Product Reviews

The avowed aim of Carrara 3D Basics is to bring 3D modelling to the masses using a simplified toolset and interface while preserving the modelling and rendering power of its high-end counterparts. It's an almost impossible task: reconciling these two disparate aims necessarily entails compromising both goals.

Carrara adopts the familiar 'room' interface, in which modelling, animation, texturing and assembly are carried out in separate areas of the application. Tools are reasonably intuitive, once you've got the hang of the keyboard shortcuts: to use the Rotate tool, for instance, hold R and three circles appear around the selected object, allowing rotation in any direction. The premise of holding a modifier to select a tool temporarily is a good one, but can be confusing for first-time users.

And appealling to first-time users is what Carrara's all about. A Flash tutorial bundled with the product helps new users through the basics of the interface, and texturing and modelling processes. Like all such introductory tutorials, though, it takes you so far and no further, leaving you to figure out the intricacies of spline and metaball modelling on your own.

The spline modelling method should be easy to grasp, as it's effectively the Pen tool from Illustrator and FreeHand operating in 3D: an outline drawn on each of three planes surrounding the object defines the profile for each dimension but, although the tool behaves more or less like that familiar to 2D designers, the result is less rather than more. Its quirky, unexpected behaviour is unnecessarily confusing; making its behaviour identical to its 2D counterparts would have greatly aided the initiation process.

To get you started quickly, Carrara opens with a scene Wizard that offers a range of optional starting points. These include natural landscape scenes - this version of Carrara is big on landscapes, skies and trees - as well as a room setting, animated logo creation, and product shots. There's even a selection of views of planetary bodies for sci-fi buffs to get their teeth

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Recognising that model creation really is a tricky thing to get into, Carrara includes a huge range of ready-to-go 3D models in dozens of categories - planes, transport, office, people, animals and so on. These are simply dragged from the library into the scene, where they can be positioned at will: you can even dissect them to make adjustments, or simply to study the geometry in order to learn how 3D objects are constructed.

The problem with the supplied models is not the range, but the quality. These are mainly low-detail, clumsy models full of inaccuracies: a fried egg has a texture like the surface of Mars, labels on bottles don't fit properly, cars have headlights represented by flat white disks, and fighter planes come with bomb arrays that behave independently of the aircraft to which they're supposed to be attached. For a program designed to show how easy 3D modelling can be, it's surprising that it appears to be too difficult even for the application's designers to get right.

The most difficult part of any 3D modelling, for the beginner, is knowing how to position objects relative to each other in 3D space: a ball that looks like it's sitting on a hand viewed from one angle can easily turn out to be several miles away and of enormous size when viewed from elsewhere.

Carrara's approach is to construct walls in the x, y and z planes onto which outlines of the objects are projected. It's great in theory: the outlines show exactly the position of each object, in each of the three dimensions. But when more than one or two models are included in a scene, these projections rapidly become a jumble of confusing outlines, making them all but impossible to use. Reducing the projections to simple outlines would have helped immensely.

Despite its shortcomings and quirks, Carrara is a surprisingly enjoyable application to use - once you've got the hang of its unique and frequently baffling interface. It has undoubtable power: textures can be applied by simple drag and drop, resizing and rotation is easy once you've learned the basics, and the results of final renders can be spectacular. There's a lot of fun to be had from combining disparate objects from the library to create surreal or fantasy scenes, and the new support for OpenGL in this version means previews and renders are much faster and smoother.

With all the interested concentrated on the high end of the 3D modelling market, it's refreshing to see an application that concentrates on getting beginners involved. The learning curve is still steeper than is perhaps necessary, but for anyone tempted by 3D, there's still no better introduction.