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What Sighman says, but to emphasize, if you're viewing the replicated objects as meshes, that will make Carrara crawl. If the bounding box view is distracting, try points or crosses.
You can also disable the Show Object in 3D view to speed up the Assembly Room view. It's available for any object, light, replicator, primitive, etc. under view in the object's General tab.
The other option is to use the Interactive Renderer to lower the displayed texture size. It's the little up arrow within a circle icon at the top of the Assembly room window. I would imagine that if you have the Octane plugin window/viewer thing open, a high texture value would slow things down, since it is an OpenGL preview by default, and that would eat memory in your graphics card.
Note that options you enable and disable are for the Assembly room view only. They have no bearing on the final render settings.
I have an old computer and an old graphics card. It has a scant 256 MB of RAM. I can open and navigate in Howie Farkes' Forest Road scene very smoothly, and that's with 30,000 plus replications of forest floor leaf litter objects, 11,000 plus grass bunch replications and hundreds of tree replications. It's very responsive. Howie uses points and crosses along with bounding boxes for his replicator displays, and the forest floor leaf litter and the grass replicators are not displayed in 3D view.
Here is a "final" volumetric lighting render done with the Octane plugin. It's a fairly simple render with a V6/C6 character with the Essina outfit for G2F ..... and a sword :roll: (but I think it fits in this image very well). The scene has 3 lights, the main light is Carrara/Octane sunlight coming through the door, and I added 2 very low intensity mesh lights for slight fill lighting.
Sorry for just posting a link, but I entered it in the PC contest so I don't think I can post it here yet.
http://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/42774/
Looks great dustrider, very realistic lighting (as you would expect from unbiased, of course!)
One of the big advantages that the carrara octane plugin has though is that it exactly matches the camera angle both in Octane and in Carrara. I think most of the time if I wanted volumetrics, I would just render that as a quick pass in Carrara and then combine in post with the Octane render, since Carrara mostly handles volumetric lighting pretty well. On the other hand, did you notice whether the Octane render with volumetrics took longer than an average Octane render? If it didn't, maybe just doing the volumetrics in Octane would be the way to go. Also, how was it done? Did you create a cube of a volumetric material to fill the space with? That's just my best guess of how it would be done, but maybe I'm way off base.
I can't run Octane, and it will probably be a long time before I can, but it seems to me from following along, that a big disadvantage to Octane and Lux, etc. is that they can't handle Carrara's volumetrics. Sure, they have a volumetric shader which is good for adding atmosphere, but I have yet to see a cloud done with them.
Now, this is where I'm headed, there is the cumulous cloud vertex model on ShareCG that looks really nice in C7.2, but something with the SSS changed in C8 and later so it looks bad in those versions. Can a volumetric Octane shader be applied to that model to get a cloud effect? It does use displacement, is that a deal killer?
http://www.sharecg.com/v/41244/browse/5/3D-Model/Cumulonimbus-cloud
Very nice render dustrider! Took me a while to load due to a slow connection this morning.
Thanks!
The setup is like you guessed, I just enclosed everything in front of the camera in a cube primitive, then used the fog shader in the LiveDB as a starting point and adjusted (a LOT) to get it where I wanted (scattering needs to be turned way down). You just have to make sure your camera isn't inside the geometry where your fog shader is. The performance/speed drops by about one third (as measured by Ms/sec), so the performance hit isn't terrible. I let this image run for about 4 hours (1800 s/p), but I could have cut it off at about 1000 to 12000 s/p with only a minor bit of difference in image quality/clarity.
One of the keys I've found to getting the image to resolve faster with low light conditions is to make sure there is some direct light getting to even the darkest places in the image. It doesn't have to be enough light to be visually perceptible, just enough to help resolve the image faster. If the dark areas end up too light, you can counteract that by simply adjusting the exposure, F-stop, ISO, or gamma values.
Here is my feeble attempt at a cloud shader for the cloud model you linked to. With a bit more work (and actually reading about the settings and procedurals a bit more) I'm sure I could make it look better. Not as good as the Carrara version, but not bad for a first attempt.
