R,

There is no news on A-Kura's site.

I don't think you have to be a serious C++ programmer to dabble in the SDK. You could probably go pretty far just taking the basic samples, inserting some code in the appropriate places, and changing the class ids and things to make it your own.

There is a yahoo groups carrarasdk group where you can ask questions and I think Mik (the guy who wrote Cognito, StarBright, etc.) did a tutorial post a while back on how to make one of the samples your own.

You can probably even get started pretty cheap on the PC side, Microsoft just posted the Visual Studio 2005 express edition for free download and it looks like it's got everything you'd need to compile plug-ins (though I haven't tried it yet).

If you have any specific questions, I'm always happy to help. I've built nearly every type of plug-in there is for Carrara so have lots of sample code to share.

Good luck,
Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
Carrara plug-ins

Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
Carrara and LightWave plug-ins