Post Your Renders like it's the year 2020!!!
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don't get me wrong Phil, I meant the only who considers carrara biased engine as "good" as top notch engines like vray or arnold or redshift or renderman, used widely for animations; a good render for realistic animations is only a matter of correct (or better "convincing") lighting and shadows, good texturing and enough post processing to get a likely result; many times with unbiased engines you get terrific stills but bad animations for many reasons, so a biased engine can always be helpful
I love Carrara's native engine for animation rendering! I suppose my lighting sucks... but I haven't been showing my latest animated renders, either. I guess I'm also not going for ultra-realism.
as I can see Daniel, you'd rather be focusing on storytelling and drama and pathos, by using carrara biased engine in an artistic way as a tool to emphasize the general mood of the story, closer to a graphic novel or art comics, way harder and different from my search; I'm only tweaking an understimated PR engine to show what can do in the field of realistic animation
In my opinion you're doing a fantastic job too!
I know you appreciate my endeavor, nevertheless it's leading to nowhere, carrara development has been stopped and the community has lost many members along the way, anyway whenever I can it's always funny to play with carrara
Only if you depend upon those things to push forward ;)
I agree with Dart. My interest in Carrara is independent of the Daz development team.
And I don't think that your efforts are going nowhere. Forgive me for being slow, but I am only now beginning to appreciate your experiments! It appears that you are attempting to make realistic global illumination without using the GI, correct? Very nice quality, and the low render times are stunning. I saw some of earlier your details which involved dark light, clouds, and high ambient. Are you going to give a detailed tutorial? I'm definitely interested.
BTW - I sent you a PM.
I know, right? I keep hinting too.
blender is alive mostly for a huge community of developers, testers and makers, with the foundation as coordinator and network aggregator; daz should make this way to stimulate the community and let carrara live;
as for a tutorial, too many things to say in such a short time
maybe some screenshots may help (hope so):
- basicly this method has been using the AO backlight (intensity around 200%) in a carrara mode: first of all tweak occluded shadows on objects nearby corners in a convincing way, then render and uncheck the AO function, having carrara precomputed the shadows it will keep a softer version; keep the sky light at minimum to avoid time consuming renders but consider it as a tweaker for lighting hue and intensity
- add dark intense distance or cloudy fog to simulate lighting from horizon and increase intensity and contrast, in my experience distance fog works better for diffuse lighting scenes, cloudy when in presence of sunlight; the ambient light must be dark and intense and tweaked mostly in the color chip; as you know if you use light colors it washes out shadows
- this method leads to a rough but fast and convincing GI, you have to take control on lighting and shadows by putting in other lighting tools, to tweak bounce lights from below or from the environment, to tune up shadows on walls etc; fortunately carrara has plenty of tools for that
the result may be convincing for animations and very fast to render (this shot took only 50 secs on a i7 6700)
jointly with light settings you have to tweak maps into carrara and other graphic tools; for example in photoscape you may routine all the maps in a folder quickly and effectively; following are my favourite settings for maps to be used in carrara, but not exhaustive, you must tune them up into cararra as well
Mod edit :- Image removed. Please repost without the full image of the face map from a product. Thankyou
sorry, Mod
Thank you, Magaremoto. You do amazing Carrara images, and these screenshots are very much appreciated.
Wonderful magaremoto! As different as I've been going, I can at least see that my mind was heading in the right direction. Very cool! Thank you so much for sharing!
Also, as I'm sure you know by now, I have also found that I can really get away with some incredibly fast renders on my 8-core, and then tweak them, even animated tweaks, in Howler or whatever VFX software one uses, which can save a lot of time and achieve convincing animated results as well.
Rendering to Multipasses can be a real time-saving enhancer!
I cannot wait to try some of this new thought to my process. Also, are you now using the Distant or Cloudy Fog system in place of the volumetric cloud dome you used before? Or am I reading this wrong?
that's correct Daniel, the volumetric cloud dome is redundant in this lighting system, pretty useless
I love your latest stills with a lot of VFXs, very "cinematic" and effective, can't wait to watching a clip with sound embedded
about multipass, in my opinion it depends on what the artist or the director wants to achieve for a specific sequence, if he wishes to favor action or storytelling; personally I prefer to have a tool that let me take control on the shot till the end without going back and forth, and make only little adjustments and/or additions in post production
Thanks for all the tips and screenshots, Magaremoto! I hope to have the time to go through them all very soon.
