Carrara 7 Pro

NOTE: Pricing for this product is in US$.

The seventh version of Carrara, which is available in Express, Standard and Pro editions, aims to offer a fully featured 3D suite at an affordable price. We’ve looked at the Pro version here.

You can switch quickly between tabs to focus on each of four main 3D workflow tasks – modelling, texturing, animation and rendering. You open on the Assembly ‘room’, which provides a central location offering a large document window for working on the scene.

3D Paint, a key new feature, can be accessed from the main Assemble toolbar. It allows textures to be selected, edited and painted onto an object, as well as giving access to various channels and shading domains (RGB, RGBA etc). This isn’t unique to Carrara, but as one of the few major new features in this version it’s worth a closer look.

The tool offers four standard methods of applying paint: the default paintbrush, an airbrush, an image stamper and the Line tool, as well as an eyedropper colour-picker and an eraser. The Tool tab offers the main colour selector, as well as options for the various tools. For example, you can choose brush orientation and use symmetry to mirror the textures across the selected axis when you paint. It’s possible to link the brush size to the pressure settings of a graphics tablet, but this also works by pressing the Ctrl key then left-clicking to resize.

We found, however, that once activated, the brush size occasionally seemed to have a life of its own. When working with primitives or text you’ll probably lack a base texture, so Carrara prompts you to add one. This happens a lot and soon becomes highly irritating, but the resulting dialog box gives you the choice of resolution and a number of file formats to save it in. This includes a PSD option, for fully supporting layered texture channels.

The image stamp and symmetrical painting functions worked well, but the tool as a whole isn’t as user-friendly as its equivalent in Mudbox, for example.

Another new feature is multi-pass rendering, which allows you to render the image out as multiple shader layers saved as separate image files. This offers several benefits. One is productivity – artists can render out a scene and perform post-production work on individual layers, rather than having to make changes to the scene and render the whole thing out again. So you could change a reflection colour, for example, or increase contrast by simply adjusting one layer.

Compositing software can also make use of these individual render passes to speed up the output of VFX animation. When choosing which passes to render, you can select whole groups, for example to add ambient, diffuse and specular layers at the same time, but it’s just as simple to select individual layers for rendering.

Carrara accepts a range of image formats, and you can choose from element options to save the renders into a separate image files or a single image file using multiple layers (providing you’re using a file format that supports this, such as PSD). The resulting passes are then displayed in Carrara, and are also saved as files.