The Texture Room
The Texture room (figure 4) allows for editing of complex shaders. Carrara has excellent procedural textures that will allow you to create realistic shaders for your objects. Each shader is created using a shader tree that defines the 10 shader channels; Alpha, Highlight, Shininess, Bump, Reflection, Transparency, Refraction, Glow, and Subsurface Scattering. By changing the settings for individual channels, you can precisely control the appearance of your shader. Eovia calls these settings "components" and there are a lot of them.
Figure 4 - Editing a Shader
Eovia has managed to develop a tool for creating complex shaders without making the tool overly complex. It's approachable and just plain fun to experiment with. Not only that, but if you render a texture (even one of those provided with Carrara) and it's not quite what you're looking for, Carrara's Texture room makes it easy to tweak the shader. In other words, despite its complexity, the Texture room is approachable and intuitive, making it a powerful tool for almost any level of 3D artist.
 Despite its complexity, the Texture room is approachable and intuitive, making it a powerful tool for almost any level of 3D artist.
Carrara 5 adds some new capabilities to shaders including a fresnel effect for accurate reflections and anisotropic lighting for better lighting effects. I used some of these new features to render an image that I displayed on the desktop of my laptop. The next day, I caught one of my colleagues at work staring at that image. When I asked him what he was doing, he told me that he was trying to see the camera in the reflections. When I told him it was a computer-generated image, he didn't believe me until I showed him the same scene in Carrara. Now that's a true test of the quality of textures in Carrara!
Animation
As incredible as Carrara's renders are, seeing them in motion is especially astonishing and Carrara's animation toolset is quite capable of producing results quickly and easily. Carrara's positioning features are also conducive to animation. For example, each object in a scene has a "hotspot" at its center around which the object can rotate, etc. This hotspot can be repositioned to any location within the scene, including a location far from the object itself. This allows you to easily an accurately rotate a camera around an object in an animation as seen here. (This animation took me literally less than 10 seconds to create.)
In its simplest form, Carrara uses key frames and tweening to create animations. However, it can get a great deal more complex and intricate than that if you wish. The professional version of Carrara adds a significant amount of functionality in this area and allows for precise animations that rival any other animation tool available. For example, using the Graph Editor (figure 5 - professional version only), you have precise control over every movement of an object.
Figure 5 - The Graph Editor
Owners of the standard version of Carrara also have some very powerful animation tools to work with. Carrara has the ability to animate using motion paths and it has an impressive physics engine that allows you to realistically animate objects of many different materials interacting with each other. Carrara also has great rotoscoping features allowing you to include video inside of your animations.
Animation in Carrara is not limited to objects moving. You can animate just about anything including shaders, properties, etc. Carrara also supports powerful animation features for character animation, including joints, bones, and skeletons, along with inverse kinematics chains for truly realistic character motion. Carrara is truly an animation powerhouse, and its animation features are easy to use and surprisingly powerful.
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