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It just came back to me why I don't use gamma very much in Carrara. I can't seem to get dynamic hair to play nice with it: a very dark color (rgb 3,1,0) becomes more than ten times brighter, highlight was zero.
Am I doing something wrong?
No, I get that too. Carrara Hair seems not too well integrated at times and I am guessing that any texture compensation that gets applied to "normal" textures is not being applied to hair.
My "fix" for it is to use a multiplier on the hair texture, so use your existing texture but then multiply with maybe 20-40%. Small test renders are useful in getting the right level.
Great portrait of the Dart Man! But please don't die on us - we need to see your next products!
I didnt created a hair for the character with carrara as i wanted but i wanted exactly the same model, same pose, same lightning in two different programs to see where i get the best realistic results out of.
So the first /darker picture was made with Daz Studio 4.6 Pro also with gamma correction but it works different on DS.
So the results are pretty well i think.
Even if i have used the same lightning i think the light and shadow is a bit different than in carrara.
So the seconds picture that i've rendered with Carrara 8.5 Pro with gamma correction looks a bit better to me about the lightning and realism is much better on this i think but there was just some points i wasn't really happy with why i also decided to do a retouching of the image with Face Filter 3 Pro.
I wasn't happy with the eyes as they looked kinda flat, even if i have added the reflection to 100%.
the same about the lips, they are good detailed but i wanted some more shine to it what also didn't really worked.
I think i will try out the bright eyes bundle next month to see if i can get out more realism out of the eyes from them than from the eyes i was using on both.
chiisuchianu - Thank you so much for posting these. I hope you don't mind me saying so, but I think in the first image the lighting looks horrible! There is no realism there at all - I couldn't quite work out if shadows were even on! (and when did you last see a light that didn't cast any shadows in real life...).
While the Carrara/gamma image could still do with some work - the overall lighting is a bit bright and burning out part of the arm for example, the overall look is so much more real. Try turning down the direct light that you have in the scene and I think it will look even better. I like what you did with Face Filter 3 as well.
Bright Eyes will give you guaranteed highlights in the eyes, which I hope you will like. It is great for bringing eyes to life, but the reflections do not alter with the environment. If you want this, and are using indirect-type lighting, you need reflection rather than "highlights" in order to create highlights in the eyes, and make sure that there is something there to reflect!
Hi Phil,
thank you very much for your feedback! :)
About the first render that is a reason why i wanted to change to carrara as it is a good render and detailed but as you said, no realism on the picture.
About the picture itself i was using noon sunlight hdri lightning, so very strong light, sky light intensity was set to 160 and indirect lightning to 121% but i will turn that down a bit to see if i can get a better result as you said.
Right now i do the render again with sunset hdri lightning to see how this will work (i just do the mistake that i don't make small preview images to see if it is like i want it or not, so i always go for the big render lol
so i will try other options about lightning with lower indirect light and intensity and will post it when it's finished.
And for sure i will make a picture again with the bright eyes than to post the result of it :)
Just to add this, i made the picture with Daz Studio, so the Scene itself have the HDRI lightning where i can set the brightness of the lightning higher or lower (3 different lights) and than again in the render options.
So if i turn down the brightness of the lightning itself the picture gets too dark somehow, the hair nearly turns to black.
As there is also a lot of shadow inside of the face my problem is that the body gets too bright and the face gets too dark on the picture when i use the bright sun hdri, so i now try to go for the sunset lightning as it gives a nice warm color all over the character but somehow a bit too dark for a portrait, so i will play a bit with the lightning and post again the picture with other HDRI lightning
Well, I'll be damned...
Philw, this little tip has changed my rendering in Carrara forever - at a glance, I would say it's nearly doubled the quality of my renders. I'm tremendously excited about this, thank you very very much (and I will be purchasing your photostudio rendering kit when it comes out).
After reading this thread, I fired up Carrara and started doing some side by side experiments. Here's 2 anything glows lights plus hdri with full GI and skylight. The pic on the left is the Gamma corrected (2.2) one, the one on the right is not gamma corrected.
I really struggle with the forums nowadays (which is why I never post anymore) so hopefully these pics will show up...
