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Ah, yes. How eerily similar the discussions of today are. It's a complete deja vu line for line, Hilarious!!!
Too true!
As far as copying photos, yes, there is something to be learned.
But I think we need to remember that observation with the naked eye(s) is much better than looking at a photograph.
Unless of course we are just trying to emulate a photograph, and not the 'reality we perceive by 'unfiltered' observation.
Of course 'reality' and 'unfiltered' are relative terms.
OT..these guys are going to achieve the best photo realism ever in real time; for those who missed it, chech out their clips :-)
http://www.siliconstudio.co.jp/middleware/mizuchi/en/
So why not encourage people to learn it?
Why are all the responses here always, "yeah, it's good, but...." ?
You may actually have fun learning something new. Even if it's suggested by someone you really dislike. :) :) :) You won't get cooties, I promise. Take the good parts, discard the rest. You aren't locked in to doing it once you learn it... :) :)
Anyway, let's not hijack Rashad's thread anymore. My breath is still abated and I'm starting to turn purple. :) :)
too often we forget that we actually deal with photos in 3d world: almost all materials we recognize as realistic are being made by layered photos; what we actually do is find out how they must be lit or, better, shaded just like in the real world.
Hi,
I've run the .car file and at the 1400 by 637 and not changes I get a render time of 2 mins and 32 seconds,
I'm using a 3gb ATI and would I get significantly reduced times if I were to go the octane and nvidia/cuda route.
Big expense as Id need to get a bigger PSU/Card and the Octane licence.
Thanks for any help.
Pete
So why not encourage people to learn it?
Why are all the responses here always, "yeah, it's good, but...." ?
You may actually have fun learning something new. Even if it's suggested by someone you really dislike. :) :) :) You won't get cooties, I promise. Take the good parts, discard the rest. You aren't locked in to doing it once you learn it... :) :)
Anyway, let's not hijack Rashad's thread anymore. My breath is still abated and I'm starting to turn purple. :) :)
I've always seen your point Joe, the truth though is that no matter how many times you root for photo references, people won't necessarily start gushing about it on the forum just because you're a strong advocate for it. That also doesn't mean that people don't work with photo references, I say that from remembering quite a number of instances where people did just that in their WIP posts, and even on the render threads. If it's something that you're really keen on though, you could start a thread just like Rashad has started here and lead the way by replicating your photo of choice in Carrara and encourage people to discuss your process with you. You may be surprised where that would lead and I'm definite we'll all have a lot to learn from the process!
Episode 3 is now uploaded on page 1 of this thread and there are new files for thread followers to download as well. Please have a look and let me know what you think.
Fun fun
I've always seen your point Joe, the truth though is that no matter how many times you root for photo references, people won't necessarily start gushing about it on the forum just because you're a strong advocate for it. That also doesn't mean that people don't work with photo references, I say that from remembering quite a number of instances where people did just that in their WIP posts, and even on the render threads. If it's something that you're really keen on though, you could start a thread just like Rashad has started here and lead the way by replicating your photo of choice in Carrara and encourage people to discuss your process with you. You may be surprised where that would lead and I'm definite we'll all have a lot to learn from the process!
+1
In another forum that might be the case, but this is the Carrara forum, and there are a lot of, well, personalities here. I tried exactly the challenge that you suggest a couple years ago (the simple bollard I mentioned) and the response was quite a bit different than you suggest. The list of reasons why people didn't want to participate was a mile long, just like this time. Even the simplest of photos that someone could reconstruct in a matter of minutes, but apparently only 1 or 2 people even tried. Maybe just 1. The rest of the responses were the same as in this thread, reasons why it's not useful.
And yes, I was surprised where it led. It led down the path of anger and "well if you're so smart why not do it for us" and the like. I really don't care what people do, I'm just constantly amazed at how people will, for whatever reason, give a long list of hundreds of reasons and excuses why they don't want to learn something, probably solely because they don't like the person who recommended it. It's incredible. I guarantee it's an exercise that many accomplished professionals due on a regular basis, but apparently it's not useful for Carrara hobbyists. Go figure.
