Pretty much every model I work on these days, Carrara first flashes up a warning sign ("can't add edge to middle of polymesh!") or just plain crashes. Today I started something that back in Carrara 3 would have taken twenty minutes. In Carrara 5, if it actually worked, it should take five minutes. After AN HOUR AND A QUARTER I gave up and deleted the file. Drum pedal (kick). Just the pedal stamping itself. A flat piece with some decorative ridges. Think of it as basically shape of the sole of a shoe, with an embossed letter "A" on it. First try. Create three polylines that follow the correct curves, duplicate and flip, weld and fill. Oops. Only part of it fills. Error message comes up. Edges vanish, leaving just vertices in space. Try to select one, Carrara locks up, force quit. Okay. Try again with lofting. First loft makes a bad scrambled mess. Undo. Carrara crashes. Again, this time selecting only part of the curve. Loft works fine. Try to finish the curve. "Can't add edge to polymesh. Can't add point to edge. Can't do this operation on filled polygon. Empty before trying again." Lousy advice. CRASH! Okay, forget polylines. Apparently the tool is put there just to make fun of people like me. Start again with a closed polyline for the outline of the pedal. Fill that. Select part of the edge and perform "extract along." Once more. Adjust the extracted edges....the shape is coming around but Carrara added a few extra vertices during extraction (vertices not in the original.) I delete one. Carrara locks up. Force quit again. If only box modeling would work for this model! But it's really the wrong shape...I'd be spending far too much time tweaking to try to get those curves. Or maybe I could do it in spline. Except spline does ass-ugly meshes, and Carrara's nasty new habits often don't allow you to clean up a bad mesh. Back to the saved file. Manage to clean up without Carrara crashing...well, more than once or twice. Now I can finally move to the next portion; to lift up the embossed portion to make the decorative shape. Select, extrude....oops, the center didn't extrude. No problem; flatten out the center, select that, make an extrusion. CRASH. Okay, I understand that there are some sub-optimal modeling methods. But why is it THEIR problem if I chose to use one once in a while? And if there is only one true way, then maybe they could TELL YOU WHICH ONE IT WAS AND TAKE THE TOOLS YOU DON'T WANT US TO USE OUT OF THE SOFTWARE? I used to be able to make models in Carrara. Since version 5, it's been frustrating crap. Great tools, but it refuses to apply the old ones, scrambles meshes at will, or just locks up entirely. And you just can't walk away....all those nifty tools, all those handy manipulators and camera controls...you just can't leave them behind and go back to the old way (the old way that actually, you know, WORKED. All in all, I think I got a hell of a lot more work done before I "upgraded."

Hey Nomuse,

 Well, there has been a bit of a paradigm shift in the way C5 models compared to C4 and it looks like you don't like it. The Vm in C5 does have its bugs but it is still a very capable modeler.
  Basically you can't connect 2 polylines using the "Connect" or "G" hotkey anymore, you will get that "cannot add edge in the middle of polyline mesh" error which is the one I think you meant in your post.  What you can try to do is Dynamically extrude each of the polylines in the same plane and then connect the 2 polymeshes  with the "G" hotkey to form your new mesh. You can connect two polymeshes with the connect tool just fine.
  So , I would do the following.  After you duplicated,flipped and welded your curves together, in Plan view(from top) I would select the outside curve dymanically extrude it (H hotkey).  Do the same for the other 2 curves and then connect them all together with the G tool . This should work for you and good luck with it. 

Mike

 I forgot to say  in your first method you suggested I did run into problems or a bug but not the major problems you describe.  Are you on a Mac ?Just curious.

  If you haven't already I would definitely post this to the bugtracker. When you fill the 2 separate polylines with the Ctrl+F hotkeys , there is only 1 polygon when there should be a bunch of them.

Mike

"Well, there has been a bit of a paradigm shift in the way C5 models compared to C4 and it looks like you don't like it. "

Aware of that.  Not sure why they found it necessary to prevent certain operations, especially as the prevention is inconsistent; sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

"Basically you can't connect 2 polylines using the "Connect" or "G" hotkey anymore, you will get that "cannot add edge in the middle of polyline mesh" error which is the one I think you meant in your post.  What you can try to do is Dynamically extrude each of the polylines in the same plane and then connect the 2 polymeshes  with the "G" hotkey to form your new mesh. You can connect two polymeshes with the connect tool just fine."

Sounds like an interesting work-around and thanks.  I have had numerous problems connecting different meshes, however.  Carrara hates to add a line between meshes and will generally not do it.  It will rarely loft (but sometimes does it perfectly)...and if you weld, you get some very odd broken shapes as Carrara re-arranges one or both meshes to suit it's peculiar ideas of order.

And it rather begs the question: if this is an excellent modeler, why do common tasks require huge work-arounds?  I can understand (though not agree with) wanting to push a particular style of modeling.  The problem is that every complex mesh and every iterative build WILL arrive at a situation where a non-standard join is the best way to fix a problem.  Carrara has apparently decided that no mesh ever has a problem.  That their own loft and boolean tools are error free, that their line tools respect mesh flow -- and all of this is far from the truth.

To add insult to injury, they haven't given any indication in the software about what they see as the correct method.  Why the huge work-around for a simple pedal shape with a raised decorative ridge?  What method was in their tiny brains that I was supposed to follow to make this five-minute shape?  If they would just tell me, I'd leave the work-arounds -- and the crashes -- and use that method instead.

Mac, by the way.

(Which is one of the reasons I haven't dumped Carrara and moved to Hexagon.   I still wake up in the middle of the night screaming from Hexagon 1.1 and 2.0 on a Mac!)

I know that Hexagon has it's problems, but version 2.2 has been pretty stable for me. Yes, you still need to save your work and it can act up, but I have been using it as my main modeler for a couple of months. Once you learn ALL the tools and it's limitations and work-arounds, it's proven to be very productive for me. Now Boolean operations in any software are a big no no. They work on certain simple shapes, but never in complex ones. I am also on a Mac.