Carrara 5 Pro review

Eovia's Carrara 5 Pro is easily the most significant upgrade in the history of this modelling, rendering and animation program.

The most immediately noticeable improvement is in the application's interface, which has been considerably cleaned up and now looks much more grown up. The browser has been moved from the left side of the screen and integrated with the Sequencer (timeline), and this gives far more room to the main workspace. In fact, part of the feel of the interface has been borrowed from Eovia's modeller, Hexagon.

Carrara has also borrowed some of Hexagon's modelling tools - and not before time: modelling has traditionally been Carrara's weakest point. Version 5 adds the universal manipulators that allow moving, scaling and rotating all from the same Widget, although we still can't understand why the Transform tools also select objects.

Soft selection extends the sphere of influence outside of the currently selected points and allows more organic deformation of objects. You can also now select loops and rings, and grow and shrink selections.

Subdivision surface modelling has also been beefed up and is more responsive, although it's nowhere like the equivalent offering in Hexagon. Proper Booleans and bevels have also made the transition from Hexagon to Carrara.

Despite all of that, modelling is still weaker than the other parts of the program, but you do get the Amapi Designer 7 modelling package thrown in for free.

On the animation front, Eovia has added a whole new Particle Generator system. As well as triangle and sphere particles, you can also use metaballs and 'Splats', which are 2D squares that always orient themselves towards the camera. You can attach any object in a scene to a particle, enabling you to create flocking behaviour. Particles can now also interact with physical objects in Carrara.

As well as all the usual tangency and continuity tools, character animators will also be pleased with the new joint-orientation algorithm for IK skeletons that makes their manipulation more intuitive, with automatic constraints applied to joints as bones are created. Furthermore, you can also paint bone influence directly onto character meshes using the Weightmaps and Skinning tools - all high-end stuff.

Eovia has also added a graph editor to the Pro version of Carrara 5. This enables you to tinker with the function curves of objects in the scene, making gradual, flowing movement easier to manipulate.

Even Carrara's Assemble room has new functionality, in the form of the Replicator and Surface Replicator. Replicator is simply a method for creating arrays - grids, linear, circular - but the Surface version is far more interesting. It enables you to randomly scatter copies of objects over an object's surface. The most obvious use for this is for distributing items in landscapes - making Carrara's terrain modelling even more powerful. You can constrain the dropped objects to particular shading domains on their target - for example, so that trees only appear where there's a land shader and not in water. Rounding off the landscape tools, Carrara 5 now supports true Volumetric clouds that scatter light correctly.

Carrara has always had a fully featured set of rendering technologies, encompassing HDRI and global illumination/radiosity, and version 5 has really upped the ante on this front with the inclusion of Ambient Occlusion. A bit of a mouthful it may be, but it's a much faster way to get radiosity-like lighting fall-off without the calculation overhead. Scenes can expect a rendering boost of around four times using this method.