This was a Pop Quiz, inspired by my last few pieces. As I was building it, I wanted to try out the Shader options in Carrara and see if I could come close to what I had learned to build with Poser. The formica floor is all proceedural. And so are the stripes in the ties. This took a few days of tinkering, the stripes. It was easy to do 2 colors, but to add in an alternative third color was more difficult and made me cry ;) The shine on the jacket is proceedural, using the Glow channel. The balloons were added for a bit of color and for reflections and are part of the Carrara library; I like utilizing these inhouse props, such as the poinsettia's in the Christmas Card. As you can see, I also learned how to uncheck a box to free up the camera proportions. When learning software, sometimes you are blind to the obvious. I had a much wider scene to begin with, which would have created a lot of unused space and take longer to render. Speaking of rendering, I tried to learn the do's and don'ts of the options to get the best results. What I found was is using Soft Shadows, the BEST options brings C to it's knees, but Good is just as good with half the time. Indirect Lighting... you have to use the maximum, best settings to kill any dirty, sooty shadows with an exponetional hit to render times. One interesting thing concering Carrara and Skin: using a decent textures, such as Pictureland's Kane, utilizing BOTH Ambient light in the scene alongside Gamma Correction in the rendering brings out the skintones well without the need of subsurface scattering or the glow channel. The initial GI render was clocking in over 24 hours long. I killed it and got the render times down to 2 1/2 hours. Once again, a learning render. I'm looking forward to doing some outdoor scenes soon, too. Thanks for the look (please view at Larger Size), and for the comments.