Exactly. So for example, a quick multipass addition to the render, which adds almost no time whatsoever, can enable such quick and simple edits to very specific areas without the need to re-render. Of course, there are many types of mutipass available. So if we use Fusion (another quick example) we could utilize a UV Coordinates pass to then distribute volumetric fog in 3d into a 2d image or animation, since we can access the UV Coordinates from the pass to control the behavior of the fog. I wouldn't work that way myself - doing my own thing - but in a multi-department studio, these kinds of tools can mean a huge savings in time and money, if they incorporate certain passes in every render - for just-in-case situations.
Cool. That makes for an immense render speed difference. V-Clouds can really slow a render down.
I know the fog in the realistic sky system is pretty easy to control. Can't wait to start experimenting with these other atmospheres. thanks again for this!
Thank you! The cool part (in my opinion) is that it looks much better in motion! ;)
dunno Daniel, in the age of cloud-based anything, we are asked to pack the product as ready as possible, and if I can get it with one tool only including color correction and vfx, the better will be for the whole process, demanding only video editing and audio mixing on the cloud or externally; in this case multipass is only your choice depending on your workflow. I'm not enough experienced in this field anyway to express a qualified opinion
thx Diomede and UB
Yup. I know exactly what you mean. I used to feel the same way, so I made this badge (upper right corner) that I used to put on my renders
Truth is, I was against doing post work mainly because I had no clue how to (for animations). Then I took a VFX course and followed through with a bunch more studying. I see things a bit differently now. Still studying - lots more to learn. Right now I'm finishing Jeremy Birn's Lighting and Rendering book to get more instict to basically look through Carrara as if it was my movie film camera. The next process is to take the film into the studio and add any necessary visual effects. Then cut everything together in the editing room. Now comes several departments at once: Sounds, Final Voices, Color Grading, Musical Scoring. Then comes the final step - show it to the public.
Just as a quick example, let's look at this again
I was in a hurry doing that vfx thing, which is actually several layers of things added to the still image.
Due to the wonderful atmspheric lighting (which I love, by the way) and the fact that the Mech's colors are so similar to many of its surrounding colors, it was difficult for me to realize the true shapes involved in the mech, close-up, doing rotoscoping techniques to mask out the mech and some boxes, the floor, etc., on my laptop. We can easily see where I messed up when we look at it.
In truth, if I were assigned this part of the project for post vfx, I'd love to bring out some extra 3-dimensional details of the mech using a high-pass filter on linear light mode with just enough radii to get the creases and individual details of the mech to stand out from the atmospheric lighting - so my rotoscoping mistake would truly stand out then.
But if I had an Object pass, I could very quickly isolate the mech and any other object in the scene for a quick and accurate mask - even if things (any things) were in motion in the scene. If things were in motion truly, with no extra pass render to work with, I would be bust for literally hours trying to animate that mask.
Even if it wasn't an Object pass though... even a Depth pass would make the masking easier, because it already lays out shapes - necessary shapes to follow.
So I could run my altered pass data on the High-Pass filter, dial the radius to make that mech pop, then apply the Linear Light as its blend mode. That part's done. Use the same altered (turned into a true mask isolating only what I wanted to be positive and negative in my mask) pass data to mask out the added effects that I didn't want to intersect with the face of the mech or the surrounding boxes, doorways, etc., That almost unnoticeable amount of extra time added to a render with the check of a box just saved me literally hours and hours and perhaps even more hours of work to accurately detail the moving shapes in the scene - which is a huge cost savings, especially if it ends up not making it fully into the final cut of production (VFX are (almost) always applied before editing)!
But that's just an example of what I just did with that image. What "I" did. The color grading person might also decide that the mech deserved even a slightly different grade that the rest of the scene.
