Waldo,

You're right, for the most part Gemini just automates the "duplicate with symmetry, line up, weld, fix all the holes, rinse, and repeat" process that is traditional symmetrical modeling in Carrara. It does come with a cut-away tool, but it's focus is the process above. It is not a traditional symmetrical mouse pointer style tool that some other packages have, but I never claimed it was.

The idea came about during the C1 beta when I modeled an entire human figure. Probably 1/3rd of that time was spent doing the tedious synching up the sides so I could do test renders and could visualize where I was at in the figure. It occurred to me that I could automate that and save people who do that style modeling a bunch of time which of course is one of the biggest points of using a computer, remove the tedious, easily automated tasks so the artist can get down to doing the art part.

I have a few customers who really love Gemini because of the time it saves. One customer in particular thought as you did that the symmetrical mouse pointer style tool was the only way to go. After the first time he used it, he was hooked, specifically because it wasn't a symmetrical mouse pointer kind of tool. When he could get inside the mesh to move points around without having to play the show/hide polygons game he realized that for some problems it was actually a better solution.

I put Gemini in the same category as Cognito, they automate and save time. You can manually do all the things that Gemini and Cognito do for you, but if you're a professional getting paid for your time, you'll probably make up the purchase cost in enhanced productivity on the first job.

I have a real world analogy if that helps. I build furniture as a hobby. With a circular saw, drill, sander, and chisels, there are very few things in the world you can't build (assuming you can get dimensional lumber). I took some time off back in December to build a new mission style headboard. I put it together using mortise and tenon joints, and the slots to bolt it to the frame were basically long deep mortises. I did the mortises by drilling out the bulk of the material and cleaning it up with a chisel. It was long and tedious work, probably took me 4 hours total. I have to do another one and this time I bought a bench top mortiser. It was a relatively expensive tool for something that does just 1 thing, but it will take that 4 hour job and make it 10 minutes. In this first project it won't quite pay for itself, but it will in the first year and I'm just a hobbyist.

Regards,
Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
3D plug-ins for Carrara
http://digitalcarversguild.com

Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
Carrara and LightWave plug-ins