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Could be the OpenGL implementation perhaps. I don't have either of those versions, so I can only make suggestions that work for me, or that I have read that work for others. I just don't have the ability to test. Hopefully you'll get it to work.
Please don't judge Octane on the basis of Howie's scenes. They are specifically made for Carrara and tuned to use a lot of Carrara's specific features, and even then they drive things pretty hard as you will know. It is not surprising that all of these features are not supported in Octane (at least for now, who knows what the future holds...). If you play to its strengths, you will be most impressed with what you can do with Octane and how easy it is to work with.
Your earlier post got me thinking, and here is an Octane render with an adjusted version of Howie's Maple Meadows with a number of the tree types removed and some adjustment of shaders. It's not perfect yet but it shows that some results are possible.
It looks very nice. Maybe my card is just to weak. To load Howie's scenes in octane was, what I was looking for most with that octane plugin or else I could easily stayed with Poser and DS plugins.
I am running a card with 2GB GPU RAM, so it is not huge, and actually with my adjustments, this took less than 1GB.
Incidentally I had not noticed before the interface responsiveness difference between 8.1 and 8.5 but I can confirm that it is indeed the case, 8.1 seems a lot more responsive with Maple Meadows loaded than it did in 8.5. How strange, I have checked preferences and they are all the same.
Sorry, don't mean to offend but.. why should you get a refund?
Don't see why you should for a working product such as this plugin! If anything you should upgrade your system/graphics card(s) and maybe seek a refund from the people (Daz) who have not fixed some of the 8.5 bugs (such as the infamous 'an error has occurred' one) or stick with 8.1 if that works for you! Rather than getting a refund from a dev who is working hard to make an already very stable and feature rich product even more amazing! Try using it 'as is' for a while and you wont regret it I am sure! You cant expect to throw high demanding scenes at a BETA product and expect it to carry such a heavy load right from the early days! Buying in to a beta means you understand that things may not work as you personally may expect them to right away, if you have followed the dev`s forum posts, read the documentation and know what is and is not currently supported before making your purchase, how is this the devs fault?
Besides, Howie does a fantastic job of setting up fake GI, but a user could easily set the scene up to use the sunlight, the already present realistic sky and atmosphere, and enable Skylight in the Render room. There's so much detail in the scene, you probably wouldn't notice if full GI such as Indirect Light wasn't used.
Let's see how it goes on. There will be updates. ;)
Good choice MasterStroke ;)
You may have your doubts for a little while as you get to grips with this new plugin BUT I am confident you will have made the right choice in sticking by your purchase..
Its only my humble opinion but its a confident one :)
Since I only do animations, the decision to purchase Octane is not as obvious. Unless of course I'm willing to make a significant investment to keep the render times down (either add another high-end video card to my main workstation or upgrade it to support more than two video cards or supply each of my existing render nodes with supported video adapters and purchase the required Octane license for each node to create an Octane render farm (could be pretty cool, but expensive)).
I need to check out what SciFunk is doing now (I assume he will purchase the Carrara plug-in).
He will probably respond himself, but I believe he has been getting some very fast render times on test animations - he quoted a two second animation (48 frames) taking only a minute or so - probably with less than final render quality but enough to give a reasonable test, and way better speed and quality than you would be able to do in Carrara itself. Although I don't do a huge amount of animations, I have found it quick and simple to render animations with Octane and the quality is superb. You can preset your quality threshold (ie. how many samples per pixel each frame will render to before moving on). If you have seen the dancing girl in the OR4C promo video, that was one of mine. From memory that was rendering at around 1 min per frame.
I should mention that I have a single 2GB GPU running on a laptop, so hardly state of the art! Octane renders fast!
Yeah he's got it, I've been keenly interested in his posts over on the Octane forum, he mentions that his render time for 1 frame is around 1 second per frame - wow! And you know his scenes are usually pretty filled up with stuff and complex, so very impressive.
I think Octane might go very well with animation rendering, actually, those fast render times come in handy with long renders :)
hello!! I don't understand how to use lights, like spot light, with soft shadows, in octane... is it necessary to create specific octane's light? how???
