Does Carrara 8.5 Pro have these features? Need advise before buying.

evilproducer

D-a-a-a-n-n-g-g!, my internet is slow today! Was there a solar flare?

Jonstark

teknostorm said:

Jonstark, the Highlight parameter in the master shader does not show any percentage. First I have to choose something (texture etc).. what do I choode?

Bump map was set to none in all textures, probably that's why everything looked plasticky. I've turned it to 5% and added the color texture map to it.. don't know where to find the bump texture map yet!

Also, turning off the depth of field and also the shadows of the 6 point gel lights reduced the rendering time per frame to 23 seconds. That's a huge relief!

The bump map for your texture will be in the same folder all your character texture maps are at. You can find it's location by going to the color channel, you'll see a small picture of the color texture to the right with a name below it. Hover your mouse over the name and after a second or two it will show the filepath to where that texture map is. This is the same folder that will contain your other texture maps, whether they are specular or bump or whatever. Then you can go to the bump channel, click on the little folder icon that's beside your colored map texture, and navigate to that folder and load the bumpmap instead.

In the highlight channel, it's as easy as clicking the dropdown then selecting 'value 0 - 100%', then you'll be able to adjust. Alternately you could select 'texture map' from the drop down and choose to put your specular map in that place, although you'll probably find it makes your highlights waaay to bright. You could get even fancier and choose 'Operators' choosing the 'Multiply' Operator, this would give you 2 different channels that will multiply by each other, then you could use the dropdowns to put your specular map in one channel and a 0 - 100% value in the second channel.

Having read Jon's skin settings, I will have to very respectfully disagree with using a reflection for the skin. Since this is an animation and the reflection level is so low, it is not worth the render time hit, and there will be a render time hit as Carrara still has to raytrace the reflections. The effect will be very subtle- perhaps to subtle to see with flashing lights, moving cameras and animated video displays.

If it were a still image, it could be very well worth the effect.

I do agree about the highlight and no reflections for the corneas. For the iris, skip the bump, especially for a video.

I completely agree with Evil on all points, especially for an animation. I actually try to use reflections as little as possible and there's no reason to use them in an animation anyway. I think I may have confused the issue by giving some settings that I would only use in a still frame render and only if I need really specific effects and am willing to wait for the render, because especially with blurry reflections you can seriously slowdown your renders.

As to your slow rendering, I'm betting it was something to do with your floor texture settings and less to do with the light shadows that was causing the slowdown, but that's just a guess :)

teknostorm

Oh I missed seeing these replies! I guess because they spilled over to a new page.

I bought the poser shader doctor plugin which solved some texture problems, and also poke away 2. I also got the reflections working.

The slowdown was definitely due to the light shadows, switching most shadows off speeds up my rendering by 3-4 times!

My presentation on Tuesday went fantastic! If I can get footage of the presentation I will post it here! Now I have a new deadline to finish the full video in 15 days, including some live shoot and a couple of family weddings to attend!

I'm now being bugged by the extreeeemely slow saving of the scenes in Carrara. I'm afraid to not save in case there's a crash (though that's rare), and everytime I save my workflow grinds to a halt..

TangoAlpha

Turn off file compression (you'll need to Save As in order to get the option), then it'll save much faster. Some people claim it also gets rid of the dreaded "An error occurred while saving", but I still get it from time to time.

teknostorm

Tim_A said:

Turn off file compression (you'll need to Save As in order to get the option), then it'll save much faster. Some people claim it also gets rid of the dreaded "An error occurred while saving", but I still get it from time to time.

Thay did the trick, it's saving much faster now! Do I have to choose 'Save As' each time, or once I save as without compression, the next time I save it automatically saves without compression? I have a habit of hitting ctrl S after major changes

TangoAlpha

No, once it's set, it's set. You'll need to Save As if you want to go back to Compressed though.

Edit: And it might be a per project setting, rather than global.

Jonstark

teknostorm said:

My presentation on Tuesday went fantastic! If I can get footage of the presentation I will post it here! Now I have a new deadline to finish the full video in 15 days, including some live shoot and a couple of family weddings to attend!

Sweet! Glad to hear you rocked it and it went well :)

evilproducer

teknostorm said:

Tim_A said:

Turn off file compression (you'll need to Save As in order to get the option), then it'll save much faster. Some people claim it also gets rid of the dreaded "An error occurred while saving", but I still get it from time to time.

Thay did the trick, it's saving much faster now! Do I have to choose 'Save As' each time, or once I save as without compression, the next time I save it automatically saves without compression? I have a habit of hitting ctrl S after major changes

If you have the Options checkbox enabled the first time you save your scene, the Save options will be displayed. For my version of Carrara (C7.2 Pro), it defaults to compressed, which I always disable, but that's a personal preference.

Once it is saved a certain way, such as with compression off, it will save that way each time the Save command is used. As Tim suggests, the only way to change it, is to use the Save As option. If disk space is at a premium, perhaps you could work on your scene uncompressed, and when you are finished with it, and ready to render it, archive it, or whatever you want to do, you could use the Save As option and enable compression?

teknostorm

Thanks Jonstark!

Thanks for the tip Tim_A!

Evil Producer, disk space is not a problem for now, so I can save uncompressed. I'll archive them later.

For now I'm facing this frustrating problem, if anyone can help me solve it (or recover the car file) -

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/52936/