Should I have Byrce or Carrara?
unclesben
Posts: 45
in The Commons
I am wanting to add some landscapes into some of my art that make in daz. Should I be using Carrara or Byrce? I am wanting to a ship scene where is out to drift and other scenes. I just dont know which program I should get to help me get the outcome I need.
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Well for the most part, you will have to do the scene in either program since not much translates outside into DS. If you want to export any terrain elements to import into DS, carrara seems to have the best track record for that, If you want to use DS assets and figures in either program, you'll have better luck with carrara. As for best terrain, Bryce wins that round.
Ok thanks for the info.
I've had some success exporting terrain obj from Bryce and Carrara, I've had almost no success exporting useful versions of their terrain texture mapping.
Supposedly there are plugins in Carrara you can buy to make it better, but I'm loathe to throw more money at it.
And of course I can be guaranteed to say "Everyone should have Bryce" oh and BTW Carrara is not bad either, but Bryce rocks.
Well based on the DAZ Galleries Bryce.
Both have advantages and disadvantages. Bryce is a dedicated terrain/environment program so is much better than Carrara for that. There is a bridge from Daz Studio to Bryce but I believe that means you'd be rendering in Bryce (which can be great!) but isn't Iray. Once in Bryce, other functions like continued posing would be limited. I'm sure Chohole will correct me if that is incorrect. Carrara does a whole lot more (eg., dynamic strand-based hair that interacts with physics, modeling objects, etc.). Carrara can load a Daz figures through genesis 2 directly in the program and continue posing/morphing the figure. Carrara won't load genesis 3.
As for what other people have rendered/produced with each program, it is the artist not the tool. Great stuff in both, not so great stuff in both. I create not-so-great stuff in Carrara, but others do amazing things.
Here is a recent Bryce challenge thread
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/100716/22nd-bryce-render-challenge-light-and-colour#latest
Here is a recent Carrara challenge thread
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/110486/carrara-challenge-27-carrara-9-give-us-a-sign-voting-thread/p1
It (Bryce bridge from Daz) works for me with a DIM install of all programs on my Windows machine. Assuming that it is not a Mac issue, the tech help people should be able to sort that out for you. Or, ask on the Bryce forum.
As with every program, you have to learn it. Which one is easier to learn, Carrara or Bryce? It depends on how you learn. I've bought every Carrara version from 3 up to 8.1 but never was able to do anything serious with it. Is it therefore a bad program? No, it just doesn't work for me. I also struggled with Bryce in the beginning (I came from TerraGen and PovRay) but after a moment, got the hang of it and I find it very intuitive; the interface was made by an artist for artists. Though Bryce is a great landscaper, it can do much more that that. It is a very versatile program but doing good character skin is definitely not Bryce's strong point. Bryce has two separate render engines, one better suited for outdoors and one better suited for indoors. Bryce image based light (IBL) options are very advanced and you can render with natural light, like they do in the movie industry, something that is as hard to do in Carrara as good natural human skins in Bryce.
I had to do a manual install of Bryce my DIM will not show up Bryce for me to download
Yes Bryce is still an .exe installer.
Either is great if you get them free. After that... well, I've got Carrara 8 Pro and have been offered upgrades on Carrarra 8.5 Pro for as little as 11 bucks, but I still haven't done it. A new Bryce, though, I'd probably buy pretty quickly, though at this point it's unlikely we'll ever see one. If I want uber-high end landscape creation, I also have VUE, which is currently the state of the art and far better supported than either of the DAZ programs, but I think most people here would actually be pretty happy with Terradome 3.
I haven't really used Bryce, so I can't help much there. Also, as a Carrara user I am probably a bit more biased toward Carrara. But I would say if all you're interested in is landscapes only, Bryce may be the better choice since that is what it was designed and optimized to do. However, if you want to do more than just landscapes, or you want to be able to use/pose DAZ figures directly in your landscape software (except for Genesis 3), Carrara would probably be the better tool.
