I downloaded the C5Pro beta yesterday. I have been using Carrara from Ray Dream days (though I used trueSpace more -- hardly used Ray Dream was too clunky).

Carrara 5 Pro, so far, is the best upgrade ever for this product. Going from rev. 3 to 4 was a bit of a disappointment for me, but this version is worth it!

Carrara's equivalent to V5I ecosystems (which I purchased 7 months ago), surface replicator, has some real advantages. For example, you can create 3D "shadow instances" (so to speak), of objects, or real instances that can be manipulated. If you have a close-in scene with a lush background, you can populate the background with thousands of shadow 3D objects to save resources. You can then populate the close-in area with true instances that can be precisely manipulated (you can convert existing shadow 3D objects to real instances).

Im not trying to initiate some Carrara vs. V5I debate, but as an all around application, Carrara 5 Pro beats V5I hands down! (BTW, Im writing this on my 3 GHz PC as my other workstations are each rendering large V5I files).

Carraras Poser imports are superior to V5I, and while Carraras rendering engine has less minute user control, it is much easier to achieve a quality render. I spent 3 days screwing around trying to get a decent 6000 X 3300 pix render with V5I, and it was not a huge file! Vues render to disk is not very good. My Windows Task Manager would show an initial resource load of ~ 225 MByte. This would (over about an 8 hour period) balloon up to ~1.95 GByte then V5I would simply go away without any fanfare! I was not setting the render option anywhere near the max.

It is true that some of the added features were available as plug-ins, and I have all of the major ones. But Eovia integrated them in, and greatly improved their functionality, while using fewer resources.

I wont go into more, but Carrara 5 Pro seems much closer to a high-end application than rev. 4, and the new interface is almost a piece of art!

After about 5 hours of playing with the beta, no crashes!

Message edited on: 10/30/2005 18:09