The world of 3D animations is better defined as “breath-taking”, 3D art can illustrate and create worlds which only exist in our imagination and can bring to life all of those fantasies and creations we only saw in our dreams; however a couple of decades ago the thought of even drawing something remotely similar to what we saw in dreams was completely ridiculous, the image quality, vectors, rendering and animation was simply impossible at the time. If you have seen Photoshop creations then you would agree that image manipulation tools are excellent to create good looking pictures, however the Photoshop suite was mainly designed to handle photography and simple animations, other tools which were designed explicitly for the web include Macromedia flash programs which allowed web designers to embed beautiful animations in web pages, however the full suite of 3D art tools doesn’t end there.

Have you ever wondered what type of tools were used to create amazing movie animations such as Final Fantasy – The Spirits Within, Shrek, Cars, etc? what about digital images which have characters which you know are not real but come so close to the real thing you might even confuse them? For this type of work there is yet another suite of tools which are focused in 3D image creation and manipulation as well as 3D video animation, you can’t use tools such as Photoshop to achieve the results you would achieve with applications such as CorelDream 3D. This application was bundled with the CorelDraw graphics suite, however after some time the company Corel decided to suspend further development of this tool, later on this tool was also sold with the name of Ray Dream Designer but this product was discontinued as well.

These product had a lot of potential but for one reason or another the companies in charge of developing and maintaining the tool failed to do so until the product was sold to another company, DAZ Productions. This company worked on the 3D application and gave it a new name, Carrara. The most recent version is 6.1, this tool has been improved and allows 3D artists to bring their imagination to life through a set of tools which allow objects to be rotated and animated in virtually any spherical angle, entire virtual landscapes can be easily created compared to other tools and beautiful maidens as well as scary dragons can be designed with this tool.

Graphic designers who specialize in 3D animation know that there are several other tools out there for this type of job, however the application which started as CorelDream 3D evolved into a very robust program now called Carrara 6.