Carrara has several features not available in DS, and possibly not available in Bryce (I hope Chohole will correct me if I'm wrong). Carrara has soft and hard body physics, 3D text, dynamic hair/fur, a tree/plant generator (this may be in Bryce), realistic sky's with volumetric clouds (I think Bryce has this??), a vertex modeler, a spline modeler, a metaball modeler, an animate-able ocean primitive, and a lot of other things I haven't mentioned. There have been a couple of threads recently with DS users asking about Carrara. They can be found here and here.
You might also be interested in looking through the entries from the current Carrara Challenge to see what users of various skill levels are doing with it. Please vote for your favorites while your there as well
I've got both and I like them both. I think Bryce is more geared towards creating landscapes and skies but I haven't explored those in Carrara yet. Carrara is a more powerful modeller but you probably don't need that for making landscapes
If you want to use your landscape as a background to the scene then you don't really need to try and integrate the programs. Just setup a scene in Bryce or Cararra with matching lighting and camera angle, render it and use the render as a background. You can import background images into Daz Studio and it will render it's own content over them.
Alternatively you can do your render in the other program and import your Studio content. Bryce has a bridge to Studio and you can create scenes in Studio and import them into Bryce. Carrara can open most Studio and Poser content (but not Genesis 3 yet) and you can do the posing in Carrara.
Given you can get both for about $70 total, or close, if you wait long enough, get both!
I love Bryce for landscapes and although I haven't had Carrara for long, I love it for just about everything. However, neither of them render skin that's anywhere close to believable while under my control. I'm not saying that they couldn't, particularly Carrara, just that it would take someone with more time or experience than I've got at the moment to figure it out. I'm a 'hobbyist' Carrara user for now, learning to get the best from it in my spare time (whatever that is!). I need to spend time rendering for for pay - there's a limit to the time I can spend rendering for experimentation and practice. As someone else has said, it's easy enough to get Bryce or Carrara geometry into Daz Studio, it's the textures that are another matter. There is a plugin that will 'bake' Carrara shaders onto a texture map, but I haven't tried it and haven't noticed much raving over it either.
On the 'raveworthy' front, I could not fail to notice the clamour over Terradome 3 when it arrived, and I gave in and bought the base product over the weekend in the interests of getting some work done. I found it impressive, easy to use... and very slow to render. On my machine at least, you can almost hear the fireflies as they twinkle around on the screen for hours yelling 'Look - no dome! We're freeeee! You'll take forever to get of meeeeeeee!'. Admittedly mine isn't the world's fastest computer, but using Terradome reminds me of when I had a much slower computer (and the images I made money from often involved Bryce renders where people stood around in shadows a lot or were silhouetted by the sun so that you didn't need to see much hair and skin detail!).
There are some ideas that just won't work with slotting a background image into Daz Studio and rendering the figure in front of it (e.g. if you want to show your figure standing in water, reflections and all), but if you're just doing head and body shots then it can be an advantage to have built up a collection of landscape renders which you can put into the background and then quickly render the figure in front of (after matching the lighting, obviously). What I do in those circumstances is choose my background image, position and light the figure appropriately, and then get rid of the background image and render the figure as a transparent png. After that, I layer it on top of the background image in Photoshop - not having it directly rendered onto the background makes it dead easy to postwork stray hair or odd angular outlines in clothes etc. It also leaves me with a growing collection of isolated figure renders which can often be layered into another image at a moment's notice if necessary.
All well good. All I've got to do now is crack the 'rendering a believable figure into a landscape showing that it's completely interacting with it's environment' problem without having to leave my computer to it for an entire day :)
I got Bryce for free ages ago, and I confess I never installed it. One of the main issues that puts me off is the glacial render times mentioned by some, including some of the experienced Brycers (someone recently mentioned needing 24 hours just to see if the render will end okay, then waiting several more days for it to actually finish). I am pretty impatient, and don't really like a render taking much more than 30 mins, and ideally 5-10 mins.
I keep hearing these stories about slow rendering in Bryce but I've never come across them myself. Admitedly I don't push it to it's limits but even with the quality turned up and one or two premium effects turned on I usually get my renders done in less than an hour, simple scenes in less than 5 minutes. I think if you switch on some of the more advanced options like true ambience and include lots of transparency the render times can get long but that's really advanced use.
