I'm sticking with Carrara.
I got a deal on Amapi 5.0. It looked like it might be good for modeling ship hulls. About a month later I hadn't figured it out and went back to Carrara. I figured out a pretty good way of doing ship hulls with it and haven't looked back.
All the short comings with Carrara are I think simply the operator
. I have a lot of problems with lighting, and now in Carrara 6, camera production frames. Most of my time though I spend on modeling in the vertex modeler. I really haven't sat down and played with the cameras, animation and lighting.
Theres a lot to learn.
Iv'e tried Amapi, Shade and even poked around in Maya.
Unfortunately I'm one of those people who doesn't have the patience if I can't jump in immediately and start making things happen I go elsewhere.
I'm not sure if there are huge differences between Hexagon-Amapi-Carrara.
Carrara just works for me and when I try a new program I just get frustrated.
I have switched from Quark to Indesign. It wasn't a big deal. I'm happy playing in Illustrator and Photoshop and It's great when I learn something new.
Iv'e seen some of Becco's stuff on Renderosity but I can't recall if his Triplane is up there yet.
All in all theres just no way in Hell that I can justify spending $1000.00 on new software (I'd get killed by the wife when the bill showed up anyway).
She might let me get a new computer though
Paul-web.mac.com/ocicatgraphics