Any one tried Carrara 4?

WOW!! Well I thought I would have to cough up the money for lightwave, but I gave the internet one more sweep and finally found a comercial program willing to give me a free demo.

Even this demo has power that blows blender away (not trying to be mean to the creators of Blender, that programs not leaving my system for a while if I can help it.)

Anyway, here’s my story. I wanted to make a comic series. For those of you you who have never tried that, if you want to make large scenes, of things like cities, Blender doesn’t have enough power to run all the meshes. So I found Carrar and got the demo. I loaded up one of its base meshes, a spring. Then I imported this thing http://gallery.mudpuddle.co.nz/view_photo.php?full=1&set_albumName=phantom&id=homij_pic_3
(homij mesh) and this thing
http://gallery.mudpuddle.co.nz/view_photo.php?set_albumName=phantom&id=knife_3_d
and a land scape, all that I had made in Blender. Then I imported a Raptor and a boy mesh from Poser. The system didn’t slow down at all! (Blender would have crashed about four models ago.) Then something caught my eye. My homij mesh’s main color in blender was currently green, and his claws were gray. Low and behold, green skin, gray claws, nothing had changed! My landscape was green (it had a texture, but I doubt that will be the same, and I don’t know how to find out yet… but it does transfer textures…)… green again! Freaking cool! If only it were free. Oh well. The format looks extremely easy to learn, though this is just my first day. Price? Amazon has it at around 250. Lightwaves price? Over 570 at the lowest I’ve ever seen.
But I’m just curious of any buyer beware stuff you guys may have. Anyone else try this program? http://www.eovia.com/products/carrara_pro/carrara_pro.asp

This may not be the best place to get feedback on a commercial application, afterall, this is a Blender site…

But as it turns out, I just bought Carrara 4 Pro also. I’ve got well over a dozen years producing 3D animations for multimedia, most of my work was with 3DS, but also LW and A:M. I took an extended break from work and now that I’m back it was time to either update or upgrade my software. I took a look at nearly every commercial app out there: Maya, Max, LW, TS, A:M, EI, Zbrush, Silo, etc. etc., I also downloaded every open source app I could find, including Wings3D, Blender, Anim8or, etc.

After trying all these apps, I decided to buy Carrara 4 Pro and keep Blender. For me, and the way I’m used to working in 3D, C4Pro was the easiest to learn of all the apps out there, I was up and productive in -minutes-. I find it’s UI elegant, it’s renderer awesome, and it’s features list is great. The modeler in C4Pro is lacking in a few areas, but they’ve packaged a free copy of Amapi 7 Designer with it, and with this combination I can create and animate just about anything. There’s a healthy list of 3rd party plugins, most of which are dirt cheap. Incidently, get the Pro version, it’s worth the additional cost.

Carrara’s biggest following is in France, so if you’re anywhere else (I’m in the US), you’ll find that there aren’t alot of fellow C4Pro users out there. The best place to hang out with fellow C4Pro/Amapi users is their group on Yahoo.

I’m also keeping Blender for two main reasons: it’s features are growing faster than any other app out there and the Blender community is incredible.

IMHO, Blender + Carrara 4 Pro + Amapi 7 Designer = one happy animator.

Paul