http://server2.eovia.com/demos/carrara5/presets.html
Looks super sweet like candy and very funtional ta boot!
Presets? No thanks.
yes, please.
not because i’m not able to tweak my own materials or append for my library, but it’s just a matter of time.
being able to quickly load a full material setup (shaders+texture, etc)whit some visula feedback will be usefull imho.
not one of the most needed feature but it will be nice.
it’s a broswer, premade shaders or home made it is soooo much cleaner to see what the hell your going to put on the mesh … it is also a model viewer and scene viewer.
beside the use of a material browser, maybe blender shader could be saved as individual files, or at least blender could provide a preview of a shader befor loading it into the scene.
but did anybody try out carrara lately? i got kinda amazed when i tried out their GI and Caustic system.
the speed was impressive. i am not so sure about the correctness of the rendering but they were fast.
Carrara targets Those new to 3D which may happen to be Graphic Designers. Drag…Drop or editing a story board everything is set to make the user think less. Seems 5 has stepped up to the plate with advance rendering. It mainly a highly developed scene graph editor. Although it has better animation tools, its still behind blender. Its comes with a massive array of models and presents to get you rendering professional withing minutes. You just happen to lose a hell of a lot of control in certain areas of the application, plus its not really a modeler [make blender/wings as a placement here].
So the main point is how easy it is to setup to render quality images. Its new present manager… pff its just the same as the old one, but you get to see all the presents together. But if you look at the price tag you may want to consider A:M your stuck with splines, but you get a powerful render engine as well with almost half the cost, plus a hugely simple/yet very power animation feature set.
dude, I’m not trying to sell the program here. sheesh. It’s shader preview window kicks useability @ss thats the whole point 
freedom to think
material libraries are indeed very helpfull.
i have one on my cad program at uni and it has all materials you would expect to manufacture. all glasses, metals, plastics, the colour of these can then be changed indipendant of their material settings.
Alltaken
i did not say carraras modeling features are the bomb.
you also are stuck only with the lambert light shader as far as i know.
i am unsure if carrara realy has better animation tools. i like their storyboard view. i find this one next to onion skinning in softimage very helpfull.
but the render engine is just realy blazing fast. however with better AA it slows down as well but is still amazingly fast.
claas
i use to use carrera to render visualisation of merchandising displays because the renderer was so fast. these days i can’t be bothered to open it - i just run everything through blender/yafray.