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OK a dumb wendy question
displacement, says 0 in render window text at the bottom but displace in 3D view seems to have an effect on the render, it updates the geometry so is it or is it me just wishfully thinking it has.
I have seen this as well. The only displacement I've been able to make work is that which is included with shaders downloaded from the Live database. I've not been able to get it to read Carrara applied displacement settings, but admittedly I haven't looked too closely at it yet.
I once used a soil material with displacement from the database and it worked, and the OR4C showed 0 for displacement just as it does for you. Good catch, I wish I had reported it myself sooner but I was fearful I was just missing something basic.
There is still a lot about displacement in Carrara that I don't understand so if an experienced user like yourself can test it and report that would be awesome.
Nice work. These are quit well done, I find that native Carrara plants look a little fakey most of the time, but these are believable and realistic. Did you put this together manually would love a copy of these files to mess with and test. Again well done.
A grand thanks to you as well for your feedback. I used Carrara for the banana plants, in fact I'd say most of the ground level plants were made with Carrara. However the ferns at ground level including the fan palms and the tall varieties of palm trees were all done in ngPlant, ngPlant makes infinitely better palm style plants than Carrara. I also find that the uv mapping on Carrara plants can be really wrong when there is a lot of curvature assigned to the stems and branches.
I think the Carrara plant generator is fantastic, but it lacks a few things. ngPlant is not so different than Carrara in many ways, but it excels ahead of Carrara because most parameters can be edited as curves instead of merely by means of a slider. Using curves to determine the way a trunk bends instead of simply moving a slider that only has one underlying curvature option makes a big difference. There are things each application could learn from the other.
I am going to tweak the saturation levels a bit, the whole thing feels a tad grayscale. Send me a PM with your email and I will send you some Carrara files as well as some ngPlant files. You would probably find you really like ngPlant. Talk to you soon.
Yes your renders look awesome indeed, made me think of Vue ones seen in their newsletters.
I have NGplant but never been able to make head or tail of it much less a leaf and trunk!
well having finished my render confirms it works regardless of whether displace in 3D view is checked or not
just says no displacement but it fibs out of modesty
I have found that if you apply displacement as part of a Carrara shader, I believe that it passes the displaced mesh to Octane, so Octane isn't aware that any displacement is taking place as the displacement takes place in Carrara and the modified mesh is what goes across. For displacement in Octane, it would have to be part of the Octane-specific material.
I re-rendered the forest scene with my replicated ferns shaded and the missing albeit not detected displacement https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9O1O5lfLN4 by loading a duf scene.
I am finding in DAZ studio too as well as Carrara lowering the sampling rate keeps the lighting "realness" just gives more of a grainy Handycam vibe than a professional film crew look which suits my animation style actually.
I am aiming more for footage captured by ordinary people than a film studio, my characters more the redneck Bogan yobbo type.
meadow but not Howie's or for that matter even carrara trees
Wendy - a beautiful video, very relaxing (especially for you!).
I thought I'd share a recent Octane render, still tweaking my human shaders!
It does get scary how much realism is now possible with CG. Great render PhilW, and yes, Wendy did pull a fast one on her fans with that one!
Carrara trees seem to be my bugbear with OR4C
no matter how simple I make them they chew up resources and one or two the most I can use although I can replicate them thousands of times
exporting obj files to decimate in DAZ studio or UUW3D proved impossible too
carrara decimate makes a mess of the vertex mesh if it can even do it,
they are just so damned high poly
if I use Predetron's or Merlin's trees I can make vast varied forests!
like the NOT Maple Meadows modified HF scene which renders with 6 samples in seconds
My findings are similar.
I do not know if this will be good news or bad for Sighman but it turns out that the workflow for OR4C scenes will be very different than the workflow for users who plan to render in the native Carrara engine. Generally, I can do a lot more with OR4C than I can do with the Carrara native engine. Here's what I've experienced.
1. I downloaded Evil Producer's Fantasy Village to see how it would look in Octane. I'm convinced the look would be very compelling for EvilProducer to observe. He has been asking if someone would render it for him. I tried. It turned out to be a very bad experience for the following reasons:
A. Because Octane doesn't support multiple generations of instances (yet), each tree source had to be manually flagged and "Optimized as an Octane Mesh" It turns out that the same thing had to be done for each of the cattails models, of which there are dozens. Ram usage on the file is around 2gb if I remember correctly, but when the OR4C tried to load it the memory jumped to over 18gb (at which point I just stopped the whole thing because I knew something was wrong). I only have 18gb of ram installed so the scene became impractical to even keep open after that point. I have a 6gb Vram card but it is hard to know if the scene ever loaded onto the video card at all, it might have all stayed in system memory.
B. On top of all of that, the scene never started rendering in OR4C.
C. This scene, while constructed quite well for native Carrara rendering purposes demonstrates several areas where thinking has to be revised when Octane is the target rendering application. Generally speaking it seems Octane keeps it much much simpler than Carrara, from light handling to materials handling to geometry handling. With Octane its all much less fiddly and hit or miss. Very few tricks are needed if any with Octane, whereas with Carrara or Bryce or DS, lots of clever cheats are needed. The skill with Octane comes in finding means to get out of the software's way, as opposed to building up the software to do things it cannot really do well.
D. I should also state that I had to delete all of the lights included with the scene, as they would serve no purpose if rendered in Octane with Pathtracing or PMC.
E. I might try my hand at this scene again, but I might replace the Carrara trees with exported versions. It's more work than I would usually invest but I really want to share these results with Evil if its possible.
