First: Instead of the old "An Unknown Error Has Occurred While..." I've been getting a "Rendering has Failed" message when I use the Snapshot camera in the Assembly Room. There's a blank white space where I marqueed. Once that happens, it's all over. Nothing works after that. However Carrara will allow me to 'Save' before I close out. I have to close the document, then close out of Carrara. But I can re-launch the program right away and that cures the problem.

Second: while starting to build the Sentinels outpost, I started to get gross distortions when I duplicated objects. It happened when I was duplicating cylinders to make the colored pipes. If a cylinder was 0.1 x 0.1 x 5.2 inches, the duplicated object would be something like .01 x .01 x 12.73. The objects became incredibly narrow and very, very long. This was not a problem as long as the objects were pipes, I could just punch in the numerical values in the Properties/Motion Tray. But for bigger, grouped objects, there was no way to restore their shape. At last I quit Carrara, then re-opened a few minutes later. The problem seems to have cured itself.

Anyone else seen these problems?

Hello Kelly, There may be several things going on here. I haven't experienced any of these. First, the rendering issue. You probably have already done some of these but here is the check list anyway: 1)make sure you are using Carrara 4.1.1 2)Make sure your video drivers are updated. 3)change the GUI from Eovia software to OpenGL or vice versa. 4)Contact Carrara Technical support - I know they'd be very, very interested in finding a solution. Secondly, the pipes: Just taking a guess here but if you have an object, duplicate it, move it and scale it and then duplicate the duplicated object, the new object will "inherit" the transformation properites of the first object. For example, if the first object was moved a distance of 5 and scaled to 80% of the original size, the next duplicate will be distance 10 and 60% from the source object. Simply clicking on another object in your scene prior to duplicating your object or undoing the duplication and then redoing duplication will fix this. Post back your results! Mark

And by the way... I like your sentinal outpost!

Mark, wouldn't it be a scale of 64% of the original? .8*.8 = .64 Or is it relative in a reduce by twenty first time, reduce by another twenty second time?

So I was rounding numbers... ;)

Mark: Thanks. I've started on the checklist [and I've been using Carrara 4.3]

On the re-sizing issue, I know about repeat duplicating and objects inheriting properties...and use it often. In this case, there was no re-sizing happening at all. I was just duplicating cylinders & elbows to build a network of pipes.

I just put in a long day today building the base, and none of these problems have cropped up. Of course. I've closed out of Carrara about three or four times, for various reasons. [Like launching Photoshop...which freezes if I launch it with Carrara already open.] Closing the app. seems to solve Carrara's problems with itself. But I'll keep you posted.

Strange... I use Photoshop with Carrara all the time. And I open either whenever, and in whatever order I feel the need. Sounds like you might have other problems with your system. What is your setup? (CPU, RAM, operating system, software versions, blah, blah, blah..)

I'm running an HP Pavilion 762n, 2.6GHz chip, 512Mb RAM, with Windows XP. I had a new 80 Gb hard drive installed about two months ago. The conflict arises between Photoshop 6.0 and Carrara 4.3 and never used to happen with C2. The conflict happens most, not all, of the time...but figure on the average of 80% of the time. It'll happen as soon as I launch Photoshop and go to open a document. Nothing will happen, but sometimes the UI [toolbar] greys out. When I click the Xbox [upper right corner] to close the app., I get the dialog box that says: "The program is not responding. Do you want to end now?" I say 'yes' and it closes promptly.

But it never happens if I have Photoshop running before launching Carrara.

Well, your getting out of my league for trouble shooting. I suspect this is a video or memory usage issue.

Contacting Carrara Tech support will yield better suggestions/solutions than I can provide:

+1 888-270-3038 (USA)
+1 650-938-4178 (Outside USA)

Message edited on: 04/01/2005 10:07

I'm on a Acre Aspire 1710 laptop with P4 3Gig CPU 1Gig RAM Photoshop 6.0 and Carrara 4.3 Pro with no problem. Have you tried updating your video drivers? (The strangest things can happen because of them, and not always video related too.) Sometimes an older video driver can help over using the latest... and sometimes you need the latest to get the most out of your system. It's a crap shoot at worst, and voodoo at best! ;) I would agree with Mark that contacting Eovia might help. Good luck!

I had weird things happen on my computer too. I upgraded my RAM to 2 gb's and all problems went away. As they say, you don't need that much RAM unless you plan on doing a lot of graphics or high end game play.

I run an Athlon64 3000+, 1GB PC3200 RAM, Nvidia Gforce card with 128MB. WIn XP Pro. The photoshop problem may have something to do with memory, PS has a habit of grabbing memory which might already be in use. Upping the RAM May help. I personally dont like PS, I prefer PS , its smaller, has all the same features, a better interface and doesnt take 2 minutes to load up. I usually leave it runninng all the time while Im working in Ray Dream or Carrara in case I need a quick texture image for a bumpmap or something.Generally The more Ram the better the Blam.. :)