But all I can do is suggest and recommend, based on what I know. If nobody is interested, then that's up to them.
*removed, the post was repeated, was half asleep.
Interestingly, I stumbled on that challenge through the link shared on this thread by headwax and I've been glued to that thread for over 30 minutes now despite having a nasty deadline for some work, yes like Rashad said, it reeks of deja vu, but guess what, the combative exchange is peppered with gems. I think there is a lot of learning and useful exchange going on, it might not be the way you want it, but trust me, it's happening, at least with me!
P.S. I realized after my post that there's no real need for you to start a thread on the topic, you can just book mark that thread and share the link anytime you want to draw someone's attention to the topic on using photos as references, because you really went to town on that one. But then again, if you start a new thread with a slightly different approach, results may differ. Not to dictate to you what to do or not to do, just wondering to myself really, I perfectly respect our right to pet peeves and to battle on with ideas, it's what keeps the forum lively and you yourself had a couple of aha moments on that thread when someone dropped something useful and you picked it right up. And yes, I just love the 'Everybody Hates JoeMamma' series ( I strongly suspect its a love-hate kinda thing going on! :lol:, it's fun, its action packed, gets everybody rattled and there's collateral damage of information dropping all over the place. Nice way to get 'damaged' if I may say. Thanks to y'all who put your hearts into these debates.
In another forum that might be the case, but this is the Carrara forum, and there are a lot of, well, personalities here.
Ah yes, the dreaded Carrara forum. "You'll never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy..." :)
Ah yes, the dreaded Carrara forum. "You'll never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy..." :)
Hey! I resemble that rem- Resent that remark! >:( ;-)
sorry OT
Does anyone have any thoughts on the new files?
Haven't tried them yet. Not sure I care for the cross screen effect, so when I get around to it, I'll probably turn them off.
Episode 3 is now uploaded on page 1 of this thread and there are new files for thread followers to download as well. Please have a look and let me know what you think.
Fun fun
thanks Rashad
Sorry things got a bit off topic there for a minute, I actually haven't tried the new files yet either, though should be getting off work soon to play around a bit, but I did have a question. The Octane render has the star light rays from the lights, is that something that actually rendered in Octane too or was that a post effect? I knew we can add these kinds of effects in Carrara, but had no idea they could be done in Octane too.
I know - it's the "Homeless Pirate" by Rembrandt!
Wow! that's an incredibly fast time, even for a scene designed to render quickly.
Octane is extremely fast for the purposes of unbiased rendering only. This is because unbiased rendering is generally many orders of magnitude more taxing to calculate than biased rendering. With applications like Octane, there is very little cheating allowed so render times are fairly fixed. Go for Octane if you really do want exceptional accuracy at acceptable speeds.
However, if you have the skill to rig a fake GI in Carrara that looks in most ways reminiscent to an unbiased render from Octane, then go for that, because as you observe, you can accomplish these renders in under three minutes.
One of the great things about having access to an application like Octane is that it can help to train your eye to better recognize the way indirect lighting should actually look, making the job of faking it much easier.
For basic speed comparisons it is hard for unbiased to compete with biased, biased most often wins in speed.
For animation purposes on your current system, for this particular scene, both Carrara Full GI and Octane will seem very slow compared to the fake GI.
Haven't tried them yet. Not sure I care for the cross screen effect, so when I get around to it, I'll probably turn them off.
I don't think I like it much either. It looks pretty awesome in the Octane version so I wanted to see if I could get a similar result from Carrara. If the Carrara version had chromatic effects it could look very similar to the Octane version.
Sorry things got a bit off topic there for a minute, I actually haven't tried the new files yet either, though should be getting off work soon to play around a bit, but I did have a question. The Octane render has the star light rays from the lights, is that something that actually rendered in Octane too or was that a post effect? I knew we can add these kinds of effects in Carrara, but had no idea they could be done in Octane too.
Octane's Post Processing is AMAZING. 90% of the stuff people use After Effects for can be achieved within Octane via the Post Processing options. The best part is that the Post Processing is it's own layer so you can adjust the properties during the render without disturbing it. I will upload a few examples when I get home later. Fun fun!
