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Launching Carrara for the first time can be a vaguely unsettling experience for anyone experienced with the software offerings from Metastream: The GUI has a familiar aura. In fact, the designers of the program leveraged the strengths of the other applications in the company's offerings and took features from each of them. Carrara sports the color picker from Painter; the terrain, sky editor, and texture module from Bryce; the sliding trays, workflow process, camera viewpoint tools, and iconography from Poser;and modeling tools from RayDream Designer and Infini-D. This has both advantages and disadvantages. If you've used any of these tools in the past, you'll feel you're in comfortable surroundings. At the same time, though, it can be frustrating when a GUI feature from one of the other programs has been adapted and doesn't work the same way as in its parent application. It's also a pity that the designers didn't grab the rendering module from any of these programs because the renderer is Carrara's weakest feature. Carrara's workflow process requires using a series of different "rooms" to accomplish specific tasks. The Assemble room is used for putting together and animating a scene while adding lights and cameras; the Modeling room is where objects are created; the Storyboard room allows rough animations to be blocked out and previewed; the Texture room provides access to the procedural texture editor; and the Render room provides the final module for file output. Around the edges of the interface for each room are trays that can be dragged onto the screen to provide context-relevant tool access. One of the impressive features in Carrara is the program's use of OpenGL: scenes are displayed fully shaded and lighted while showing antialiased wireframes at the same time. It's worth mentioning that there's an update for Carrara available on www.metacreations.com that provides some bug fixes and a ton of additional shaders that should have been included in the program's initial release. However encouraging the availability of the update is, questions remain about the future of the program. MetaCreations has reinvented itself as Metastream, and is in the process of divesting itself of 3D and graphics tools. Corel recently purchased Bryce and Painter, while egi.sys of Germany purchased Poser. Metastream is still searching for a foster parent for Carrara as of press time, and a cloud lies over its future. This is food for thought when evaluat-ing whether to purchase the application.
Modeling strength Carrara's strongest feature is probably the bevy of modeling tools it provides. The program contains both Vertex and Spline modelers, as well as Terrain, Metaball, and Text modelers. The process is essentially the same for each type of object: After selecting the appropriate icon and dragging a bounding box in the Assemble room, the appropriate modeler is launched. In the Vertex modeler, it's possible to subdivide a group of polygons within an object to add detail and facilitate more precise modeling. The tool lets you select and name polygon groups and includes the ability to weld them together; perform deformations that include waves, bend and twist, bulge and stretch, and execute standard operations such as rotate, scale, taper, and shear. Rounding out the power of this tool are Boolean operations and multiresolution mesh capabilities. One complaint is that even though it's possible to select a set of polygons to subdivide and name them, it's not possible to select this subset of polygons in the Texture room to apply a different texture to the named set. Based on extrusions, the Spline modeler allows for good control during object creation by supporting sweeping, extruding, lathing, and skinning tools. You use the Spline modeler tools to draw 2D shapes, called cross-sections, and convert them to 3D objects by extruding or skinning them. Existing objects can have cross-sections added. Once you've created a 3D object, you can further refine its shape using an extrusion envelope. Com-plemented by creasing and smoothing commands, it's surprising that controls for beveling and rounding ob-ject corners are overlooked. Overall, the Spline modeling tools are quite powerful. The program also includes a realtime Metaball modeler, a Text modeler for creating extruded and beveled text, and a Terrain modeler that's lifted directly from Bryce v1.0. As a group, these modelers provide a wide range of precision modeling capabilities that put Carrara in the high-end league. Perhaps the most interesting feature in the modeling tools is the inclu-sion of context-related menus, called Ghost menus by Metastream. Similar in function to the Marking Menus available in Alias|Wavfront Maya, a single click of the mouse (modified by holding down the Control/Alt key) will pop up a context-related menu set. This means that you don't need to move the mouse to the control bar of tool icons to perform such tasks as rotating or scaling a set of polygons, which is a very useful time-saving feature.
