Guess who I saw walking around at MacWorld? The Poser businessman! He went straight out of Poser's Walk Designer into Carrara3 with nary a hitch to his stride. Antoine showed me a couple other bits in the Eovia booth. Transparencies and textures cross over, too. The plugin is due in a couple months. :) I was nailing the poor guy with questions about whether that or that would work (the Spanish Inquisition should have hired women), and he wants to stay noncommittal on some features until they are worked out. The modeler is pretty spiffy, too... with the subdivisions he was getting incredibly light models polygon-wise. The show itself was big and noisy and crowded. (I came home and took a lovely nap.) However, the atmosphere is optimistic and enthusiastic. Folks like showing off their new goodies and it is a great chance to talk to technical experts about their products. I had a couple of PhotoShop questions which may have been answered (have to try out the solution). Corel was not there this year (I missed seeing their rabbit), but the Bryce interface for terrains appears to be sneaking into Carrara. I suspect them of integrating tool pathways the way Metacreations should have. FormZ, Maya and Cinema4d were all there. FormZ had a nifty model with had been created in plastic from a virtual one. It had internal staircases and everything! The DAZ folks are reported to be there, but I missed them. The art show had some interesting pieces, but they all appeared similar, despite a panel of judges. They were all uneasy works, with David Ho being a prime example of this style. The display of them was poor: too crowded to stand back and look at them. A bit more physical airiness and they may not have been as oppressive. Carolly

Carolly, did MacWorld sponcer the art show or was it someone else?

too bad those new credit card sized Apple 4 GIG Ipods are still way over priced :-(

Carolly: This is GREAT news about Carrara3. One main reason I upgraded was because I thought they might do a plugin but wasn't sure. Woo Hoo... Thanks for the great news! Joe

It's great to hear about the plugin. While I don't use Carrara much myself, I can see how this is exciting for a lot of users. More options is always better :v)

Well, I'd read that something interesting was going on between them, but it is better to actually see it happening. I can't afford to upgrade (it's a couple hundred dollars); it may be that I can't afford not to upgrade if all goes smoothly. Thanks to Dr Geep we can make a lot of items out of primitives, but Cararra's got a real modeler and getting organic squishy shapes out of it is easier. I prefer to use the better tool for the specific job, but at some point the various tools have to work together to produce the image.

Attached Link: http://www.macworldexpo.com/gallery

Barbarellany, The gallery homepage is www.macworldexpo.com/gallery and it looks like it is basically presented/run by the Silicon Valley Art Museum: www.svam.org with a panel of 9 judges brought in to make final selection. The images will be on view there for a couple months before traveling across North America. The next contest starts Feb 15 with entries to be received by May 9th for the summer MacWorld. (rules will be at the first address, but might not be up yet) They choose 30 images with thousands of dollars worth of prizes. Competition is probably stiff, but even so we have several members here who can do as well as what I saw in the show. Poser was used in a couple of the renderings, Painter in a couple, but almost everything went through PhotoShop. :) Carolly