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True, u dont need to do run through a ton of sample renders, especially when u know u have a good light setup in place however; its still nice to do the occasional semi-good quqlity test render as u work on the project. Helps spot and issues or errors or areas needing refinement, especially when ur using full GI. Sometimes its a matter of placement for other characters and objects in relation to where the light and shadows are cast. Slows things down even when using a presaved irradiance map and low quality details on a full GI test render. This is where potentially Octane can really help out.
Some very vaild points made there Mohandai ;)
For those who might be interested, attached are two images I did just to get a crude speed comparison between Carrara and Octane (using the DS plugin for Octane). To make a "fair" comparison I used the same scene in Octane and Carrara, with the default mats/shaders, and an HDR for lighting. To make it a close comparison I basically used max settings in Carrara (except no dof, and I didn't turn improved edges on), since that is what Octane is doing. Of course both images could be much better, but this was really just a test, and I wasn't trying to get the best image possible. Both images were rendered at 1200x1500, the images posted here are reduced to 960x1200. I forgot to use dof with the Carrara render - so you can add a bit more to the final render if ray traced dof was enabled.
I let the Octane render go to 2000 samples per pixel, and it took just about 15 min. using path tracing and the final render setting. The Carrara image took 2hrs. 17min. Of course I could change a few settings, use a light dome for fake GI, or even just use a 3 point light set up and probably get very close to the Octane render time and shave a great image, but that would defeat the purpose of the test a bit. Still, I think that a little over 2 hours really is't bad at all for Carrara, I'm sure Lux would take a lot longer.
What I really like about Octane is the nearly instant feedback you when you change lighting, shaders, etc. Another thing I really like about using Octane is my system (laptop) runs a lot cooler rendering with Octane than with CPU rendering. I'm definitely going to get the Carrara plugin, because it will be a great addition to my Carrara tool-set, but I'm pretty sure Carrara's internal renderer will still get a lot of use!
Interesting comparison and two very nice looking renders.
Very interesting comparison.
It looks like IMHO that Carrara renders some stuff better in the image than Octane and Octane Renders some other things better than Carrara.
I wounder how things would look if a Carrara render of only the things only the things Carrara renders better were to be combined in post with an Octane render of just the things Octane renders better.
Jay_NOLA wrote “It looks like IMHO that Carrara renders some stuff better in the image than Octane and Octane Renders some other things better than Carrara”
That’s exactly what I thought as well. I think a lot of that could be addressed by optimizing the shaders for each renderer. That’s one of the reasons I didn’t do any editing of the shaders, I wanted to see how the shader translations compare between the two. Of course the other reason is I didn’t want to show off my incompetent shader skills, and make things look even worse.
I think this does demonstrate how good Carrara’s renderer is holding up, even without any major upgrades over the past few years. But, with the proper hardware configuration (i.e. a huge investment in video cards, like 4 GTX Titan cards), Octane is simply amazing. The video links below give you a good idea what can be done with multiple GPU’s.
4 GTX Titans:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhqf1n2xq80&noredirect=1
8 GTX 580’s:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ1IRQTqMMY&noredirect=1
Or, just one GTX 590:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmukImTkmHY&noredirect=1
I'm dying to ask - did you use any gamma setting with the Carrara render?
Octane wins hands down in that comparison IMHO. It would have been nice if the Carrara pic had DOF on the wall as well, but even without the colours and shading around the figure seem so much more vibrant.
Looking into this now..
Sure, Octane is faster in lot of cases, especially if you have the hardware.
But I assume it will be the same price as the DS plugin: 279€ (ca 375 US$).
Thats the price of C8.5P with lots of shader plug ins (from DG/Inagoni) that maybe will not work with Octane.
Yeah. This is what kept me away from Reality (for DAZ). Love the concept, but the practical outworking for animation meant an awful lot more work to stay where I am today.
However the time is coming where this will be practical (enough integration to make it feasible), then the more realistic look will drive us into the arms of one of these renderers (a Lux derivative or Octane). At that point, as long as I can animate I will jump (rendering) ship.
Octane is looking good so far, I watch with interest.
