for more information on this award, see HERE

Carrara 5 Pro is a general purpose 3D graphics program which can be use to design and render still images and animations. Although it is a powerful, fully featured application, it is (by the standards of 3D software packages, anyhow!) fairly easy to use. While it is unlikely to tempt many big Hollywood special effects teams away from their vastly expensive graphics suites, it may appeal to serious illustrators, artists, web designers and the kind of animators who don’t have a few tens of thousands of dollars, pounds or euros in ready cash. Here I’ve been looking at the latest edition, Carrara Pro 5.0.5.

Carrara 5 can create and render landscapes of great detail and beauty. For a larger view of this image (in a popup window), click HERE (800x600, 354K).

Getting Started

Creating a scene in Carrara can, in principle, take a matter of moments. When you start a new project, a box pops up, giving you the choice of loading an empty document or running the ‘Scene Wizard’.  If you choose the Wizard, you can quickly make selections from a library of pre-designed scenes ranging from desert landscapes to outer space; from an illuminated logo to a Christmas card complete with snow and fir trees.

The ready-to-use scenes are a great way to get you started. They provide you with different types of logos, terrains, lighting effects and rendering options which can either be used as a basis for your own compositions or studied as a means of discovering the possibilities of Carrara.

Initially the scene is loaded into a 3D workspace. Here you can add, delete, move and scale objects, alter the lighting, and reposition the camera. A great many objects are provided as standard. These are shown in a Browser window at the bottom of the screen. Adding them to your scene is just a matter of dragging and dropping. These objects include terrains, plants, vehicles, buildings, furniture and much more besides. It really would be possible to create scenes of some complexity just by creating a town, mountainside, island or office using existing objects.

To create your own objects, you have to switch to the Modelling Room. Here you can pull, shape, twist and extrude 3D vertex models or ‘lathe’ 2D spline drawings in order to create bowls, glasses and sculpted columns. Back in the Assemble Room you can apply materials to your objects by selecting glass, metal, patterned and wood-like shaders from the Browser window. If you want to preview a part of the scene to get an idea of how the finished image will look you can just click a camera icon and draw a rectangle over a part of the screen; this does a test render of the selected area.

In this latest version of Carrara, the user interface has been substantially redesigned. While it retains the characteristic ‘look and feel’ of earlier versions, it has smoothed out a few of its eccentricities; to take a simple example, it now has Windows-style Close and Maximize buttons in the top right-hand corner instead of the confusing ‘show and hide’ eye icon of previous releases.

In Carrara 4, there was an 'eye' to minimize Carrara but no 'close' button!

Carrara 5 has, sensibly, added Maximize and Close buttons...

And it has also adopted docking windows and palettes to take full advantage of the available screen space. In earlier versions, the working windows were free floating and frequently overlapped the tools and icons arranged around the edges. You can, if you wish, undock the main window to have multiple projects arranged in free-floating windows. And you can drag the tool palettes around to redesign the workspace layout to suit your preferences.

In Carrara 4, the working window was free floating and panels slid out from the bottom and both sides; the result was that windows and icons were often accidentally obscured...

In Carrara 5, the windows dock by default. The object browser which used to be on the left of the screen has now been put into a tabbed page of the bottom panel. This is altogether a neater interface.

Figures and Models

You can create models using a variety of tools and techniques including spline, vertex and metaballs (smooth, organic models which exert a sort of ‘gravitational’ influence on one another, with surfaces moving together as two objects approach each other). Special support is provided for importing figures created using Poser. This includes the ability (in the Pro version) to import dynamic (moving) cloth and hair.

The rendering features have also been improved. Long gone are the days when mere ray tracing was considered to be the bee’s knees. These days, a good renderer needs to be able to simulate very subtle interactions of reflected and refracted light to produce effects such as Global Illumination (diffuse lighting or ‘radiosity’) and caustics (interference patterns caused by transmission through transparent objects such as lenses or reflective objects such as mirrors and metals).

Carrara 5 also adds in something called Ambient Occlusion which is, apparently, a sort of faster global illumination. I can’t pretend to understand the technical details of this. All I know is that it sometimes makes it possible to render very nice looking pictures with soft-edged shadows in a fraction of the time needed for a full global illumination render. I say ‘sometimes’ as the quality of the end result can vary quite a bit depending on the layout and lighting of the original scene. In some circumstances the difference between a relatively slow render with full indirect lighting and a faster render with ambient occlusion is negligible. In other scenes, the difference is obvious with ambient occlusion rendering harsher shadows and less subtle colouring. Getting the best from Ambient Occlusion requires that you experiment with various settings both in the scene itself and the rendering panel. It may not produce the very best results possible but the time saving can be significant so it’s often a good compromise.

Other new features which can increase the photorealism of a scene include a transparency channel for creating diaphanous materials, subsurface scattering for creating translucency and a Fresnel effect to altering surface reflection (say on water or glass planes) according to the viewing angle.

There are also some animation improvements to deform of skin over the skeleton of a jointed body, for example; meanwhile, an enhanced particle generator can simulate everything from fluid droplets to swarms of bees.

Landscapes.. Carrara 5 is great for designing landscapes. You can create, deform, erode and texture terrains and fill in the gaps with water planes to create oceans, lakes and rivers. There is a decent library of plants and you cab also create new species by making adjustments to the stems, branches and leaves. A new feature lets you populate a landscape with vegetation by adding plants to a ‘surface replicator’ tool. This instantly places numerous plants all over your landscape. First grow your tree. Here I have loaded a ready-to-use tree and I am using an editor to make a few changes to its appearance I have added my tree to a Surface Replicator. Now I can pick another object (here the terrain) onto which a multitude of trees will be automatically placed... And this is the result. In a matter of moments I've been able to 'plant' hundreds of trees on this hillside! Note: also see our overview of dedicated 3D landscape programs and our reviews of Vue, Bryce and Mojoworld.

Verdict

Carrara 5 does an excellent job of simplifying 3D modelling, animation and rendering. Even so, you shouldn’t be deceived into thinking that Carrara is so simple that a total newcomer will be able to create complex photorealistic scenes effortlessly. To the best of my knowledge, no general purpose 3D program is that easy!

It would be more accurate to say that Carrara is easy to use by comparison with the competition.  All the high-end packages such as 3D Studio Max and Cinema 4D have a steep learning curve – they also have a pretty steep price. Within the price range of Carrara, one of the strongest competitors is Realsoft 3D (600 Euros for Windows; 200 Euros for Linux). This is an excellent program that packs a lot of power; and, with its somewhat more conventional all-in-one user interface, it may appeal to people who are used to working with one of the well known professional 3D packages. On the downside, Realsoft3D is, in my view, far more difficult to learn than Carrara. Another mid-priced program with a dedicated following is trueSpace (from $595). Once again, this is a capable program but it has an eccentric user interface which may initially prove to be a barrier.

In my opinion, Carrara 5 provides an unparalleled blend of power, quality and ease of use. If you are looking for a serious but accessible 3D graphics program that won’t break the bank, look no further!

Huw Collingbourne

March 2006