A big warning if you guys are thinking about getting Softimage. Intend on upgrading your PC or MAC, they have fairly average min. requirements, but my system which is well above those requirements really bogs down on the simplest thing. I did find out that its likely my video card which is ATI. I contacted support and they stated its a known issue with ATI cards, and its something unfortunately that you can't fix completely. Also, know that while the non-foundation versions will receive maintainence releases, foundation will not, I'm not sure if they just plan on upgrading, and charging or what. But no patches etc. This is directly from Softy tech support. 5) Is motion blur in Carrara visible in reflections/refractions and through transparent objects? Are caustics and global illumination cast by moving objects or moving lights correctly motion-blurred? Yes this is now in Carrara. 1) Can Carrara render out user-defined frame buffers from G-buffer channels like specularity, reflections, diffuse, ambient, Z-depth, and shadows in a single render pass for assembly in a post-processing video FX editor like AfterEffects, Combustion, etc.? This provides extreme control over every aspect of a CG animation in post. For example, if your director decides after the render is complete that he would like to adjust the specular or diffuse color on some objects, you don't have to re-render the scene... for instance, you can accurately adjust ONLY the spec or diffuse layers, or change the color of shadows easily in post without affecting any of the other properties of the render. By saving the Z-depth info, you can save valuable render time by applying DOF or fog, etc. to your animation in post, rather than rendering it out. Things like this can prove very valuable to pros when they're working on something in a limited timeframe. Carrara can do this. 2) Can Carrara's GI solution be saved to a file, and re-used in an animation, so that when the camera moves, only the necessary photons are mapped to the existing pre-calculated solution, allowing MUCH faster GI rendering in an animated scene, since the renderer does not need to re-calculate the GI for every frame from scratch. Renderers like Brazil, Vray, and MentalRay have the ability to cache the intial photon map, and add to it incrementally on a frame-by-frame basis. This can be partially done with Baker, in combination with Environmental lighting. 6) Can Carrara create on-demand loading of object files and on-demand procedural object creation using geometry shaders: in MentalRay, geometry is not created until it is needed, the geometry cache maintains only objects currently or recently in use to reduce rendering times and concurrent memory requirements. Not exactly. But kind of Anything Grooves for instance doesn't render show at full resolution until rendering time, Anything Grows functions the same way. Also you can turn SDS off and on, so you can animate without SDS and then render then turning SDS on. Don't get me wrong I've demoed Softy, thought about purchasing it. But the complexity level, and slowness of the software was negative to me. And I am pretty sure we all know why Softy dropped in price. They don't have as big of a market share as they used too, and they need to regain it back. They lost there place up with the big software back when they were purchased by Microsoft (I believe it was them) and when they relaunced they have yet to gain the ground. And with C4D, CS4, HASH, etc at very good prices with similar feature sets its been hard on them. They have a great program, and do yourself a favor don't smash something until you do the research.