Ok, Carrara Studio arrived today. Just got home though. Wife had surgery today for 2 herniated discs in her neck. Been at the hospital all day. Hope to be able to dive in this weekend. For now, I will just be reading the manual. Donnie

Good luck with your wife. Do tell us what you think. I am particularly interested to see what a Light Wave user thinks of Carrara.

Glad to see you on board! And say good luck to your wife:-) -TOXE

I sure hope your wife does well an feels better.

Thanks everyone. She came through the surgery with flying colors as they say. As far as Carrara so far, I need to spend some time the next few weeks to get a good comparison. I have been using LightWave for so long I am used to using keyboard shortcuts. So far I find the modeler in LightWave to be easier and faster. Could be the fact that I have been using it longer. One thing I am sure about is selection in LightWave is much easier, polygon or point. In Lightwave modeler there is a "void" area in the lower left pane. Clicking here deselcts any points. When I select a point or points, they dont move. Once selected, then I hit "T" to move them. Only the points I have selected will move, no matter where I drag in the window. In Carrara, I usually end up selecting new points and moving them by accident. Also in LW if I need to add more points to my current selection, I just hit the "T" key again, that puts me back in selection mode again. Then I hold shift and select more points to add to the selection. If I want Polygons I hit the spacebar and it goes from point selection to Polygon selection. As I mentioned, once I am done with the current selection I click in the lower left pane of the interface and it deselects everything. Sounds like a simple difference, but working in modeler in LW is vey fast and efficient. Also in LW there is the option for object replacement. Say I have animated a ship flying by. Now say I want it to be a different ship, but want everything else in the animation to remain the same. In LW I can hit the replace object button and choose a new object. This object has all the animation that the other object had, including anything in the scene file (deformations, scale, etc). In Carrara it seems I need to either go into the modeling room and delete the object, then import the object I want. Then return to assembly. But also I have to remember to save the object again as something different to avoid overwriting the original object. I think that is right. If there is an easier way I would appreciate any feedback. One other thing that comes to mind so far is clip maps. Lightwave allows you to use clip maps on geometry. If I apply a mask in transparency, I can use that same texture on the object level to cut the geometry. This allows for more accurate shadows since I am actually affecting the geometry. I havnt found a feature similar in Carrara. Other than these minor differences I have been thrilled with Carrara so far. There are many things in Carrara that I wish LW had. The tree generator comes to mind. The fast GI and Caustics is another area. I like the soft shadows, they are not much of a render hit. In Lightwave to get soft shadows requires either a shadow mapped spotlight (which doesnt always look great) or an area light (render hit). Another way is to use the spinning lights trick that is employed in Eki's PlugPak. The physics engine works well. It bogs down on complex objects, but its easy enough to use a stand in to track for the more complex object. LW 8 has hard body physics, but I didnt upgrade, so I cant compare the two. Lens Flares in Carrara are much better with a lot more control. As I mentioned before though, before I switched to LW from Infini-D I was thrilled with Ifini-D's lens flares. One thing I noticed though. In Infini-D I was able to use tube lights to simulate laser beams--they were visible. Playing with them in Carrara I have yet to be able to do that. The selection issue I mentioned with regard to the modeler also carries over to the assembly room. Too often it is easy to move the wrong object. Pressing the spacebar in Layout(LW's assembly) goes from moving the object to rotating it. Press it again and it goes to the scale feature. Eventually you end up back to the move buttons. It makes positioning objects very easy. In this regard I feel LW is more precise and much easier to use. But LW has had years to mature and reach the level it is at. Being version 3 I am very pleased with where Carrara is at right now. When I consider the price for all these features its even better. LW also has a powerful graph editor and spreadsheet function. I would like to see Carrara have these at some point as well. This allows changing say a whole bunch of lights and their properties at once. I tried grouping lights in Carrara, but when I went to properties for the whole group I couldnt change anything, just the properties for the individual lights. Also LW has a global panel for lighting. If you want to lower the intensity of all your lens flares at the same time, just change global lens flare intensity. This changes them all proportionately. While still maintaining the brightness differences between them all. So a couple of gripes are really all I have at this point. Once I learn all the keyboard shortcuts I beleieve I will have less things to complain about. This is without a doubt, for me anyway, the best bang for buck out there. For some who does freelance on the side or someone who does this everyday this is a very competant program. Most of all I enjoy using it too. Donnie

