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Donovan,.
in case it's not been mentioned,.. Navigation in carrara becomes easier when you discover the Alt key, plus your Mouse buttons and movement, to Move, Rotate, Track, and Pan the camera.
In carrara, whatever object you have selected in the scene,. becomes your rotation point for the camera's,. this can seem awkward at first,. but it becomes like swinging through the trees
If you lose the plot entirely,. Select an obect on the SCENE panel,. and hit 0 "zero" to zero the camera onto that object,. the camera is repositioned to focus on thet object, or group of objects.
Hope that makes sense :)
Wow. Fantastic!
Two basic questions. How many characters can you load in Carrara (is there a limit)? Does one generation use more resources than another?
The limit to how many characters you can load will depend on the memory in your computer, and how complex the characters are. Figures such as Loretta Lores and Lorenzo Lores take a lot less resources than full resolution characters, and as they incorporate clothing, there is no need to add extra resources for clothing. If you are after really big crowds, then you could look at using a replicator and you can get thousands of characters in your scene. The Instance Randomizer plugin (free from Sparrowhawke3D) can be useful in disguising obvious duplication of characters.
The differences in character generations will be less important than the size of maps that you are using. Many characters these days come with very detailed maps of 4096x4096, but unless you are doing extreme close-ups, you don't really need maps with that resolution - so look at reducing them to 2048x2048 (takes one quarter the memory) or even 1024x1024 (takes one sixteenth the memory).
Thanks Phil. Sorry, I should have been more specific (the problem with posting near bedtime).
I should have asked, how many normal resolution characters can you load in a scene? It soulds like from your answer is that it is a variable depending on memory.
I am looking at around 10-14 characters, and I only have 8 GB system memory.
I found that the real limitation isn't how many you can load in a scene, but how many can you load and then save the file. When Carrara files get bigger than 2 GB they won't open.
There are so many ways to work efficiently (and even more ways to Not! - ed) which should actually eliminate the need to ever find out the answer to this question. I normally wouldn't work in a way that produces a picture like this, but all of these figures are actually in this scene, though they're almost all a replication of one of the original eleven or twelve actual Predatron LoRez people.
This was actually just a bit of having fun with Yofiel's awesome St Peter's Basilica freebie model, shown here using the Woodlands Base scene for all of the lighting and atmosphere, clouds, etc.,
I think someone made a comment about how cool it would look filled with people, so I made a few LoRez people including male and female children (both Lorenzo and Loretta come with an abundance of shape morphs!) and then replicated thousands of them. I cannot remember the actual number of people in this scene.. but it's a lot.
Like 3DAGE will tell you, and has in many other threads, there's never really a need to have so many people in any one scene. Yeah... something like this image was realy fun, simple to set up, and easy (and efficient) to save. This saved .car scene (I always save mine using compression and with a thumbnail) weighs in at 96.8 Mb. So if we're just doing a scene of mass like this... the number of visible figures possible should be no problem. I made this one on my laptop.
But if we're looking to do animations and such, or just want to do massive numbers of individual (not replicated) figures, we really should look to using proper filmmaker/photographer techniques to use efficiency to our advantage - eliminating the need to find out how many Carrara might max out on.
My animation computer handles vastly more than this laptop, and this laptop had no problems with these thousands of figures.
There are many times when I want to have many figures in a scene at one time, like on a Star Ship bridge scene, for example. For this I can make a base figure wearing the uniform, etc., and then use the "Duplicate Tree" from Fenric's Posing Pack 3 which gives me another real instance of the model. It's not a replicated model, so I can go ahead and change the morphs, give it an entirely different pose, change some shaders, etc.,
I immediately go back to my good ol' Edit > Remove Unused Masters > Consolidate Duplicate Shaders before moving on.
I'll then repeat the process. When using the aforementioned Predatron's LoRez figures, I can even resize them to be children, make them into Aliens, Orcs, Dwarves or Zombies as well as applying a bunch of other individualization facial morphs. These LoRez figures don't have the greatest morphs for close-up speech and/or expressions... so I only use these as background folks - but for that... they're amazing to work with!
