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Just to clarify, you mean the Carrara V.7 manual, correct? I'm pretty sure no such comprehensive manual for V.8+ exists in any format.
Thanks for everyone who contributed suggested to this enquiry. For reference, I have now had a reasonable look at a few programs:
Shade3D, Lightwave 2018, MODO, Maya, 3DMax, Cinema 4D, Studio 3D and Blender.
My general approach was to launch straight in and do a minium of training or manual reading. Learning each of these would obviously be impossible and is always the problem with any new software. I was testing for usablity rather than features. AlsoI tried to import fbx files exported from Carrara into each program. Without going into too much detail, Cinema 4D had the most sympathetic UI coming from Carrara but as noted is very expensive unless you can get an education price. The others had various degrees of issues and nasty interfaces. Modo actually crashed a couple of times doing basic things. The most successful imports (most comprehensive, but not complete, at keeping textures and geometry were those into Blender. )
Looking at the videos and plans for the upcoming Blender release is very hopeful. It is a much cleaner interface and they are planning 'workspaces', the same idea as Carrara's 'rooms'. The Evee realtime viewport looks very impressive and they are developing an asset management component to store materials and other resources. They are also hoping to develop a Pose library for figure assets. If it all comes off, it seems like the best, most likely alternative. And being open source, with an enthusiastic distributed user group, the software is less likely to languish even if the current development group disappears (unlike propriety software.)
For the time being, I will wait and see what the 2.8 release is like (and meanwhile not update the operating system on my computers, and perhaps even install an alternative boot disc with the current operating system) but Blender does look the most likely alternative from my research.
Cheers
With the demise of several plugin developers, DCG, Inagoni, etc, Carrara is officially dead after fighing a long illness of denial.
I suppose I will have to eventually migrate to Blender as much as I completely hate that program. But it seems to be the way of things and my colleagues at work swear by it.
Currently I model with Form Z and animate with Carrara. I'm playing around with Strata 3D and Unreal Engine as well. Strata has proven to be quite useful, fun to use and does what it was designed for, product packaging and interiors, very well.
So long Carrara, it's been a fun 20 years.
Sorry I comment that late.
I tried other programs like you did.
I tried Blender. It's the one I spent the most time trying. GUI is a bit overwhelming but there is a certain logic in it and I think that, with time, I could get used to it. But there's that damn right click selection. I use rather intensively the right click. I have been for about 20 years, on hundreds of softwares. In at the very least 99% of these software it's purpose is to bring a contextual menu. If I were to use Blender all day long and almost no other software, I could get use to this too. But it's not the case. To me it feel a bit like driving a car with the brake and gas pedal inverted, so ...
I tried C4D and I completely agree with what you said about it. Including the price ...
I tried MODO (12.0). I found, unintentionally, a reproductible and rather basic way to crash it about 30 min after I first started it. And their support confirmed this ... and also said it was corrected in v12.1 (which was in beta at the time). But besides that, I rather like it. And while being expensive, it's a lot less than C4D.
I didn't try Maya nor 3D Max. They're subscription only, and not a small one. Far too sophisticated and expensive for my needs anyway.
The other softwares you mentionned I read what was said about them, but didn't find them interesting enough to try them.
I like to model. MODO is said to be one of the best modelers, and I feel rather at ease with it. So I think I'll take my chance with that one, despite its tendency to crash. It seems there are some interesting discounts from time to time. As I am not in hurry, I'm waiting for one. But no more than a few months.
My guess would be that the ultimate plan over at DAZ is to incorprate Carrara functionality within Daz Studio. I've been playing with a lot of this software for quite a while and have watched the functionality of Daz Studio evolve quite a lot. By the way, to answer your original question, you might look into Eon software's Vue. It's only available by request these days, but their website is still functional and you can look into the software to see if it fits your needs. It does seem to be gear towards large pictures, landscapes, etc.