Why I keep Carrara in my toolset despite everything.

3dView

These can be frustrating times for Carrara users and owners. The 8.5 cycle has dragged on and on (which is required if its not ready ).......the feature set besides content driven implementations gets less dynamic each version number along.

There is sense that DAZ has a difficult time working on all this content sharing interfacing with Genesis and Daz studio and Carrara. And if you are not a big content user of Carrara you can only imagine of all that effort being put into instead some features that could really need improvement and or additions .

So why bother with all this ? Especially when one might have other choices ---

Because Carrara is just so fun to use. Out of the box and with a little tutorials here and there and you can be up and running quickly . Give it some effort and you can produce some awesome stuff. It excels at quick results.

And Carrara does so much..........its width and breath of features really can compete with the big fellas in many ways.

It could be even much more .....but that's one of the frustrations with Daz.

Still what it is .....what it does --keeps it in my toolbox .

Garstor

Well said!

As a hobbyist artist (a term that I have to use very loosely around here), Carrara fits my needs quite nicely. Sure I am a bit frustrated at the long development cycle -- but as a former Microsoft employee I know how difficult building good software can be. There was just over 5 years between SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005 and they still did not get everything built that they wanted to.

Carrara is fun and it is easy produce some amazing scenes with just a little learning and effort. The community here also makes Carrara a worthwhile investment of my time and money. I eagerly await the next release and hope that it successfully builds on and improves what 8.1 has.

djmulcahy

I complain a lot about Carrara, but that's mostly because there's so much unrealized potential there.
As an animating tool, it's the best combination of ease of use and power and price there is, I think, pretty much without question. Combine that with the ability to use an enormous wealth of beautiful content, it wins hands down.
I think the biggest problem, and the reason there are so many complaints, is that while the users recognize this, we have the distinct sense DAZ doesn't.