Carrara Portrait Studio!

Jonstark

Can't believe it's been out two whole days now and there still hasn't been a forum thread for it yet (what's going on, Philw, too modest to announce it?)

It says something that even with all the hoopla about 8.5's release and capabilities, it's the Portrait Studio that I'm *really* excited about :) So far this is the best Carrara product purchase I've made in years, and just by playing around with it I've learned *tons*. Not to mention all the extra info in the included pdf

I know we all like to use Carrara for different reasons and purposes, so maybe it won't be everyone else's cup of tea. Some people get really passionate about landscape scenes, for example, and are more likely to get this kind of high from a Howie scene, for example. And while I love that stuff too, it doesn't have the same thrilling hold over me.

But for me, since my passion and hobby has centered around trying to render daz people in Carrara more realistically, this little product has been a goldmine! :) Anyway I give it 5 stars and recommend it to anyone who is on the fence.

It comes with with 15 separate scenes, each with a different style of portrait lighting. Each scene is it's own room (which can be made invisible with the click of a button if you want to use your director's camera to look around, several lights in a configuration, which are set to 'point at' a Focal Point Object, which means that if you want you can move the Focal Point Object around to exactly where your figure's face is (or where you want the focal point) and the lights will automatically follow it. There's 3 different cameras loaded, ready to go, giving either a headshot, an upper torso shot, or a full body shot, and there's a stool your characters can sit on (if you want) as well as a backdrop (an object like you would find in a real photo studio, not referring to the 'backdrop' function in the scene window) in the background. He has tons of shaders/textures for the backdrop as well, to emulate real world backdrops and there's a curtain object that hangs in front of the backdrop (by default the curtain is invisible, but it's there and can be used with the click of a button)

Anyway, here's my first try using it (as usual my detestable vanity compels me to do a self-portrait first):

Jonstark

This is from the window left scene, and I didn't fool with it too much, but I did fool a little bit :)

Ironically the very approach used in this studio is one I (rather clumsily) tried to use a few weeks ago with a scene I built from scratch, in that most of the power of the lighting comes not from actual lights, but the use of global illumination in conjunction with making the meshlights glow. There are some regular spotlights involved in the scene too, but they are of low intensity and not meant to be used for direct light of the characters, so the only 'real' lighting that is likely to hit your character is bounced light from the walls/ceiling etc.

Using the glow function of the meshlights included gives very realistic falloff and works great, but if you like a bit of specular you won't get too much specular effect from them. I like my character's skin to have a little bit of gloss for the specular effect, so I figured out a way to basically use the scene but still pump it up.

There are a couple of ways to amp the specular effect, just using the lighting as is. First, you could simply add some reflection channel to your texture, a small bit like 1 percent. For me regular reflections were too reflect-y even with a very very low value. Blurry reflections would probably work fine and be the best solution, but blurry reflections take way too long to render, so I generally avoid them. Also if you use a bit of SSS in your texture, the diffuse reflection channel adds a fair bit of specular effect as well, even if you do nothing else.

But if you want to bring your highlight/shininess channels back into play, there's a way to do that too. Simply add a couple of 'Anything Glows' lights to the scene, and match them up with the meshlights (Softbox-Key and Softbox-Fill, for example). Now you're adding a light that will come from the same direction as the glowing meshes themselves, but you don't want to overpower the scene by adding too much light, so set them at a very low intensity (say 12% for the key light and 9% for the fill, and I'm guessing if you want to keep it totally even you could also knock down the glow intensity percentage of each of the meshlight textures to make it all even). Now you've added a light type which does activate the highlight/shininess channels of your texture, but it's of such low intensity it's not going to have much effect to the overall illumination level of your character's skin.

Next, go into the texture of your character and kick the highlight intensity into freaking overdrive, say 3 times as high as you would usually set it. This means that the highlight/shininess is very reactive to a small intensity of light. For years I've seen posts from people wondering if there was a specular-only light type in Carrara (there isn't, as far as I know) but this is the way to get the same effect, because you're not increasing the light intensity, but you are increasing how intensely your specular effect will be to that light :)

Anyway, I'm getting caught up in minutia, when the real point of my post was that I am *really* loving the Portrait Studio so far. Great work, Philw! :)

(and I think there should at least be a forum thread about this where people can post their renders to show it off. So here it is.) :)

Dartanbeck

I bought it too!
I've been getting dizzy when I come to the forum lately! lol So... thanks Jon, for posting this!
Yeah, it shoots really nice pictures!

WendyLuvsCatz

well I know one thing now to put in my shopping cart when I get my over pay for Carrara refund credit!

kakman

I purchased it immediately as well.

While I am not all that interested in rendering “portraits”, I knew that this product would be an invaluable learning tool – which it is!

It is really put together very well and the PDF file is great too, and the pricing makes it a bargain.

Another great product from PhilW.

Headwax

yes I bought it before carrara 8.5 because I knew which one I wanted more ;)
Philw has done a grande job, it certainly adds a sparkle to the eye.
I've been using it for still life's as well.
It's a great quick way to get a good lighting setup without screwing around.

we really need more vendors to start making products for carrara.
or the vendors that we have making more products for carrara.

so thanks Philw appreciated.

PhilW

Thanks for the kind comments! So pleased you are liking it. I share below a render I have posted elsewhere but I think it came out nice. This is Gia for G2F, rendered with Window Right lighting. Some people thought this had SSS applied but it doesn't, it is the effect of the indirect light bouncing off her body. As for other Carrara products - watch this space, not too long to wait!

PhilW

Here's another one I did recently, features the Hellsing V4 outfit (and the now not available LongDrape Hair...)

Jonstark

PhilW said:

Here's another one I did recently, features the Hellsing V4 outfit (and the now not available LongDrape Hair...)

My favorite so far! Longdrape looks quite excellent actually, looking forward to that too

EddyMI3D

For you mentioned Long Drape Hair. How can I put it to Dawn

PhilW

Sorry guys, wrong end of the stick! LongDrape Hair was previously available at Renderosity, but didn't sell that well and so eventually was discontinued last year. It couldn't be used on Dawn as it was done direct on a V4/M4 head, if something similar were done for Dawn, it would need to be a separate product. The forthcoming product is something else entirely...