Not enough true Carrara stuff in the book
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In case my point of view might be useful I thought I would add my thoughts about my particular situation following my recent purchase of Carrara Pro 5 prompted by a recent offer at Daz3d.com.
Having almost purchased Carrara 5 a year back, and on and off thinking about it, I ended up downloading every 3d Application there is over a long period to test out and see what worked best for me and unexpectedly ended up adopting Blender as my package of choice, not because it was free but because of the features, great tie in with my wacom tablet and the totally updating aspect of the program as it is always undergoing constant new features and additions and has a great community.
Just recently however, I purchased Carrara 5 pro due to an impossible to resist offer where the cost was £90 with free updgrade to Carrara 6 later this year. Despite all the hard work I put into Blender, there are great advantages in owning Carrara 5 and none of my Blender endeavours will be wasted as I learnt a lot and will continue to use Blender.
However, history out of the way, I looked around again for books and other learning resources for Carrara and this book came up. I went to the bookshop this morning to have a look and was so disappointed.
Half the book is devoted to using Carrara with other software which whilst is of interest, the book misses out on being devoted to full learning Carrara.
All the sections on using After Effects, Poser, Digital Carvers guild and more are all great and I would certainly use those at some point, it means there is hardly any real tutorials on using the progam in and of itself as the rest of the book is just walkthrough stuff no better than the manual.
To sum up, there are some useful points in the book, but too much space is devoted to programs seperate to Carrara where the book should focus on using Carrara in my view. Yes its good to know about using other programs with Carrara but what we all need is a book that helps us to leverage Carraras great features alone without being diluted.
I have to say that I didnt buy the book at all and instead have gone to VTC.com regards the CD tutorials for Carrara which are great and just what need. Amazon also sells this CD and its great to sit back and listen to interesting and focused lessons and recommend it highly.
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Really Useful!
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I'm working my way through this book now. Usually I fudge my way through a program occasionally referring to the manual. However, as this is one of the few "How To" books I've ever bought, I'm finding Mr. Del La Flor's prose and tutoring style very easy to read and work through - as opposed to some other tutor books that send me to sleep.
After owning three versions of Carrara Mike has finally helped me to get to grips with the spline modeller!
This book also contains a couple of exercises for the Hexagon modelling application - which, like Carrara, has recently (April 2006) been acquired by Daz Productions.
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