Here are some pretty good looking clouds done in Octane:
http://render.otoy.com/newsblog/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/CloudForest121.jpg
Here is my feeble attempt at a cloud shader for the cloud model you linked to. With a bit more work (and actually reading about the settings and procedurals a bit more) I'm sure I could make it look better. Not as good as the Carrara version, but not bad for a first attempt.
Here are some pretty good looking clouds done in Octane:
http://render.otoy.com/newsblog/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/CloudForest121.jpg
Those do look good. Are they filled polygonal shapes that are replicated?
The cloud you made using the ShareCG cloud looks pretty good as well. I think some tweaking of the color and density could make it a great addition to an outdoor scene.
Those do look good. Are they filled polygonal shapes that are replicated?
The cloud you made using the ShareCG cloud looks pretty good as well. I think some tweaking of the color and density could make it addition to an outdoor scene.
I'm not sure how they were made. The image is from a forum post about clouds in the forums over at Otoy. It was done by one of the developers at Otoy and he never revealed his secrets.
The link below is another render done for the PC Anniversary Render contest. Thought I'd enter a couple renders to at least show DAZ 3D (and potential users) that some people are using Genesis successfully with Carrara. This image uses a custom V6 character with the newish Battle Kimono for G2F, the Mag Tower and a lot of stuff from the accessories packs. Almost all of the textures were edited/optimized for Octane. Be sure to view the full resolution version to see the outstanding details in the Battle Kimono textures, they are really outstanding!.
http://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/43777
Awesome, awesome render Dustrider! I absolutely love it!
Very impressive job! The best way to advertise Carrara is to show what it can do. You have certainly done that with this render!
How do IES lights work? I'm trying under Distribution -> Octane Textures, selecting distribution = greyscale image and loading a .IES file.
Whist I get different results from different files, none are as expected. Using no other lighting and path-tracing.
It sounds like you are doing everything right to set them up. You will probably need to increase the emmision power quite a bit though (4000 or more?) to get them to light the scene properly. The IES lights typically are much "darker" than a simple black-body emitter.
Wow! Thanks for the compliments everyone!
It sounds like you are doing everything right to set them up. You will probably need to increase the emmision power quite a bit though (4000 or more?) to get them to light the scene properly. The IES lights typically are much "darker" than a simple black-body emitter.
Ok thanks Dustrider, will try that.
The Octane manual says that the Power setting should be in real-world Watts. Confusing how this seems such am inaccurate statement?!
Well thanks to your suggestion I finally get some expected results :)
Ok thanks Dustrider, will try that.
The Octane manual says that the Power setting should be in real-world Watts. Confusing how this seems such am inaccurate statement?!
A lot depends on the specific IES file, and how well your "light" mesh matches the light modeled by the IES. Flat planes will have a greater light response than say cubes or spheres. The size of the light mesh will also influence it's relative effect in the scene, as will the efficiency setting. So the manual could be quite correct if all of the factors not controlled by the EIS are set up to faithfully reproduce the light the EIS was modeled on.
I find the biggest advantage to using EIS for lighting is when lights are visible in the scene, with the proper EIS, they will appear a lot "darker" while producing equivalent lighting effects (brightness) in the scene. So you can have lights bright enough to light the scene that won't be too bright and overpowering if they are visible in the image.
I'll try to post an example of a scene with and without EIS lights tomorrow.
Wow - Looks Great!
Ok thanks Dustrider, will try that.
The Octane manual says that the Power setting should be in real-world Watts. Confusing how this seems such am inaccurate statement?!
A lot depends on the specific IES file, and how well your "light" mesh matches the light modeled by the IES. Flat planes will have a greater light response than say cubes or spheres. The size of the light mesh will also influence it's relative effect in the scene, as will the efficiency setting. So the manual could be quite correct if all of the factors not controlled by the EIS are set up to faithfully reproduce the light the EIS was modeled on.
