Carrara 5 Pro: Eovia reinvents the 3D app into a sophisticated suite of tools.

When Eovia began shipping Carrara 5 Pro, Carrara 4 users around the world cheered. Little they did know what was in store. Soon, loyal Carrara users would discover that more than just another upgrade, Carrara 5 Pro had been reinvented into a sophisticated suite of advanced modeling, animation, and effects tools.

As a result, Eovia (just recently acquired by Daz Productions) has completely updated the Carrara look and work flow, improved modeling, animation, and texturing tools, and added a slew of new features such as volumetric clouds, subsurface scattering, displacement mapping, optimized rendering, and more.

Redesigned Interface

When Carrara is first launched, the most obvious improvement is its new interface. Featuring crisp, sleek lines, Carrara's look takes a minimalist approach to user-interface design. Smaller buttons, smart organization, and resizable trays reduce clutter and allow most of the user interface to be taken up by the camera views. The Sequencer tray, which traditionally houses the timeline, has been reorganized and now also includes a revamped asset browser and new graph editor.

However, Carrara still uses the "rooms" analogy to organize work flow, which may take some getting use to. Fortunately, every aspect of Carrara's interface can be fully customized to taste, and camera navigation is now possible through a standard three-button mouse. More than just looking nice, the new interface is powered by a re-engineered OpenGL engine that allows for real-time display of lighting, textures, and transparency, among other high-end features.

Improved Modeling

Carrara's vastly improved Vertex Modeler takes no-nonsense, polygonal modeling to a new level. Based largely on Hexagon's revolutionary modeling engine, the new Vertex Modeler features sophisticated surfacing tools, including Ruled Surfaces, Double Sweep, Gordon tool, and Coons tool. 2D construction curves, though somewhat modest, have been improved and include Circle and Rectangle primitives, along with a polyline and interpolated curve tool.