To replicate all of those people to be where they are, I created a Vertex Object and edited it in the Assemble room - a simple set of polygons shaped to the area I wanted people, including the little area on top the stairs. Those stairs are HUGE to these people, but they don't seem to mind - just milling about the place. They really do look pretty cool.
I know Yofiel has updated this model since I did this. I need to update and get his higher rez statues too, even though I was happy with these.
I also remember wondering if polygon resolution had anything to do with replicating - wondering if one huge polygon would only get a few people on it. Nope. Carrara doesn't care one bit. Just make a shape however we want, set the replicator onto it and let it go! Carrara truly is an easy system to work with - and for so many things in so many different ways!
Ahh, worth knowing, thanks! The first scenes I made in Carrara were relatively simple but HUGE (over 200 MB). I think I wasn't compressing when saving. Now that I compress, much more complex scenes are rarely more than 60-100 MB.
I read your examples Dart, but I don't see how they apply in my case. I need 10-14 full resolution characters in one scene, all different and with different outfits. Any suggestions on how to economize?
It's funny, I would swear that I read somewhere on the forum that there was a practical limit (other than 2GB scene size) to how many full resolution characters can be in a scene. I'm happy if I am mistaken!
I don't know if you are working on stills or animations, but for either you might consider rendering a few characters at a time and then compositing the results together. There are a number of advantages in working like that, but it just requires a bit more planning.
Nope, since that would be a highly inaccurate statement as no two figures are equal in every way. There may be some sort of ceiling for this or that, but I think that is all determined mostly by individual machines and how the individual owner keeps it.
"Full Resolution" is arbitrary and has a different meaning to different people. And they can have entirely different attributes.
I apologize... your question seems kind of vague to me.
Genesis 2 figures are pretty high resolution to me and sometimes I have a difficult time with just one of them in my scenes which have other elements in them. But M4 and V4 figures, also high resolution, work so well for me that I can easily just keep adding them in from my browser. The trick would be to make sure you get them into position and posed right away. The more and more you bring in and the working view will begin to get more and more sluggish and closer to wanting to crash.
Many folks would argue whether you truly "need" 10-14 figures all in the same scene. Just because we need them all in the same image or video doesn't mean that we need them all in the same Carrara scene.
That's what I was starting to say earlier when I brought up 3DAGE. He has shown me (it took many times before it finally sank into my head! LOL) how we can use compositing techniques to keep our work in Carrara super efficient - and that we never really have to have a lot of content in any one scene.
It's never easy to answer something like "How many figures can I load with 8GB RAM?"
Much more beneficial questions to answer are more like: "I need to have 10 - 14 figures gathered around a table covered with swords in a dark dungeon setting with dismal lighting caused only from torches - how could I pull this off?"
While that one would still need a hefty interview in order to make it even less vague, it's a lot easier to understand where the asking person is trying to go, whereas the earlier one is so vague that it seems more like a question to ask the RAM chip manufacturer.
Either way, though... I'm always happy to help. But time is always a factor.
OK, I'm obviously asking a question about an absolute ceiling that doesn't exist. Rather, it is a variable, and optimizing that variable is hard to pin down without very specific details.
Sorry for the general misconception. But in asking, I learned something. Many useful tips, thanks!
I'm going to start loading characters and see what happens...
I try to always consolidate duplicate shaders often - especially as soon as I load in another object, when I'm trying to build a scene with a lot of stuff on my laptop. Even on my desktop with 16GB RAM, I still try and work as efficiently as possible - also trying to separate things if I can. For example:
If I need people in the background doing stuff... but they're in the background, I like to render them, and then render my main characters either in front of them or separately using alpha to composite in post.
What I mean by render in front of them is that I'll load the one render that I just made of the backgroung characters into the backdrop of the new scene with my main characters in it. My first attempt at this was really fun: I made some running goblins and orcs in the distance, running toward the camera, and rendered it. Then I moved the camera a little closer, swapped the figure's positions around while also swapping some shaders, loaded the previous render in the backdrop (animated avi file) and rendered again, and then repeated that two more times.
I wasn't as good at lighting then and it looked kind of crappy because of my crappy render skills (or lack there of) at the time, but it worked really well!