First Post Here...
GumpOtaku
Posts: 106
Hi! Since I got a copy of C6 Pro through a purchase of FCA vol. 1, I have been figuring out how to use it. (I cannot afford C8.5 even it's reduced to 70 bucks. Cheap-I-Am!)
I figured I'd make a post here to ask for general assistance.
~GO
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Welcome to Carrara!
You'll love it! Figures, Characters, and Avatars 1st release is how I got into Carrara as well. Back then in 2010, the book was still sold here at DAZ 3D, and so I was able to get a really sweet deal on Carrara 7 Pro at the same time, which came with a free upgrade to 8 Pro, since it was very near release! In order to do all of that, I got a Platinum Club yearly membership. I was actually expecting to spend more on Carrara that what all of that cost, so I added a bunch of new goodies to the order as well.
Holy Cow! I was downloading content all day and some the next!
I was very pleased to see all of the stuff that comes on that Disc, included with FCA. Really sweet!
Carrara is a vast experience, so we all need to uncover its tremendous abilities layer by layer as our needs determine. To help in this, I have started a thread as a place where we can explore for any type of Carrara-related information we might need or want. While I'm sure it doesn't lead to everything, it's a good place to browse:
►►► Carrara Information Manual ◄◄◄
I find it to be useful all the time - not just for myself, but also when I want to help someone with a question. For example, Forum Help Links, found within the first post of the thread as a sort of Table of Contents, is where I endeavor to catalog some of the threads in this forum, organized by topic. Although some of the titles don't mean much at a glance, some of them contain some really good tips and screenshots to help us on our way.
It's certainly not a perfect system, definitely a bit on the different side! LOL
I hope to fix some of the links in there that don't lead to much and, instead, put a link to those topics in some of the ones that do have a lot discussed. But I'm reluctant to do that, as this system helps to get some questions that have not yet been answered, answered. Because when you find a thread with your question in it, it may even have an answer suitable to the original poster, but not your needs. By leaving a new post in the thread will bump the thread back to the top. Those of us following that thread will also get an e-mail - so your chances of getting a lot of help increases.
Before I actually began that thread, however, the original intention was simply to make a post that indexes all of the helpful video tutorials by Cripeman, which are excellent, and I'm sure that some may be using Carrara 6. You should certainly be able to do most, if not all of this in 6 Pro:
► Cripeman’s Carrara Video Tutorials Index
Eventually, I'd like to index those by GKDantas as well, which can all be found at the Carrara Cafe.
I've also written some articles that might interest you:
► What Content Can I Use in Carrara? ► Carrara Cafe
► Optimizing Your Content – Shader Basics ► Carrara Cafe
► Major Production – My Production ► Carrara Cafe
You may need to get a free account at the Cafe to read those, but you'll want to do that anyways... it's the Carrara hangout! Lots of cool articles, tutorials, freebies, downloads, galleries....
► Your Carrara Browser is all about making a custom Browser setup, which helps you create a super-efficient method of storing bits and pieces to full scenes that cater to your workflow.
► Navigating in Carrara Has some useful tips
► Some Miscellaneous Tips & Tricks Has some nice things to know as you're getting to grips with Carrara
► Daz Install Manager - Installing Custom Poser Runtimes includes information about the Poser Runtime structure, using it in Carrara, and using the new DIM (DAZ Install Manager) to create custom runtime folders.
These and much more are found in the thread of the first link I put in this post, but these are a great beginning.
I also have a few tutorials on My YouTube Channel
Finally, before finally hitting the Submit button, I'd like to direct you to the wonderful Carrara 3D Expo (C3DE) Magazine, which has beautiful pages of interesting articles all about Carrara and its use.
Again, Welcome to Carrara!
If there's anything you need, we're all here to help!
A lot of the training materials available will still be useful to you, although you will obviously miss out on later features. But the basic interface and facilities have changed little since C6. Try looking at YouTube, on Carrara Café, etc. If you want to follow a structured approach, and if I am allowed a plug (!), try Infinite Skills "Learning Carrara" video tutorials (I am the author).
Welcome, and Hello!
General Assistance? isn't he mates with Colonel Panic? Or was that Major Disaster? I'm always being told to watch out for Captain Complacency...
Seriously though, Dartanbeck's info pages are like gold. And the Carrara Cafe has more than 250 tutorials on all aspects of Carrara, as you'll see in another thread here. Plus there are lots of helpful people here who know an awful lot of stuff, so don't be afraid to ask. (but don't look to me in that regard - I'm usually doing the asking!)
