can Carrara render skin results like Lux?
Mistara
Posts: 38,675
i'm seeing amazing lux renders on da.
Lux takes so long, was wondering if i should just concentrate on Carrara?
my carrara lighting skills are newbie.
i'm not sure what is best possible for carrara?
thanks !
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In my opinion yes.
I don't remember exactly how long these took to render, 2-5min.
Some tips here:
http://carraracafe.com/articles/10-reasons-you-need-a-falloff-shader/
There is a Luxus plugin for Carrara if you want it, but it will still be slow.
Carrara has a very capable GI (Global Illumination) renderer. It also can take awhile, though maybe less than Luxus.
There is also the standard renderer and it can provide some very nice results if you learn lighting.
There is a very good, 3D software agnostic book by a PIXAR guru, called Digital Lighting and Rendering by Jeremy Birn. It covers all the render methods and how to light for them. There are also people here that are very knowledgeable about shading and lighting and can steer you in the right direction.
I'm not going to lie to you, there is going to be a learning curve, but if you enjoy learning new things and discovering that many times it's not as hard as it looks, then you should be good to go!
I don't really strive for a lot of hyper-realism in my renders, but I can post a couple I've done using Carrara exclusively to render them.
The Aiko 3 picture is done using Carrara's Skylight (which is part of the GI renderer). I used a white a color in the scene's background and the Skylight interpreted it as a light source. I also use a spotlight or two for highlights.
The picture of V4 wrapped in holiday lights uses no GI at all. It uses some spotlights to create a rim light, a dimmish keylight and a dimmer fill light. It also uses bulb lights (point lights in D|S I think) parented to the holiday lights.
The Steampunk inspired render uses the realistic sky and the Skylight to treat the sky as an image based light.
Carrara is definitely capable of good skin, as well as render in general. Ringo has some great examples of skin in Carrara in his gallery here (http://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#users/90/), as well as some great Carrara skin shaders for sale in his store (http://www.daz3d.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=RingoMonfort).
These two images (links below - be sure to go to the full image view, the shaders look much better) in my gallery here are about the best I've come up with. These definitely rendered faster in Carrara than they would have in Lux. But it's fairly easy to make good shaders/mats in Lux. It just depends on the results your looking for, and how long your willing to wait.
The Scorceress
http://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/29816
The Crystal Scorceress (As I recall, even with all the caustics from the crystals, and set to full ray tracing, this image took a little over 2 hours to render)
http://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/18392
Edit: (hit post too soon :red: ) As a side note, I have Luxus for Carrara, but use Carrara's renderer more (a lot more) than Lux, because in most cases, I can get equivalant, or nearly equivalant results in Carrara. The caustics in Lux tend to be a bit easier to set up, and depending on the scene, they will be a bit better, but overall, if you push Carrara to full GI/Raytracing, you get great results.
Not to hijack this dustrider, but have you tried caustics with a red/green/blue light source? Try this, create a light of your choice, set the brightness to 33% and duplicate the light two time so that you have three lights in exactly the same position and orientation (if it is a directional light). Now change the color of one light to pure red, one to pure blue and one to pure green. The resulting combined light will appear to have a 99% brightness and look like a white light. I imagine you would want to turn off gamma correction.
When using caustics and refracting materials, it will break apart the light into the component colors similar to a prism in real life. It's not physically accurate in how it breaks apart the spectrum but it's good enough for art.
Thanks for the tip EP, I remember seeing something like this somewhere ... probably on this forum ;-)
I've never tried it, but the results look great! will have to play with it a bit on the crystal scene.
If you are OK with nudity, check out the skin on these:
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2538862&username=PhilW&member;&np;
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2542296&username=PhilW&member;&np;
I have had a lot of positive feedback on these and in my view they rival what you can do in Lux or Octane, but just using Carrara. You can find out more about my techniques in the soon-to-be-released "Realism in Carrara" tutorials from Infinite Skills.
I loved that series of images Phil! Amazing work there. I'm hoping that you can think of other eras to reproduce!
Wonderful teaser on the future tutorials too. I can't wait (I just wish it wasn't Infinite Skills...their interface into the videos is awful...fortunately your excellent content offsets that annoyance).
OPTIMIZING YOUR CONTENT – SHADER BASICS, an article I've written for the Carrara Cafe, helps to explain how to use specular highlight and bump maps made for use in Poser - using the files that come with character packs and even the basics from some figures, from a content-user's perspective. I didn't get into actually making these maps, but rather just how to use what some of these products provide us.
As you've hinted about in your original post, lighting is the other half. While realistic looking skin requires some well-setup textures, we still need to use good lighting practices to take advantage of those textures, and to get realistic-looking skin.
It's not always as easy as 1-2-3 to explain good lighting techniques and practices. Some of the most popular methods used in CG are included with Carrara as preset examples if you've installed the Native Content pack, but still... these can only show 'examples' as each scene needs its own considerations. I have found the book, Digital Lighting & Rendering - Third Edition - by Jeremy Birn, to be an excellent source of knowledge as it is written by a professional in the Cinematic and CG fields of stage lighting, and has good teaching skills. One of my Carrara friends didn't find it to be quite as much of a Must-Read as I did, as you can see Here, while I was much more excited when I wrote my article regarding the same book: Want faster, more efficient renders and/or better lighting?, but if you like to soak up great information on many ways to improve upon lighting and rendering techniques, I find it to be a valuable read!
