12 cores, maya, and morphs
simon.fex_03751fa4a4
Posts: 20
Ok yes I'm a noob, relatively speaking, so I have a few basic questions, and yes I searched the forum first to make sure these weren't already addressed, so here goes.
1.) Any way Carrara can recognize more than 8 cores? I have a 12-core mac pro but on the renders I'm only getting use of 8 of them.
2.) Has anyone worked out a recipe for getting Daz/Poser models into Maya? I have Daz 4.6, Carrara 8.1, Poser Pro 2012, and Maya 2014, and have tried (at least I think) every combination of format from all programs into Maya, and mostly I just get the models broken apart once they get into Maya, some more than others. Mainly I'm trying to get some of Stonemason's stuff into Maya, and although I would have thought FBX would've been sure-fire, it actually seems like collada does best, with minimal fragmentation, but still too much to spend time re-attaching everything. Most elements float a few feet above the ground level. The best solution so far has been exporting out of Poser into Maya, again using collada if I remember correctly. That seemed to do fine but the texture maps for the ground/street (in this case, Urban Future 4) take on this weird glass/water look where everything is reflected in its surface. Anyone solved this problem so far? Any of the vets here?
3.) And finally for now, along the same lines as 2.) - do Daz morphs work in Carrara? and if so, do I have to do anything to make sure they show up in Carrara and where would I find them / how do yo use them in Carrara?, And ultimately, can you somehow get the Daz morphs all the way into Maya intact? Mostly these are things like doors opening and closing, etc.
Ok that's it for now. You know what they say, long time reader, first... or maybe 3rd time poster. I appreciate any feedback, thanks guys!
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Comments
I could be wrong, but I suspect Maya is a little too rich for most people on this forum. ;-)
The thing with the shaders you mentioned is probably an issue all 3D programs have when opening something created for another program. Carrara has a different shading system than Poser and DAZ Studio. Carrara can interpret and import Poser shaders, but since not all functions are the same or work differently in Poser there are issues that need to be fixed. For some odd reason, Carrara doesn't import Studio shaders.
It would stand to reason that Maya and Poser also have a different system and Maya is interpreting Poser's shaders the best it can.
Can Maya import .obj files? Maybe if you export the set in that format it will open in Maya. You should have the option to save the shaders as well. I think morphs will work as well provided the correct options are enabled when exporting. I don't have much experience in that department.
Speaking of morphs, generally speaking, things like opening doors aren't morphs. In Poser style models it's some kind of rigging.
hey thanks for the quick reply... yeah I've never understood why Carrara still can't import Daz shaders, or really, Daz anything as it's the same company. Just, wow... Yeah I could never afford Maya either but it came installed on the Mac Pro I bought so hey, why not, and really I'm wanting to use Maya because it seems the particle systems and dynamics and so on are way more capable, so again, why not? Follow up question though, I understand what you're saying about shaders but in my limited understanding, would that account for the actual geometry being somewhat scattered upon import into Maya? I thought shaders were more for things like glow, bump, texture, and so on. And all of the models I want to use are environments or objects like cars, etc, so the extent of the morphs that come with them are usually doors opening, sliding back and forth, landing gear going up and down, turrets rotating, and they're always under the morphs section of the parameters tab in studio, so that's why I used that term. I thought rigging was more akin to figures and their skeletons and so on. Anyway yeah I think importing into Maya is a matter of getting the export settings right, as I'm close, but I don't know near enough to take the time and struggle through every single export combination you could try to get it to work and I figured there have to be some experts on here that have already paved that road for me. Thanks again though of course! :-1
In regards to the shaders I was responding to the part where you said the ground plane looked watery or shiny. Shouldn't have anything to do with the geometry scattering. Sorry for the confusion.
I hear what you're saying about the sliders to control the doors and such, but usually you can select them and use the manipulators to move them around as well. I have a couple models that work that way, but I'm doing a big render at the moment and can't load one up to check. Hopefully someone will be able to pop in and help you out better than I.
Maya came pre-installed on your Mac Pro? Did it come that way from Apple? If so, then damn, I wish I had the dough to upgrade from my G5!
from Apple? hah, yeah right, no way... I actually bought it from a post-production house here in NY so it was already on there. I actually started on a G5 dual 2.0 and carrara 6, so I feel your pain :p Had to do a *lot* of overtime to buy my new beast. :-1
Just as an FYI, that sounds like a mistake. Maya is a very expensive piece of software and licenses like that are generally not transferable. You should check with Autodesk to confirm the legality of your Maya install.
Yeah. Get right out and do that! ;-)
while I would never advocate stealing something, if the software just happened to be on the computer you got, I fully understand the irrisistable urge to use it.
In private for personal experience nobody would ever know.
but
definately not a good idea to publish anything commercially or advertise the fact.
I won't even use adobe CS2 that I downloaded WITH serials from their own publically reachable site because it is not endorsed by them!
I have kept it though for evaluation purposes like a very long trial, but never use it to make anything I publish.
Ditto on this
Carrara can use any Poser or Daz3D models,. and it will import and convert poser Mat's to Carrara shaders,.
