What can I say about Carrara 6? Well, it "serves its purpose" as a friend of mine would say. It hardly gets recommended here however. As a lower end app it lacks a lot of features that would provide an easy button to 3d design. Carrara 6 was actually provided free on a free disc packed with an issue of 3D Artist magazine. For a free app it's good. Even the low cost regular price is a good option for someone on a budget. For the higher end designer the big players are stil the way to go. Anyway, I made an animated logo to test it out: Namemaker animated logo. Pardon the aspect ratio, it was a requirement for the project I was using it for.

Everyone has dabbled in some sort of photo manipulation using Photoshop. However, has anyone tried video manipulation to the same extent? You take a still image and cut it up into segments that can be animated to produce an animated clip. It is as if the image came alive. I was inspired by the work of Michel Victor Lima de Oliveira. His work can be found at DeviantArt. I cut up a picture of a Hawk in Photoshop and animated it in After Effects with the following results: Hawk video manipulation.