Dimension Theory, one of our expert Carrara-using Published Artists, here at DAZ 3D, has a brilliant product available demonstrating shader-building techniques upon a single character product, making the learning specific, with real results by simply loading presets. He's even included tutorials and an HDRI scene to help illustrate his points. A very good study on realism and at various levels of intensity, from not-so-slow on rendering, to "It's okay that I can't use my computer for the rest of the day, realism is what I NEEED!" settings in the shaders. Very cool, with some great explanatory tutorial: Carraracters Delphinia
Note that the product requires RM - Delphinia, or the presets won't load. Personally, I find these sorts of products to be very well worth their investment, and then some. Buying Ringo's shaders are also a great way to study "Pro - Shaders" techniques.
Finally, I have found Indigone's Free shader resource and lighting kit to be an excellent learning aid - especially when I was new to Carrara. Don't let the name of the free product fool you:
V4 Skin Shader kit and Lights for Carrara 6 uses procedural shaders, so they work for nearly any figure, and it also works on Carrara 7, 8, and 8.5 :)
It includes some excellent explanations as well as the wonderful shader presets.
While you're at it, her Endless Eyes Kit is another valuable find.
Great renders and skin shaders Phil. Looking forward to the realism tutorial.
Great renders and skin shaders Phil. Looking forward to the realism tutorial.Ditto that!
Fantastic work from everyone. Very inspiring.
I have been playing with Luxus for Carrara (btw: Great Luxus for Carrara Resource Pack PhilW), but the long render times have been a major drawback to animating with it. Also I am unsure if the quality difference is worth the time and effort. With Carrara you can get good renders in less than a minute, which helps when you have thousands of frames.
Another drawback of Luxus for Carrara is that it doesn't support many of Carrara's features. I gave been unable to get the hair, particle emitter and cloud objects to work with it. And terrain shaders need to be converted to something else. But this could just be my lack of skill and knowledge of the product.
These techniques look amazing, do they take long to render?
a bit off topic but I found that kerkythea got a decent job in this image (not my work). Only to point out other viable free renderer out of there
Joeping - thanks for the kind comments. I don't think I would ever try animating in Luxus, it would just take too long. Animation in particular is always a battle between quality, image size and render time, and for the foreseeable future there will always be compromises involved. The renders that I put the links to I think took around 30-60 mins each. Not too bad for the size and quality, but no good for animation.
That said, my own view is that you don't need the same level of photorealism in animations that you would aim for in a still image. Other factors come into play, and in particular the realism of the movement will make or break the believability of an animation. Each frame may be perfect in terms of render quality, but if the movements are stilted and jerky, it will kill any feeling of realism in the output. So I would aim for a "good enough" compromise in terms of render quality but make sure that your movements are fluid and realistic. Easier said than done of course!
Don't get me wrong. I bought Luxus for Carrara because I applaud the developer's wonderful customer satisfaction input when he developed it, and to have the flexibility to use the amazing Luxrender straight from within the amazing Carrara. It's an asset that I am happy to support, even though I'm not yet ready to go that route. Joeping and others have been showing how incredible of a job it does. But Carrara's native Texture room flexibility when using Carrara's lightning fast render engine is my boon as an animator. Add just a few of the many excellent shader plugins and the whole system expands tenfold. Add more and... and... and...
I intend to eventually collect ALL of the shader plugins made for Carrara! Getting closer!
Thanks to Misty Whisky for bringing up this question. It's been very illuminating.
The power of Carrara shaders are so vast, its great to have such such knowledgeable resources to ask questions. Thanks for the help and inspiration.
Please don't think I am bashing LUXUS. It's a great plug in and I have only been trying it for a couple of weeks.
Well here is my contribution to the topic.
“Realism in Carrara” sounds exciting Phil. Waiting in anticipation!
woww. impressed. so it can be done. about how long does a render like that take?
oops, you already answered in previous post. 60 minutes?
elianeck posted a carrara render, got me to thinking about concentrating on carrara instead of lux.
http://elianeck.deviantart.com/art/I-caught-you-457753753
A lot can depend on your hardware, if you're using render nodes or not, on the number of lights, the shaders that are used and the render settings and resolution.
The images look great and for the time render of 30 to 60 minutes is awesome as compared to the hrs it takes under LuxRender. Definitely something to keep an eye out for. It may help me revive my 3D nude portrait blog.
i posted it on an other topic
but i think the skin turned out nice
so it's should be good in this one too
all of these render look good so far!
~GO
I had forgotten about this thread until brought back up by the latest comment. Here are a couple of recent ones from me. If you are interested in my techniques for lighting, materials and rendering, my latest training "Carrara Realism Rendering" has just been launched on the DAZ Store:
http://www.daz3d.com/carrara-realism-rendering-training-video