It's literally night and day - the gamma corrected version doesn't just make it easier to see details, it actually shows details that aren't even visible on the non-corrected version. Also I always thought that gamma correction 'lightened' every part of the image, but that is really not so - it actually cuts the 'glare' in some spots, so that the parts of the image with a lot of highlight don't 'blow out' the image, or leave it looking over exposed. It also makes the light transitions much more even.
So yeah, this method really really works well with hdri. But I wondered, how will it work in a closed room with no hdri but just full GI enabled? That's when I ran into something really strange I didn't expect. I set up a photostudio scene using 3dc's photostudio from Rendo. I used some flat planes for a rectangular prop from one of the sets that I made invisible and matched up to the lights (which themselves were also set to glow) and then set an anything glows light for each light so that lighting wise everything was close to correct as I could make it. Here's a far shot to give an idea of the room setup:
So the first time I rendered, I ran into something unexpected (but not necessarily a bad thing, it just took me by surprise). Again, the Gamma corrected (2.2) version is to the left and the non Gamma corrected is to the right (all other lights and settings the same). Check it out:
1 DS stock render
Gamma correction still works great, and brings out far more details, and makes the lighting more evenly distributed and lifelike, but to my surprise, in an enclosed room with only full GI and no hdri or skylight or other light sources - instead of making the image lighter/brighter it actually visibly darkened the image. So I kicked up the lighting intensity quite a bit to get the gamma corrected version to not be so dark, and it quickly became very apparent:
One last comparison, just for reference. On the left, is a gamma corrected Carrara shot (with carrara hair this time, because it's more awesome) and on the right is an unbiased render done in Thea of the same scene (of course it is textured differently and the lights are as close as I could make it). I think that Carrara stands up very nicely actually, even against an unbiased render engine.
those pics are awesome!
So again, thank you so much for this tip PhilW, you've excited me greatly about rendering in Carrara again :)
Quick couple of questions: How did you arrive at 2.2 as the setting to use for the Gamma correction? Not that I think you're wrong (clearly the rendering itself seems to prove you're right) but was this some mathematical deduction or was it trial and error to find that 2.2 was the right setting?
Btw, Dartan that last pic of yours is tremendous, looks almost like it could have been done in Lux, congrats, just had to say.
And Philw, how long do you think it will be before you're studio lighting product will be available to purchase? Looking forward to playing around with it :)
And apologies for hijacking the thread to show my experiments, especially to bigh, who got caught in the middle :) Very nice render there too.
You've definitely got a direct light in there as well - probably the default light? I would suggest turning this down rather than the indirect lighting.
Also you should be able to rotate the background around the z-axis, but you can't (I lodged a Feature Request on Bug Tracker for this years ago...) - so what you need to do is rotate everything else! Select everything in your scene - objects, characters, lights, camera, everything - and then Group them (Ctl-G). Go to the Top view and rotate the group by say 90 degrees and do a test render, then another 90 degrees, and another test etc. You will then get a feel for where the light in your background is coming from and which is the best orientation for your render!
Hi Jon and thanks for your posts. It was actually by comparing the outputs from Carrara with Luxrender that led me to this discovery. And you sound as excited by it as I am!! The value of 2.2 comes from internet research into Linear Workflow and seems to be the value that most monitors are calibrated to. It is not set in stone though, and I sometimes find that a slightly lower value can look nice and provides a bit more contrast - oh, to have it interactive as it is in Lux! (Actually, if you lower the value of gamma in Lux to 1.0, you can make it look like an old Carrara render!!).
On the Carrara Portrait Studio, I have now submitted it to Daz for QA, it may be a couple of weeks before it gets launched, it will depend on how busy they are.
You are quite right about not blowing out highlights, more defined shadowed areas. It starts to look and behave like real life rather than a render. Of course there are some things that need to be adjusted, but at least you are working in the familiar Carrara environment.
I'm so pleased that you are getting great results with this. You are right that the realism can rival that from Lux and other unbiased render engines - there are some additional examples on my Rendo Gallery
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/browse.php?user_id=380840
No kidding! This is a *huge* discovery for Carrara, and my fear is that people will miss this thread and miss out on this approach, which is - at least in my opinion - revolutionary.
