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I bought my Carrara 8.5 pro during a recent 50% off (recent as, about 10 days ago) sale. So it was $65 - because there was a stack of other discounts on it already for reason I don't understand.
Sure I could have gotten Bryce and Hexagon even cheaper - but diminishing returns on discount percentages mean the difference would have been smaller than buying these all at full price. Of course I also already have Bryce and Hexagon and have had them for years. And I think I got both during big sales.
If you time it right - the differences in price for these is not significant. Vue on the other hand, I don't know if they are sale crazy like this place is - and without some heavy sales Vue starts to look rather pricey for equivalents.
You make a good point about sales prices. In addition, they sometimes package a lot of other content with the programs, which also affects relative cost. The value of that extra content to the user would depend on the buyers' intended use for the programs.
Yeah - I got a huge array of genesis and generation 4 content with my copy of Carrara 8.5 for reasons that didn't make sense to me - but I'm not complaining.
I think the same thing happened with Bryce back when I downloaded it but I wasn't paying attention to the same degree.
Between Bryce and Carrara I would not let price be the deciding factor because given Daz's sales you can get them into similar budgets if you time it. Between those two and Vue... I can see and in fact myself had to... consider the cost. I was a Vue user from version 3 through 6 - and most of my old gallery is Vue material. It is my comfort zone. But I jumped off the wagon this time around because I was looking not only at its current cost... but that this seems to be its trend... Vue has become of interest to 'professional studios' - so its trying to price itself to people who tell their accounting department to buy 20-2000 Maya licenses for the machines in the animation department. Vue's version for us hobbyists seems to have less features now than it did when I left at 6... but more advanced. And upgrade for me would be halfway a downgrade...
For anyone interested in what can be done with Carrara, you should stop by the Carrara forum and take a look at the August Challenge Voting thread ( or just click here: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/44589/). There are some really creative and great entries that show a wide range of things that can be done in Carrara.
The various challenge entries demonstrate how easy it is to make your own "stuff" in Carrara from relatively simple objects to more complex things like suspension bridges. Many,of the entries also integrate DAZ3D content into the project, and demonstrate how easy it is to use Carrara to enhance your creativity and your DAZ/Poser content. Check out the WIP thread to see how everything was made here:http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/44033/ DAZ content.
Oh, I almost forgot to mention, if you like what you see, please vote for your favorite images while you are there (you can vote for three images, and suggest honorable mentions if you want). Voting is open to everyone, you don't need to use or even own Carrara to vote.
This was mentioned several times earlier in this thread, so I thought I'd give a quick update. The Octane Render plugin for Carrara was just released (the public beta). Now Carrara has plugins for two external render engines, LuxRender, and now Octane Render!
Carrara's internal render engine is fantastic and can produce very realistic images. However, pushing Carrara's internal render engine to virtually un-biased rendering also means looonger render times. In most instances, Octane can render equivalent or better images in much less time.
Below are a few renders done with Octane. More information and renders can be found the Carrara Forum here: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/45564/ You can view the introductory video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GeGGs_QU-I
Note: You really need to click on the images and see the full resolution to really appreciate the detail/quality of the renders.