Performance
Carrara lives up to the marketing. It is stable, well rounded, powerful and rich in features. The speed of its render engine, especially for the high level of quality it offers, is astonishing. Carrara is a generalist 3D solution, meaning that it does many things very, very well.
However, there are some specialized 3D programs that excel in some of the areas that Carrara has, but in ways that Carrara can’t touch. Carrara does great outdoor scenes, but Vue 6 does incredible outdoor scenes. Carrara does particle effects, but dedicated post solutions like Motion or particleIllusion do it faster and better if you already have compositing software. LightWave has excellent particle solutions with it’s Voxel system, so if explosions are your stock and trade, LW does it faster. Carrara doesn’t have soft-body dynamics (think water and cloth), but it can fake it with it’s Metaballs and can import cloth from Poser - if you can live through the calculation cycles from Poser that is. MODO screams through Caustics and Ambient Occlusion renders - significantly faster than Carrara, and Carrara is pretty quick. Additionally, there are some dedicated plug-ins (specialized software that does something unique) for LW and other programs that you can’t get for Carrara. It’s just that they also cost thousands, that’s right, thousands of dollars. Oh, and some of those require you to purchase a separate render engine, too. Ouch. Carrara’s plugins, on the other hand, are very affordable.
Expect a learning curve. It won’t be as steep as with other 3D apps, but it definitely does slope up. It just does it at a manageable pace that won’t leave you panting. As film, video, and photography professionals, MFM’s readers have an advantage that many people don’t. You are more likely to understand lighting. Everything you know about good scene lighting must be used in the 3D world. Using/creating things like soft boxes, etc., are an important part of imitating reality. Remember those new god requirements you encounter with 3D? The software isn’t the master creator: you are. And fortunately, “god” has an instruction manual in this case.
But in the search for the perfect 3D solution, and in comparison to some other options that are out there for 3D, I can offer up my wish list for improvements: engaging higher end, photo realistic features like Blurry Reflections; Caustics (the way light behaves when traveling through transparency); soft shadows, ambient occlusion and such take longer to render - sometimes problematically so, due to deadlines. It would be nice if those were faster and I know they can be when seeing programs like Modo in action. The Carrara modeling tools are good but they are not great. There are dedicated modeling solutions out there like Hexagon, Modo, Silo, Rhino that do it better. But for many, many model requirements, the Carrara tool set is more than adequate. The option to work in one room, for experienced users, would be nice.
Caveat Emptor: 3D stuff is computer intensive. If you are thinking of using Carrara or any other 3D app with an aging system, read the System Requirements very carefully. Expect issues in real-time viewing in OpenGL if your box isn’t up to date. And of course, expect longer render times.