I've spent years refining my approaches to texturing, lighting, etc in Carrara (and I know you've spent even more years), rendering thousands and thousands of bald vickies and improving my approach, looking to coax realism out of this software, which I always knew was capable of top-notch renders, but I just never could seem to get close enough to make me fully happy. I had seen other artists use Carrara to produce much more stunning, vivid and detailed renders so I knew it could be done, but never quite got beyond 'pretty fair', and the more I learned, the more flaws and critiques I could see in my renders.
This new approach stands everything on it's head. After changing the scene so that the lighting is more realistic with the click of a button, I was able in just a few minutes of test rendering and texture tweaking to greatly improve my textures in ways I never would have even been able to see before.
The tragedy is that if DAZ had only known about this, they could have long ago set the Gamma Correction 2.2 as a default render setting, and imagine how many Carrarists would have long ago been able to make use of this. It's amazing to me (and really unfortunate) that the original creators of this software didn't set this as a default, actually. I'm so glad you discovered this, and were willing to share it.
chiisuchianu, thank you for the kind words, and to echo Philw, I'm pretty sure you've got a distance (infinite) light in that scene. Whenever you start a new scene in Carrara, it automatically loads one distance light into the scene, which is set with very hard shadows and at 100% intensity (if you change cameras to the directors camera, you'll see it hovering over your scene). You may want to just delete it outright, and load new lights instead, or at least modify it so it isn't so intense, comes from a different angle, and give it some soft shadows so it doesn't overpower your scene.
Also you may want to lower the ambient light in your scene to zero so there isn't any artificial lightening (in the Scene tab under render settings, it loads as 20% ambient light).
Hope this helps a bit :)
thanks a lot for the informations! :)
i was playing a bit with the light in the scene as i saw they all comes from the side, so i set the color of the light a bit more blue color and turned one light to the front to shine a bit more in the face to get the shadows out there, it's now rendering but still think about missed to set some texture options but i will try in my next render :)
thank you - it was just to show what you can do in DS .
it's all ways fun to do new stuff .
not to pop any ones bubble - we talked about this I thinking 3 or 4 years - when C7 came out .
edit - to add my render took less then 5 min.
No kidding! This is a *huge* discovery for Carrara, and my fear is that people will miss this thread and miss out on this approach, which is - at least in my opinion - revolutionary.
I've spent years refining my approaches to texturing, lighting, etc in Carrara (and I know you've spent even more years), rendering thousands and thousands of bald vickies and improving my approach, looking to coax realism out of this software, which I always knew was capable of top-notch renders, but I just never could seem to get close enough to make me fully happy. I had seen other artists use Carrara to produce much more stunning, vivid and detailed renders so I knew it could be done, but never quite got beyond 'pretty fair', and the more I learned, the more flaws and critiques I could see in my renders.
This new approach stands everything on it's head. After changing the scene so that the lighting is more realistic with the click of a button, I was able in just a few minutes of test rendering and texture tweaking to greatly improve my textures in ways I never would have even been able to see before.
The tragedy is that if DAZ had only known about this, they could have long ago set the Gamma Correction 2.2 as a default render setting, and imagine how many Carrarists would have long ago been able to make use of this. It's amazing to me (and really unfortunate) that the original creators of this software didn't set this as a default, actually. I'm so glad you discovered this, and were willing to share it.
One of the blogs I read while I was researching this stuff (and there's a lot out there for other 3d programs if you look, plus research papers and all sorts, some way above my head) was someone bemoaning that for years 3d software has been capable of this kind of workflow, but defaults are set up so that it is not used - in effect, they are set up to render "wrong"! The implementation in Carrara is not perfect, hair renders very light for example and needs to be corrected, but in general the light now behaves "right" and it makes a huge difference. I've had more "wow, that's like a photo" comments in the last two weeks than I've had in the last two years, it really has made a step change in realism. And it is far easier (or at least it seems that way to me) to set up lighting, there's a much wider margin of what looks good.
And it's still early days with this, I still feel like I'm learning more things every day.
And good tip about Ambient Light, it should never be on in my view (except if you are using Ambient Occlusion for an Animation because of the render speed).
