I seem to be getting slow motion when I preview animation, regardless of the OpenGL settings. How do you adjust this so you can see how the movements will appear in real time?

You could try the storyboard room, but I don't use it... or knock down the frames to get an idea and render a simple movie - low res and preview/ draft settings.

Hi Paloth, On a pure playback, the frame rate accelerates when you choose the more simple preview options. I usually simply scrub the timeline with the time marker. OpenGL is cool but real time animation is asking a ton from your system since Carrara is calculating 3D space plus textures plus lighting plus change-over-time. You'll notice that even articles you see at CG Society, when the animators are previewing motion, they only use degraded screen presentations - for the same reasons. It's not a Carrara thing, it's a computer thing.

Is there a way to render just the OpenGL preview of the animation as a movie so it can be played back at full speed?

Not that I'm aware of. Explore some of the alternative render modes like Draft. In regular pro workflows, we typically render wire, non-texture gray scale animations or Draft renders for motion and camera swing proofing. In the regular photo-realistic mode, if you turn off anti-aliasing and dial the raytracing down to 4, you can get some pretty speedy renders. I haven't encountered the "perfect" 3D solution yet - and I use quite a few. ;-)

in poser you can render the viewport (preview), which even with anti-alias on gives you a frame every 2-5 seconds. With anti-alias off, 1-2 seconds. So you can make test animations pretty fast. 

Since the open gl and even the software implementation is fine, you can make legit animations from this, as long as you are not going for photorealism. For instance, if you are post processing with fancy filters in After Effects.

I believe you can render the viewport with the scanline render engine in 3DSMax and that the upcoming 2008 version will have a turbo mode for this.

This is not the same as "seeing" your animation in the viewport. For that, I agree to turn down the viewport settings until the scrubber gets fast.

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