Eovia Carrara 4 Pro

The first noticeable thing about Carrara 4 Pro is the interface and the way it takes over the screen. Don’t be afraid-underneath the non-standard sliding drawers and overly designed color scheme lies a potent 3D graphics and animation application. If only the interface didn’t get in the way.

Carrara has a long history, with an ancestry that includes Ray Dream Designer and Infini-D. Once owned by MetaCreations and now by Eovia (the former MetaCreations team), Carrara is every bit as mature as you’d expect from the fourth major rev of an application. Carrara rightfully boasts its high-quality render engine, capable of generating frames for everything from the Web to CD-ROM to high-resolution HDRI for film or print.

Although the new features list for version 4 is short, it’s significant. Chief among the features are improvements to the animation tools, such as the Morph Targets for character animation and a new Inverse Kinematics solver that is easier to set up for animating bones. The sky simulator and new terrain editor help create landscapes of your own design, complete with trees and shrubs, rather quickly. Any time gained in the design stage is lost during rendering, however. Eovia has included a multi-platform network render engine for artists working in networked environments.

Other rendering improvements include blurry reflections, true 3D motion blur and the transparency of materials correctly shown in the rendered frame’s alpha channel.

Carrara can import just about anything, too, plus export Quicktime movies and frame sequences. While not the speediest 3D application, it proves easy to use, solid and very capable in many applications. You wouldn’t want to animate and render your own Incredibles with it, but it’s ideal for 90 percent of most client work. Right now, I have to give Carrara 4 Pro a rating of solid. The nonstandard, inefficient, wasteful interface is the product’s biggest drawback. If Eovia modernized and streamlined the interfacce, Carrara could easily rate a sweet.