Carrara™ Pro 5.1:  The Complete 3D Animation and Design Solution

reviewed by Robert Pritchett

We should speak too lightly of Carrara™5  Pro by Eovia – and I mean that literally. This latest version can take digital drawing and make it look very realistic. The last time we did a Carrara Pro review was December 2004 http://www.maccompanion.com/macc/archives/december2004/software/CarraraStudio4.html

Since than, Eovia has included an excellent guided tour that quickly gets one up to speed on the improvements to the program. No audio though. However, in the box there are two CDs. One is the installer disc and the other is an application disc that has a bunch of other items that enhance the app and show what can be done with it.

While doing this review the US division of Eovia was acquired by DAZ Productions, Inc. and the app was also updated to version 5.1. Obviously, DAZ has great expectations in rounding out their offerings with the inclusion of Carrara Pro as part of their family. They, like us look to Eovia to continue to provide an app that is affordable, yet easy-to-use. By the way, do you remember Bryce? Now you know who DAZ is. http://www.daz3d.com/

They also were able to gain Hexagon (a 3D polygonal modeler) from Eovia Europe SA, which, by the way, stays independent of DAZ.

Back to the box version, besides the 2 discs, there is a difficult-to-loose card that has the serial number on it and another tri-fold card that is a quick guide to all the tools and keyboard shortcuts for both Macs and Windows systems. There is also a card that invites to get a free pass to http://www.lynda.com/freepass/eovia to begin looking  at 9 hours of training and another card that presents the add-ons and other excellent Eovia products.

If you have done any 3D work at all, you are going to so like the modelers (Spline, Vertex and Surface, text and formula, environment and shape tools), 3D manipulators, alignment tools, Boolean operations, collision detection and grid projections as well as twist, bend explode, dissolve, spin and other modifiers, special effects such as terrain modeling with real-time filters and shaders, a sky editor, atmosphere and volumetric effects, lens glare, motion blur, depth of field. There are also animation tools such as Bezier, linear, noise, motion path animation, bones and constraints, morph targets, physics animation and an advance particle generator.

Along with Carrara Pro comes the Carrara RenderNode for photo-realism that includes such things as global illumination, caustics, skylighting, ambient occlusion, subsurface scattering, displacement mapping as well as non-photorealistic, network and batch rendering.

The plug-ins are extra cost items such as a building modeler known as ArchiTools ($89), a 3D vector and  flash renderer called VectorStyle 2  (($99),  a dynamic poser  TransPoser 2 ($99),  Eovia Grid ($159) that offers another 25 nodes for up to 25 Carrara collaborators in a network and there are also other 3^rd-party apps.

Other Eovia products on that card are Hexagon ($169), Carrara 3D Basics 2 ($99) that teaches 3D and Amapi Pro 7.5 ($329) for drawing in 3D space and doing conceptual design work.

I highly recommend looking at the reviews linked above. The one from Bitwize mag has lots of pictures, but really the best tutorial is from Eovia on how this 3D app that cost so much less than other comparable apps does so much more than they do. It takes a fish, a ball and an “I” and walks through stick modeling all the way through animated rotating text that looks like a TV station logo announcement with light flash and everything. Eye-O-via, get it? Took me a while to figure that one out and get the subtle humor. I’m sure the instructor had a lot of fun generating it.

See Carrara Pro isn’t just about 3D, it is about animation that makes sense, making the unreal seem real.

Diamond video (mouse over the pic below)

This is a QuickTime video created by Joe Grover.