Hi Celmar,
Sorry for my crude examples but..
Here are two or three methods, there are more ways but these are the most commonly used methods:
1st image:
Left= Blackbody,
Right=Texture emission,
2nd image:
added a red color light & some bloom..
See pics..
Celmar - just to add to Orion's examples, Carrara's normal lights (distant, spot, bulb) do not come across to Octane, so you need to implement your own using meshes with either glow set high in the Carrara shader (I'm talking typically 1000% or more), or using the emission channel in the Octane side of the shaders. You can then adjust the value and color of the light interactively while the render window is open. Simple planes and spheres work well as meshes for this, if using a plane, be aware that the light only emits from one side (in the direction of the surface normal, but you can't usually see this in Carrara).
If you really want a spot light, build yourself a simple cylinder in the vertex modeller with one end removed, and put the emitter down at the closed end. You can then control the spread of the spotlight by making the tube longer or shorter, kind of like adjusting the shrouding on a real spotlight. It is worth saving a little library of mesh lights to re-use in other projects or to act as convenient starting points, although once you get used to this way of working, it only takes a few moments to make a simple one.
Allright, I now made it to render Howie's Country Lane. Secret Lake doesn't load at all in Octane4CR. Anybody made it?
Great render Phil! Any chance there's an 'Octane for Carrara' tutorial coming up? ;)
Peter.
Great render Phil! Any chance there's an 'Octane for Carrara' tutorial coming up? ;)
Peter.
Well I have thought of doing it...
I purchased Octane. Real time viewport preview is one of the features I like in Lightwave (been spending a little time learning it), but now Carrara can have it though Octane. I loaded up one of my outdoor scenes in Carrara, activated Octane and saw it with all of the applied textures without having to make any changes. This was not true in my Lightwave tests, as none of my shaders were supported; had to use the Octane nodes. In Carrara, it just worked and its easy to make changes to the Octane configuration as well as using the Octane materials. And playing with lighting scenes with light emitting from objects is fun (similar to what you do with cycles in Blender).
I am pleased with what Octane brings to Carrara from an animators perspective. Most high end packages provide a way for the animator to preview the animation at full speed through a 'playbast' or 'preview' or 'view port' render, which usually renders fast at one second or less per frame. Through Octane, this is now possible in Carrara.
Three of my primary reasons for looking more at other 3D packages
- Love Carrara ERC (provides features that are available in high end packages), but with certain things I could not get consistent results across render nodes (with local rendering everything works great)
- no real-time preview render
- limited rigging - lacks the ability to save weights; any changes to bone hierarchy (i.e. adding hold bones) requires rebuilding weights, etc.
To make a long story short, with Octane I can remove two of the above issues (realtime preview is provided and I don't need to use render nodes; ERC issue is eliminated). Have been playing with Project Messiah, which is a good tool for eliminating the rigging limitations/concerns. ;-)
I am seeing very good results with my GTX 580 Classified video card, but I look forward to the performance boost gained from adding a GTX 780 (or higher) card.
I have a GTX760 (viewing) coupled with a GTX780 6Gb just for rendering.
Works great, but gets quite hot inside my case though, I wouldn't render with it for hours without additional cooling.
Peter.
Just loaded a scene that has a character with Carrara hair, but the hair is not seen in the Octane viewport. The documentation doesn't contain anything about hair. I read the following: "Octane 2.0 supports hair rendering. An optimized hair render primitive is now available to allow rendering of hair or fur while reducing memory usage by 20 times compared to previous processes."
So, how do I use the optimized Octane hair primitive? Can I use Carrara hair?
I saw hair on figures in the promo.
You can't currently use Carrara hair in Octane, there is currently no conversion from Carrara hair to anything else as far as I know. You can of course use normal transmapped hair and that renders well, better than other renderers that I have seen. Or you can render two images, one in Octane without hair and one in Carrara with hair and composite the two (you probably don't want to be doing that for animations though).
Using Carrara, is it possible to create poly-hair/ transmapped hair using a process similar to this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_NxUgseQBQ (painting on poly meshes as supported in Maya and 3DMax) ?
