Hey Ashley, I tried to reply to your email but it bounced. Anyway, Email me with your mailing address and how many passes you want. Email me at philip@eovia.com -Philip

Indeed Amapi's focus is the modeling of the geometry. While there is a little bit of basic raytraced rendering (not bad one actually) and cartoon rendering, and a tiny bit of animation, it is really on the modeling side that Amapi shines. And, alas, you may either get hooked and totally like the interface, or just not know how to think different after all and prefer Carrara. Carrara certainly is much more powerful on rendering features, and animation. It includes visual effects, particles, atmospherics, fire, terrain, patchy fog, fountains, motion blurr, tweeners like Bezier or Noise tweener, and you can animate parameters on the shaders (you can't in Amapi). You can also render 3D on top of 2D backdrops, which can be animated (Quicktime, AVI). Can't do that in Amapi (altough you can render against a static image in Amapi). Carrara also supports a shadow catcher for making it look like there's a shadow caught from the 3D object onto the scene in the backdrop image. Nothing like that in Amapi. The list is long with modifiers to make explosions, black hole (tornado) effects, dissolve and more. Carrara really deserves the name 'Studio' in that it has a bit (or a lot) of everything. It event has 5 modelers - the terrain modeler (which can also import greyscale images so you can use it for much more than terrain), the text modeler, the Spline modeler, the vertex modeler and the metaballs modeler. And it includes Amapi 5.15, which came out about 2 years ago - not a bad deal at all. If you have a limited budget at this time and are hesitating which to go for, try Carrara, and see if you can model all you need with Amapi 5.15 (included) and Carrara's own modelers. Likelihood is that you will, unless you do indeed have some sophisticated heavy-duty modeling needs. Or it just doesn't click with the vertex nd spline modeler whereas you're happy with Amapi's tools and interface - certainly possible. See some examples at http://www.eoviamirror.com/movies - mostly Carrara stuff. If you have time to try the downloadable demos and trials, check http://www.carrarastudio.com/tutorials for Carrara tuts and http://www.tgsmirror1.com/Marketing/Amapi for Amapi tuts. Others are also shown in the main site. I have a bunch listed also at http://www.staigerland.com/amapi - both for Amapi and Carrara I like to think that Amapi is a little bit more oriented towards some features you might need in a CAD world, to manufacture prototypes (STL import/export), to make inflatable balloons ( e.g. http://www.staigerland.com/amapi/balloonproject ), when you nead robust booleans and fileting (chamfer) tools, and annotations of dimensions (distances, angles, surfaces, circumferene, volumes), when you work with data from CAD files (IGES) to be imported for rendering or further modeling, ... although I will admit I know Amapi better than the modelers in Carrara so I may not know it all enough. The truth is that in many cases it's possible to use either Carrara or Amapi to model something, but I have a feeling it'll be done faster on average with Amapi. Do you care to tell us more about your specific needs so we can make a better assessment? i.e. are you into print, web animation, 3D games,...? -Philip

Attached Link: http://www.eovia.com

Hi Genny, I certainly understand your concerns. But, as mentioned by Jackson, EOVIA is not part of a large company, not part of COREL either. Also, the September special (30% off)is not necessarily the best deal available to you. Since you have RayDream (or if you had Infini-D), a much better discount is offered - $149 instead of $399. If you had Carrara 1.0, it's even better yet - $99 for the CD set, or free download indeed for just the bug fixes with the 25 plugins. The CD is actually a set of 2 CDs (application CD and content CD), comes with a 500+ page manual, and they are hybrid CDs good for Mac *AND* Windows and the license works on either - you can sidegrade and switch platform. And it includes 850 models and a full version of Amapi 5.15 (last years last release of our Nurbs/polygon modeler - see the elephant tutorial at www.tgsmirror1.com/Marketing/Amapi >> go to Amapi 6 tutorials). Amapi 3D is now at v6.1 and exports to RayDream, Carrara, Shockwave and Flash. Trial available on the website too. I hope this helps. Feel free to ask if you have further questions. Also, there is a huge Carrara list at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/carrara - over 1400 active and enthusiastic members eager to help and many came from RayDream or other ex-M.C. products - feel free to ask them how it works with Carrara.

Ok, please let me know what you find works in terms of file formats. On the Mac, Amapi has 3DMF import/export, and VRML 1, 3DS, DXF and a few more. I wonder which format you find works best to get data from Amapi to Carrara. Here's some stuff done by a 12-year old in Amapi: www.staigerland.com/amapi (look for the mech - cartoon shader). -Philip

Did you use RDS 5.5 for rendering or for modeling? Do you use Carrara for both? Perhaps Amapi could be a better and more stable modeler, a free trial version is on all Tucows mirror sites now (www.tucows.com)for Windows and Mac, and it exports to RDS 5 and many other formats. Here's something that was modeled in Amapi and rendered in RDS 5.5: http://www.tgs.com/Galleries/Amapi3D/Spotlights/Megalex/megalex.html Other samples in the user gallery at www.tgs.com/amapi and in my own collection at www.staigerland.com/amapi/samples.html Anyone out there used Amapi and Carrara? Is the 3DMF export the best for this or DXF, 3DStudio...?

Not sure about Carrara, but my preferred place for looking for internet related shareware/demoware/freeware/adware is TUCOWS. Amapi 3D 5.15 for Mac and PC is now at one of the 400+ mirror sites all over the world - www.tucows.com - Multimedia tools/Image Editors. Just thought you might want to know if you're interested in the Amapi trial. For the trial password to unlock save/export, register at www.tgs.com/amapi (PC Demo or Mac Demo), no need to download again if you went to Tucows first. -Philip

Yeah, great stuff! The sound effects can tremendously improve the multimedia experience, no matter how perfect the visuals already are. I foudn this neat program at Target for $25 called MTV Music Generator, if you're curious about what you can make with it check http://www.staigerland.com/amapi/music2 and in the upper left corner you'll have 4 clips to choose from (sorry, Windows Media player only right now). I've only touched and grazed on the capabilities of this, there's a gazillion of sound effects hidden in there I haven't explored yet. I'll have to first upgrade my PC from 200 MMX (3 years old). -Philip

The message I found there states that Adobe was in the process acquiring Canoma, not Carrara. The message also comments on what Canoma and Carrara can do, but it doesn't state that Adobe bought Carrara. They only bought Canoma. Meta Creations still owns Carrara.