The snowman went quickly, but I got the idea to have him sledding, so that took more time...

Nice modeling, especially considering you originally used booleans. I'd love to see this textured and lit with Godzilla's foot about to stomp it!

My offering to the challenge, a little green guy I call Makk Nugget. All modelled in C months ago, but just boned and rendered for the first time here.

Litst, I can't comment much about the cost of Photoshop, because I work for an ad agency that buys all the software I use, nor can I comment about "Gimp" because I've never heard of it (I'll have to check it out). I currently use Photoshop 6, and the sheer range of control it gives over image manipulation is not only impressive to me, but has saved many of my assignments by allowing me to do things that would be enormously time consuming/expensive to create any other way I know of. Photoshop is a workhorse in the world of advertising, and it's an industry standard that is understood by the clients I work with. No other image manipulation program can claim that, no matter how intuitive it is to use. By the way, not all Americans own gazing balls, just as I'm sure that not all French are rifle-droppers! scifirex

Excellent suggestion, Litst, but I can't stand idly by while you badmouth Photoshop! I took your image and added some Photoshop "smudge"-ing to the grass under the ball and the ball's cast shadow. Such an effect can add realism by making the 3D elements actually look like they're sitting on and interacting with the background, and it only takes a few minutes. I love Carrara, but Photoshop is an absolute necessity for a commercial artist, in my opinion! scifirex

I contacted the makers of Furrific a couple of weeks ago about a Carrara version. Their response was that they are too busy to do it themselves, but are looking for a third party to write the necessary upgrade. How agressively they're looking remains to be seen, of course...

Does this count? I created this image for the Renderosity Magazine cover contest theme "New Beginnings". I liked the idea of the "new beginning" for a newly-hatched dinosaur in reality being a new beginning for the mammals as the killer asteroid comes crashing down. Anyway, this got little respect in the voting despite the incredible feat of balance displayed by the baby rex in his egg! Modeled in Carrara and rendered in Bryce.

Is there a spherically mapped shader in tis particular file? I work in an ad agency and a co-worker of mine both run Carrara on Mac systems (both OS 9 and 10). We've found a bug in the program that automatically crashes Carrara when we try to re-open a file where there is a spherical map. Our only way around it is to open a new document in Carrara, import the old file, and change the offensive shader. Other than large file size, this is the only thing we've found that crashes the program.