[EDIT] I've spent all afternoon researching. It's like the old betamax vs VHS choice. I'm going with Octane over Lux as Octane is ONLY written for GPU processing. Both seem to have a large following on youtube. Both much larger than "just" carrara. However if you assemble / animate in Carrara but post your rendered work as an Octane render I think you'd get a much bigger audience.
Here is another render from Carrara with "DOF" - sort of, to compare with the Octane version. I should have set it a bit higher - had it at 50%. I tried ray traced dof, but after an hour I still had an estimated 39 hours to go. So, that actually makes Octane even more impressive, because it uses ray traced dof, not z buffer based blur applied in post.
Phil - no gamma used for the image, just a simple default settings Carrara render, using an HDRI that came with Octane.
Sci Fi Funk - Right now Octane seems to have an advantage over both SLG4 (Simple Lux GPU) and Cycles for GPU renderers.
SLG4 is still quite fiddly, a bit a a black box (some people are getting it to work quite well, others not so much), doesn't have the same materials support as Octane, and definitely not as stable as Octane. But development on SLG ihas been pretty fast over the past year, so it may be a great option in 6 months or so. Lux CPU can produce some awesome renders, but being only cpu based it is slow, so definitely not in the same league as Octane for speed.
Right now Cycles is only in Blender, but it is pretty stable and has good material support (but still a bit behind Octane). With the new Apache license, there may be some plugin or easy import support in 6 months to a year????
One other attractive feature with Octane is that Otoy is actively working toward a feel of consistency between the plugins. So if you need to use another application, say DS, Poser, or even C4D, the skills you learned working with the Carrara plugin would be easily transferable to the next plugin.
Three weeks ago, I thought that Octane was just too expensive for faster renders, and was willing to wait for SLG to develop. After I heard the announcement of the Carrara plugin, I had more interest, and decided I should give the demo a go and learn a bit more about Octane to see if it was maybe something I might like to use some day. Needless to say, I was really impressed. Due to some of the GPU limitations, it isn't for everyone, or every project (though with the Kepler based GPU's it's much better), but the interactive nature is fantastic, Feedback on lighting changes and shader modifications are almost instantaneous. Editing shaders is just about as easy as Carrara, and isn't a big deal at all, since most of the time we have to tweak everything when we get it in Carrara anyway.
Dustrider - I tried with DAZ and Lux (reality) back in 2011. It was a world of pain, so I left it for a while. Octane is waaaay better imho.
Reasons. It's totally GPU, and it works! Also the stand alone version rocks. This software is going places. Check out the facebook group 1.1m subs.
You can (sort of) use Carrara with Octane for Animation right now. Via DAZ.
Here is my first ever Octane render from a Carrara scene exported to DAZ 4.6 via DAE. atm it's just a single frame. I'm looking into getting animation data out of C8 to DAZ, but I'm slightly skeptical (esp. re characters).
Anyway, I'm going to play with it via DAZ right now, and drop Carrara as a renderer right after the current episode I'm working on (the mammoth 8 some 2.5 years into this). To practice whilst the C8 version is being worked on, I'm going to re-render the DAZ episodes (pilot, 1-4) via Octane.
This is a 2000 sample frame, but honestly for animation (esp. via Youtube) 200 samples is fine for daylight scenes. Rock on!
Anyone heard of Arion? It's a combined GPU and CPU unbiased render engine, and I think that's probably the future of most unbiased renderers. I know Thearender (which has 2 separate versions currently, one for GPU and one for CPU) will have a combined CPU & GPU renderer version releasing around Christmas.
