carrara Plug-In, Transposer 2, doesn't quite work and play well with Poser 6, there's a supposed bug fix in the works, but no idea when it may be out. Probably when the Poser 6 SR 1 gets released... Carrara can export OBJ files, and I've had pretty good luck using them in Poser 6 (and earlier versions). As good as firefly is, Carrara's renderer is the easiest to set up and use, not to metion pretty darn fast, even on my 733MHZ Mac.

IMHO, the "about a week" should've been 3-6 weeks. However when it comes to squishing bugs -- it's very hard (if not impossible) to accurately predict when the SR will be truly ready for release. Sometimes fixing a bug here will make one appear there and the circle of fun continues... FWIW, from what I've been able to gather, it should be a very worthy SR. Hopefully.

Nice screen cap-mini tute, Nomuse! Thanks for posting it. It helped me out.

Just got the downloadable version -- I work at a "copy shop" so a printed manual is like, no sweat :) And first impressions, boyHowdy! An interface that actually makes sense to me! I can finally toss Amapi into the ol' trash and fergetaboudit. As claudia said in a post in the Carrara yahoo list, the manual is very well written and the movies in the PDF really helped me get a feel for the software. This feels like a home run for Eovia!

Attached Link: http://www.crtoons.com/dmc/main.html

Now that I have Hexagon (the $99 price was what I had been hoping for), I'll probably model in it, import the OBJ into Poser and then use Transposer to port it all into Carrara for rendering. As far as scaling goes, glought, by trial and error I hope to be able to model the object in Hex and then when importing into Poser use the "figure height" option to get the object scaled correctly. I'm very close to actually figuring out how to make it work and get consistent results. As soon as there's animations that I feel okay about posting, they'll be up here. Right now it's just at an experimental stage. It's kind of ironic, that I don't concider myself an animator, I just want to use 3D to create comic art for my stories. The URL that's linked here is for a weekly comic strip that's currently on hiatus while I scope out this whole 3D/carrara/poser thang. I would love to see those characters in a 3D enviroment... Nomuse, while Carrara's physics engine is better than Poser, Poser does have cloth (soft body) dynamics and strand based hair systems. Even though they're processor-intensive, the final result is worth it. One other reason why I choose poser is that I can create a base (nude) character and then design clothes and costuming for him/her/it and have a wardrobe that can be used at a fraction of the time it would take me to do the same just using Carrara alone. Let's say my superhero character, AstroGal has a costume and normal street clothes that she would wear in her civilian ID. I would have to not only bone each as a separate object, but would also have to re-do the bone influences and some of the morphs mostly for the clothing. With Poser all that is mostly avoided. And having parameter dials so I can just "dial" up a pose, save it and re-use it later, same with materials. Again, with Carrara, that would be very time consuming. The fish animation took me the better part of a month to animate (using Carrara 3 and using only bones for movement). The ability to use Poser's magnets and morph tools, the options open for unique characters and such are wide open. Didn't mean to write a novel here, hope it gave some insight to the decision making process that lead to my current workflow. Oh, glought --If Poser and Carrara are brother and sister, does that make Metacreations Darth Vader? ;D

From talking with a Curious Lab tech support guy, it seems the upcoming Service Release 1 will address the memory bug and deal with the shrugging icons' cause in Mac OS X. I haven't created any large scenes w/P6 yet, but the only times it crashed on me was when I was trying to import an OBJ that had it's material paths messed up.

Attached Link: http://www.crtoons.com/tdworx/priscilla_5mar03.mov

bwtr: I've used boning in Carrara since v3 and it's okay, but there's no 'real' way to save poses other than creating it once in the animation and using copy&paste keyframes to replicate it. The URL is a link to a quicktime movie that I did some time ago using Carrara and bones. For me the value in poser is being able to rig a character and then save poses that can be re-used. I've made more progress in one week with poser and carrara than in a month or so with only Carrara. Also Poser has dynamic cloth and hair, which is a big plus. Shonner: I'm still trying to get a handle on Amapi. In my experience, Amapi's interface gets in the way of me actually doing anything. I'm not giving up on it, but again with the upcoming release of Hex, learning Amapi may be a moot point. Hopefully I'll be able to get the Xtract CD-rom soon and I'll check out the article you mentioned, bwtr.

Wonderful Character design there, Noviski! I really get the feeling that there's some history to that character (the actual myths notwithstanding) that helps make him real to me. I really like how the muscles are depicted (as somebody else pointed out). I especially like the "Popeye" forearms. About the only thing that leaps out to me is how the palm area just seems to have a groove between the heel of the hand and the base of the thumb at the palm. It would look better, imho, if there were more curvature in the thumb-base area. Looking at a hand, there's a " depression between the pinky-heel of the palm and the thumb-base of the palm, especially when the thumb and pinky are touching Overall, great job. Are you planning on animating it?

bwtr: I need to export from Carrara to Poser to bone/animate the human characters that I created in the Vertex Modeler using Carrara 4Pro. While, render-wise, Carrara is heads&shoulders above Poser, when it comes to character animation, Carrara is sorely lacking, even with the improvements that v4 has. As far as textures goes, I have Baker and hope to put it though some paces in the next couple of weeks. The couple of times that I exported a selection in Carrara as an OBJ and checked the "Convert proceedural shaders to textures" the resulting OBJ would freeze P6. I'm sure it had something to do with the filepaths or something. I feel that converting the proceedural shaders to maps prior to exporting (via Baker) would result in a pretty smooth export and import. From talking with a tech support guy from Curious Labs on Friday, I got the impression that the situation with Transposer/Poser 6 is having some forward movement. Thanks, bwtr, for the latest post -- it did clear up some things for me. The distinction between save as, for entire scenes, and export for the selected object. What I'm really after is a workflow that will enable me to create my own characters in Carrara's Vertex Model (or eventually Hexagon or Silo, if Hex is over priced for my budget), import that character as an OBJ into Poser, create a skeleton-rig for it and then use Transposer to import the animated character(s) into Carrara for rendering. thanks again for the info.

What I"m doing in Carrara is to import a figure, modify it and create a new figure that I'll import into Poser, give bones and such to inside the Setup Room. Later I'll be just exporting characters of my own creation to Poser and rigging it/them up in there. The surface-point "offset you described, Nomuse, is really annoying. I've found the same thing to happen to "native" Carrara meshes if they are too small. for importing, the settings I've found that works okay is to leave the Auto Postion setting checked. Disable AutoScale and have 1 OBJ unit equal 50 Carrarara Units. Create Carrara Objects as *Vertex Primitives, create single poly mesh. Grouping - Create only one object. This'll import the Poser OBJ in a good size for the Assembly room, allows editing in the Vertex Modeler w/o funkyness. And when exporting from Carrara and importing into Poser, the Poser dialog allows for rescaling back to Poser "size" just like Nomuse said. There's no need to re-scale the object when exporting it from Carrara, at least for my current uses. I have Transposer 2 and poser 6, so until Eovia and Curious Labs work out how to make the two work and play well with each other, it's not really an option. Although there are work-arounds, Transposer 2 and P6 are still funky, as sometimes I'll get one figure and only the props attatched to the second figure (no figure body gets imported by Transposer). Still working on that one, though. Thanks for all the comments and such, it's been a big help.

Thanks for the info/suggestions Mateo and Nomuse. Exporting and OBJ from poser and then working from that is a great tip! Especially since I'm using Carrara to model in -- and there's no way to set normals direction in it. I tend to model in quads and really work at keeping the mesh organized and clean, so no star points. Just Quads and some Triangles. thanks again, all the replies have really helped. Wotta great community!