We’ve all known geeky types who are achingly brilliant one moment, stunningly stupid the next. It’s like that with Carrara, Metacreations’ new 3D modeling and animation app. Just when its many excellent features have honestly impressed you, it hits you with a gaffe so amazingly dopey you can’t help but laugh.
MetaCreations is currently undergoing a major restructuring to focus only on Web-integrated e-commerce products. MetaCreations has said it will continue to manufacture and support Carrara for now, but you may want to take the company’s somewhat fragile position into consideration when purchasing this product...
Carrara replaces the aging Infini-D and RayDream in Metacreations’ software lineup, and it’s about time. Operations take place in five rooms: the Model Room, where you build 3D objects; the Texture Room, where you texture and surface models; the Storyboard Room, for quick animation tests; the Assemble Room, where you put objects together and work out the animation; and the Render Room, for cranking out the final frames.
Carrara’s modeling tools are impressive. You’ve got your choice of a spline loft modeler, a vertex modeler, and a metaballs modeler (see “Supermodelers: Three Gorgeous 3D Tools,” below). There’s also a terrain generator and a 3D-text creator, geometric primitives, several kinds of volumetric special effects (such as fire or fog), and particle systems. The vertex modeler offers real mesh modeling with smoothing, cutting, and welding; from a features standpoint, it’s up there with Newtek’s Lightwave Modeler.
The metaballs modeler works as well as any we’ve seen. However, you control surface threshold only on a global level — you can’t adjust the attraction of individual blobs. One important feature is dynamic tessellating for splines and metablobs. When they get farther away from the camera, the polygon count decreases; closer, and it increases. This makes for maximum rendering efficiency.
While it lacks true function curves for complete control of tweening, Carrara has several kinds of tweeners that allow decent control of object movement between keyframes (the Spline and Velocity Graph tweeners are most useful). The sequencer is like most others and works as you’d expect.
Carrara has much of Bryce’s procedural texturing power. Shading domains allow you to apply different textures to separate areas of your model. The parametric mapping geometry sticks textures on a deforming model, but applying the map in just the right place can be difficult.
With such a promising feature set, why did the elves at Metacreations create a program that commandeers your whole screen — but stubbornly won’t spread to a second monitor? Plus, it hides your tool palettes when you drag them over the main work area, forcing you to close your work window to find them again. And in the metaball modeler, it plays a cruel trick on unwary users — cleaving the standard view-switching buttons onscreen even though switching views in this modeler requires an entirely different method.
Well, you get the idea. For a low-to-midrange general-purpose 3D app, Carrara offers a wealth of features — and frankly, there aren’t many competitors in this price range. Just get ready for a few chuckles.
Anzovin, Steve, Anzovin, Raf. (May 2000). Carrera 1.0. MacAddict. (pgs. 56-57).
MetaCreations Corporation
Applications
out of 10 (0 vote)
55 / 
2015-08-10 / 
6a4df6f7a90b2943a1a93402f86bec9bd471b247 / 
/ 
Carrara.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
SheepShaver
