WOW! Incredible image!!!! How about a tutorial on it for those of us still trying to figure it all out. Did you do this in C1 or C2?

Beautiful image! Details please...

that is incredible... A few threads back I was looking for someone to sell me on upgrading to C2 and nobody could. But this image just did. Sometimes a picture IS worth a thousand words.

mvernon:
I did this test image in Carrara 2 and it was pretty simple. There are two objects in the scene: a cube which has been scaled to look like the top of a deck, and a sphere. For the sphere shader I used the chrome shader in the shader tray. For the deck I used a texture map that I got from the web (don' t remember where, maybe from someone here) which I used both in the color channel and in the bump channel. The background is a picture I also got from the web which I tiled with a value of 1 horizontally and a value of 3 vertically.
I also used Anything Grooves (displacement mapping plug-in) on the deck, to give it a more realistic look, but you can get a good result without it also.
Now for rendering:

1. In the scene properties I turned ambient light off and set skylight to 200.
2. I removed the light that Carrara adds to a new scene
3. In the Rendering room I chose Global Illumination as the renderer with the following settings:

• Anti-aliasing -> best (the default, fast, was not giving good results)
• Object accuracy -> 1 pixel
• Shadow accuracy -> 2 pixels
• Indirect Lighting enabled, no interpolation
• Lighting Quality -> good
• Accuracy -> 16 pixels
  The rest of the parameters I left at the defaults.

The rendering took approximately 40 minutes on a PowerMac G4 733MHz with 384MB of RAM.

And of course, I used depth of field for the background.

WOW! Increadible, looks like a friggin photo! Thanks for sharing your how to as well! -Paul

that is a nice render. the dof really locks your eye on the sphere. i have some questions about your machine, just to help me get a better idea of the amount of time the GI adds to the scene. what was the original render size in pixels of the image? how many megs of ram are on your graphics card? and how many megs of ram are alloted to carrara (if you're using os9)? -pix

Very nicely done. This global illumination looks very powerful. Thanks for sharing this with us!

Pixelicious: The original render size was 640x480 pixels The Graphics Card has 32MB of RAM (NVIDIA GEForce 2 MX) In OS9 Carrara was allocated 102.4 MB