Mental Ray isn't just for Softimage. In fact, I don't use Softimage myself either. I use Mental Ray in combination with 3dsMax 6.

"Carrara can do this."

Are you sure Carrara can render out user-defined G-Buffer channel info in a single pass? I'm shocked. Why don't other users seem to know about this powerful feature? That's something VERY essencial to making professional level animation, and having extreme levels of control in post. I know of NO other mid-level app that can do this. In fact, I wouldn't work in any application that couldn't do that.

Also, what about rendering in layers? For instance, if I have a character dancing on a stage, and I want to render the character and stage in seperate passes... can reflections, refractions, and shadows of the layer that is currently hidden to the camera still be rendered on materials in the active layer? For example, if I'm rendering the stage layer, can the character's reflection still show up in the shiny wood material of the stage, even though I have the character hidden to the camera's view at render time? In Max I have the option to hide an object or layer from camera view when rendering, but still allow it to cast shadows and reflections of the active objects if need be. If so, will motion blur still render correctly when doing this?

Message edited on: 11/06/2004 15:30

Oh, one more question about light control... Can I select one or more direct lights in a scene to affect ONLY the ambient channel of object shaders... and ignore shadow casting, diffuse, and specular properties of objects in a scene? This allows you to render a very fast ambient pass, to use as a base layer for compositing. After that, then you can render key lights, specularity, reflections, shadows, etc. to seperate layers for compositing in post. It's a good way to achieve fake GI in a scene, without having to render with actual GI calculations (faster). Also, can I use shadow maps instead of soft raytraced shadows? I find it very interesting that Carrara has a lot of the pro-level rendering features at such an affordable price. I actually began my 3D career with RayDream many years ago. It's the app I learned on. :-)

Nice a fellow Dreamer. Layers are not as advanced as you are describing, you get depth, channels, etc. Though from chat sessions with Eovia they seem to be planning on adding more flexibility with layers and the ability to seperate out DOF, rendering filters, etc. Shadow buffer maps can be used but they are default maps generated by Carrara, it would be nice to be able to control them, thats a good idea. Yeah Carrara is a good program. It gets critisized often before people give it a chance, and really look into it. Thats why I've stuck with it, and with every new release it is another step closer to the big boys at half the price. You should download the demo and give it a try! Brian

At half the price? Not anymore! Carrara 4 has increased their price form version 3 to 4 by almost 50%! Couple that with the the Big Boys tools lower their prices and SoftImage XSI reduced by 75%. What you have is Carrara costing more that the Big Boys. And to get the funtions and tools like the Big Boys your into spending big $$$ on geting multiple plug-ins that should have been included in the base product. (Replicate, a standard feature in Lightwave).

The name is Replica, and a similar plugin that does its functions in Lightwave has been priced at $80. I reiterate on my previous statement: "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 regain the ground. And with C4D, CS4, HASH, etc at very good prices with similar feature sets its been hard on them." Hence the price drop. I've yet to see features in Softy that I find appealing enough to purchase it, when its such a slow piece of software. If I were to go to an alternate choice, it would be Lightwave or MAX, possibly Cinema, but definetly not Softimage, especially with annoying people like InfoCentral in the community.

Yes, objective information can be very annoying when your in a subjective world. And the name of this $80 Lightwave plug-in is?

Subjective world? you are definately annoying!