I'm glad to hear your wife is OK, and that you got the new Carrara. But from an outsiders viewpoint, why would you want Carrara is you have Lightwave and know how to use it? I've been a Carrara user since it's inception, and before that with Raydream. I like Carrara a lot, I think it's a great program for those who can't afford the big packages. It's a powerful app that will reward those who put their time into it. But, honestly, Lightwave is 10 times the program, and has proven itself in TV and movies for years. I think you will be modelling a lot of your stuff in Lightwave for a long time to come. Carrara is very difficult to model a lot of things with, some things are just not possible to do and make look right. Bottom line, Lightwave is a proven professional app, that has been used extensively. Carrara is a growing 3D app, it has a long way to go before it reaches the mountain that Lightwave owns. But, I think you will have fun with Carrara, and you will find reasons to use Carrara instead of LW for some things. Good Luck. kaom

Exactly. I plan to have fun. I imagine I will use Lightwave for some time to come too. But I like many of the things that are in Carrara. To get trees in Lightwave requires a plugin. Tree Druid from Dynamic Realities. Cost--$195. Other dedicated tree and plant generators can be had, but with large poly counts and they lack the complete integration with the application. Carrara cost me $399. For that price I get a speedy (compared to Lightwave) GI renderer. An amazingly fast raytracer. I set about 100 spheres up on a tiled plane, with reflection and refraction on in Carrara. With an atomosphere in the background. It renders very fast. Now, of course we dont buy 3D software to render out shiny reflective spheres, but it can give a good idea to how fast an engine is. I was impressed. I plan to duplicate (as close as I can get) the benchmark included with Lightwave, specifically the one with refractive and reflective spheres on a grid. I want to compare times and image quality. The indoor lighting example was also noteworthy, I was able to "play" with the photon settings and get very reasonable render times for full blown GI. Yes Lightwave as a whole is a lot more powerful than Carrara, however I rarely have the need for most of that power. I do some product shots and a several flying logos each month for local TV commercials. I do not do any character animation, and I do not foresee doing any anytime soon. I am well versed in most areas of the program and I do find some of the features indispensable at times. So for me and my needs, Carrara may be a better fit. If not, I still have Lightwave 7.5C, which fulfills most all of my needs now, but like I said the tree feature and the rendering speed were both worth consideration to me. So yeah I guess some may think I am crazy to buy Carrara while owning Lightwave, but you never know til you try. Plus I think it is important to have competition in the marketplace. I find it amzing that even though Carrara overall is not up to Lightwave in total features, it has some that are much better and it has some that Lightwave doesnt have. Of course Lightwave has a lot of features that Carrara doesnt, but I rarely need these. Quite a few of Lightwave's features and the overall robustness of the program are more suited to a studio environment. I have kids and until they grow up and finish college I dont see myself moving to another area. So for a while I am stuck here, with no intentions to move. So I have a small market. Light freelance work is all I will get in this area. Carrara should be able to handle most of my needs, if not, then its back to Lightwave. For now though I am having fun learning a new app and exploring all its features. If I were in a studio environment or faced with hefty challenges week in and week out it would be entirely different. In the end, if I cant implement Carrara into my workflow, then I am out $399. I can make that back easily on one job. Not bragging, just saying that sometimes experimentation is ok, and I saw enough with the demo to know I wanted to try the full version. Also, if it doesnt work I just gained a $399 tree generator. lol Thanks for the kind words. Donnie

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

Welcome. Be sure to check out all the resources. http://www.3dxtract.com Thats a big one, nice magazine available for free. http://www.vizualds.com My site. Lots of tips and downloads so you can play. A nice GI setup for testing/experimenting too Glad to hear that your wife came out ok, I'm sure she'll be in pain for awhile, make sure you take care of her. Yeah ,Carrara is a big secret a friend of mine actually did a lot of the recent blockbuster ad logos with Carrara, its rendering engine is fast for the price. Brian brian@vizualds.com http://www.vizualds.com

Hi Brian. I will check out your site in just a bit. I may have already been to it. I have been scouring the net for info on this program lately.

That's the one thing I've made money doing with Carrara, It's flying logo heaven. For stuff like that, it's a breeze and the results look broadcast quality... I wish more studios used Carrara for broadcast graphics, there would be more jobs for all of us.

