Fretslayer

I use DAZ 3D's 'Carrara Pro 6'.
I spent a lot of hours working my tail off learning MAX and LWO and when I found Carrara I didn't have to work at it - the program just worked with me and my mind and everything came as easily to me as drinkin' beer and playing guitar.

I still use MAX and LWO for things now and then but Carrara is my weapon of choice right now.

If anybody would like to have a look at it, follow this link.
They also have a 30 day demo version available for download.

http://www.daz3d.com/i/software/carrara?_m=d

I know it's not an industry standard tool and that there are some people who look down on those of us who use DAZ tools and products but like I've said before... I think of myself as a writer then an animator and lastly a modeler.
For me, it's all about how to get my story out there and Carrara lets me concentrate on my story and not on '...how the heck am I going to animate this?!'

There are things I would like to see in Carrara (like creating a path) but it more than makes up for the things it's lacking.

If anybody would be interested in it, I can try and make a tutorial on how I did these shots.

I love this progam...can ya tell?! LOL!!!!

@ EG - Ok, cool that you could get the larger file. I was honestly worried about it because I can still remember my days on a dial-up (after having broadband for years I got stuck in a place without it and I went nuts) trying to download anything bigger than a couple of mb in size. The AVI file if it is much cleaner and you can see the specularity on the ship as it passes by.

I must tell you this - the textures on your mesh look really good in Carrara.
When the lights hit the surface of the ship it looks really metallic.
Nice work man...Nice work!

I still need to figure out how to get the UV mapping for the nacells and the pylons to work correctly. I've been having an awful time with that but UV mapping is not my strong suit - at all - LOL!

And it goes without saying (so why am I saying it then?!) but I'm going have this site and everybody who's meshes I've used credited in the final version of the animation. Perhaps once it hits something like YouTube (or whatever) it'll drive some people here - never can tell.

I have some other test footage but I'm not happy with it so it didn't make it into this edit. At the moment I'm converting the ST:2 bridge for Carrara/D|S and Poser but I still have a lot of stuff to do on it. The lighting is being tough and when I set the lights up so I like them it drives the render time into the 20+hour range and that's not acceptable to me. Since I'm one guy with one computer I need to have my renders come out clean and quickly.

If my bridge conversion is good enough when I'm finished I'll upload it (with the artist's permission of course!) here in case anybody else would like to use it. One of the things I'm doing with it is mapping the computer screens to run AVI files so the lights and other stuff moves and blinks and all of that.

Ok, I've written a book... sorry.
LOL!