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Nice comparison, Dustrider. I think you are also showing that with the right settings, Carrara's renderer can produce pretty similar results to Octane sometimes!
Here is my latest render, a simple portrait but I think it came out nice. I believe that my V4 HiRes shaders for Octane were distributed as part of the OR4C download and this uses them but just swaps out the textures - the character is Mimi by Vyktohria.
Nice image. A question begging to be asked, how much time did it take to render and what were key elements of your settiings?
Super render
Nice image. A question begging to be asked, how much time did it take to render and what were key elements of your settiings?
Lighting was an HDRI plus two mesh lights (simple planes). The material settings are as the V4 HiRes materials which are included with the OR4C distribution so you can re-use and examine these as you want. They mainly use a Mix material between Glossy for the upper skin layers and Diffuse with Scattering to model the deeper skin layers. It was rendered using the Path Tracing kernel.
Time to render is a little harder to answer! I was initially putting this together fairly late, so once I was sure it was giving the results I wanted at a smaller scale (600x600), I upped the resolution to 2000x2000 and went to bed! So it rendered through to 3000 samples per pixel (the default setting) and I am not sure how long it took, though it was probably a few hours. On seeing the results, there were a couple of things I wasn't 100% happy with, and so rendered again with changed materials, but that render was only around 30 mins I think. I then combined the two images using layer masks in Photoshop.
As you will know, Octane quickly renders a version of your image which looks noisy or grainy and then progressively the noise/grain will clear. How long this takes depends on the materials, the lighting etc. and how much grain you are prepared to accept for your purposes. I think this image would be virtually clear of any noise at between 30-60 mins. The reduction in noise is an exponential function - if you render for twice as long, you effectively halve the amount of noise - in effect it never actually clears completely, just gets so low as not to be noticeable. This can happen in seconds for simple scenes and materials, or it can take hours for "difficult" lighting and materials. If it is taking too long, it would probably be worth adjusting your scene to render faster.
I have been thinking of plopping down the $500 for this render engine and really would like to know if its worth it. I have seen many renders here but not sure that I can duplicate this with Carrara. My question to you all who own it -- is this really worth the investment.
Thanks all.
Only you can really answer if it is worth it for you. Carrara can get quite close with the right settings in many cases, and I can still see myself using both renderers for the foreseeable future. What I have found with Octane is that it is easier and faster to get excellent results, the render times are often an order of magnitude faster than the Carrara equivalent (very important if you are an animator), and the ability to fine tune lighting and materials with a live preview makes me more productive. I certainly don't regret having it.
Thanks for the info, I am planning on getting it in the next couple of weeks. How about stability and overall buggyness of the plugin are you happy with that?
IMHO yes, it's definitely worth it, for me. Can you get equivalant, or nearly equivalant results in Carrara without Octane? Yes, you can, but the renders will typically take longer (in some cases much much longer). Where the Octane pluck really shines is the near realtime feedback (final render quality feedback) you get when working on scenes - especially when working on shaders and lighting, something you just don't get with Carrara.
Whit the Octane plugin it takes me a fraction of the time to set up a scene compared to using the internal renderer. I tend to tweak shaders and test render A LOT. With the Octane Render View Port open I get almost instantanious feedback on any changes I make. So, not only do my final renders take less time to complete, but the setup process takes a fraction of the time it takes using Carrar's internal render engine. As a result, I think the quality of my renders has improved a lot since I started using Octane (I should probably qualify this statement by adding the technical quality has improved for sure, the artistic quality is probably debateable).
I have had zero buyer's remorse with my Octane purchases (I also have the DS plugin), and I really enjoy using the Carrara plugin. If you tend to use a lot of dynamic hair, you might not find it as fantastic as I do because Carrara's dynamic hair is not supported (there isn't any dynamic hair support in the Carrara SDK to use with the plugin).
The demo should be out soon, and you should definitely give it a test run. That's what I did about a year ago with the Poser Plugin demo and I was immediately hooked.
Thanks Dustrider for the fast reply.
Thanks for the info, I am planning on getting it in the next couple of weeks. How about stability and overall buggyness of the plugin are you happy with that?
The stability is excellent, and is quite bug free. The public beta feels more like full release software than beta software. Sighman, the developer, has been very quick to respond to any issues that have come up.
Yes, it is pretty bug-free and I know that Sighman is continuing to work on it to add new features, such as support for duplicates as instances (which will make scenes more efficient and aid compatibility with existing complex scenes) and object motion blur (it already has camera motion blur).
Very cool. Cant wait till the demo comes out.
This render was done while setting up and testing the V5 - Bree shaders (same shader formula as the shaders included with the Octane plugin for Genesis2). This is a V5 character, lit with an HDRI and one mesh rim light. If your interested in the shaders, let me know and I'll post them to the Carrara forum over at Otoy.
As usual, you really need to click on the image to zoom to full resolution the really see the quality of the render.
This is an example of combining an Octane rendered character with Carrara rendered hair (using the Multi-Pass render system). I have had the character a while, it is a free one:
http://www.sharecg.com/v/31000/gallery/11/Poser/Naeima-V4
Inspiring render there PhilW and thanks for sharing Naeima. She loads well into C8.5, and with gamma 2.2, ambient at 0 and an HDRI environment set to the background at 163% intensity, she looks good if we pretend that the butterfly lashes were an artistic inclusion and not a glitch we didn't bother to fix! While waiting and hoping for the OR4C demo version to be available to tinker with, we shall take some time out to paint her nails....they are begging for some paint...not so?
Naeima doesn't come with bump maps but I just copied the color maps to the bump channel and that seemed to work pretty well in this case.