Oh, and welcome aboard :)
Argh! I usually include Phil's excellent training courses in my opening welcome spiel! :ahhh:
Sorry about that! These links can give you a taste of what each course is about. And now he has a new Basic Learning course, the same as this, but with the new 8.5 material added in. So, for the same price, but more material, I'd get the new one. Who knows? You may end up using 8.5 Pro before you know it!
I'll not take it personally, Dart!
Oooops... gotta go... again!!! :ahhh:
First off, congratulations on trying out Carrara! Welcome aboard!
I'll start off by saying Dart's Carrara information Manual will be a big help, as well as Phil's training. To save you some time, and since you said you're using Carrara 6 (Pro?) and can't afford Carrara 8.5, you don't need to worry about any of the Genesis, Smart Content or DIM tutorials at this point, as they're all Carrara 8.5 features.
There are some features in Carrara 7 and 8 that are also not in Carrara 6, such as modeling in the Assembly room in C7, and Sunbeams, IES lights, Negative Lights, etc. in C8.x so don't be alarmed if you follow a tutorial and you can't find a certain feature. I think the Vertex Modeler also had a bit of an interface change in C7.
I'm not telling you this to discourage you, C6 still has many fine features, such as being able to use the DAZ Gen 2, 3 and 4 figures, dynamic hair, etc.
Not to mention the fact that the Carrara 6 Manual is freaking awesome!
@Dart - your animations and tuts are awesome btw.
@Evil no discouragement taken. I know I had to swallow whatever pride I have left and purchase 8.5, I must explain that to my wallet and my judgement tho.
~GO
I'm using C7.2 Pro and am still productive, enjoying using it, and still learning its many features.
I've just uploaded a new one for the Carrara Cafe: "Painting with Shadows", a simple but fun test bed for practice with lighting your subject with a single light, allowing Carrara's incredible Global Illumination with Indirect Light and Scene effects to complete the rest of the lighting.
Since there's only one light, the lighting setup takes no time and, in this exercise the GI and IL take virtually no time to render, so it's a perfect situation for getting in some good experience looking at how to Paint with Shadows to improve your renders and lighting design skills ;)
Like usual, it's no short affair. But I like to try to cover everything that I feel is related to the topic, taking that extra time to explain why I'm doing 'this' and how it relates to 'that'.
Thank you for taking the time to explain this subject. I found it very interesting and timeous, as I'm at last starting to get some grasp of lighting. :)
Never realised that the soft shadow radius had to be turned up so high to get an effect.
Kind of depends. In some brightly lit outdoor scenes, I'll keep the soft shadow radius below 100 ft. Sunsets or overcast scenes I'll go much higher into the hundreds of feet sometimes. To emphasize the the effect in a studio or indoor situation I may go higher.
OK, so basically I'd start my testing at around 100ft (30M) and take it from there? My default is at 0.03M - no wonder I don't see any effect by going as far up as 10M:)
Sounds like a good amount. I've gone as low as 50 ft. for a bright, high-noon kind of day. I usually set it at 100 f.t to start.
When I first started practicing it, I was flabbergasted at how quickly Carrara renders in this way. With Full indirect lighting and higher render settings, we can really bring render times to a crawl, especially with full, highly populated scenes.
So when he and others say that it's good practice to adopt a linear workflow, starting in a similar way as I suggest in the tutorial is a good place to begin, and build the scene up from these smaller beginnings. When doing so paying careful attention to not including unnecessary trans map use and other render intensive things. Not saying to omit this stuff altogether, but to be aware of what it is that we add, and what it will do to our productivity.
In this, I've found that dynamic hair doesn't need Gamma Correction, and later found that Phil reported the same. As a matter of fact, it seems to be imperative that you don't use Gamma Correction if you're using dynamic hair. But perhaps I haven't exhausted all options. This doesn't mean that we'd need to abandon a linear workflow, however. As joemamma2000 pointed out, linear workflow doesn't necessarily mean that you need to apply GC to the render, if we make the corrections to all maps used in the scene beforehand. I've not tried that at all yet - but I've made some renders that look really nice with dynamic hair without the use of GC, so....