A quick scan of the Rendo galleries can show at a glance how excellent Octane is (I'm thinking specifically of RGUS's stuff, but there are plenty of others that are great). The limitation of being GPU only is that (I believe) the scene has to be small enough to be handled by the video card, which means extremely large and complex scenes are problematic. However I'm thinking that an unbiased renderer that uses both CPU and GPU combined can do the best of both worlds: large scenes, extremely fast render times. As Octane has always highlighted as a major selling point the fact that it can render unbiased screamingly fast, I have little doubt that somewhere down the road they will develop a CPU+GPU render solution. I think it's awesome news that a Carrara plugin is being developed for Octane, and even though my present laptop can't really run Octane, I'm already planning ahead for my next computers (and will make sure that it can support GPU rendering) and once I have a machine that can do it, I will definitely be on the list of people purchasing this plugin :)
I only wish there was a Carrara plugin in the works for TheaRender, as that's the unbiased render engine I am able to use and get the best result from, and I'm so tired of exporting my scenes as .obj files from Carrara, re-importing into Thea, retexturing everything before I can render... Oh well, I'll just have to keep studying up on C++ so eventually I can just create a plugin for Thea myself :)
Interesting, I would be interested if I could get a licence that would allow me to use it with Carrara AND poser - looking on their site, Octane is not a cheap puppy :/
Hey Si Fi Funk, great image. I'm glad your enjoying Octane too, it's pretty amazing. The plus to learning the DS version now is that you'll have a real jump on things when the Carrara plugin becomes available. That's one thing that I really like about it, the same lighting system, shader system, and renderer for DS, Carrara, and Poser. It will open up the use of the particular strengths of each application (like Posers cloth room) while keeping a consitant work flow for lighting and shaders and consistent looking renders from which ever you chose to use.
I have Reality for DS, and Poser, and Luxus for DS and Carrara. I like Reality 3 for Poser the best. Carrara is so much faster and capable of renders of equivalent quality in most cases, the only time I really use Lux is via Reality 3 in Poser (I hate Posers lighting - never have been any good with it). But, all it took was playing with the Octane/Poser demo, and I was hooked.
Otoy produces some high quality stuff! Considering the DS plugin is still in beta, and hasn't been updated in a few months, it's amazingly good (and the new features t_y has been developing/showing look great). I also like Otoy's philosophy to make a product that can be run on all cards, not just Quadro's (Nvidias own GPU renderer only runs on the "pro" cards). I think Otoy has targeted a good market segment as well. They seem to be targeting the serious enthusiast as well as the small graphics/architectural/3D studios and freelancers that have a real need for faster render times with outstanding quality, but can't afford the overhead of a render farm.
Enjoy!
You would need to buy both the Poser and Carrara plugins, and one license of Octane (if you use them all on the same machine). If Otoy follows the same policy a they have on all of their currently available products, you can purchase the Carrara plugin after it's released for Beta, and before it gets to final "production" status. You get the beta for half price, with a free upgrade to the production version when it comes out.
Since you own Poser, you should give the Octane and Poser demos a test run. You can download, install, and use the demos without registering with Otoy, so there is really nothing to lose (except a few hundred dollars if you enjoy it as much as I did).
I think if Octane pushed forward with a seperate development branch of Octane Renderer that exploited the 'no texture limts' option that is coming in the latest Nvidia Cuda SDK, that would revolutionise Octane's usability in Poser, Studio and Carrara.
The Texture limitation is the ONLY thing holding me back on octane at the moment...oh, and waiting on Nvidias new Titan Ultra GPU.
But I will most definately purchase the Carrara plugin for Octane when it comes out.
S.K.
Thanks Dustrider. I'm sold on the Octane way of doing things now.
I'm thinking the same thing as you. Practice now on Daz ready for Carrara. Not sure if this link is already posted, but just look at the Daz workflow man! https://vimeo.com/60253899
Real time, accurate light rendering vs best guess, test and wait? Come on, in a few years why would anyone want to stay with faking it? (I've read that Vray will never die because its so quick and people used to it. However GPUS are accelerating quicker than CPUs so to those people I say - see me in a couple of years).
Also you can (almost) use Carrara now (via Collada export, DAZ import and Octane), so why wait? I'll be posting more renders when I start to get the hang of accurate night renders. I think they seperate the men from the boys. Any help you can give me on that journey appreciated, otherwise I'll do a tutorial when I'm the other side.
That is really good news *rubs her eyes* will I really be able to render stuff with my NVidea 480 GTX GPU?
That would be so awesome...
Dumb question, since I had so far no software that used GPU for rendering graphics (except for Games)
If GPU can be used, can you simultaniously also use the CPU? Would be great to use both for the extra speed... no clue if that is technically even possible.
