Why, Carrara, why?

makma

The scene was modelled in Carrara 8.1.1, added the simplest materials possible without any reflectiveness or specularity and highlights except windows glass. Sky lightning rig was the only source of light. So?
Rendering for one and a half of an hour ended with an error message - pic 1
Exported the scene via 3ds file format into Thea Studio, added materials from it’s library and rendered in a quarter of 2000 x 1500 px picture using Presto MC engine using both CPU and GPU cores together on machine with Intel Core 2 Quad, 6 GB RAM and GTX 660 graphic card, WIN7 64 inside - pic 2
Is there anybody to develop a plug-in for Thea Studio? Regular price for such plug-in for Thea Render is 69,50 Euros. They provide a tool to develop it; SDK for Thea, basic version for free. I could pay that price to have an access from Carrara to a wide variety of render engines: biased and unbiased, working on CPU alone or GPU and CPU together, very easy sky set-up, fine and simple material system and the ability to have photo quality full control visualization when building a scene thanks to Interactive Render working fast and accurate.
Perhaps there will be a day of C9 arrival with all of these features on the board, but until this magic moment I would be very happy to work with Carrara with Thea together.
I was the only person modelling in Carrara in a crowd working mainly in 3DMAX, SketchUp and VRay. It was a shock for them knowing that I had used Carrara. They thought that is was dead for years… Another shock was the time of rendering in Thea…

Greetings, Marek

Jonstark

Don't I wish! I love Thea Render, especially the new Presto2 engine that has GPU + CPU rendering, I pretty much render in Thea all the time whenever I can, after exporting from Carrara as an obj file.

Would love to have a Thea plugin for Carrara, currently I just have to retexture everything in Thea. I save scenes that I've previously created though, for certain, and that saves a little time, but still if there was a Thea plugin... I would be first in line to purchase :)

makma

Hi!
Thank you Jonstar for comments.
My workflow is almost similar to yours now. Modelling in Carrara or Hexagon (the most underrated modelling app in the world!), scene set-up, simple materials, test renders. When ready I export the scene or model to 3ds file. I had some issues with obj exports from Carrara when opening the file in Thea. Some strange poly deformations occured. So I prefer exporting to 3ds. Setting materials in Thea is a simple task, IMHO. Comparing rendering capabilities of Thea Studio to the ones of Carrara is simply unfair (sorry, folks, I read a whole thread on photorealistic renderings in Carrara and it is OK if you are trained enough, but in Thea Studio photorealistic rendering is very, very easy.) Presto engine is absolutely a dream to render even on my more than moderate machine!
I use this mode of work for all my archi-vis renderings and it seems to me very competitive in price to 3DMAX/Vray alternative. And the most important, though Carrara/Hexagon are considered as hobby apps they can do the job in this field of imaginary and my pictures confirm that. Few years ago 3DArtist wrote that Carrara 7 was a "Swiss Army Knife" among all-in-one 3D apps. We all can prove it is true. Of course, there are some problems when working with Carrara: lack of ability to put away each and avery property panel alone to the next monitor display, lack of easy visibility tweaking of a layer to name just two. But I don't know the most friendly 3D app, though Thea Studio is a really fun to work with.
So I like Carrara and I can do a lot with it but time has passed by and new possibilities arrived to give me easy way to get photorealistic pictures avoiding days of rendering, so plug-in to Thea Render engine seems to be a reasonable request. I hope it will be available some day.
Below: raw render of hotel entrance and final picture.
Greetings,

Marek

evilproducer

Jonstark said:

Don't I wish! I love Thea Render, especially the new Presto2 engine that has GPU + CPU rendering, I pretty much render in Thea all the time whenever I can, after exporting from Carrara as an obj file.

Would love to have a Thea plugin for Carrara, currently I just have to retexture everything in Thea. I save scenes that I've previously created though, for certain, and that saves a little time, but still if there was a Thea plugin... I would be first in line to purchase :)

Wow. It's been awhile I think. Welcome back! I thought we had lost you!

Jonstark

evilproducer said:

Jonstark said:

Don't I wish! I love Thea Render, especially the new Presto2 engine that has GPU + CPU rendering, I pretty much render in Thea all the time whenever I can, after exporting from Carrara as an obj file.

Would love to have a Thea plugin for Carrara, currently I just have to retexture everything in Thea. I save scenes that I've previously created though, for certain, and that saves a little time, but still if there was a Thea plugin... I would be first in line to purchase :)

Wow. It's been awhile I think. Welcome back! I thought we had lost you!

Thanks Evil, I'm a diehard Carrarist for life, but Daz forums hate my guts and won't ever let me login and post, so I mostly lurk. I have to use a different browser and login 3 times (while juggling, hopping one one foot, and singing the 4th verse of the national anthem) before the Daz site will let me in, so it's just become too much work to post, and I mostly just lurk nowadays, but I'm still out here and check by every so often to see the new announcements about Carrara 9 that never seem to come... :)

magaremoto

you are right, thea presto is super cool; I usually make a 2 pass export: carrara>3ds>accutrans>3ds>thea; in accutrans there are also useful functions to scale and adjust textures if needed

makma

Hi, Magaremoto!

