Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Stryke 9 on August 27, 2002, 10:05:40 pm
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In case you haven't kept track of the daily adventures of me, I got Carrara 2 recently. Recently being a couple weeks ago, but effectively today, because I was out somewhere where they didn't have computers for two weeks, waiting patiently for a chance to get home and install C2 and FS1. Oh, I also had a life while I was out, but that's irrelevant. Anyway, let's pretend today was the day the package arrived, and I just installed it to test out its goodies.
It is beauteous.
As those of you who've been unfortunate enough to have me talk at you about software know, I'm a bit partial to some software that's a bit far from mainstream, to the extent that nobody's heard of it, and which is sometimes a bit... specialized. But Carrara seriously has it all. "Global Illumination" (that's radiosity, to those not in Eovia, corp. They had to translate for me), caustics, IK structures, sky diffusion and generators, tons of procedurals, and an intelligent motion-generating system. And it's fast. Damn fast. I've seen Lightwave on radiosity, and this is closer to standard ray-tracing than Lightwave radiosity. I haven't tested anything insanely intensive yet, but I happened to have a detailed room with glowy thingies, one and a half walls, and a roof you can't see, and it took maybe thirty seconds to do an 800x600. Probably not even. Keep that in mind, and also that I had every lighting effect turned on, from radiosity to soft shadows:
(http://www.wpierce.com/wlp/hall.gif)
I know the room isn't done (aldo, you see what I have to work with since the final copy got trashed?), but it should give an idea. I'll stop babbling, and just say that Carrara is also damn cheap- $300 or less. Buy it, at the very least so that I have compatible software for all your damn models.