Eovia, a wholly owned subsidiary of TGS, has been working over the last few months re-branding MetaCreations Carrara and bringing it back to market. Now the release of this new “old” product is imminent, Philip Staiger, EOVIA Amapi/Carrara evangelist, told MacCentral.
How imminent? Look for a release date of Monday, June 18 as EOVIA has completed the process of bug-fixing and re-branding Carrara to an Eovia product, under the name Carrara Studio.
Carrara Studio, described as “the successor of Ray Dream Studio and Infini-D,” two popular 3D graphics applications for Mac and Windows, is a complete 3D solution for modeling, animation, rendering, and special effects, Staiger said. It enables full real-time scene manipulation and high-quality 3D rendering up to 11 times faster than its predecessors, he said.
Carrara is optimized for maximum performance with High Speed Rendering and support for Open GL, and creates high-quality 3D output for the Web, multimedia and print. And it has Flexible Workflow, Storyboarding and full export for MetaStream, (the open file format for streaming 3D over the Internet).
“With an elegant, intuitive and uncluttered user interface, Carrara Studio delivers professional results without a professional learning curve,” Staiger said. “Whether experienced in 3D or not, Carrara Studio is the clear choice for every digital artist, Web designer, and multimedia producer.
Besides re-branding the product, Eovia has added new features to Carrara Studio, including: Amapi 3D v5, a complete NURBS modeler; Smart Pack, a set of 25 new plug-ins; and Carrara QuickTour, an interactive tutorial. AMAPI 3D offers a large selection of advanced modeling tools such as NURBS and polyhedral constructions, multiple extrusions and sweepings, Coons and Gordon surfaces, smoothing tools, chamfers and Boolean operations. It also provides a high-performance rendering module allowing the creation of quality outputs for printed illustration and the Web, according to the folks at Eovia.
Along with a choice of several import and export formats, AMAPI 3D offers an optimal 3D technology for the Web and multimedia: the 3Space format. The application has a large number of application fields: illustration, product and environment design, packaging, architecture, multimedia, dynamic content for the Web, video games and more.
Existing Carrara users will be able to get a free re-branded, bug fix update via download, or purchase the new package at a discount if they want to get the new features, materials and model collections included on the CD.
Mac system requirements are a Power Mac/G3 266MHz or better; System 8.1 or later (we are waiting to hear back on an OS X version); 64MB of available application RAM; 16-bit color display (24-bit recommended); 65MB of free hard drive space; and a CD-ROM driver. A 3D graphics accelerator card is also recommended.