Rhi
Octane is a GPU-only renderer, so it uses the processing and memory of your GPU, not your CPU or the RAM that you may have. The best way to test if your GPU works is to download a demo version and just test it. You may find that it works, but that the memory on your GPU restricts what you can actually do as all geometry and textures need to be loaded into the GPU memory, and if you have 256MB or 512MB, you may find that restricting. There are also some limits (depending on your GPU) on the numbers of textures that can be loaded at once.
Rhiana,
I have some good news for you. I was rendering with one session of Carrara at near max CPU, rendering in DAZ via Octane at 100% GPU, and editing in a fresh instance of Carrara - all on a standard i7 machine with a GTX 460!
Ok both DAZ and editing were a tad sluggish, but it wasn't bad, plus I was rendering two scenes at once at full speed. Fantastic!
@Sci Fi Funk
Thanks a lot! This is good to know. So I can render at full GPU and torture in the meanwhile the dynamic cloth in poser :D
It must be technically possible, as there is already an unbiased renderer out there (Arion 2) that claims to use both the CPU and the GPU together to render, and Thea (another unbiased render engine) has announced that around Christmas it will be releasing a combined CPU + GPU version of it's render engine. Currently Octane is GPU only, but for because Octane has always had the selling point that it is super fast at rendering, I have very little doubt that they are probably working on putting together a CPU + GPU solution as well, to be able to increase speed even more. I have a feeling that in future the CPU + GPU paradigm is where most render engines will go.
Here we go.
I'm taking baby steps here. Once you get past the "wow! I can do EVERYTHING right out the box" feeling (ha ha). The reality is that to do what you are used on Carrara requires a rethink.
atm then although I'm learning about all these great lights, my renders are restricted to single sun light. However I post this as I've been playing about with renderers, cameras and light colouring.
This is the well known Sci Fi Apartment. It's a great model to render with in Octane because it uses hardly any textures. It is heavily uv mapped.
This took 20 mins or so to render. I know there are fireflies on there. I could get rid of them in an instant by choosing HDRI lighting, but the result is somewhat more realistic with the daylight light source.
JUST TAKE MY MONEY!!!!!!!!
Very nice, Steve! After all the reading and video demos, I think I'm sold on this product now. I really like to work sequence used. I guess I'll download the demo this week.
Now, to get that new video card.... :-/
And the new computer to run the videocard… :red:
Ha ha haaa.
Yes this is what I was thinking. You - you - mean I can do p-photos??!!?
I'm playing with faster options (as I'm an animator don't you know). If time allows I'll post an HDRI driven render. Where as this took 20 mins or so before I had to move on (and completely ridiculous for animating), HDRI can do this in seconds. I would think I could disguise the fact it's not quite so good by additional lights. We'll see.
I had some trouble connecting it up (power leads), and getting the rest of my system to behave after following the standard advice on using the latest drivers (didn't work). I present my solution here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GBgQspeOsg
Fractal - go for it man - would love to see your work. Come on everyone post your renders!
Its nice that Carrara will be getting another exporter at some point but I my money went on Thea Render a while back after being sorely let down with unpredictable Car Crashes.
My workflow is now using Daz Studio for characters and props, then exporting with the brilliant McjTeleblender script to Blender and rendering with Thea's integrated plugin.
The funny thing is the workflow is more like the old days of using Transposer which I always preferred than failing to get Daz characters to work in Carrara, except now I have the added benefit of a state of the art renderer and access to goodies like fluid simulations.
So just a nod to have a look at Thea before you lay out your hard earned as it can also do biased Vray type renders when your scene exceeds your GPU memory, is physically based, rather fast and has the best material editor.
Great info Woodscreation.
It is a very valid point to have a biased back up solution for when unbiased lets you down (for various reasons). You have my greatest respect if you can get Blender to play nice. With your workflow is the blender interaction minimal? How much effort did you have to put in to get the workflow to all work together?
btw. I do think it's different this time. (A phase heard so many times before I know). Due to the rapid increase in GPU speed and memory, plus the quality of the interface and speed of execution.