i'm a long time user of carrara 1 (not intensive) and have been wondering now if its finally time to upgrade to ver3/4

i've been testing out ver3 at a friends on a small simple animation project and cannot believe the bugs! nothing works properly in the animation section. random animations appear between key frames, speeds are not consistent using the motion path, groups and subgroups dont work properly...what gives? is 4 anybetter?

is it just me? were on a mac os-x what should have taken me a couple of hours is now taking me over 8 and i'm still not done.....!

You might want to test C4P, it has a ton of fixes really, and a lot of work has been done on the animation side of things. It also has several new features, like better terrain. Even if you are limited to rendering only 4 seconds of animation, and there is no saving of projects you can work with animation that is longer than 4 seconds in the demo. Importing your scene from one of the earlier versions is of course as simple as it always has been, just open. Only once have I encountered weird animation in cs3, and it was probably due to a hidden keyframe (a keyframe lower in the hierarchy that I couldn't see without opening the entire hierarchy), which made a timelapse sky animation I did suddenly change direction in the middle of the animation, very annoying.

Hello spinners, C4 is much better on the animation side now. (working on a mac) I've complete several projects for broadcast. Motion paths behave and being able to use multiple computers on the same render has shaved hours off of the render time. What kind of delays are you getting while rendering? As far as "weird motion issues", Carrara automatically has bezier selected as the tweener function. Depending on the type of motion you have, it can exaggerate some movements and "overextend" motion between key frames. I usually set my default to linear and then convert to bezier as required between keyframes. Mark