Reality 2 vs Carrara

BC Rice

I've always considered Carrara to be superior to DAZ both in animation interface and rendering quality, but looking at some of the images from this Reality 2 software, it's pretty potent.

Does Carrara match the level that Reality 2 appears to provide DAZ, and if so -- what would be the steps to achieving something like that? I feel like I crank Carrara's rendering capacity to the max. I light things properly. But I'm not seeing renders that look quite as nice as these.

Thanks

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/reality-2-for-daz-studio/92598/

JimmyC_2009

Reality is just a plugin for DAZ Studio that allows DS users to utilise Luxrender.

Luxrender is an open source free render engine, and it is of the 'unbiased' type, as opposed to the 3Delight render engine which is 'biased'. There is a great deal of difference in how the two different types of engine work, and I would suggest that you have a look on Wikipedia or similar to see what the differences are.

There are several unbiased render engines available, but most of them aren't free. They also take a great deal of time to finish renders, and in fact, Luxrender never stops at all until you tell it to. Blender has a similar idea with the Blender Cycles. I have both Reality and Luxux for DAZ Studio, both use Luxrender, but they are not a simple solution to rendering real looking images. It can take a lot of time to get good results.

I can't help with Carrara lighting, but I'm sure someone on the Carrara forums can help there.

ringo monfort

Hi,

For me it is always a Work In Progress in trying to create photo realistic render images in Carrara.
Here are some examples.

http://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#users/90/

3DAGE

HI BC Rice :)

Haver a look at LUXUS for Carrara,.

http://www.daz3d.com/luxus-for-carrara

The Luxrender "Engine" is freely available,.
"Luxus" and "Reality" are both commecially available plugins which use the Luxrender engine.

As Jimmy points out,... there are several renderers availanble.

Octane renderer for Carrara will also be available soon, although OctaneRenderer is Not free.
(IMO) It's in a class of it's own. (that's probably a biased opinion) :) As an owner of Luxus for Carrara / Reality DS, and Octane.

Carrara's internal renderer is more than capable of producing "almost photographic" quality images but the key to getting there includes Good Shaders and Good Lighting.. it's not as simple as cranking the renderer settings to the Max
(normally all that does is,... takes longer to calculate)

Jimmy is correct that renderers like Lux and Octane will constantly "improve" the image quality as it renders,. but you'll have an almost instant view of your image, as you're working with shaders and lighting, which allows you to adjust lighting and shaders to get the best out of your scene, and you should have a "Maximum samples" setting, which you can adjust to allow a longer or shorter render time per frame for Animations or Still images, so the render time can be set by you..

Shaders :.
Unfortunately many Carrara user load Poser/DS content as a staring point,. (nothing wrong with that) except that those products were built to be used in Poser or DS, so,.. All of the Shader settings were built to take advantage of the way those programs shaders and Lighting systems work with the programs render engine.

In Carrara you'll need to do some work on those shader setting to make them work better in Carrrara, and if you do that, then it's possible to produce a much better image.... even in simple lighting.

There are multiple books about 3D CGI lighting,. which is an example of how difficult a subject lighting is to master.
don't be disheartened,. practice and try to learn from the examples of others.

Hope it helps :)

DustRider

Boy am I glad I checked the thread before posting - I'm just to darn slow at answering. A lot of my comments echo what JimmyC, Rngo, and 3DAge wrote - so I'll apologize for my cross posts in advance (becuase there would probably be another several replies before I finished)

BC Rice said:

I've always considered Carrara to be superior to DAZ both in animation interface and rendering quality, but looking at some of the images from this Reality 2 software, it's pretty potent.

You can get some pretty outstanding results with Reality/Lux. As JimmyC mentioned, Reality 2 is a plugin that provides a bridge between DS and LuxRender. I have Reality 2.5 for DS, and Reality 3 for Poser (Reality 3 for DS is in development). Reality provides some automatic conversions of DS (or Poser) mats to Lux, and provides a very nice user interface for editing your materials for Lux. As is typical with any shader conversion process, the software can't quite interpret all possible options/combinations perfectly. Reality 3 for Poser does a much better conversion than Reality 2.5 for DS. I would expect that Reality 3 for DS will be even better (it has been in development for over a year).

