Carrara 5 Pro review

Verdict:

The upgrade to version 5 fully deserves the title of 'no-brainer'

Review Date: 12 Dec 2005

Price when reviewed: (£379 ex VAT)

Reviewed By: Tim Danaher

Our Rating 4 stars out of 5

The renderer now also supports subsurface scattering, which gives the effect of light shining through non-transparent objects, suffusing them with a glow. This is particularly useful for light shining through leaves or skin, for example.

Eovia has also added displacement mapping support, allowing for true deformation of objects using bitmaps or, indeed, Carrara's own extensive procedural shader collection. However, objects that have displacement maps applied generally need to have fine (that is, heavy) meshes in order to deform properly - no sub-polygon displacement is available yet.

Talking of displacement, Carrara can now import 16-bit texture maps, so you can import displacement-mapped models from ZBrush for rendering. And speaking of importing, Carrara 5 Pro supports FBX 5 and 6 import and export, although it was a little flaky in the beta version we reviewed. We hope this is fixed by the full release, as FBX really is the future of 3D data exchange.

Other rendering features include support for Fresnel effects - basically increasing or decreasing the reflections of a surface as the angle of view to the surface is changed, which is essential for realistic water and glass. Anisotropic shading is also offered, and this essentially accounts for light scattering differently on different parts of an object - useful for simulating materials such as silk or brushed aluminium, for example.

We did encounter a few teething problems in our pre-release copy, but these were confined to switching between documents in Carrara and switching back to the application from other programs and will be ironed out by the final release. It's a much over-used phrase, but for new and previous users of Carrara, the upgrade to version 5 fully deserves the title of 'no-brainer'.

Prev Next

Get more reviews, tutorials and in-depth advice, every month with Computer Shopper.
Click here to try 3 issues for £1

< Previous Reviews : Software Next >

Sponsored Links

Be the first to comment on this article

You need to Login or Register to comment.