Lesson: Never use native Carrara trees for larger Octane targeted projects, they must be exported and reimported as obj's, and even then you need to keep it down to a single material zone. Use UV mapper or whatever software and carefully apply UV maps for the trunks and leaves where everything can fit onto a single page without overlaps. Reimport the model into Carrara as a single group/material and you will be good to go as far as OR4C is concerned. The complexity possible with this approach is nearly limitless, easily beyond Howie Farkes level complexity.
On the flip side, the Fantasy Village will render in Carrara native, but my uber complex Volcanic Archipelago project will not. There could easily be several million duplicated objects within the scene which Octane handles easily. OR4C takes only minutes to build the scene geometry. Carrara native however, takes something like 12 hours just to calculate the geometry from the surface replicators, this doesn't even count the time needed for rendering all that complexity with the shading and highlights.
Rendering in Carrara native just became a big no-no!
As a potential vendor my idea was to market the scenes as being suitable for rendering in Carrara native with the added benefit of having Octane Materials for rendering in Octane if one so desired. But to reach the level of complexity I'm after it means leaving the territory Carrara native is used to working within, and pressing on into realms where Carrara native might not be designed to go. It saddens me to consider a product sold as a Carrara product that cannot actually be rendered in Carrara without the help of outside applications of Octane and OR4C. I'm really disappointed right about now. I'm in the rethinking mode.
I have so much to learn about Carrara.
I will say that I don't necessarily like the way the Instances Tab affects memory usage. Imagine that I have a tree as a master object that takes 20mb of ram. I then have an "instance" of that tree listed on the Instances Tab. Fine. but if I decide to duplicate the instanced tree it will add an additional 20mb to my scene memory usage even though I haven't added any new master objects. It's exactly the same usage as if I had simply loaded a second master object. No memory is saved by this current scheme of master vs instance. Truth be told from a memory standpoint masters and instances are equal.
It's also a shame that the Surface Replicators have a limit of 100,000 objects per replicator. This means that if you want to cover a large area with grass models you will need multiple surface replicators, each supporting the maximum 100,000 objects and each harboring their own ram consuming instance of the original grass mesh. No good.
I wish Surface Replicators could be raised from a 100,000 to 1,000,000 limit.
I wish Carrara didn't treat each instance as if it were a unique item.
Wowowow!!!
Amazing work, Phil!!
Rashad, Thanks for sharing your analysis (and your kind comment!). As I understand it, Carrara handles duplicated objects as true instances and so should not need much extra memory usage for each duplicate. However OR4C only uses instancing for Replicated objects, but not for Duplicated, which are handled as separate objects requiring extra memory usage. You seemed to be saying that Carrara also needed the extra memory, which I do not believe to be the case.
Thanks Rashad. I think the issue with the cattails is twofold. They use procedural shaders and not image maps, and they also use dynamic hair on the seed pods.
The wooden fence comes to mind as well, as that also uses procedural shaders. If it matters, they are also spline objects as opposed to vertex objects.
Then there's the ocean primitives used for the ponds... and the procedural shaders used on the dam....
Yeah. I could see some big issues with that scene in a standalone renderer now that understand the un-biased render issues a bit better.
and before you ask Kevin, utterly no way The Dells could be rendered in Octane. :lol:
Maybe if I baked all the procedural shaders to image maps. ;-)
Maybe if I baked all the procedural shaders to image maps. ;-)Thank goodness for our super-awesome built-in render engine... right? ;)
Sadly once again its those carrara trees
I am only having success rendering forests repopulating my scenes with other mesh trees be it from Merlin and Faverals sets or Xfrog freeebies
and I can use 20 varieties easily but carrara trees only a couple
tried decimating them in Ultimate Unwrap3D it is lucky to load any without running out of memory DAZ studio decimator took forever too and not much polycount reduction.
You are probably fully correct in this observation. It is impossible to separate which application feels the ram increase since OR4C runs an Octane instance from within the Carrara page filing, which is why the carrara page filing seems to double or triple once Or4C is initiated. All I know is that the total ram usage increases with each new duplication. It's good to know that the instancing ideal works most of the time.
http://youtu.be/XJD9uL77SZs a quickie, rendering more slow panning longer video at only 3 samples, video here used 4 slides 10, ok not good quality but does give that homemovie feel
Octane sounds pretty awesome! I am sure that I will give it a try but right now I am out of money for this month.
So to use the Carrara plugin I have to buy the plugin and the standalone software?
If I want to run it on my PC and notebook, do I have to buy 2 licenses?
Unfortunately the answer again is yes. You will need a separate license(s) for each computer. You could "move" the licenses from one computer to the other, but it can take up to a couple of hours for the license server at Otoy to complete the process of un-registering the original computer and being ready to register/license the new computer.
Octane 4 Carrara really does not like Smay's suit
Wendy - that looks like it may be an issue with the normals. In the vertex modeller, there is a command to align the direction of the normals, you may want to try that and see if that works?
OK dumb Wendy Octane render 4 Carrara question of the day
In DAZ studio I can set up textures as emitters, how do I do this in Carrara?
I have done it by using a live database emitter texture and swapping out the maps but are there lighting profiles like incandescent or fluorescent etc lights like you get in the node editor in DAZ or the standalone?
I changed the emission to blackbody but the opacity map does not seem to work
Wendy,
Have you found any luck with your questions? It's been a while so hopefully you've found the answer by now. it'd be nice if you dropped in and filled us in.
In the meantime, here are a billion more test renders from my Volcanic Archipelago project. All renders are 1920x1080 and serve well as wallpapers. Thanks for your time. Feedback is greatly appreciated.
Even more renders for you.
And even more if you have the stomach.
One more round to go.