A Potent 3D Graphics and Animation Application

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.