I am a long time Carrar and Poser user. I do package design and walk around animation and am very comfortable with both. What does Shader 8 do that is different and or better than Carrara? Are they compatable? Do they compliment each other in some way? And whats the difference besides the cost between Standard and Professional? Always looking for a better way, vernonglen

I think you mean Shade 8 ;-) anyway Shade, in my opinion, is one of the WORST 3D programs ever conceived!!! Poser imports not withstanding. its user "interface" looks as though someone ,in a malicious act of cruelty, combined the WORST of an old copy of Quark Xpress 3.31 and the WORST of 'Pov Ray"& "Blender" and crowbarred in some spline modeling tools from the original alpha release of autocad for DOS . is scene navigation "tools" appear to be deliberately designed to prevent you from locating ANY scene object. I gave shade7 a good two weeks of my time as i was looking for a poser external render engine that supported ,PZ3.s natively it was not long before i determined that Shade was NOT a viable option . I now use Carrar pro4 Do yourself a BIG favor....FORGET SHADE!! :-)

wolf359, after your description i'll never vist the shade site!! Every program that share at least one pixel with Xpress make me furious!! -TOXE

Correct, I mean Shade 8. too bad, is there another Mac friendly program that would allow me to create clothing styles for Poser?

Shade 8 has a horrible user interface that is not very user friendly. e-Frontiers demo me Shade 8 at siggraph and I wasn't not impress by it at all. Also for a company that now owns both Shade and Poser their on poser import and support is a joke. Plus it is way over price. Ringo

I've bought Lightwave 8 (+ Vue) with free upgrade to 9 at 795 , with a difference of 40 , really Shade don't have sense! When any software house use the word "professional" on the box you can be sure that is a "beginner" software. Have you ever seen the word "professional" on the XSI or 3DS box?! Believe me, i'm working in the advertising industry since 10 years... -TOXE

As for the difference between Carrara Standard and Carrara Pro, there are a bunch of features that are really nice to have in C4Pro that Standard doesn't have. Blurry reflections, motion blur (that's pretty good, if rather slow), and more. The Eovia site details the differences pretty well. I found the Pro edition was what I needed for my work.

When any software house use the word "professional" on the box you can be sure that is a "beginner" software. That explains Windows XP Pro :D

Toxe: So how have you found the transition to Lightwave from Carrara? Do you still use Carrara? Ligthwave's pricing is looking very attractive and now in the range of programs like Carrara 4 Pro. And by looking at the feature set of Lightwave it seems like it is a more complete program. Now, who is going to do the art for the Carrara 5 box? :-)

Ok, I have to throw out comments on that one. 1.) One of my 3D students was eligible for a free sidegrade to Lightwave via some of his editing software. He attempted to use lightwave for my class versus Carrara, therefore, my exposure to lightwave has been through this student. Bottom line, for generating single images and straight forward animations, the interface with Carrara is holding its own just fine against lightwave. I also think the images Carrara can make can hit just as hard as lightwave (as a general rule). DISCLAIMER!: I think amazing results can be made by both packages when skilled and patient users are at the wheel. They both have their strenghts and weaknesses. I still think that Carrara is a fantastic product for the $. 2.) There have been other Carrara users who have "left" for lightwave and have wandered back here at Renderosity. 3.) I haven't researched it in detail recently but the word a couple years back was that you could get the code for a reasonable amount of $ but when you went for the plug-ins, hang on to your shirt! Carrara has come a long way in the last few years. -Kix

Hey Toxe, How are you liking Vue infinite, is Lightwave an easy transition from Carrara. Just interested in your comments.

Pretty much my opinion of Shade. I'll admit that Carrara has weaknesses. But Shade...has some big ones. The scene management/navigation is one thing that I'd have to say didn't make any sense and is akward to use. Plus some of the things that Shade is toting and innovative is a joke. Magic sketch for instance is essentially the commercial version of Teddy (google it) and offers nothing innovative. As far as LW is concerned. I own 5.6 and have never been that interested in upgrading. Even with the Vue I deal it just doesn't seem that tempting. LW is powerful but with an interface that is still stuck in the Amiga days. And as nice as Vue is, besides its plant system I've never been that interested in it. I'll stick with Carrara. It gets the job done.

How faster does Shader render compared to Carrara? Carrara is showing its age by its slow render times. Vue 5 Infinite renders my GI scenes much faster than Carrara.

I guess we may just have to wait and see what Carrara 5 will have.

I'm personally looking forward to Carrara 5. I'm hoping they've taken some of the public requests to heart.

Like including Hexagon with Carrara 4 for $299 now.

"Vue 5 Infinite renders my GI scenes much faster than Carrara." Took advantage of the pre-release Lightwave 9 + Vue 5 Infinite offer. Just received Vue and can't wait to start playing around with it. It has got to be a lot faster then Bryce. Man that demo clip on the e-on site is awesome. I just had to download a copy for myself. I think I have played it like 20 times already.

Anything renders faster than Bryce these days.

Yeah that demo is awesome. Though from playing with VUE Infinite I wasn't that impressed, essentially the ecosystem tool they rave so much about is just a replication tool. Whoopdeedoo! Still a good program though. The solidgrowth is what I like, though the quality of the plants are not quite what I expected. And I was somewhat disappointed. Much better then Carrara's plant modeler though. "How faster does Shade render compared to Carrara? Carrara is showing its age by its slow render times. Vue 5 Infinite renders my GI scenes much faster than Carrara." Really? When I demoed it, the rendering speed didn't seem that different. "I'm personally looking forward to Carrara 5. I'm hoping they've taken some of the public requests to heart. " I am too. I've been pleasantly surprised with each new release of Carrara. People forget that Carrara was gone for a few years from development and the fact they are pretty much on par with a lot of the features available in other programs in there price range is amazing.

It still renders better than trueSpace.

"I guess we may just have to wait and see what Carrara 5 will have." And waiting we have been for a while. It seems Eovia is taking there time with this new release, hopefully this means the release will have a lot of new features. The competition is getting tough out there both in price and features and it is not a good sign when a legendary Carrara artist like Toxe has already moved to another software package. I really hope Carrara 5 surprises us with great improvements and new features. Has anybody heard when it is going to be released?

It'd be nice if Hexagon, Amapi Pro, Carrara Pro, and Instant Viz were all just one Eovia 3D app with a new name for $495.

"It still renders better than trueSpace. " Where did that come from? "It'd be nice if Hexagon, Amapi Pro, Carrara Pro, and Instant Viz were all just one Eovia 3D app with a new name for $495. " We can all dream.

The 64 bit version of LightWave has just been released!

"It'd be nice if Hexagon, Amapi Pro, Carrara Pro, and Instant Viz were all just one Eovia 3D app with a new name for $495." I came pretty close in Carrara Pro 5.