Entry-Level 3D Modeling and Animation with Carrara

"Maya [for example], has been created to be used by designers spending 100 percent of their time on Maya," claims Eovia president and CEO Antoine Clappier. "Carrara Studio is made to deliver simpler but quicker results." And, he adds, it has been assembled as a turnkey solution to a range of graphic designers who are themselves using a range of tools.

Certainly the $400 package (which incorporates Eovia's Amapi 3D NURBS tool) comes with a laundry list of options. These include five rendering engines, including a Zbuffer, cartoon renderer, raytracer, hybrid raytracer, and global illumination; and seven modeling options including bezier patch, polygonal, subdivision surfaces, metaballs, NURBS, terrain, and text. Animation features include keyframing, bones, skinning, inverse and forward kinematics, bezier path, and physics simulations. And numerous lighting and texture options include lens flare, particles, and UV mapping.

Carrara Studio 2 runs on Windows 98/ME/NT/2000/XP and Mac OS 9 and OS X platforms. The software costs $399. (Eovia; www.eovia.com)-Jenny Donelan
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