As mentioned, LuxRender is a unbiased render engine, which in general terms means it doesn't use "cheats" to calculate light and light effects. Biased renderers like what Carrara has use these "cheats", or mathematical/statistical/predictive approximations of lighting and lighting effects. So what does this mean? Biased renderers can typically render much faster than unbiased renderers because they use biased physics to approximate scene lighting. But most biased renderers have the ability to improve the lighting and render quality to either nearly unbiased or fully unbiased like Lux (actually, even Lux isn't fully unbiased, but it's very very close). Carrara has the ability in most situations to come very close to the quality output (and unbiased nature) of Lux, but the render times will be much longer.

There is a plugin sold here that enables you to use LuxRender with Carrara, Luxus for Carrara: http://www.daz3d.com/luxus-for-carrara (there is also a DS version od Luxus). I also have Luxus. The implementation of the user interface between Luxus and Reality is quite different, but they both provide the needed tools to get excellent results from Lux.

Lux has three render modes, CPU only, hybrid CPU + GPU, and GPU only (SLG). Most people use CPU only, and it can be very slow. Render times can go anywhere from and hour or two, to several days depending on scene complexity amd shaders used (my longest is 70 hours). The hybrid mode is faster for some people, and slower for some people, but speed increases are around 1.5-2 x (though it usually takes more samples per pixel for the image to converge, so speed increases are actually marginal). The GPU only mode is really only for the hardcore render geeks. It's extremely fast, but you need to be sure to set-up your scene properly to get it to run (and to run without crashing the video card).

There is a thread about Luxus for Carrara here: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/42282/

Does Carrara match the level that Reality 2 appears to provide DAZ, and if so -- what would be the steps to achieving something like that? I feel like I crank Carrara's rendering capacity to the max. I light things properly. But I'm not seeing renders that look quite as nice as these. http://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/reality-2-for-daz-studio/92598/

Yes you can match, or get very close to the same results with Carrara. You will need to increase your quality settings, enable full ray tracing, indirect lighting, possibly caustics, use a good light setup (using HDRI possibly with an additional light or two helps a lot), and edit your shaders to get the desired result, and often you need to use DOF as well.. Phils new Realism Rendering Training Video may be a great way to start on realistic rendering in Carrara.

As 3Dage mentioned, there is a new Carrara plugin in development for Octane Render. Octane Render is a GPU only renderer, and is exteremly fast for an unbiased render engine. I have Octane Render, the DS plugin for it, and will get/use the Carrara plugin as soon as it becomes available. Octane makes unbiased rendering fun, FAST, and easy (well, you still need to set up lighting, and optimize shaders, but the interactive nature of Octane with near real time feedback makes all the work quite fun and fast). So far, my longest render with Octane was about 12 hours, that same render would have taken several days in Lux, and 24-48 hours in Carrara. Most of my final renders are in the 30 min to 2 hour range.

Here are a couple of images done with the DS plugin and Ocatne (keep in mind these were done early in the learning process with Octane):
http://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/18826
http://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/21158

But we can't forget Carrara, here is a WIP image that is pretty good for "realistic 3D " done for this month's challenge.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/44033/P84

DustRider

I forgot to add in my post that regardless of the render engine used, optimizing/editing your mats/shaders for the render engine and lighting used is a crtical step to achieving the best results. In the right hands, most, if not all render engines are capable of achieving outstanding results within the limitations of the features that are available. Like 3dage said, to get the best results from DAZ/Poser content, 90+%of the time you will need to edit/tweak the shaders (actually, unless you are using content designed to work together, to get the best results from DS or Poser you typically need to tweak the shaders to your lighting, and to match the other content in the scene).

BC Rice

Thanks all. I found the plug in.

As for shaders and maps, I'm not 100% certainly that Lux would help with the only thing I care about, and that's making the model below more photo realistic. For her I only use Carrara's built in metal shaders (I found them to be better than what I could get from the DAZ store). But those shaders are just different colors on dials (reflection, highlight, color, etc). Is that something that Luxus will help improve on?

I guess before I drop $30 on Luxus, I want to feel fairly confident that it's going to improve on what I'm already getting out of Carrara.

Basically, is there a consensus that using Luxus will more than likely help to make my metals be more photo realistic? That's all I need to know as that's all I'll need it for.

Thanks again for all the help!!!