Even more, that data could also make for an easy cloning of the mech to add more of them to the scene - say it's an animated scene with the mech walking... multipass information is almost immediate in the render phase. I save all of my animated renders to their own folders, so it's easy for me. If I never use any of the extra passes... I can easily just delete them once the project is complete. Otherwise I always know where to find it, since the folder is the same name as that part of the scene - the same name as the clip that's playing in the software's timeline! ;)
Just some fun food for thought
Carrara has a LOT of various outputs for Multipass rendering. For grins, here's an Atmosphere pass of the cave system from Environkits Badlands using a sherical camera. I've reduced its size and quality for web purposes
One could use this to isolate the entire atmosphere (by using Threshold) or isolating it from strong to weak, as it is now - and, of course, anything except the atmosphere. Quite a powerful bit of extra data at almost no cost to render time.
Further, these various passes, once we get used to using them, can often "Save" otherwise "Not Right" renders. Post vfx can soften shadows, enhance details, clarify lost items, replace missing parts from an animation... major time-saving stuff!
Some VFX software, like Fusion and HitFilm for two quick examples, can even use spherical (or otherwise) renders to simulate lighting, reflections, distortions, many things onto whatever is in their workspace - most often used for a 3d workspace and we need the objects inside the workspace to match the footage it's being applied to.
When we see the assassin sneaking up behind 007 through the reflection in his eye, that was tough work back when all compositing was done on chemical film! Nowadays we can add a sphere into the VFX workspace, mask it to fit the eye of the moving character, and put a spherical map onto it. Use another spherical map in another channel to help reduce the effect a bit to make it more believeable, etc., etc., and it never stops.
While some might hear and/or even believe that VFX is a cheat, the funny reality is that almost all movies are VFX, whether they look like it or not. It's been that way from the beginning of motion pictures. Embellishment is what the human mind requires or they'll walk right out. Too close to "real" gets boring quickly.
Fun:
many all-in-one tools have render layers that can manage what you have made on my shot, in order to apply vfxs, color masks, corrections, point clouds for instancing or whatever internally, and composite the whole in preproduction always in-house, with no use of other tools but third party plug-ins; these layers may contain more than one pass and they can possibly be improved in post for the final result.
but for a production with carrara we should do as you suggest, Dan, thanks for the tips
My newest render with octane, just added a bit sharpness on PS + lightning effect for sun
had a few issues uploading the image
this video can give an idea of what I mean
Hey Chris, very nice!
Just a note of caution. I think that your image above is over 800 pixels wide, which the mods discourage. You might want to drop it down to 800, and then enable a larger image when clicked.
If you have any confusion over the posting of images, I'm sure that you will figure it out much faster than I did!
Nice Render, Chris!!! Awesome!
Yeah, that's what I mean too, but all we really need to do for Carrara to help with the post production is to decide which passes will help, and simply implement them into the animated render sessions. Believe me, I'm still very new to all of this - and I'll never own/use Maya - I can almost guarantee that.
Here is a render I made just after optimizing this new figure I got from Cybertenko
I'm still experimenting with using cinematography lens techniques, in this case wider angle and, instead of zooming the camera in, I move the camera closer, then use measurements between the camera lens and the subject to set my depth of field. But I was also trying to implement some of your lighting technques, but since I'm using a spherical background, the atmospheric fog was a bit of a nightmare, so I used volumetric clouds for effect and for a light boost to the illumination of the scene
Here's the same render but after a few of the new post techniques I've just been learning. I still have a long way to go, so please forgive me if I've overdone it some.
Clarity helped to bring some richness into the metal of the main figure, while a High-Pass filter in Linear Light mode helped to bring out some of the sharper 3d definition. I also applied a little bit of HSL adjustment before the image data was run through Clarity - a bit of saturation boost countered by a lessening of the luminance. This is where I saved the actual edit, so I can continue when/if I feel like it.
Very subtle change in over/under stills like that. In an animation, however, the one with the filters helps the viewer's attention remain locked onto the main figure, because it's minor details ar much more pronounced, so the eye naturally adheres to it.