I wasn't sure what to expect, but was blown away by the difference. After doing a 'standard' render with no gamma correct, and then one that was corrected to 2.2, then loaded the 2 pics up in just my windows viewer and clicked back and forth between them it was an overwhelming difference, as if the non-corrected 'standard' pic was of someone illuminated by a flashlight in a dark room and for the gamma corrected pic someone was flicking the light switch for the room on, with details flooding into place. At the least, I would say it nearly doubles the render quality, adds a level of detail, and grounds it in the 'real'.
Carrara hair has always been very touchy and fickle, IMO. It looks fantastic (far better than transmap of course) but is very light-reactive. I tend to try to knock the highlight level way down to try to counter that, and with your tip about using a dark color multiplier I think it can be controlled to get the color wanted (may take a test render or 2 to get there, but hey at least with the gamma set at 2.2 at least we know what the playing field is supposed to look like and can texture the hair to match).
Using the gamma 2.2 approach does mean that we'll have to tweak the light levels and textures to match, but hey we're carrarists right? If we were scared to enter the texture room we'd never get anything done anyway :) And I don't think the adjustment will be difficult (and the reward in rendering details is just... wow).
I just totally agree. It's a new world for Carrara users! Although frustrating that it has been sitting there for years and years....
This was a render that I did a little while ago in Luxrender, and it struggled to resolve the grain in the shadow area in the foreground. So I decided to try a comparable render with indirect light and gamma setting in Carrara. The render settings were not the highest, to render in around 30 mins while the Lux one was run overnight. There are areas where I think each is better than the other - with a little texture tweaking I think I could improve the Carrara one - and the Carrara rendered at least ten times faster for what I think is overall a similar quality render. I hope this is interesting!
Very close, the two scenes aren't quite textured the same so that may make some difference (the lux scene has a reflective metal for the baseboard of the bar and running along the table bottoms, and also the upper bar edges look reflective/metal there, as well as the chandelier holder; whereas the Carrara render has a dark nonreflective shader for those areas, also the arch on the wall is white reflective in the lux render but wood shader in the Carrara render). I think the lux scene demonstrates something I see often when rendering in Thea and that is probably just part and parcel of unbiased rendering, if you look at the shadowed area on the floor in front of the bar there are 'firefly' spots (any area where there isn't any direct lighting and relies on bounced light to hit in unbiased rendering takes longer to clear out all the fireflies, in my experience).
The Carrara one has some noise on the white wedge ceiling in the corner, not sure why, and is letting a lot less light get through to the bartop than the lux render.
But honestly we're not talking worlds apart here; Carrara matches up pretty darn well.
My thoughts exactly - a good summary of the differences. Where the Carrara one is dark and not metallic is where I hadn't changed the Lux shaders back! So yes, the Carrara one could be improved to match closer, but the overall quality and lighting is pretty darn close I'd say.
Yeah, it has been sitting there for years. Many years. In the professional world it's nothing new. Along with a ton of other "new" discoveries, which aren't really new at all. Which is why I keep beating the dead horse of people here learning about computer graphics first before jumping in and playing with software. Don't think you're learning about 3D solely by reading the Carrara manual, or trial and error by spinning the dials and pushing all the buttons.
Again, I would strongly suggest that if people really want to be good at this stuff, consider buying a general 3D book and learning about the basic concepts, rather than working backwards and learning the software first, then trying to figure out what it all means later. Once you know the basic concepts, it's amazing how the software will suddenly make a lot of sense.
JoeMamma2000, you make a lot of sense.
I know the shadows might be not thar right but it's not easy for me to place them in the right place to get them a natural flow and i also thought about how to do that with carrara.
It's just a Background and the stone i've added seperately, so they would be in the background of the picture, when i would do a render without the figure there wouldnt be any shadow in the right place, so i am open for any ideas how to get some natural flowing shadow in this scene.
It was an idea of mine after seeing the portrait that it is a nice pose for a fully scene and not only for a portrait picture.
I also played with the light a bit that the colors will look as natural as possible and so i found out that skylight of 120% and indirect light intensity 60% would be the best with the HDRI lightning.
So i'm open for any feedback :)
i have removed the image i used before as i've found a better way to place the shadow but still not that happy with it.
But let me know what you think