Yes, good point Kaom. Unfortunately for a lot of 3D artists, flying logos pay the bills so to speak. But sometimes it can be fun, if you get a client who is open to different techniques and looks. Most of what I do is replicating the look they see on national TV. Local clients want that look. I would someday like to work at a studio, but by the time that could be a reality for me, the digital landscape is going to change, I think. So for now flying logos and product shots, and stuff I do for myself for personal satisfaction.

I hear ya. For me 3D is a like digital LEGO'S. We're all like kids playing dollhouse. We can do whatever we want.. Oh wait, no...we're artsits and these are out tools and we can do whatever we want.. kaom

Donnie, With regards to controling many lights at one time try using master lights in carrara . I haven't used it but I think you should be able to control many lights by a single entry into the master light dialogue box. See page 374 of the manual . It may do what you want. Regards Mike

Donnie, I just tried the Master lights and it works fine , may not be totally flexible but playing with this feature for a few minutes makes me wonder why I haven't used it before. Anyways here is what I did. Group all the lights that you want to change using the "Master Light" feature into a single group. Then select this group then look in Edit menue at the top of the screen then select "master light" from this menue. You can change the settings to effect only certain types of lights,or all the lights in your group. (bulb,distant etc. ) Go back to assembly room and all your lights are updated. Thanks for your comment about the lights ,now I think I am going to be using this feature in the future. Mike

Great Mike. Glad you found that. Been too busy taking care of my wife to actually play much with the program, but I should get a chance to get into it sometime in the next week. I had to work on my sisters' computer last night and reinstall Windows, so I took the manual over there to read while I was working on it. The manual is pretty good. The master light option is pretty cool. I know I used the spreadsheet feature a lot in Lightwave. Right now I am in the process of working with the texturing options. I notice on the Texture map option there is no option to set the position of the map. There are no numeric entry panels to set the exact position of the texture. Perhaps this can be done with a reference texture? In LW you have control of where the texture is positioned. This makes it easy to animate movement of the texture along a given direction(s). If not Im sure there is a workaround. I hope anyway. Also, the layer option for placing textures is very strange. Its very hard to position them using that method. Guess I will have go into the modeler and set up domains. I am trying to get different materials for each part of a logo. The bevel, sides and front. I will keep experimenting with it. Need to pick up the manual tomorrow from my sister's house. I accidently left it there last night. With the manual it should be easier. The online manual is ok, but I prefer the hardcopy/ Cheers.

Ok, figured that out. Pretty simple actually. I created the text with the text primitive. Then I placed a bone and then attached the skeleton to the text and bone. Once I did that I removed the skeleton and the bone. This way I can go in and edit the text in the vertex modeler. I know you can create text with more options in the spline modeler, but its often just as easy to create it with the text tool in assembly. But when you do that you cant set shading domains, because when you hit the model button with the text selected it just goes back to the text entry panel. By attaching a bone to it, it is automatically converted to a vertex object, then you can edit it as normal. Anyway, once I went into modeler I just selected all the polygons using the marquee tool. Then I added a new shading domain called "bevel". Sounds strange but there is a reason. Then I deleted all the other domains. Then I selected just the side polygons and added a shading domain called "sides". Then I selected the front polygons and added shading domain called "Front" Once in assembly I used the layers list option. I set the first layer or base to be the color that I wanted for the bevel. Chose apply to "Bevel". This made the whole object that color since the "bevel" from the modeler actually includes the whole object. Then I set the next layer to "Sides" only. Then the final layer to "Front". This allows surfaces to be applied perfectly to the different elements of the object. Im sure everyone else knew how to do this already, but thought I would pass it along. Donnie

One more thing. I really like the shading tree. Took a while to get my head around it, but I am starting to like it. It offers an infinite number of ways to do certain things. Also, in the example above. Once I set the surface options for the first layer, I just "Ctrl dragged" a copy to the next layer. That way the initial reflection and highlight options were already set. Saves time. Then its just a matter of adjusting the colors.

For placing texture maps use a "rectangular" layer on your object. You should then see numeric entry fields for changing locations. One note to remember that these fields represents a value of 0-1.0 . So think in terms of percentages when placing the tmap using these numeric entry fields. Also , there is a "translation " in the x and y axix which moves tmaps Hope your wife has a speedy recovery. Mike

I don't think Carrara can exclude an object from recieving light, someone else may know a workaround but I cant think of one right now. Mike

Yeah thats what I was afraid of. Sometimes it comes in handy, but I am sure I can work around it. I dont need it too often so I think it will be all right.