I find the biggest advantage to using EIS for lighting is when lights are visible in the scene, with the proper EIS, they will appear a lot "darker" while producing equivalent lighting effects (brightness) in the scene. So you can have lights bright enough to light the scene that won't be too bright and overpowering if they are visible in the image.
I'll try to post an example of a scene with and without EIS lights tomorrow.
That's great info, good to know. Thanks again.
Ah I just did a classic newbie error I thought worth sharing in case helps anyone else.
So I left my test scene rendering overnight. Get up and go to see how she looks, I wiggle my mouse and click. Screen comes to life and I saw Render window restart, so it thought I'd done something worthwhile enough to start again. BAM! lost 10hrs worth of calculations.
Ooops.
Sorry to hear you lost 10 hours of cooking!! When I'm to the point of creating my final image, I always "lock" it so I don't accidentally make it start over with an errant mouse click (even on the 10-15 min renders).
Here are the examples of IES lights compared to standard mesh lights. The door in the background is lit at almost the same brightness in both images, but you can easily see the difference in the lighting. The image with the bright lights is the one with simple black-body emitters, the darker lights use an IES file for an industrial fluorescent light with a lens (dispersion lens).
If your interested, the full sized final render (which has great detail) can be seen here: http://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/45095/
Great image as always Dustrider. I have a silly question......how does one check how long a render takes on OR4C? Finally started toying with the demo version.
The first image was made with the native Carrara render engine with the normal light set up.
The second image was made with the native Carrara render engine with Gamma correction applied as per best practices taught by PhilW.
The third image was a first pass with OR4C, PMC kernel, sampling level set to 3,000, and no changes made to all the settings from the original file.
The fourth image is also an OR4C render, direct lighting kernel, sampling level set to about 3,000, hdri added, emitting meshes used to improve the lighting, looks interesting, the skin shader obviously needs to be adjusted for Octane, but this was just a quick try. Quite obviously my rig is not rendering it fast enough for my needs in Octane (both OR4C renders took over 30 minutes, though I just started at this, I'm sure I'll find faster ways to render in OR4C as I get to use it more). I quite like the second image with Gamma correction, but it also took way too long (this being an animated project, I tried several things to reduce the render time without luck) so I eventually opted for the default Carrara rendering set up, tweaked the shaders to get the best out of them under those circumstances and I got 20 seconds of animation rendered in about 15hours. The fifth image is a sample from that animation sequence. Will post the entire work on a different thread once I'm done with postwork in PdHowler. Of course I can't render an animation in OR4C until I actually purchase it, but till then, the experiments continue.
Thanks for viewing, and do forgive the dodgy renders! :coolsmirk:
Very nice, all of you... this is a fun thread to peruse! Very nice! Very cool!
Hi DADA, thanks for the compliment!
The time/samples it takes to render an image with Octane is variable. Basically you let it render until your satisfied with the quality/clarity of the image. Often 1000-1500 s/px will be enough, sometimes less, sometimes more. How many s/px you need depends on the materials and lighting used for the scene. Specular materials and materials using SSS will require more samples, as will low light scenes (Specular and SSS also require the use of either the Path Tracing or PMC kernels to get the proper effect). For animations, you set the number of samples you want each image to run (in the Render Target settings), so you could set it to say 800 s/px, and once that value is reached, it will start to render the next frame.
I let the image above run to 3000 s/px, but there was no visible difference that I could see after about 1,700 s/px (wasn't using the computer so I just let it go to 3,000). I would guess with proper lighting your renders could have been stopped at around 1000-1200 s/px without any major loss in quality (but I could be wrong).
One thing to keep in mind when using Octane (or any unbiased renderer) is that you probably will need to use a much simpler lighting set-up. If using an HDRI, often you can get by with just the HDRI (with a high quality HDRI), or the HDRI and one additional light. Each additional light will also typically slow down your render speed (Ms/sec). With biased render engines we often tend to add more lights to simulate GI, but with Octane, typically the simpler the light set up the better your results will be.
