MetaCreations Carrara

Carrara combines and replaces MetaCreations' two 3D authoring packages, Infini-D and Ray Dream. It is a lot cheaper than the £1000-plus professional behemoths such as 3D Studio Max and Lightwave, and even undercuts Caligari's formidable Truespace and Macromedia's Extreme3D.

Given the price, £351.32 including VAT, the feature set is impressive. Most of the tools you would now expect to find are there, including so-called Metaballs (malleable modelling entities), multi-layered textures, scripting and compositing. There are some omissions, notably network rendering and Nurbs, which is used to create complex curved surfaces.

This is not necessarily a problem because the effectiveness of a 3D package rests on results, not just specifications, and access to too many fancy effects can muddle the modelling and rendering process.

The interface is simple and easy to navigate. If you have used any other MetaCreations products, such as Bryce and Canoma, you will immediately recognise it, because the same basic layout has been used.

Some PC users may be irritated by its violation of Windows conventions, but they should quickly come to terms with its quirks.

Scene by scene
When the program first starts, you are presented with a window showing the 'workspace' for the scene/model being worked on. As with most 3D packages, you can view the workspace from different angles through several 'viewports'. To the left of the workspace is a set of tools for moving, rotating and scaling selected objects within the scene, and for altering the view of the scene. Above is a series of buttons for adding primitives, such as spheres, and special objects, such as Metaball 'blobs', terrains, particle emitters, lights and cameras. Below is another series of buttons for changing the way the scene is viewed, including different ways of rendering the objects in the viewport (as wireframes, rendered objects or partially textured objects).

The Windows version of Carrara supports both OpenGL and Direct3D, so it should be able to take advantage of 3D hardware acceleration - more or less essential to smooth operation.

Surrounding the window are three handles that can be used to drag out the Sequencer, Properties and Browser 'trays'. The Sequencer lists the objects in the scene beside a chart that shows what happens to the objects over time. It is the main tool for managing animations, although it can also be used to select particular objects by name. The properties tray shows the properties for particular objects, materials (called shaders) or the entire scene. The browser tray allows you to load in a folder of preset objects, cameras, lights, shaders, bitmaps, effects (lens flare, for example) even constraints (that determine how an object can be animated) and drag them into the scene from the browser tray, or the primitive buttons.

The interface is split up into a series of 'rooms'. You perform different jobs in different rooms. The default is the 'assemble' room that is used to bring together objects and materials, usually dragged into the workspace using the browser or the buttons for primitives and special objects. The other rooms are for modelling (and behave differently, depending on the type of object you are modelling), applying shaders or textures, animating and rendering.

Most of these rooms are well designed and easy to use. The animation room is particularly useful, because it displays a storyboard for the scene - a series of frames that show what is going on at any particular time. You can add and manipulate objects within each frame, and see the results of the changes over the length of the animation. The texturing room is relatively easy to use as well. A panel appears showing a texture hierarchy, with the main material and each of its channels (the textures properties, such as shininess bumpiness and so on) at the top. To create multi-layered textures you add branches to the tree. The render room is more or less bare, at least when you first enter it. It fills up with a picture of the fully rendered scene as it is computed. The renderer seems reasonably fast.

In each room, the contents of the trays reflect what's going on. So, in the render room the properties tray contains settings for rendering the scene: the type of renderer to use (z-buffer, ray tracer or 'hybrid ray tracer', an optimised version of the ray tracer), the size of the output image and whether or not shadows and reflections should be rendered.

Room with a view
Working on a project involves moving from one room to another. Often this happens automatically. For example, if you press on the spline or vertex object button in the assemble room and drag onto the workspace, you are taken straight to the modelling room, where the tools for creating spline objects become available. Spline objects are built up from splines, or curved lines, that act as cross-sections or profiles for the finished model. Vertex objects are built up by moving individual vertices.

The rooms reveal one of Carrara's weaknesses. Early 3D packages were really suites of separate programs for modelling, texturing and so on. Having to swap between these programs while working on the same projects was awkward, so in more recent years 3D software development has focused on becoming 'modeless', using the same workspace to perform these different functions. Carrara takes a step backwards in this respect, although artfully dresses up the manoeuvre with the rooms device. And it nearly pulls it off. However, in certain crucial areas the trick fails, such as in the Metaballs modeller, in which various tools behave differently to the rest of the package. For example, the zooming tool works in an entirely different way; a trivial inconsistency, one might think, but very annoying when you are moving frequently between rooms.

Another shortcoming is the quality of its documentation and help. There is no context-sensitive help; all you get is an online version of the manual in PDF format. This is useful, but no substitute for a proper help system in such a complex piece of software, and the situation is made worse by the quality of the manual itself, which often provides no more than cursory coverage of the subject matter.

The Tutorial is worse. The printed version is full of mistakes, calling for non-existent menu options and introducing concepts without explaining them.

There are a few other problems. For example, there is no method for locking a selection to prevent accidental interference with unselected objects. There is a crude system for creating selection sets (grouping objects so that they can all be selected at once), but it is only implemented in the Metaballs modeller.

MetaCreations has recently announced a change in corporate strategy, focusing on website content creation. How Carrara fits in with this is still unclear. The package outputs to MetaCreations' Metastream format, for sending streaming 3D over the internet, so perhaps this assures it a place in the company's future. Being a new product, one would expect a certain level of long-term commitment.

Carrara certainly deserves it. Its elegance and functionality makes it a sparkling entry to the 3D software market. It also appears to be exceptionally well behaved. In all the time we used it, it did not crash once. Beautiful and reliable - now that's quite a combination.

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