Something I found recencly is that Bryce has a render priority setting, the default is medium but you have to set it to high for it to use all of your CPU cores.
Astracadia: Were you rendering TD3 with atmosphere? If so, try it without. Atmospheric effects in Iray are horribly slow and, IMO, 99% of the time better done in post.
I have a decent but not spectacular computer, and got a TD3 Azone terrain to render in about 5 minutes.
TerraDome 3 renders very fast for me as long as I don't use the atmosphere props. Once I added atmosphere it slowed to a snail's pace. Like Will said, a lot the atmosphere effects are better done post work. Terradome is a very very versatile landscape prop. I am pretty sure its going to be my go to environment prop for a very long time.
I have both Bryce and Carrera. I love Bryce it makes gorgeous landscapes. I haven't had time to really even open Carrera and try it yet though I have had for a couple of months.
Every render takes too long, no matter which program you use, everybody complains. In every program, there are strategies to speed up the render time. There are options engaged that take ages to render but make no difference for the final image. Bryce can include or exclude objects from being lit by lights or HDRI, for example. Here, plop-rendering a critical part, changing options and comparing the quality and render time is a great help. Bryce can, by the way, also render over a home network.
TerraDome3 render times are long with atmosphere on, I read. I suspect that is a similar option like Volumetric World in Bryce. Gives nice results but start the render before you go for a long holiday. Luckily for Bryce, there are alternatives that give the same result but render in a reasonable time. Can't speak for Carrara here.
Here's a Bryce exported generated terrain with TerraDome3 badlands shader put on it and TD3 HDRI backdrop/lighting.
I'm excited, because between having Bryce, Carrara, and TerraDome3 (and every other landscape that I've gotten my hands on), I have huge amounts of options.
(I should note that this took 6 minutes to render, and maybe another 6 minutes to play around with distance canvas to get haze how I wanted in Photoshop)
Every time I see one of Horo's Bryce renders in the gallery, I'm awestruck.
Personally I prefer Carrara because it does pretty much everything and I rarely need to go outside the program (okay, so I have to import to DS in order to create 3Delight and Iray shaders, but...) I have nothing against Bryce, as Horo proves time and again, it can produce fantastic results, but I haven't put in the time to learn it, and honestly I haven't felt the need to either - for my own work and workflow.
A lot of the things that Bryce can do, Carrara can do too, but with maybe slightly less control or precision. Terrains, oceans, skies, volumetric clouds, they're all in there. I can also render my own skydomes using the spherical camera. So ask yourself, do you need the ultimate control of a specialist or would you prefer the flexibility of an all-rounder. It's horses for courses to some extent, and the right tool for the job. But given how cheap they are at the moment, buying both ought to be worth serious consideration.
Oh, and get the 64-bit Pro version, otherwise if you do start using it heavily you might regret only having the 32-bit Standard.
Another thing that Carrara can do straight out of the box is utilise any spare Macs/PCs you may have lying around and turn them into a render farm. I only just set one up a couple of days ago, and it's already turned a 40 minute render into a 10 minute one, at zero extra cost! :)
That was probably me. You've exaggerated slightly, but your general description of my point is fair. Buuuuuuuuuuut - context.
I was talking about combining multiple area lights with transmapped surfaces. With Bryce (to avoid noise), you'd have to do that with some combination of stacked lights and True Ambience (Bryce's global illumination facility). Yes, this takes many, many hours on my overclocked hex-core Intel thing. That's why it's such a novelty to see (GPU) Iray whizz that out in minutes before my boggled eyes.
Regular Bryce scenes, even fairly complex ones, can render in the time frames you're talking about. Normally they'll take a bit longer (as will Cararra or any other CPU powered renderer). I think a few hours for a complex scene rendered large is fair for any CPU renderer.
I highly recommend Bryce.
Bryce rocks It rocks so seriously that I even titled an image Bryce rocks.
Thanks, Will. I've tried it without atmosphere and it is a bit quicker. I think my problem is that most of my images have to be quite large (3000+ x 4000+). I like to use large bodies of water too, and all those reflections add to the time taken. Atmospherics I can do without - like you say, postwork is often a better option - but once I decide I need water in a scene then it's usually non-negotiable :)