I'm having a very tough time considering whether to upgrade to Carrara 2.0, or to go for one of the mid-priced 3D packages. In the running for me are Carrara 2, Lightwave 7 and Cinema 4D XL7. I have only a Power mac G4 at home which is why Studio Max is not on my short list.

While Carrara is far and above the most affordable contender (I qualify for the $199 upgrade from Meta's Carrara), I have some reservations about where to spend my money due to some very serious quality control issues I came across while attempting to use Carrara for professional project. I did a project for work entirely in Carrara on a Power Mac G4/450, and I encountered several very serious bugs that were real obstacles during production. The biggest problems I had were:

1. Animations failing to render at the end of the first frame, with an "unexpected error" dialog popping up. The workaround seem to be to set the rendering file format to quicktime, and them switch to sequenced pict when it came time to save.

2. View window failing to redraw after Eovia update to the software. I would click to go from single-camera view to 4-camera view, and window would just go blank. I ended up having to use the view menu to switch views instead of the view-switching "dot". I found no workaround or fix for this.

3. Failure and unpredictibility of anti-aliasing in a render. This was the deal-breaker for me. I tried during my project to render everything with high-quality anti-aliasing. Sometimes AA would work well, other times I'd get bad renders that were very poorly anti-aliased. I could render the same exact scene twice, with the same settings, at get wildly different results in terms of anti-aliasing quality. To this day, I have no idea what was going on. In the end, I had to render everything at 1600x1200 and use photoshop to shrink it down to 640x480, in effect faking antialiasing by downsampling. Argh!

Given what happened during this project, I'm very hesistant to continue doing production work with Carrara and I'm exploring the two other packages mentioned.

What really keeps me from using a new pacakge is not the price though, but the huge learning curve. I have the demos for C4D and Lightwave, and in checking out each one it was like I was looking at some kind of control panel for an alien spacecraft. The sheer unfamiliarity of these interfaces has me really scared to switch programs. I tried to make a simple scene in LW and C4D with a sphere and Cone, and I got really disheartened and frustrated. And I didn't get anywhere in the Maya demo!! Clearly, each of these softwares requires MANY hours of training and tutorials before I can even use them well enough to evaluate or compare them.

So right now, I'm really torn between just going along with what I know and love, which means getting Carrara 2.0 and hoping for the best in terms of big-fixes, or jumping headlong into one of the more expensive and more powerful programs. From playing around with them at work, I'd have to say that Cinema 4D looks like my other real option. I find its interface intimidating, but less so than Lightwave's.

Sorry for the long-winded post! I guess after all this, my really question is: is anyone else in the same boat? I'm really stuck deciding here, there are just too many pros and cons on this issue for me to commit to a software package! I am really truly hoping that Carrara 2.0 is stable and not riddled with bugs like 1.0.

Any input whatsoever on this topic could be indefinitely valuable to me. Thanks in advance Rostiy folks!

-Adam

P.S. I'm a Director Lingo programmer by trade. 90% of my 3D work is just for hobby, but I have actually done a fair amount of rendering stuff for work also. I also use Poser at home and freelance projects, so Poser-compatibility is an issue for me too.