I found this picture from SoftImage gallery website. I like the renderer alot. I wish I could afford Softimage its way too expensive and am afraid to buy it. I hope Carrara or Poser can make identicial renderer like the photo. Can you make a picture like it? Waldoo

Yes, definitely yes . Carrara supports global illumination with skylights to make this kind of lightning . To model the woman, Carrara isn't the most productive solution, but it can do it . See my head modeling tutorial on my website (in my sig) but keep in mind that it's an old tut and that Carrara supports subdivision surfacing now and that makes things much easier . The hair would be the tricky part, but nothing impossible here ... litst -----> www.chez.com/litst

I tried to use GI it made my girl's skin to blue. How can I fix it? Waldoo

It's probably because your sky is too blue, so it casts blue light . Try another color that is less saturated, it should work .

Totally agree with litst on this one. Carrara 2.X can do this. Use white in your background. You could add a blurred picture of the forest as the backdrop. Should work just fine. -Kix

-Kix

This image really is an example of ibl or image based lighting using an high dynamic range image, HDRI, in the backdground to generate the lighting in the scene, IMO. The image is rendered using GI in order to get the subtle variations in color on the rendered model. Carrara can do this if you have a suitable background image and you set the backround to that image, play with the sky intensity and render with GI. You don't need to spend $17,000 to achieve this effect! This type of rendering can make even the crappiest model look good and is not a special feature only of Softimage. One thing that separates Carrara and packages that support HDRI is that they also support special image files that represent a 360 panorama for the background, sometime called image probes. This type of image is wrapped onto a virtual sphere in the background that completely envelops the scene without messy seams and maintains better perspective relative to the camera. Also, HDRI images encode a greater range of color/brightness data per pixel allowing for a truer range of lighting values for use in rendering. These two features are normally present with packages that support HDRI. It is hard to do this in Carrara without generating a panoramic like image, ie very wide image that does not have a noticable seam and proceeding as I mentioned above, playing with the sky intensity to simulate hdri. Carrara does not support HDRI images directly and the wrapping of an image onto the background in Carrara and producing the proper perspective relative to the rest of the scene takes some trial and error.

Carrara 2x do not import sequenced obj files or animated obj. Its not really worth to work on Carrara except modelling unless they support sequence import function. I know that Carrara have bones but i am not going to drag on all joint dials for each move. Poser have better offer; Dial library, links joint to the control source or with other joint dial, export sequenced obj, and many more. But Poser have very poor with rendering performance and the picture quality. Bryce have good render quality but not same as Carrara. I have small "Computer-self click and typing" program for bryce to import each obj in for each frame to be rendered. I can ask programmer to make program like it for Carrara 2. Hopefully Carrara 3 will support sequenced obj import function and joint dial library. Waldoo