Advantages/disadvantages of Octane plugin for Carrara vs Octane plugin for Daz Studio?
teknostorm
Posts: 163
I had purchased Carrara because Daz did not support video texture mapping and I urgently needed it for a project. But since Octane Render does not support video texture mapping either, that advantage is lost. Also Carrara's render speed was much faster than 3Delight, but that won't make a difference if I'm using Octane render. Daz studio gets updated more often than Carrara. Carrara crashed a lot for me, and many saved projects woudn't open (mostly related to complex motion data), while Daz studio is very stable. But Carrara definitely has animation advantages. I already know about those.
So as far as the Octane render plugin and integration into workflow and speed is concerned, since there is no demo for Octane render plugin for Daz studio, can anyone who has tried both tell me about the differences /advantages/ disadvantages?
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There are a couple of people that have the Octane plugin for both DS and Octane, Wendy and Dustrider spring to mind. I know I've seen Dustrider saying that the Carrara plugin is better integrated and works far better, but I couldn't really tell you the reasons why (hopefully he'll swing by, see this thread and give a better detailed opinion). I have seen threads in the Commons complaining about some of the shortcomings of the DS plugin for Octane, but since I never use DS I didn't pay that much attention to specifics.
I've got the Octane for Carrara plugin and have to admit it's pretty great; very difficult to think of anything that needs improving, is matches Carrara's cameras exactly (so that I'm able to composite an animation with Carrara hair with my Octane animation if I want, as one example) and the auto-convert for materials is one of the best I've seen for any plugin. Octane materials in Carrara is also kind of brilliant, as every Octane shader is just adding another layer on top of your normal Carrara shaders, so you can have both in one shader (probably not explaining that very well).
The plugin developer Sighman is always working on refining the plugin, very responsive as you can see by checking the Octane for Carrara plugin forum over at the Otoy website. He genuinely 'gets' Carrara and I think uses it himself, so is very mission-oriented on making the plugin work as seamlessly as possible, and has succeeded to a very large degree on this already.
Now that Iray is a freebie for DS, that pretty much kills any developers incentive to put in critical effort and money and time to develop other unbiased engine plugins for Studio, so I doubt that there will be much 'oomph' put in to correcting any of the flaws that apparently exist with the Studio plugin (not just for Octane, but really for anything, and I doubt there will ever be any other plugins for other unbiased renderers developed for Studio in the future).
Only real advantage of the DS one is HD morphs
I have only 1.2 which does not do displacement it would cost me almost as much to upgrade to 2.whatever and I believe from what I have read animation is broken in that build so not much incentive for me to do so.
DAZ studio even with keymate and graphmate nowhere as easy to animate in as Carrara either
I can load a few scenes in it that do not work in carrara and if you are into such stuff the geografted genitals retain their UV mapping unlike Carrara.
Given the opportunity again I would only buy the Carrara plugin myself but since I have both I do use it, mostly for HD figures facial animations but even those a pain as need to use 32bit to create and save animated pose files for speech or Mimic live which is a PITA not having direct wav file imput, I have to use stereomix and risk feedback and other issues to play wav files.
Good news on the geografted genital front Wendy. I'm working on converting my procedural skin shader to Genesis 2, and intend to work on a Genital version for both male and female. I think it may work, because basically a UV map is "paint within the lines" and a procedural doesn't do that.
We'll get Garstor back yet! ;-)
Good news on the geografted genital front Wendy. I'm working on converting my procedural skin shader to Genesis 2, and intend to work on a Genital version for both male and female. I think it may work, because basically a UV map is "paint within the lines" and a procedural doesn't do that.
We'll get Garstor back yet! ;-)
Holy cow, that's right! Procedurals should definitely cure that problem, good thinking :)
teknostorm - good news for you - Octane Render for Carrara DOES support animated textures. I just did a little test of applying an AVI as a texture in Carrara and it worked fine in Octane. I also tried using sequenced PNGs, you need to set start and end frames as animation keys with these, but again it all worked fine.
Ah that's great news! However I did a test run with my Carrara project which had sequenced PNGs as texture map and Octane showed only the first PNG on the texture, while Carrara rendered the texture as the sequential animation. Do I have to set separate keyframes for the sequenced PNGs for Octane?
When you load sequenced PNGs, you will see a little slider on the image preview in the shader - use this to set the first and last frames as keyframes and all should work as expected. I thought you needed to do this for Carrara itself too but maybe you were lucky!
I've done this for Carrara already, setting the slider for sequenced pngs for keyframes (thanks to this forum for that as well!).
But when I loaded the project and used octane plugin demo on it, octane rendered it with only the first png as texture on all frames, while carrara's default renderer rendered it with sequential pngs for each frame.
Odd - it definitely worked for me on a quick test. Can anyone else test and see if it works for them?
I have not had much luck myself