What's New in 7:

Larger Texture Support in OGL -- Carrara 7.0 provides the ability to increase the texture size that is displayed in the Open Graphics Library (OGL) or viewport. The settings will be based on what texture size your graphics board will support, and can be adjusted for performance or quality.

Collada Export (pc only)

Vertex Modeling in the Assembly Room -- This tool gives more power to the modeler who can model in context to the other objects in their scene.

LOD Support for Figures -- Carrara 7 also includes support for Content Figures that have multiple Levels of Detail (LOD).

Non-Linear Animation Play

PNG Image Save Option -- PNG is a better format for alpha and transparency than GIF and uses lossless compression, which produces a superior image quality to JPEG without the artifacts that JPEG compression produces.

Features:

Landscape Wizard - Create any natural surrounding you desire. Easily construct original landscapes by combining terrains, shaders, skies, vegetation, and rendering presets.

Plant Modeler - The Plant primitive simulates real plants with branches and leaves, such as trees. And speaking of trees, with only a few parameter adjustments, you can create a whole forest of trees and plants.

Terrain Modeler - The Terrain primitive simulates natural terrains. By adjusting the parameters, you can create rocky mountain ranges, desert dunes, gorgeous valleys, sun-filled beaches, and beyond.

Sky Simulator - With Carrara 3D Express, you can produce lifelike skies and clouds quickly. Whether you want to create the perfect sunrise, a romantic sunset, a stormy night or a blissful summer day, the Sky Simulator will help you form the sky of your dreams.

Scene Wizard - Provides more than 100 pre-built scenes, ready to customize to your heart's content. Use this vast array as starting points for your own projects or as examples to assist you in learning to build new scenes of your own.

Rendering - Carrara 3D Express contains a strong list of rendering options for creating your own stunning renders. It also has the ability to render the advanced effects and options of any Carrara Pro scene file.

Key Frame Animation --A key frame is a moment in the animation where an object's characteristics change. Key events are marked on the time track for each animatable property. Carrara then generates the 'in between' motion automatically.

Inverse Kinematics (IK) - Allows you to move a joint on the end of a hierarchical chain, and have all of the other joints in the chain move accordingly. For example, when you move a hand to the desired point, the other parts of the arm change position accordingly. Or, you can move a figure's foot to take a step, and the parts of the leg will bend accordingly.

Storyboard Feature - Helps you easily create professional animations in just minutes of practice. The visual timeline interface makes it a snap to control your animation. Your scenes can be assembled and animated in real-time with instant visualization so you know exactly how things will look, before the final render.

Collision Detection - When objects bump into each other, Collision Detection prevents one object from crossing the boundaries of another one and going 'inside' the object it's bumping into. Instead, it either stops there or bounces off of the object it is colliding with. Collision Detection is most often used in physics or with dynamics such as hair or cloth dynamics.

Shaders - You can animate shader properties of an object. For instance, you can change the color of leaves over time to simulate transitions from summer to autumn.

Morph Targets - Changing morph target settings over time allows you to create things like facial animation on a figure, make a figure gain or lose weight, add some 'jiggles' here and there, and so on.

Modeling - Modeling describes the process of forming the shape of an object. With Carrara 3D Express, you can learn to create original models from primitives using basic 3D modeling tools.

Basic Primitives - The Vertex Primitive tools let you create several basic 2D or polymesh shapes: Sphere, Cube, Cone, Cylinder, Polyhedron, Plane, Oval, Grid, and Polygon.

Text Modeler - Create 3D text of any character set you have installed on your system easily with the Text Modeler. Design flying logos and impressive 3D graphics using this easy and useful tool.