There is a bit of a learning curve to use Octane effectively (or any unbiased renderer), but once you get the hang of it, lighting and materials are much more "predictable" (at least for me they are). Even though your system is a bit under powered compared to what most people are using (96 cuda cores), your getting decent speeds. Just keep in mind that using Octane is like rendering in Carrara with full GI/ray-tracing and all the settings maxed out, but rendering animations on your current hardware might be a bit to slow.
On the image with the HDRI it looks like specular on the skin is a bit to low, and the lights a bit to bright. The materials in Octane are really quite simple once you start to understand what settings you need to adjust to get results like in Carrara.
Oh ... that last image from the animation render looks great!
Hi all, new to the Carrara forums here having just purchased it and the Octane plug-in recently.
I've used Octane Render for Lightwave for almost a year now and it's simply an awesome tool for archviz or animation. Being able to previz in real-time and render out complete projects for clients overnight is simply amazing. Well worth every penny spent...
I also have some experience with the DAZ 3D and 3DS Max versions of the plugins as well. The Max users are having a hard time of it, and so far their version of the plugin (along with MODO) isn't quite as far along as some of the others... The DAZ 3D plugin is very well done and I'm really enjoying it for DAZ animations, which is what led me to Carrara. The Blender version is also well done, which is a huge boon to their community.
However, I must say that I'm impressed with what has been done for Carrara with the Octane plugin, as it's quite unique. Every other version of the renderer uses Octane differently than Carrara. In Lightwave, for example, I've had to forgo all of my shaders and LW tricks of the trade when using it. But here, the author is trying to blend it into the existing interface and interpret the shaders so that they are usable in Octane. Bravo! I think that if he successfully pulls that off, Carrara will have the most powerful yet flexible implementation of the Octane plugin.
That means that I'll be modeling objects in Lightwave, texturing and animating my characters in DAZ (the Photoshop bridge is to die for) and migrating it all over to Carrara for easy scene setup, instancing and advanced shaders.
So congrats to the Carrara community on having someone do such a great job on the plugin. I can't wait to see it when it's finally done. =)
- Sylver
Rogeraususa - great to see that feedback, I haven't used other Octane versions but I have been very impressed with what has been done so far with the Carrara plugin, so great to see your thoughts on that. And welcome to the Carrara community too!
Great to hear the comparisons. Just food for thought though, Carrara has many more advanced animation features that Studio does not, with the exception of the dynamic clothes, though from what I understand, there are ways to bake the simulation.
Thanks for the warm welcome!
Yes, typically for alot of my LW work I create the animations in DAZ or Messiah Studio, bake them and send to LW. I'm hoping that the enhanced integration between DAZ and Carrara can benefit my pipeline and allow me to work the animations directly in Carrara. I'm still learning the software, but looking forward to seeing what it can do. =)
I typically do architectural visualizations for most of my projects, but I'm considering shifting towards creating some DAZ products. There don't seem to be as many props and buildings available and I think I can manage that pretty well. LW has some awesome tools for that, so creating them there and exporting them to Carrara should allow me to have a gateway to that platform pretty easily.
Thanks for the warm welcome!
Yes, typically for alot of my LW work I create the animations in DAZ or Messiah Studio, bake them and send to LW. I'm hoping that the enhanced integration between DAZ and Carrara can benefit my pipeline and allow me to work the animations directly in Carrara. I'm still learning the software, but looking forward to seeing what it can do. =)
I typically do architectural visualizations for most of my projects, but I'm considering shifting towards creating some DAZ products. There don't seem to be as many props and buildings available and I think I can manage that pretty well. LW has some awesome tools for that, so creating them there and exporting them to Carrara should allow me to have a gateway to that platform pretty easily.
DAZ and Carrara, it is the same thing!
There are DAZ Studio, DAZ Carrara, DAZ Hexagon, DAZ Bryce…
Still an example of the extreme orientation of the Home Page of DAZ !