Thank you Hoofdcommissaris (great name!) I swear I looked everywhere trying to find them and didn't see that button. It is strange that it is separate from the other presets. I wonder why the manuals don't cover that. Thanks again.

Thanks PhilC and ockham so much. The script sounds like the exact solution, but I'm not familiar with Python at all or how to make a PC version work on a Mac. I will try the scale-down approach and see how it goes.

Been gone a long time - all of my efforts have been geared toward upgrading my customers to OS X and troubleshooting their various issues. The last piece in my quest to completely leave OS 9 behind, was Carrara, and joy of joys, it is now OS X native. And double joy, it supports my dual processors! I'm learning how to use bones for the first time and I've come across an issue, which maybe someone can help with: when I apply a constraint to a bone it doesn't stick! When I select the bone again after applying the constraint, it says there is no constraint. Is there something I'm missing?

If you're interested in some serious surface treatments that apply to most 3D situations and software head over to www.dvgarage.com and check out the "Attention to Detail" area of the site. If you can afford it, pick up the Surface Toolkit CD or DVD for $199 (I was fortunate to have gotten this in a recent promotional deal they had for Electric Image.) It has 166 hi-res photoshop "grime" files to use in your shaders along with some Quicktime tutorials about how to use them in conjunction with some great lighting theory. I've learned more about shading, lighting and imitating reality in an hour from these tutorials than from the piles of books I have in my shelves. Highly recommended. Michael

I like! Especially the blue glow against the pink. That'll be a kick to animate.

Thanks for the comments guys. The smoke is indeed post-processed in Photoshop; I'm not real proficient in controlling volume effects in Carrara - need more practice. As for where you can see the whole series - well, the whole series isn't done. But, I threw together a quick site explaining a little about the worms (others have asked about them and what's wrong with me). Included are some sketches from the early days, the complete pen & ink version and current samples from the 3D version. And here's the link: http://www.olywa.net/mclarsen/Showdownweb/index.html

I hear you willf! I began my graphic career with those archaic tools 12 years before the first Mac. For a truly satisfying experience, everyone should have to "spec type" for a 5 column, 12 page daily (hopefully remembering the correct leading); cut apart pages of galley type; pasteup with FPO graphics or create the ones needed; create acetate overlays for additional colors or effects; get the whole mess under the camera; shoot the negs; strip them for plating and then have the client change one of the jump-stories or delete it all together and away we go back to telling the typesetter about the additional galleys we need. When I think of the amount of hours involved in getting a piece ready for print or using that new-fangled press-type or making type/layout changes compared to what we do with computers now... Long live the bits and bytes!

I'm standing on shakey ground here in my home town of Olympia, Washington. mclarsen

Only as old as I feel, which changes from week to week and ranges from 18 to 80. mclarsen

My 2 cents: You don't say if you are on a Mac or PC, but if you are using the Mac version, I would recommend not going to Carrara until Eovia comes out with a fix. The Mac version of Carrara has some serious stability problems. Apparently, PC users got a better product and weren't as happy with RDS. I have been a long time user of Ray Dream and have always been happy with its performance and stability, with the exception of the vertex modeler which is intolerable in my opinion. If you use that feature in RDS, you'll really love the Carrara implementation. I recently purchased a new Dual-processor G-4/500 with 1.2gigabyte RAM and the new NVidia card. As an experiment, since I can never keep Carrara running reliably on anything else, I gave the application 1 full gigabyte of RAM and still had the same crashes and freezes as before; especially when using physics or complex procedural shaders. In spite of all the problems, I will jump on the "new and improved" Carrara when it comes out because the program is just plain cool! mclarsen

Or you can do it in the spline/freeform modeler. The default is set so that whatever you initially draw or import on the drawing plane will extrude. Many options available for modifying/tweaking to the desired shapes and you can also do lathing within the freeform modeler.

The multi-view works just like in Carrara except there are a couple of more combinations. In other software, this would be considered a major numerical upgrade as you wind up with almost a completely new Poser after installing the pack. They have really listened to the user base and packed a lot of improvement in this "pack". The only difficulty with bones I'm having (I'm busy converting my western worms to Poser figures to make animating them easier) is aligning the bones properly; meaning that as long as things are fairly straight and symmetrical it's pretty easy, but if you have several items that curve, such as curved fingers, then alignment is more challenging. I think the problem is that all the other bones are visible behind the ones you're working on; all the white lines and triangles get confusing. This will just take practice to overcome, hopefully. So, as a tip for creating figures in Carrara (or elsewhere) to go into Poser, keep all the elements and poses as straight as possible to make "boning" easier. My question to Curious Labs is if they are preparing a plugin for Carrara as they have for 3DS and Lightwave. Poser seems to have much more in common with Carrara than the other two. I've written them with that question. mclarsen

It appears that the page is gone. Anyone know what's up or where any other download site is? By, the way, I just got my copy of Poser Pro Pack and for those of you who want to get your characters into Poser, this thing rocks. The bones feature is worth the price alone. Check it out!

Very nice! I only have one suggestion: The grain on the seat part of the stool does not seem to be quite right. The handle and legs are perfect because the grain follows the contours realistically or vice versa. I think the seat should have a different grain pattern on either the top or side. Michael

Not to rain any parades, but you will not be able to eliminate the Type 2 errors completely. There are less of them with the patch installed but, it is still next to impossible to keep Carrara stable on the Mac. I have been trying for over a year to keep it running in a productive sense on 3 different Macs. There are periods of clarity and smoothness, but then the simplest things will send it into fits of type 2 and type 3 errors. It doesn't matter how much ram you give the application; in one case, I have given it 320mb of ram with no improvement. After keeping track of the activities that cause the crashes/freezes, it is obvious to me that how Carrara accesses memory or a bug in how it utilizes that memory is the source of Mac Carrara problems. The system version impacts it as well. The most stable version seems to be 8.51. Unfortunately, I prefer system 9.04, and that is less friendly with Carrara. I'm now installing system 9.1 on one machine and will test Carrara on that - fingers crossed. If you haven't already, you can turn off all extensions, except the ones needed for basic functionality, turn off virtual memory, allocate the maximum memory you can to Carrara and don't run any other programs at the same time. You then may have a chance of keeping it stable, but you'll also have to trash the preferences when the type 2 errors start again. My personal opinion, backed by 15 years of Mac fanaticism and tech support for the graphics industry, is that Carrara is broken (or was never finished) on the Mac and needs to be redone. The new owners are facing a real challenge in this regards, because of the imminent release of OSX.