Carrara Pro
Overview
Carrara is a drawing program for 3-D images and animations from 3D images. The idea is that you create images by adding in objects (cylinders, spheres, etc.) You can the specify a sequence of images and Carrara will create a Quicktime movie just as Avid does. In fact, you can import your Carrara movies into Avid as clips. A number of parameters (quality, anti-aliasing, and surface type) can be controlled that affect the look and the quality of the image and the time it takes to render any image or movie using the Carrara file. Even more than with Photoshop and Avid, we'll just scratch the surface of using this system. It is a typical basic professional-class 3-D and animation program.
To see an example of a very simple animation of 3-D objects, click below.
Try kicking
these cans (481KB Movie).
The book animation below was ray traced (a technique giving high quality shadowing) for 36 frames at 12 fps. It took about 30 minutes to render this video in 2000. Today, it would take less than a minute.
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(1.3 MB Movie) Watch the shadows.