Holy cow, I had no idea Octane had post processing at all, this could be very useful stuff!
Also I forgot to post my render times for the scene (using the pre built fake GI rig) which was a hair over 10 minutes on my little laptop. Very fast, considering the size of the scene. I need to do a full GI version to compare, but I have done that scene with full GI before and it took much longer for a much smaller render.
Hi Rashad,
Thanks for the reply, I'm running Carrara on what would be classed as old by now (I've had it 3 years) a dual
hex core xeon (24 threads) and 48gb Ram.
Recently sold my Modo and Zbrush licence's hence getting back into Carrara and Blender as they'll both
cover all my 3d needs and I'm also off the expensive upgrade treadmill I was on with Modo.
I've got HDR light studio v4 so I'm going to mess around with that and Carrara and wait to see whether I'll need
to spend that extra on Octane/Nividia GPU and a new PSU.
Your Volcanic Archipelago pics are very persuasive for the Octane option though, are the plants native Carrara btw.
Pete
Kind of a semi-related question about using large arrays of lights for faking GI...
My memory is kind of fuzzy on this, but I recall one of my big issues with using many lights in a scene was the lack of a "group control" of many lights, so you could control all parameters of a group of lights with one slider setting. I *think* Carrara has a very rudimentary controller, but I recall it was of little use, although I'm not sure I recall the reason why I thought that...though maybe I'm thinking of a different app...
Usually with faking GI I tend to look for a 80-90% solution...something that is fairly quick to set up and quick to render, compared to, say, a GI render. I'd hate to spend 5 hours setting up a scene so that I save 1 hour in rendering time over a full GI render.... :) :)
Of course it's a different story with animations, but with still images, tweaking and placing and changing colors and intensities on a big array of lights might be more work that it's worth. Just something to keep in mind...
EDIT: Oh yeah, it's called the Master Light. I recall it lacked some very basic functionality to allow you to group and controlled a group of lights. Not sure exactly, but I recall I decided not to use them until they made them more functional.
The Master light has the standard light controls. You can choose to control a parameter such as brightness by using a percentage or a strict value. So if you have lights set a 75% and 50% intensity and want to keep them relative to each other, but want to increase the intensity by 10%, you would choose the percentage adjustment. If you wanted each to be the same intensity, then you would use the standard slider.
What you don't have is light specific options, such as you would find on a shape light. For example, you couldn't change the fall-off method via Master Light.
You also don't have access to the light effects such as soft shadows or lens flares through the Master Light.
Of course replicated lights don't need a Master light, as generally it is just one light that is replicated many times, so there is just one to adjust per replicator.
Oh, okay....
I *think" the Master Light only controls lights by type, not by selection or grouping. Maybe I'm wrong on that though, it's been a while.
So you can only have a master light for all bulbs, or all spots, etc. Not very useful...
I'm rendering at the moment, so I can't get a screen cap, but at the top of the control panel, it lists all the light types with check boxes next to them, so that you can choose which type or types you wish to control.
If you've made an array of lights to light a specific area or object, you could put those lights in a simple group, then if you need to make an adjustment to all of them, such as change the hue, so they're all the same, you just click on the group in the Instances palette and then select the Master Light, and you can adjust them all at once.
Which reminds me, for those not Familiar with the Master Light, it only works on lights that are selected.
But that's my point....I don't think it controls lights by group. Only by type of light. So in a given scene, a master light with only Bulb selected controls all the bulb lights in the scene. There's no way to specify or assign a master light to a specific group of lights. Or am I all wet on that?
Nowhere in the Master Light control does it say what Group it applies to. I think it applies to ALL lights in the scene of the selected type.
By the way, I also recall long ago there was a plugin that gave you the functionality of assigning as many Master Lights (or whatever they were called) as you wanted to various groups of lights. And that worked okay, but I also recall some problem or annoyance with it that made me decide not to pursue it. Can't recall hearing about that plugin in years, if it's still alive.