Hi Phil,
Is it possible to do Texture tiling with the current Beta.
I tried to get the Octane grass shader to tile, but it would not...admittedly I was attempting it on V4, don't ask.!!!.
Cheers,
S.K.
Thanks, I put in the bump maps, tweaked the alpha channel in the lashes to get rid off the butter flies and used a multiplier operation on the colour channel of the fingernails to paint them. Realised I left the default scene light in there (had intended to render with only the primitive I created with a glow channel together with the HDRI), I removed it and preferred the realism of the render, but I was now missing the highlights on the skin and just bumping up shininess and highlight was not fixing it, so I replaced the distant light and after many trials, got a passable result by setting its brightness to 5%. Not very happy with the render (it feels grainy, I used DOF but I don't think that's what it is, can't figure it out though) but for a quick and spontaneous encounter with Naeima, I'm happy with the baby steps.
P.S. this quick excercise gave me ideas for the September Carrara Challenge, so I'm going to move relocate my experimentations to the WIP thread for that contest.
P.S. The first image is the one without the distant light in the scene, I wanted the some shininess on the skin so when I replace the distant light at 5% brightness, I got the result in the second image which I preferred.
Yes, tiling works the same as Carrara (except I don't think that the seamless option works). I have included a screen image which I hope helps.
Thanks, I put in the bump maps, tweaked the alpha channel in the lashes to get rid off the butter flies and used a multiplier operation on the colour channel of the fingernails to paint them. Realised I left the default scene light in there (had intended to render with only the primitive I created with a glow channel together with the HDRI), I removed it and preferred the realism of the render, but I was now missing the highlights on the skin and just bumping up shininess and highlight was not fixing it, so I replaced the distant light and after many trials, got a passable result by setting its brightness to 5%. Not very happy with the render (it feels grainy, I used DOF but I don't think that's what it is, can't figure it out though) but for a quick and spontaneous encounter with Naeima, I'm happy with the baby steps.
P.S. this quick excercise gave me ideas for the September Carrara Challenge, so I'm going to move relocate my experimentations to the WIP thread for that contest.
P.S. The first image is the one without the distant light in the scene, I wanted the some shininess on the skin so when I replace the distant light at 5% brightness, I got the result in the second image which I preferred.
Good progress! Shininess and highlight only work with scene lights, and not HDRIs or glowing meshes, which are not recognised as "lights" by Carrara. To get highlights with those, you need to set some reflection - but the downside of doing this with skin is that ideally it should be blurry reflections, which will take an age to render. This is an area where Octane definitely scores, as there is just one set of controls which control highlights and reflections, and you don't get sky high render times with soft reflections.
Yes, tiling works the same as Carrara (except I don't think that the seamless option works). I have included a screen image which I hope helps.
Hummm,
Thanks Phil,
I will have another play around tomorrow...my new 780 GXT 6gb should have arrived by then.. teeheee..
Cheers,
S.K.
Great news about the plugin being released! For any fence-sitters, I also got the stand-alone and DS plugin as betas and have been very happy that I did. As long as your hardware is up to speed, it's a lot of fun to use.
I'm still catching up on the posts in this thread so this may have already been answered, but does anyone know if we can use Carrara to populate an Octane scatter node?
Good progress! Shininess and highlight only work with scene lights, and not HDRIs or glowing meshes, which are not recognised as "lights" by Carrara. To get highlights with those, you need to set some reflection - but the downside of doing this with skin is that ideally it should be blurry reflections, which will take an age to render. This is an area where Octane definitely scores, as there is just one set of controls which control highlights and reflections, and you don't get sky high render times with soft reflections.
Thanks!
If you set up a replicator or surface replicator in the normal way in Carrara, it then automatically translates this into a scatter node in Octane.
If you set up a replicator or surface replicator in the normal way in Carrara, it then automatically translates this into a scatter node in Octane.
Wow, that's actually pretty great. Really much more than I was hoping for. I just got the plugin and am reading through the docs - looks like Carrara trees are a bit tricky to replicate. Have you had better luck with xfrog or other imported trees?
Carrara handles trees very efficiently, in that there is replication going on within each tree, and then the trees can be replicated themselves, so there are (at least) two levels of replication going on. Octane can only handle one level (at the moment - this may change in the future). Octane Render for Carrara offers a couple of options of how this is handled - basically you should choose the flattened option when replicating lots of trees, and unflattened if you have a single complex tree as a featured object - see the documentation here:
http://render.otoy.com/manuals/Carrara/?page_id=494
You may be best off keeping the complexity of background trees to a minimum, for example restrict the generation count to no more than 3. What you are doing when flattening the tree is making a larger object of a single tree, but limiting the amount of replication to just a single level. This is similar to how an imported tree would be handled, for example an Xfrog model. So it is not a reason not to use Carrara trees, but be aware that having too many types and high complexity is likely to be too much!
This is an image I did when trying out replication.
Fantastic! Thanks for the detailed explanation Phil, can't wait to get home and try it out for myself :-)
in response to Masterstroke
Well said. I find the tendency to tweak and prod something as complex as Octane's renderer until I get it doing stuff no one's done yet, but gee, it sure does some beautiful AO renders with the default settings. Really speedy on my GTX 680.
I stuck with Carrara mainly because of it's solid fast renderer and it's intuitive texturing, and to see Octane being integrated so tightly is pretty cool.
well I bought Octane for Daz studio today
I like Carrara render engine already so was not such a priority will seriously consider at some time though
3Delight on the other-hand totally pissed me off!
I find 3Delight (which is not a delight at all) intolerably slow. That's why I don't use it. I would be curious to know how much faster a GPU based engine like Octane really is.