Hi! this image: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1643367&member
use a spotlight (with softshadows) just outside the window, directed inwards. Indirect lighting turned on and a big white wall on the opposite side of the spot (inside the room, not visible in this camera angle) for those photons to bounce from. A hdri for backdrop but not used for lighting, you can use an normal image for backdrop, work just as well. Hope this helps a little, but these kind of scenes are veeeery tricky to calibrate...took me several hours just to balance the light...

Hmm.. I tried Carrara 7.1.1 and it crashed on my first render, It was a simple scene with a m4 and a hair. I think it can be something with the transparency, because one of the cores just stopped on the hair, and when the other core was done carrara crashed and shut down. Or perhaps its a amd dualcore problem, Im on a amd athlon 4200+ with 3.25 gig of accessable ram. Other than this C7 felt sluggish on my system. Never had this sort of problem in C5, just the "run out of memory" problem and I guess theres just not much they can do about that. Hope you get things sorted out, perhaps C7 just like new systems better.

Ooops, almost forgot; the way the "window" is arranged, with thin cubes blocking some of the light, there will be some coarse shadows on the wall no matter the quality settings. You could try a more open window too, moving the lighted box further away so it won´t distract the view.

Ok, it start to look better now. You can crank down Photon map accuracy to "0" and it will render a lot faster with very little (or no at all?) quality loss. In this scene I think you could set object accuracy to "1". No matter how high quality settings or how expensive render software you use, you will always end up with some noise in the end. A cheap but effective trick is to add a texture (wallpaper) to the wall, then you won´t notice the noise. If the noise still bugs you there´s always photoshop.  Oh and one more thing, you got a "floater" on the table (magazine hovering above the table).

So I´m not the last dinosaur here? I too love those little art-covered boxes containing a couple of CD´s, some bonus offers and a PRINTED MANUAL. I could easy pay a 50$ extra for a printed manual.

For me Daz was the second worse thing that could happen to Carrara, only Corel would be worse. That said I don´t think Daz is a bad company, they´re just not just right for Carrara. When I bought My first Carrara 3 I think It was a "cutting edge" product when it comes to high end features to a low price.

I jumped from Carrara 3 to 5 and thought I might go from 5 - 7 now and give Daz a chance. When I saw they left us old Eovia users out in the cold by not launching a rebated upgrade from v5 I too decided to leave Carrara for other software. Besides I do not like the direction the developement has taking, like you said; Carrara is now a backseat app to Daz flagship, Daz Studio.

I will probably continnue to use  C5 for a long time, I still thing it´s a powerful app in many areas but perhpas it is time to learn someting new...

The eye texture from poser models is often a problem in Carrara ( i.e. too dark). If you add a small amount of glow to the eye texture it usually help a lot. Another thing to remember when playing with global illumination is to check the "light trough transparency" (for eyelash) for both the raytracing pass and global illumination pass.

Now thats a great demo! Mush have been lots of work behind it.

Hi!

I think you  mix/confuse the "main" camera (default named "camera 1") with the directors camera.  Choose camera 1 in the upper left corner and then you should be able to see exactly what you render (as if you where looking through the camera). The directors camera is very helpful to navigate in the scene without disturbing the poition of the main camera.

/Tommy

No you are certainly not the only one, I ordered my copy on november 7th and havent got anything yet. I have contacted elements5 regarding the order and I will also write to eovia and let them know how I feel about the way this thing is handled.