The shader engine is different in Poser, DS, and Carrara,. none of them share the same render or shading engines, so a conversion of the shaders needs to be done. and some user adjustment is necessary in all applications to make the shaders work better for that programs shader engine, lighting system, and renderer.
Content will often be sold with two differently constructed shaders,. One for Poser,., and One for Daz Studio.
that's what enables daz Studio to use Poser products, right out of the box,. ..the shader adjustment work has already been done.
Carrara can use the Poser mats,. and with Carrara 8.5,. (still in development) it will open both DUF (Daz Studio) and PZ2 (Poser)
files,. which can be materials, poses, animations etc.
Daz3D didn't develop Carrara,. (as they did with Daz Studio) .. they purchased Carrara, Bryce and Hexagon form another company.
so,. although Carrara and Daz Studio are now owned by Daz 3D,. they had no control over how carrara was originally developed.
They do have control now,. and they're making all their applications work better with each other.
Some of those may be "Morphforms" a mixture of a Morph and a transform,. these will probably need to be reworked in your 3D program, using a constraint like an Axis constraint to open and close the door.
Hope it helps )
Ok well I was planning on buying Maya anyway, so I'll check on all of that even though it was implicit that the cost of Maya was included in the Mac I bought, so maybe I've been had, but regardless the Mac is a powerhouse so I'm good. And yes, it has 12 actual cores, no hyper threading, as it's 2 x 6-core cpu's, so again, if anyone knows how to get Carrara to recognize the other 4 cores on a Mac, I'd be grateful.
And I get what your'e saying 3DAGE, about Carrara being acquired and all, but it's been... how many years since then? And I may not post much, but I've been reading these forums for enough years to know all about Daz's "coming soon" mantra, so... count me in with the rest of the group that kind of grumbles about slow updates et al. I mean Hexagon has been 2.5 for how long now?
Oh, and btw, I just bought AntFarm's The Checkpoint, and installed it through the DAZ3DIM *and* manually from my downloads page, and neither Daz or Carrara sees it... anyone else having this problem? For that matter, why does Carrara show some content in its browser that Daz doesn't, and vice versa, when the content was purchased from Daz itself? Like Daz will show Planet Lave but Carrara won't, but Carrara will show City Infernos and Daz won't... not to mention every installer seems to install stuff anywhere it wants in the Library and/or Runtime folders and it all ends up being a huge mess... is this common and is it a given that if you want everything uniformly installed you just have to go in there and move stuff around yourself?
Welcome to the Poserverse... 8-/
In general, Carrara is more compatible with Poser than D|S - or it has been in past versions... I don't have the products you mention.
I use several runtimes to keep things more organized (but runtime sprawl is always an issue).
I can't directly answer this question, but I use an eight core Mac Pro, and due to hyper-threading, the rendering process shows 16 "buckets" on screen.
Not all Mac processors support hyper-threading, but since it's an operating system level kind of thing, I don't think Carrara would know the difference between a real core and a hyper-threaded one.
Seems like you should be seeing 12 render buckets. (Maybe 24).
I wonder if there is a difference between Carrara and Carrara Pro when it comes to the maximum number of render threads. Which version of Carrara do you have?
My mac is only an i7 with 8 "cores", but when I run it on my hex-core Xeon linux box (via Wine) it uses all 12 "cores". However, Carrara only allocates eight colors so if you have a system with 32 cores you will have each color show up four times. If the tiles are too small, Carrara doesn't number them so... are you sure you only have 8 render tiles, or is it only 8 tile colors?
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As someone brought up hyperthreading... For what its worth, hyperthreaded CPUs appear to have double the real number of cores but can't do any more work. That is, my mac has a 4-core i7 processor that appears to have 8 cores due to hyperthreading. Yet a multi-threaded render is only four times faster than a single threaded one. Well... it varies actually because a lot of the setup is single threaded so it is often less than four times faster.
What hyperthreading actually does is help to ensure that every last ounce of work the CPU can do is being done -- at least in a multi-threaded environment. With rendering this is already the case so hyperthreading would not appear to provide any benefit. OTOH, when I was doing some performance testing on Xeon (the 12 "core" linux box) for some renders it would *exceed* six-times performance. My best guess is that this was due poor task scheduling during the single threaded render.
In any case, Carrara has no idea of "real" versus "virtual" cores -- it just uses what the operating system presents. So while enabling hyperthreading won't halve your render times it won't hurt them either.
Different render engines can not be made to read shaders or any other unique files systems the exact same way. They all work differently using different equations. You will only at best get an approximation, which is what you can do if you tweak the files manually. Use it for what it can do best. Don't try to reinvent the wheel. Not even the big companies, such as Autodesk, support the same shader system for different render engines.
No. It shouldn't. The OS (Mac or Windows) would abstract away the details from the running processes. Carrara plays nicely on my 24 core Windows Server, so I don't see why it should be any different on a Mac.
Also: Echo the sentiments on licensing... ;-)
You'll quickly learn to love the Carrara shader system anyways! It's just the way to go.
I remember pulling my hair out about shader conversions when I first started. You will not regret learning the shader system in carrarra, it is so powerful and versitile,