Today Daz announced they will launch Carrara 7 Beta in mid November. The Beta release will be will be open to the public!

 

Here are the new features and enhancements that I gathered from DAZ's official Carrara Forum..

 

1. 3d paint capability

2. Real display of Bump and Specularity inside 3D Paint

3. Vertex modeling in assembly room

4. LOD (Levels Of Detail)

5. UV enhancements (UV mapping and tools in Carrara 7 are now very similar to how   

    they work in Hexagon. This also means, no more UV dialog because it's all integrated 

    into the 3DView and the properties tray)

6. Add Relax Seams to the UV Editor

7. NLA (Non Linear Animation) merge tracks

8. A lot of focus on addressing bugs and enhancing existing features.

9. OpenGL enhancements including support for larger texture sizes in Open GL display

10. Multipass rendering

11. Reduced memory allocation errors during render.

12. Optimization of content shaders to greatly reduce cases where the same shader is

      loaded multiple times.

13. Hair dynamics enhancements

14. Zero a content figure, will be split up, so you can zero the pose and morphs separately

15. COLLADA Export

16. The ability to turn off constraints without also turning off the joint.

17. Improved content support, including Michael 4 compatability.

(By the way did I mention M4 has been released...psst...pass it on.)

18. New splash screen

 

If time permits: saving to PNG

Daz is looking into an alternate solution for moving scenes between Daz Studio and Carrara. Time permitting; this might make it into Carrara 7.0.

 

Dynamic cloth is independent of Carrara as it is being developed by Optitex. (or not, it depends on what rumors you listen to)

I'm hoping Mark Bremmer will produce a C7 tutorial! How 'bout it Mark?