Product Reviews

Carrara is excellent value. This 3D graphics and animation program provides an impressive range of features, yet its £199 price is an absolute bargain by most 3D software's standards.

This latest version of Carrara includes several powerful tools and features that will appeal to anyone who does a lot of 3D design work. There are some oddly named options, such as ambient occlusion and subsurface scattering, which are simply better and more realistic lighting effects. Improved OpenGL support speeds up the rendering of complex 3D scenes. We noticed the speed improvement, even when designing models on a laptop that had a fairly modest GeForce Go 420 graphics chip.

The improved particle generator is impressive. Many 3D programs have particle generators that can create effects such as flowing droplets of water or exploding shrapnel. Carrara's particle generator allows you to create an object, such as a bird, and treat it as a particle. You can then use the particle generator to create automatically a vast

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flock of birds that swoops across the screen.

Features such as this will have experienced 3D designers and animators frothing at the mouth, but Carrara falls down in its attempts to make them accessible to new users. Take the particle generator, for example: click on the Particle tool in the main toolbar, and you're presented with a huge dialog box that fills almost the entire screen with dozens of different settings and options. It will take you a while to figure out how to create your flock of birds, and the task isn't made any easier by the online Help files, which simply list various features without explaining how to use them.

To be fair, Eovia has made some attempts to improve Carrara's ease of use in this upgrade. The program throws wizards at you from the moment you launch it. A Browser pane at the bottom of the screen allows you to select a variety of ready-made 3D scenes and effects. There's also a Wizards command in the main File menu. Even the standard New File command asks if you want to use one of the wizards to create a new scene. These wizards allow you to create a wide range of indoor and outdoor scenes quickly, along with effects such as mountain ranges, clouds and flowing water. But once you select a wizard, the program drops you in at the deep end and leaves you to find your way around its vast array of tools and dialog boxes.

This is one of the most powerful all-round modelling and animation programs available in the sub-£500 price range. However, its ease of use is still a problem, and it's not the best place to start if you're new to 3D graphics work