I use this when dealing with a winxp multicore system. its a freeware http://www.mlin.net/SMPSeesaw.shtml.

I hope this isn't a dumb question but is it possible to do figure animation with rotoscoping in Carrara? I'm thinking if yes than graylensman can make a video of someone interacting with his product and somehow in Carrara sync the live-action video reference to a 3d figure. does this make any sense? info on rotoscoping: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotoscope

winmount is a windows program that allows the creation of ramdrives from various formats...examples zip, rar, iso's. I haven't installed the carrara 6.1 update but I do use carrara 6.0.x pro. With carrara I use winmount to access runtimes in zip or rar files that aren't part of my normal runtimes which are always connected to carrara via the browser/content tab. at first I tried using an iso creation program and organizing my runtime folders that way. but since many programs open zip files I choose that format to replace the iso's. I may start using 7Z from now on for its higher compression rate.

looking at my two messages above it looks like not that much of a difference between the two images. someone might be tempted to say that a only a little playing with the lights will fix it. trust me the shader preview render looks way better using YetAnotherToonShader than the final render no matter what settings for final render I use.

My best efforts so far. the red thingy is a Carrara primitive sphere with a "normal" texture applied. no changes were made to the geometry of the sphere itself.

I use SMP Seesaw ( http://www.mlin.net/SMPSeesaw.shtml ) to manage my dual core. SMP Seesaw Pro is a more powerful, open source version of SMP Seesaw. It provides these additional features: Support for up to 32 CPUs Control processor affinities for system services Programmatic interface for C/C++, Visual Basic, Windows Scripting Host (JScript and VBScript), etc. hope it helps!

In case you need some more options...like batch conversion check out> free FBX Converter Transfer project data from one application to another quickly and easily with the FBX Converter. This utility lets you convert OBJ, DXF™ and 3DS files to and from the FBX file format. FBX 2006.11 Converter FBX 2006.08 Converter FBX Converter 6 http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=6839916

Eovia's price for the printed manual is excellent. If  there is a need to get a pdf printed you might want to check out an online pdf printing service like   http://www.printfu.org/index.cfm?mcAction=startOrder . I've never used them but am thinking of giving them a try.