Presto is really special engine and it would be fantastic to work with it directly from Carrara.
I didn't know about accutrans. Seems to be interesting tool. I haven't any problem with exporting to 3ds from Carrara even models made in SketchUp exported to 3ds before. I import them to Carrara to tweak its mesh. Carrara imports 3ds from SU easy with textures and all the textures import well in Thea. The only thing I found is importing model to Thea with defined each and every shading domain. It is very important to do that in Carrara before exporting to 3ds because Thea groups items by materials.

Marek

magaremoto

Hi Marek,
have you tried the brand new fbx export option in SU 2014? it works fine for carrara.
In most cases accutrans optimizes meshes for its native "remove similar polys and verts" function

makma

Hi Magaremoto,

I work in C8.1 and didn't find the fbx file import possible. I use free Autodesk FBX Converter to adapt free models from libraries on Internet.

For manual mesh optimization Hexagon is enough for me. It is stable as far as I follow exactly the procedures described in manual. Its manual was the most important reason I've got into 3D modelling at all. Easy to read, inspirational and very clear in programme description. I've found that Hexagon mainly crushes when I do something against the rules shown in manual. I came to Carrara just from Hexagon indeed... I think that with a little improvement it would be a great modelling app!
For automatic mesh retopology I've bought an educational/non-commercial version of 3D-Coat just for about 100 $ that has marvellous mesh optimization tools and of course it has exceptional tools for 3D sculpting equal to Z-Brush IMHO and excellent UV and painting tools too.
Of course I will give accutrans a trial go! Thank you for an advice.
For me the main problem with getting different models from many sources in the Internet together in a scene are not meshes but scaling them. I found that conversions cause strange scaling of the models. So after Bertrandt Benoit (strongly advice to visit his blog bbb3viz to find excellent photorealistic renderings and a lot of advice) I've prepared a cube of exactly 1 m size both in Carrara and Thea. I put it into scene as a reference to scale everything I import into scene. That works fine for me.
Below my trial in Carrara to get a mood of lighting I found in pictures of an american painter Edward Hopper. The office model from disc of 3DArtist. IBL light only. Probably my first trial of this kind of light source in rendering. Took hours to render. Still I like it.

Marek

Jonstark

Beautiful renders, Makma

makma

Thank you, Jonstark!
The pictures of Hopper I can describe as "magical realism" following a genre of Garriel Garcia Marquez novels. The magic lays in lighting, colours and composition of the scenes. He was a master of this kind of magic. My pictures are only an attempt to catch this mood.

Below I present pictures rendered in Carrara 8.5 beta 32 bit. The project was about reconstructing abandoned old manufacture into a cultural and arts centre in Lodz, a city in the centre of Poland. The building were constructed in Carrrara. I built the windows walls in spline modeller in Carrara from the lines of Illustrator. Wanted to save time in building it in block modelling method. Unfortunately spline model gave a very messy mesh that I couldn't wrap around in good brick textures. You can see that. So I have get back to block modelling. Trees are from Arboretum library and were rendered separately with alpha channel because of a very long render time. Aprox. few hours. The scene without the trees were rendered for overnight. Both renders were composited in PS. Chairs, tables, lamp posts are free models from archive3D.
Unfortunately many renders crushed and that was the reason I have put money saved for C. 8.5 into Thea Studio. The shift allowed me to finish the project on time.
I really don't know what caused the crashes. I used realistic sky rigs to light the scene. I like very much the Tim's rigs because they give fantastic possibilities to find a moody lighting. I deleted all the other lights in the scene, reduced translucency and highlights in shaders. So what's the problem?
All the pictures are raw Carrara renders only composited together with the trees in PS. No other post.
Greetings.
Marek

makma

makma said:

Thank you, Jonstark!
The pictures of Hopper I can describe as "magical realism" following a genre of Garriel Garcia Marquez novels. The magic lays in lighting, colours and composition of the scenes. He was a master of this kind of magic. My pictures are only an attempt to catch this mood.

Below I present pictures rendered in Carrara 8.5 beta 32 bit. The project was about reconstructing abandoned old manufacture into a cultural and arts centre in Lodz, a city in the centre of Poland. The building were constructed in Carrrara. I built the windows walls in spline modeller in Carrara from the lines of Illustrator. Wanted to save time instead of building it in block modelling method. Unfortunately spline models gave a very messy mesh that I couldn't wrap around in good brick textures. You can see that. So I have to get back to block modelling. Trees are from Arboretum library and were rendered separately with alpha channel because of a very long render time. Aprox. few hours. The scene without the trees were rendered overnight. Both renders were composited in PS. Chairs, tables, lamp posts are free models from archive3D.
Unfortunately many renders crushed and that was the reason I have put money saved for C. 8.5 into Thea Studio and 3D-Coat. The shift allowed me to finish the project on time.
I really don't know what caused the crashes. I used realistic sky rigs to light the scene. I like very much the Tim's rigs because they give a fantastic possibilities to find a moody lighting. I deleted all the other lights in the scene, reduced translucency and highlights in shaders. So what's the problem?
All the pictures are raw Carrara renders only composited together with the trees in PS. No other post.
Greetings.
Marek

makma

Admin, please delete doubled post.
Thank you.
Marek