Texturing, animation, and the storyboard The Texture room provides procedural, multilayered shaders and a hierarchical shader tree. The Texture room mimics much of the texturing capabilities found in Bryce. Textures can be mixed, and shading domains let you apply different textures to separate areas of your model by creating shader layers. These regions take the form of geometric shapes and are best applied to objects created within Carrara, as opposed to imported objects created in other 3D apps. In any event, applying the map in the right place can be taxing. It would be better to allow shaders to be applied to polygon groups. In addition to supporting alpha channels in texture maps for transparency, maps can be saved externally and internally in Carrara's native file format. This can save disk space while allowing a file to be modified externally without having to reload it back into the program. The animation toolset is probably the most difficult and frustrating aspect of Carrara. The Sequencer works in a standard manner: scrub along to the point in the timeline where you want to make a change, perform a transform, and a keyframe is automatically created. Although the program lacks absolute control of spline and velocity graph tweens, this can be overcome with careful tweaking. The problem lies with the interface design-the Sequencer tray lies across the foot of the screen and a double-click expands it over the main modeling window. To select a variety of objects in the Sequencer, the tray needs to be expanded to cover almost the whole modeling window area. Then, after selecting the items to be transformed, the tray must be closed so that it's possible to see which objects have been selected and where they're going to be moved. Click in the wrong place and drop your object selection (or realize you've selected the wrong objects), and the Sequencer tray must be expanded again, the objects reselected, and the tray rehidden. This can make for tiresome work. On the other hand, the Storyboard room is a useful feature. When you enter the room, a series of frames representing the animation are rendered in shaded mode. Selecting one of these frames and then entering a modeler and performing an operation automatically creates a keyframe, thus making it fairly easy to quickly block out a series of moves and transformations. Additional animation features include collision detection, IK constraints, and physics. Physics applied to an object can simulate, for example, a ball bouncing. Its behavior can be modified by such things as Directional Force, Point Force, Damping Force, Torque Force, and Flow Force. At the same time, all aspects of a model from texture to shape can be animated, and modifiers such as stretch, bend, twist, explode, and shatter can be applied over time. Rendering and environmental effectsCarrara provides a plethora of environmental effects, including a Particle System for creating smoke, fire, explosions, rain, and fireworks; a Volumetric Sky Simulator with animated sunrise, clouds, moon phases, and rainbows; Volumetric Light controls for creating light spheres, light cones, and 3D shadows; and a Lens Flare designer. These effects can all be added through the Browser tray in the Assemble room by selecting the appropriate item from the toolbar. The rendering engine includes a number of modes: raytracing, hybrid raytracing (optimized for conical and isometric cameras), and a draft Z-buffer mode. However, rendering isn't as simple as loading a scene into the Render room and selecting Go. In fact, the program's default lighting settings almost ensure that any rendered scene won't look particularly good. Object reflections and light refractions won't be present unless at least one light is added to a scene. Even with a few lights added, it's still difficult to ensure that a scene will render well without careful tweaking of camera views and light settings. For a program with such powerful modeling tools, it seems like an oversight not to have the default render settings produce a usable image. Even when careful attention is paid to lighting and camera angle, the program yields below-par renders: All images created have a somewhat flat appearance and look vaguely 2D cell-cartoon-like. If you're looking for a Stan Lee style, this can be very attractive; but for standard photorealism, it doesn't cut it. It seems odd that when creating a program to supplant RayDream Designer and Infini-D, the developers didn't pay more attention to making sure that usable images can be created with a minimum of fuss. And that they didn't fully implement the more advanced rendering features of these other programs. ConclusionCarrara is an impressive first release. It was originally intended to supersede two established 3D tools-Infini-D and RayDream Designer. The highlights of the program are its versatile and powerful modeling tools, but it's apparent that Carrara is a first pass at a new application. The interface suffers a few flaws, one of the biggest being the Sequencer tray that covers the modeling window. Most of the others are merely reflections of the program being wet behind the ears. Given that Carrara can export files in a reasonably large number of standard formats, you might consider Carrara for its modeling capabilities alone. Still, it's a shame that Metastream decided to abandon their 3D tools in favor of becoming a Web company, because it raises questions as to the long-term viability of Carrara. Let's hope a suitable foster parent picks up the ball where Metastream dropped it, and soon. Chris Manners is the director of design at LimeVoodoo Productions, a San Francisco–based digital design firm. |
