COMPANY: DAZ 3D | URL: (See Buy link below) | TYPE: Standalone | PLATFORM: Mac, Windows | PRICE: Varies
		Carrara 8 is faster, more dynamic, and even more full of life than ever before. Guided cooperatively by both professional users and dedicated engineers, this latest version of Carrara demonstrates the power of group-sourcing and building upon a solid foundation to accomplish truly impressive results. All-in-one 3D solution An ideal 3D workhorse within any designer's creative suite, the highly-affordable Carrara lavishes speed and power that enables users to create more freely and deliver the highest-caliber results under even the tightest deadlines. Finally, there is a single solution for realistic figure posing and animation combined with advanced modeling, terrain-building, physics, and rendering that is readily compatible with a large array of 3D assets. Illustrators, Creative Designers Carrara is the perfect choice for the design professional looking for a complete 3D package. It offers complete modeling tool sets, fantastic landscaping and vegetation features, ultra-rich texturing capabilities, and state-of-the-art realistic and non-photorealistic rendering. Carrara software's exceptional richness and ease-of-use will help you to move beyond the ordinary and give rise to the extraordinary. Modeling: New and Improved Build any 3D asset from scratch to complete your 3D scene easily with a large array of tools including the new displacement brush, bridge, edge extrusion, and symmetry tools. Create large lists of morph targets, use Sub-D cages, use booleans, and metaballs for ultimate creativity and edge, bevel, and surface tools for precision. Landscapes, Seascapes, and Skyscapes Once you have your actors and props created as you like, why not create a breathtaking environment within the very same tool? With Carrara's Landscape Wizard, you can quickly create any natural surrounding you desire. Include volumetric clouds to scatter sunlight, grow forests, fill oceans, or move mountains. With Carrara, you can do it all. Animation Whether you prefer non-linear animation, or the traditional graph editor, the power to animate complex scenes within Carrara is at your fingertips. With rigid body dynamics, a robust particle system, collision detection, dynamic hair, procedural shaders, and full support for the rigging used within all of DAZ 3D's figures, there's nothing stopping you from creating award-winning animations. Advanced Rendering Options: New and Improved Now you can achieve a new level of realism in your scenes with Soft Shadows, Blurred Reflections, Blurred Transmission, True Ambient Lighting, Caustics, Global Illumination, Ambient Occlusion, HDRI, Motion Blur, Subsurface Scattering, Shadow Catch, Transparency with Absorption and Depth of Field. With the addition of Multi Pass Rendering you can enjoy more flexibility and control over your renders and post-work than ever before. New and improved features in Carrara 8 Puppeteer for Carrara (New for 8.0!) The same great node-based parameter control you enjoy in DAZ Studio comes to Carrara 8! Create animations, modify morphs, control parameters across time-lines, and even record your inputs as an animation time-line with this versatile and powerful tool. Plant Editor (New for 8.0!) Have more control than ever over plants, vegetation, and trees with the intuitive plant-editor tool. Mix leaves, add fruit, or even add your own custom flowers to any plant type. You can even control the shape of plants with spline-based tools. Save your creations as presets, and take control of your scenes like never before. Inmproved Multi-Threading (New for 8.0!) Carrara can take advantage of new CPUs and hardware with improved multi- threading support. Carrara's internal rendering engine has been completely overhauled to take advantage of multi-core CPUs, with multi-threaded support for rendering, lighting, and many other internal calculations. Watch your renders complete even faster than ever before, and take advantage of complete support for networked multi-core render farms. Improved FBX Export (New for 8.0!) Carrara supports export in FBX, and the export library underwent a complete review and rewrite. Export FBX animations, rigging, and many other parameters for a world of new options for moving content into game engines and other 3d applications. God Rays (New for 8.0!) Experience the power of nature as streams of light filter down from the skies above. God rays let you add drama and impact to your artwork with powerful options to create and control the shafts of light radiating from above. 64-Bit Mac Support (New for 8.0!) The creative platform of choice for graphics professionals gets support for the 64-bit Mac. Have larger scenes, experience faster renders, and break the limits of what you imagined was possible. Edit in Vertex Modeler (New for 8.0!) Edit conformed clothing in-place inside the vertex modeler without having to zero the figure. Network Rendering Improvements (New for 8.0!) Carrara has been optimized heavily for multi-computer networked rendering environments, with support for multiple-CPUs out of the box. Add the optional "Grid" plug-in for support of render farms of up to 200 cores. Negative Lights (New for 8.0!) Utilize Carrara's incredibly powerful light tools in a whole new way with negative lights. Use lighting tools to strategically remove lights from your scene, create dramatic shadows at-will, and even create negative lights in color to remove hues from your lighting. IES Lighting (New for 8.0!) Download millions of free IES Lighting templates from lighting manufacturers around the world to use to control the shape, pattrern, and color of your lights. Use IES lighting with directional, area, and spot lights to take your scenes to the next level or realism and drama. Normal Maps (New for 8.0!) Create normal maps for your objects to enhance the detail and realism of your objects, while increasing render and work speeds. Bullet Physics (New for 8.0!) Utilize the powerful Bullet Physics engine to create dramatic, stunning animations in real time. Watch objects bounce, spin, drop, collide, and deform in real time. 3D Paint Includes a new 3D Paint Tool that enables textures to be selected, edited and "painted" directly onto an object. The 3D paint tool provides a variety of painting modes including brushing with a variety of brushes, airbrushing, stamping, and support for lines, an eyedropper, and an eraser. UV Editing/Unfolding Includes a new UV Editor that shows a 3D view of the polygon mesh, a 2D display of the UV values on the polygon mesh vertices, and a set of tools to manipulate them. You can choose from 4 different projection methods to use for custom mapping. LOD support for Content Figures Includes support for Content Figures that have multiple Levels of Detail (LOD). You can use lower resolution LOD figures in your viewport to enhance performance and then render with a higher resolution LOD figure for the best quality. Vertex Modeling in Assembly Room The Vertex Modeling capabilities that were previously only available in the "Modeling" room are now available in the "Assembly" room. This enhancement saves time by allowing you to perform modeling functions in the assembly room where other objects can also be seen. Transparency Optimizations for Rendering Time consuming and complex transparency rendering operations have been optimized in Carrara 8.0 to provide better and faster results. Multi-pass Rendering Provides the ability to render multiple passes and save these off to separate image files. These render passes or layers (multi-pass render layers) can be edited in another application like Photoshop to increase contrast in the rendered image, change a reflection color, make an edit to a shadow map, or even swap out a background color. Larger Textures in OpenGL Display Provides the ability to increase the texture size that is displayed in the Open Graphics Library (OpenGL) or viewport. The settings are based on what texture size your graphics board will support and can be adjusted for performance or quality (up to 4096x4096). Bump & Specularity in OpenGL Display Provides the ability to view bump and specularity while in OpenGL display (if your video card supports these options). NLA Track Groups When using Carrara for creating animations, this new grouping tool provides an improved interface to create groups of tracks then collapse or expand the tracks in those groups. This new tool helps you optimize the screen space so you can focus on your animation. COLLADA Export Figures and scenes can now be exported in COLLADA format. Currently only available for Windows. DAZ Studio Content Support Improvements Includes enhanced the handling of .DAZ scene files being loaded into Carrara 8.0. Requires DAZ Studio Build 2.3.3.138 or higher.
				Check out the HowieFarkes scene files for Carrara (see screenshot at top left)! He provides complete scenes with architectural and foliage elements that you can use in pieces or as-is.