Even if you don't use Gamma Correction or a linear workflow this whole setting up a scene to be efficient with Global Illumination makes for some interesting experiments. Indirect Lighting combined with Sky Light global illumination is really interesting to explore. Enough so to require a few more videos on the topic. This first one is an exercise in getting light angles techniques engrained into our minds, to help us become more efficient and just plain more effective at creating appropriate moods by using the right shadows. Making sure that we practice and experiment, rather than sticking to what we think we already know and like. As I've mentioned in the tutorial, this is also meant as a way to improve how we imitate GI and IL with light rigs - simply by helping us to see how the angle of incoming light changes what we see, and helping us to break away from keeping too many shadows out of the scene - looking at them as a potential hindrance, where we should be growing shadows as the benefit that they provide.
But expanding beyond those very important principles takes us into building the scene according to how we might want or need the light to reflect back and forth, in, out, and through, to create intense realism, unrealistic effects, and predictable flows of light continuation. And in any of those cases, realistic or not... believable. It takes shader construction into a whole new realm of thought, just as well as the placement of objects, depending upon which shaders they wear.
The whole topic of Maximum Ray Depth becomes much more important, as we start to rely upon shadows cast being seen through reflections. The effect that shaders, in general, have in the lighting environment, with or without values in the glow channel. Refraction, Transparency, Subsurface Scattering... this stuff has always been necessary of consideration in scenes that don't use Global Illumination. Now they open up whole new opportunities to further our scenes in many different ways. I have yet to make good use of the beautiful DCG shader expansions that I have: Shader Ops 1 and 2 and Enhance C. These tools add a lot to one of my ordinary scenes. But introducing GI, IL, and Caustics makes the additional functions that these beauties provide a whole new realm of thoughts of potential exploration.
Anyways, I look forward to hearing from others in their experiments and am anxious to further my own investigations into all of this.
Since Indirect Lighting can play such a factor on render times I also intend to further demonstrate how well Carrara can perform its own post work - something that can become an essential ally in this thing. Instead of trying to light our motherboards on fire, building an entire GI/IL scene that is also using Caustics in a single shot, rendering over renders will put smiles onto many a face, me thinks ;) So I intend to put out some videos on the techniques I've tested in that regard as well.
Okay... why is it that I carry on so? Why?
No wonder my lovely, beautiful, treasure of a wife calls me Sir Babble on... and on... and on.... :ahhh:
I tend to use the Skylight more than full GI, for outdoor scenes, and even then I try to avoid it if I can. If I'm having trouble simulating it, I'll render a smaller version to see how it looks and to get some ideas as to where I need to put accent lights. Aside from that, I intend to practice the Occlusion Sandwich method which Jeremy Birn talks about in his book, Digital Lighting and Rendering, as I think it gives you faster render times, a GI look and with a bit more control of how lights interact in the scene. With full GI, you're at the mercy of the simulation in many ways. I think the real advantage with the Occlusion Sandwich method for me, will be in animations to get a GI look.
...misses the point of the exercise if you have to stop and sandwich the renders in order to see the results, this exercise would be a beautiful method of designing the initial lighting for an occlusion sandwich, however. I don't blame you for not sitting through the tutorial... LOL... it doesn't 'push' the use of IL or GC... or even GI for that matter. It uses GI to act as an artificial, artificial GI setup, so that you don't have to set up a rig. (EDIT: LOL we're using real GI to substitute an artificial GI) The exercise uses a single light and is meant as a way of practicing "creating shadows". I urge the viewer to try and avoid only going for a preferred look, but to experiment with many angles to produce a wide variety of results.
Along the way, we also get a great chance to explore the many features of the Carrara Global Illumination system as a beautiful way to set up shaders, try new scene settings and effects, render time differences, and much more. But the main point is to find new looks for your renders by using shadows from angles that you don't ordinarily use. The reason for this is that most of us already know what we often use and like. It has come to my attention recently by another artist that it has become very common to in affect reduce the actual amount of shadows cast to a point where they become most insignificant. They are so often used only to help describe sharp details, but heaven-forbid they should be cast across the main view of the surface.
So it can be a beneficial experience to explore what we don't do in our normal setup. For me, that includes the entire GI system, which I really don't use in my animations. But when I started messing around with this, I've found it to be amazingly fast to set up (I mean... one light... the default scene light!) and using the experiment as prescribed, renders almost instantaneously with full Indirect Lighting. So I originally created this test bed method as a way of building my heroes appearances onto the new Genesis 2 figures. Then I gave the workflow to Garstor as homework, since he was curious about real world lighting techniques.
If we explore what Jeremy Birn is saying about Global Illumination with Indirect Light, Carrara works beautifully and predictably as described and recommended. In this tutorial, we're not going as far as test renders though... we're painting shadows, using a single light as our brush. During a portion of the seminar, I add a duplicate of the light, and use it as a rim light, and the new one as a key or sun light. But we're staying so far away from final render settings, that I even urge the viewer to try and avoid using soft shadows. Shadows painted in new and interesting ways can be a beautiful way to improve ones renders.