That's very good news.
There isn't anything that is quite like the painting process that is shown in the video. You could try using a surface replicator which in some respects could give a similar result, but I think with less control than the artist here was achieving. I am thinking that you would get more control by zoning the hair and applying different settings per zone, the more zones you had, the more control you would get, but the more work would be involved.
I am watching this thread with interest but not prepared to spend that kind of money on a beta.
Poser demo enabled Poser dynamic hair import but no updating, I found it painfully slow updating dynamic cloth too which kinda scotched my desire to buy the Poser version
Doing animation I have expectations beyond its ability it seems
But the Carrara shader room compatibility interests me hugely, I often render 360 spherical backgrounds for animation so can see a use for it for that
Just want to wait until it is a stable build first before considering.
Hi Wendy - it is pretty stable now to be honest.
I can understand your hesitation, but in the for what it's worth department, it's quite stable for a beta (actually it's very stable compared to a lot of full release software). One thing to keep in mind is that the price of the plugin will probably double when version 1 is released (that has been the case with all the other plugins), so buying it while in public beta save a bit.
The demo version should be out in the next week or so, which will let you try before you buy.
CyBoRgTy, I'm really glad to hear it's working out well - I thought it probably would!
I'm very excited by this plugin, probably will be picking it up when my next paycheck hits.
With my luck the week after I purchase it there will be an announcement on the Thea forums of a carrara plugin on the horizon, and I'll end up doing a V8 smack to my own forehead coupled with a Homer Simpson 'doh!' :)
But really that plugin for Octane looks very stable, very useful, very useable and just too too enticing and good to resist :) And I don't want to wait for 'maybe/someday' when there's a really good Octane plugin right here, right now
I Have found the Beta very stable.
Indeed I have just invested in a 780 GTX 6gb and plan to get a 2nd one next month...Thats how much confidence I have in Sighman's work.
cheers,
S,.K.
For those who like comparisons, here are some quick renders I did with Carrara and Octane. Of course, comparing Carrara's internal renderer and Octane is like comparing apples to oranges, but I thought it might help give you a bit of info on what sort of speeds could be expected with Octane on a modest GPU. For this test I used my laptop with a 2.2 GHz quadcore i7, 24GB RAM and a Geforce GTX 670M (Fermi based - 336 Cuda cores at 598Mhz - 3Gb VRAM)
First - These are "Out of the Box" renders, meaning I didn't do any shader work to improve the render for either Octane or Carrara (except I did change the texture maps for the hair from Fast Mip Map to Sampling, and I think I may have editied the Eyesurface ant Tear mats for Octane, but it was a while ago and I'm not sure). This would be a prime example of the classic load, pose, render exercise. You could get better images out of both Carrara and Octane by tweaking the mats/shaders, but this can be used as a good general benchmark for relative speed between the two.
The same HDRI was user to light both images - no other lights were used. All renders were done at 1000x1000 pixels DOF was not used in the Carrara image - cause I was .... um .... lazy :roll:
The Carrara render used full ray tracing, both indirect light and skylight were activated, and of course light through transparency was checked. The other settings I changed are as follows:
Anti Aliasing - Good
Object Accuracy - 1 pixel
Shadow Accuracy - 2 pixels
Lighting Quality - Good
Accuracy - 4 pixels
All other render setting were left at the default values. (Note: to actually approximate the image quality/detail of Octane, all of the settings I gave should have been set to the max value, but some would say that the quality gains are marginal so I didn't use max seting which would have significantly increased render times in Carrara)
In Octane only the default settings were used. I set the render to stop at 750 samples per pixel. Setting this value higher would have increased image quality slightly, but not a lot since there are no complex materials used in the scene. The Direct Lighting kernel in Octane uses a bit of ambient occlusion to speed up rendering, and is considered a biased renderer. The Path Tracing kernel is fully unbiased.
The render times are on the images, but here is a text listing too:
Carrara - 22 min.
Octane, Direct Lighting - 5 min.
Octane, Path Tracing - 11 min.