I briefly write my story through the years in 3D digital graphics, starting with my finding Carrara in the first place. It's quite short compared to everything that went on in that time, so I might write more about these times in future articles and link to them here as well... we'll see.

After discovering all of this, I was already at a point where I have discovered Poser's animation tools - rendering static images was no longer enough for me.

Well, animating characters wearing conforming clothing and hair started to introduce problems. It's been so long since those days that remembering the exact issues is difficult. I do recall poke-through more than anything, though.

I started looking for 3D modeling software capable of loading and working with these figures just the way I could in Poser. Turned out that this isn't exactly what professional animators do, so the simple answer was: "No". The less simple answer involved a complex work-around process which still didn't result in a working environment I'd feel comfortable in.

All I really wanted was 3d modeling/tweaking capabilities in Poser. There are magnets and deformers. That's not what I wanted.

Being the provider of my family, it took me quite some time to save up enough to take the plunge.

I'll never forget the day when my wonderful, beautiful wife told me to go ahead and order that thing. "What thing?", I asked, not having a clue what she was talking about. "That club membership and software you want for your 3D hobby thingy". I nearly blew a fuse with delight!

Carrara, when sold through Daz 3D, includes an amazing bundle of Daz 3D figure goodies for the premiere figure at the time of that particular release. I started with Carrara 7 Pro, just before the release of Carrara 8 Pro, and included access to the otherwise closed beta for Carrara 8 Pro, which was sporting Carrara's very first 64 bit architecture, among many other new wonders.

That time Victoria 4 and Michael 4, along with their other generation 4 pals that were created using the same uni-mesh (so that texture maps and other things were compatible) had been their premiere figures for quite some time, and the support library of content available was massive and amazing! Still is!

So Carrara came with the Victorial 4.2 Starter Bundle, the Michael 4 Starter Bundle, and a slew of other useful (and fun!) goodies.

So there I was, working full time plus overtime, spending what little free time I could find to download file after file of amazing content... I was in Bliss Zone!

Still very much a newbie at all of this 3D stuff - and brand-spanking new with Carrara, I was still stuck in all of my Poser ways, being at the beginnings of my switch. In fact, I often found it easier at times to just hop back into Poser if I wanted to do something very quickly - like shoot off a quick render of something.

With Carrara, we don't need such things. Carrara has a whole bunch of preset landscapes and scenes, but just tossing in a few terrain pieces populated with some Carrara trees is easy and fun, and can quickly create a fully realized 360 degree environment.

The realistic sky completes the scene and can use the Sun light and Moon light for both illumination as well as an impression of the actual thing - sun or moon, as well as having full atmospheric parameters to adjust for just the right setting.

I remember how I was amazed at how much faster the content library (runtime) loads in Carrara compared to Poser. I almost forgot how long it takes to switch runtimes in Poser. They just fire right into view in Carrara. Pretty cool.

Rendering is another beautiful thing in Carrara. Unlike Daz Studio, Carrara gives so many options to choose from for setting up the render engine. I can make it render really, really fast if I want, or go for more of an automated super-realistic approach, which can take much longer.

But it's really nice how we can set it up to work anywhere in between, or even at those extremes.

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