MD Communications - Carrara 5 Pro Handbook

By Mike de la Flor, published by Charles River Media (An imprint of Thomson Delmar Learning)

The Carrara 5 Pro Handbook scored 8 out 10 in a 3DWorld magazine review, issue 79. Get your copy of the The Carrara 5 Pro Handbook from www.amazon.com or from the Charles River Media website.

The Carrara 5 Pro Handbook is a project-based, instructional book that focuses on teaching 3D fundamentals and getting readers up to speed with Carrara 5 Pro (and Carrara 5). This book is designed for begining and intermediate users.

The Carrara 5 Pro Hanbook features three chapters that cover introductory 3D topics and five chapters designed to get the user familar with Carrara's new interface and Carrara's unique workflow.

This edition has been updated to cover Carrara's new, advanced modeling tools with three complete Carrara modeling tutorials. Model a NASA rocket, a superhero character from head to toe, and a Piper Cherokee airplane all with Carrara's native modeling tools. This edition also features two bonus chapters on modeling with Carrara's sister application Hexagon 1.2. With Hexgon you will model Raul, a caroon character, and a cool concept car.

Carrara modeling tutorials
Modeling tutorials by Mike de la Flor, Jack Whitney, and Patrick Tuten.

The Carrara 5 Pro Handbook features extensive tutorials on using stock shaders and building custom shaders. You will learn to UV map as well as use new tools such as Displacement Mapping and Subsurface Scattering.

Carrara 5 shaders
Get up to speed with Carrara's shaders, UV mapping, and sophisticated shaders.

Animation topics include tutorials by Mike de la Flor and Peter MacDougall covering rigging with bones, animating a walk cycle (Quicktime movie), using morph targets and lip-synching (Quicktime movie). Also featured are comprehensive tutorials by David Bell and Lisa Yimm, Andrea Newton and Eric Winemiller covering integrating Poser content into Carrara, and compositing Carrara animations in After Effects. The book also covers converting 3D scenes into 3D animations and illustrations with VectorStyle 2 and several of the Digital Carvers Guild plug-ins.

Become familiar wth Carrara's animation tools.

With The Carrara 5 Pro Handbook you will discover how to work with many features in Carrara's powerful render engines including, Global Illumination, HDRI, Caustics, Motion Blur and NPR.

Carrara rendering
Lender to work with Carrara's advanced render engines.

The Carrara 5 Pro Handbook ships with a CD-ROM stuffed with hundreds of incremental and support files to help you successfully complete each tutorial, as well as with a gallery of illustrations and animations to inspire you.

This new comprehensiven new volume is designed to teach 3D concepts with Carrara 5 Pro as the tool of choice, providing readers with a solid foundation in 3D fundamentals as well as a proficiency in Carrara.

Key Features

Provides a detailed guide to many of Carrara's new tools.

Includes many hands-on tutorials on modeling, texturing, animation, special effects, and more.

Teaches how to use popular Carrara plug-ins and how to work collaboratively with Poser, Hexagon, After Effects, and Flash.

Includes indepth tutorials on High Dynamic Range Image (HDRI) lighting, Global Illumination, Caustics, and NPR.

Includes a CD-ROM with Carrara 5 and Hexagon demos (Mac/PC)and support files for the book's tutorials

Author
Mike de la Flor ( Houston, TX ) is a freelance medical illustrator, instructor, and writer. He is the author of The Digital Biomedical Illustraiton Handbook (Charles River Media 2004), The Carrara Studion 3 Handbook (Charles River Media 2003),and is a contributing writer for 3DWorld, Computer Arts, MacFormat, MacWorld, and Computer Graphics World magazines. Mike is also an adjunct instructor at Kingwood College where he teaches computer-graphics. Mike has served as staff illustrator at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, and Baylor College of Medicine.