As to working predictably as described by in Birn's book, not so much for a GI animation in my experience. Calculating at each frame in my animations creates flickering artifacts, and animating a figure with a static map causes other artifacts. The Occlusion Sandwich method has less of that and if you design your lighting with an eye towards what is being reflected and render the reflected light with no shadows, then the occlusion pass and finally the key light pass with shadows, the overall effect renders faster (especially for a more complex scene) despite the three separate renders. Then again, I'm on an ancient computer and have been working on optimizing my animation scenes for speed for years.
As a photographer, I am very well aware aware of the value of using shadows to accentuate differences in a surface to give depth to what could otherwise be bland and flat. The technique of doing so in Carrara is what I found of most value to me in Dart's video.
Do tell more about this sandwich - in words of one syllable, or less:) Looks interesting and I'm currently trying to get to understand the use of AO.
I would get Birn's book, but Amazon refuses to send to Africa because of the unreliable postal service. In fact, South Africa is very different to the rest of the continent as far as services go and we compare favorably with any first-world country, but we all get tarred with the same brush.
I haven't checked if it is mentioned later, but you only need to set the soft shadow radius so high with Distant Lights. With Bulb (Point) and Spot lights, you should set the radius to a normal, sensible value to match the size that your physical light would be. With Distant Lights however, the light is effectively at infinite distance, therefore you need a much larger radius to see any effect.
Dart, great video and I like the overall approach to trying different lighting setups and angles - even though I was shouting at the screen for a while "Turn off the Ambient Light!". Glad you noticed after a while!
Can I just pick up one point in your earlier post:
You said "it seems to be imperative that you don’t use Gamma Correction if you’re using dynamic hair" While Gamma Correction correctly deals with most textures, colours and maps, it does not correct the colours and textures applied to a Hair Shader and the hair ends up looking pale and washed out. Rather than not using Gamma Correction (I know - unthinkable!), I would recommend manually adjusting those hair textures. A good starting point for that is to multiply the hair color by itself, which is roughly equivalent to ungamma-ing them (not quite, but Carrara doesn't have specific gamma controls and it is the closet equivalent I have found). Then do a test render and adjust as required!
evilproducer - you can get a result very similar to the Occlusion Sandwich in Carrara in a single pass by rendering with Indirect Light and Ambient Occlusion Only turned on. Set the Occlusion distance, and then adjust the Ambient light intensity/color to balance against the direct lighting in your scene. You lose the flexibility of adjusting these post-render, but can render in a single pass and get more or less the same result (unless you are using more sophisticated ways to produce the Fill Light layer).
Roygee - the "Occlusion Sandwich" consists of three renders:
1. A "Fill Light" layer that acts as the base lighting, it contains no shadows (and is therefore very fast to render). The simplest way to do this in Carrara would be just to use an Ambient Light only pass. A more sophisticated way to do this would be to use one or more "normal" lights with shadows turned off, this would allow you to have different light colors and intensities across your scene.
2. An Ambient Occlusion layer, which contains no actual lighting information or surface colors. This can be done in Carrara using an Ambient Occlusion layer in the Multi-Pass renderer (unless anyone else knows of another way to do this?). This layer should be Multiplied with the Fill Light layer in Photoshop (or equivalent).
3. A "Key Light" layer which basically consists of your direct lighting. This should be rendered without any global illumination or ambient light, as these are catered for by the other layers. This should be combined as the top layer using Linear Dodge in Photoshop.
The overall aim of this approach is to mimic full GI but do it in a faster render time. It depends on your scene, but if you take into account the time to set things up and do postwork, I personally think using full GI can be a faster approach, even though the actual render time may be longer (but often not that long on a modern computer!).
Can I also recommend this thread for a discussion of using Gamma Correction and Linear Workflow in Carrara:
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/25644/
...and evilproducer has a thread * Tasty Occlusion Sammich
Yes, with Gamma Correction set to 2.2. Copy your existing color channel, insert the multiply operation and then paste the channel into Source 1 and Source 2 slots. This should get you close. From there, you don't need to adjust both sides of the multiply operation for fine tuning, it is just what I have found to be generally a good starting point.
Thanks for the further information, everyone:)
Saved all the discussions for some serious testing!
Testing and observing... yes... that was my true intention with this exercise.