Carrara Rendering With LuxRender? Needing to expand Carrara's rendering quality.

Aunty Betty

Hi Folks,
I'm attempting to ascertain specifics with regards to rendering from Carrara to LuxRender. To move with the times I need to expand the render quality I can get from Carrara

I'm presuming I am correct that you can get a bridge to render between Carrara and LuxRender?Working on Mac OsX? I cannot find any videos with regard using Carrara and LuxRender together. In fact I can find very little on this subject with regards specifics and working methodology.

Which minimum version of Carrara is required to do this 7, 8 etc?
Does it work correctly /well - do the Carrara procedural textures including texturing plugins transfer material / texture data to LuxRender or do you have to set up materials in LuxRender itself?

If I am correct I have seen a video where a Carrara user is sending their Carrara data to Daz Studio to use Octane Render? What would be the reason for this?
Is it because their is an issue with Carrara and LuxRender - the user likes OctaneRender better?

Any feedback from anyone who has expanded their rendering output to an external renderer with regard working with Carrara would be much appreciated.
I have been learning Blender Cycles - just in case what I hope cannot be achieved. The advantage with Cycles being that there are many tutorials online from the Blender community.

Many thanks in advance.

3drendero

Here are your options:

OctaneRender: http://render.otoy.com/manuals/Carrara/
There is a free trial so you can try check if it suits your needs before buying.

Luxus for Carrara, LuxRender plugin for Carrara that exports to LuxRender:
http://www.daz3d.com/luxus-for-carrara
Addon with readymade materials:
http://www.daz3d.com/luxus-for-carrara-resource-pack

While there is no trial, there is a free beta of the new LuxusCore for Carrara, which integrates LuxRender into Carrara and adds GPU rendering:
http://carraracafe.com/plugins/luxuscore-for-carrara-plugin-unofficial-manual-2015-02-15/

Would still recommend to stay and use the Carrara Renderer first, what do you want to do and what do you miss in Carrara?

Dartanbeck

You'll need to learn a whole new way to create shaders to switch to a different engine like Octane or Luxrender. The Luxrender site has plenty of examples and education on the subject. Spheric Labs created Luxus, as mentioned above, with a whole group of folks from this very community working with his generous beta team offer, and has created an amazing product. It provides special shader options directly into the texture room. He is also working on the new Lux Core, and a thread exists here in the forum about that, too.

Carrara - Realism Rendering, by Infinite Skills, authored by Phil Wilkes, is an amazing course on how to increase the realism in Carrara renders using everything you've already got at your disposal! It's a fantastic course, no matter what your skill level.

Aunty Betty

Many thanks 3drendero,
Your help is greatly appreciated in getting the information I was looking for with far greater ease.
With your regard your question: what do you want to do and what do you miss in Carrara?

For me, it's the lack of adequate reflective colors in the shadows that I get with Carrara . Also I have an issue with the compressed falloff of Carrara's shadows as they transition in occlusion - also the manner in which the shadows can readily fill in and neutralize. For some years now I have been falling back on Photoshop's development with regard improved technology to open up the shadows to make up for the arrested development of Carrara's render engine.

Whilst I can achieve the quality I am looking for in both Lightwave and Modo I cannot work anywhere near as fast as I can when texturing and creating a scene set-up as I can with Carrara.
For me , Carrara beats them both hands down with regard ease of setting up materials - the time saved with texturing is enormous. That has been what has kept me with Carrara for so long as my staging environment.

I can and do already push Carrara to come close-ish to the lighting render results in Lightwave and Modo. It's when adopting certain methods in Carrara that productivity severely goes down. I know from experience what lighting set-ups I would dare to attempt in Carrara and where it's failings will smack my face for trying.

I'm two weeks in to learning Blender - more particularly heavily focusing on cycles and node based material editing.
So far I like working with Blender's Cycles materials set-ups more than Lightwave or Modo's - somehow it's structural logic seems more similar to Carrara with regard material construction even despite the nodes.

Many thanks,Dartanbeck for taking the time to reply and inform me of the community's cooperative assistance with the development of Luxus, as well as your tutorial link.

I cannot find any in depth video tutorials on working between Carrara and LuxRender using Luxus as a bridge and therefore can make no assessment on whether the work flow and methodology appeals to me or not,

Any good information you have in that department would be greatly appreciated.

My thanks to you both.

---------------------
OctaneRender for Carrara : Yet Not for Mac
The plugin supports Carrara 8/8.5 Pro or Standard, 64 or 32 bit for Windows.
OctaneRender for Carrara is available for the following operating systems:
Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1 - 64 or 32 bit
The OctaneRender for Carrara plugin uses the Microsoft .Net 4.5 or greater framework.
Note that it is highly recommended that you use a 64 bit addition of Carrara because it can take a lot of memory to load scenes into Octane.
OctaneRender requires a Nvidia driver supporting CUDA 5.5
Software Requirements
The plugin requires OctaneRender Standalone Edition to be installed and activated. The Standalone Edition does not need to be the same Octane version as the plugin – since they operate separately.

-------------------------------
LuxusCore for Carrara plugin _ Yet Not for Mac
Beta installation for Windows x64 only, free(Updated 2015-03-24):

-------------------------------
Luxus for Carrara - no information on what version of Carrara it runs on? I could not find user feedback videos , tutorials, video examples or blog articles of people running Luxus with Carrara on a mac system.

3drendero

Limited options with Mac for now, Luxus probably requires Carrara 8, there are not many users of Carrara 7 left.
You have the DAZ3D 30 day money back guarantee and Luxus is cheap so it should be easy enough for you to try it.
Get the resource pack to get a quick start with the new Luxrender shaders.
The unofficial manual is here: http://carraracafe.com/downloads/?did=33
And some more downloads are here: http://carraracafe.com/plugins/luxus-the-luxrender-plugin-for-carrara-developmentdocumentation-blog/

3drendero

To get some help your problems inside Carrara, it would be helpful to start a new thread and post some renders showing what you get and some example picture of what you want.
Then some of the experts here may give you another method to work inside Carrara.

You can also read through Joe's big thread about compositing here that has a lot of useful info:
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/54406/

Maybe these pages describe what you want to do with the AO pass quality?
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/54406/P255

Aunty Betty

3drendero,
many thanks for your further assistance and input.
I shall go through the threads you have kindly supplied and see if I can squeeze a little more out of Carrara and investigate things further.

Some of the suggested techniques perhaps are for version V8 and above.
I'm currently running 7 Pro. If the techniques suggested are version 8+ solutions I'll perhaps download a trial to see if V8.5 answers what I'm looking for.

My attempts in multipass rendering in v7 always resulted in banding artifacts in the ambient render when applied as a blend in photoshop -particularly over smooth glossy textures where they were easier spotted. Again perhaps there are ways to improve or minimize such artifacts.

Thanks.

Aunty Betty

Ooops, Is there a trial download for v8.5?

3drendero

Here is a trial
http://download.cnet.com/Carrara-8-Pro/3000-6677_4-10782148.html

There may be a sale on carrara 8 pro now, so check that out since it is a massive upgrade over 7. It may be even cheaper if you sign up for 3 month PC membership to get even more discount. The shopping basket shows that.

3drendero

Mac
http://download.cnet.com/Carrara-8-Pro-Mac-64/3000-6677_4-75362544.html

3drendero

From the Sale thread, there is a Carrara 8 Pro sale going on, it is only 65$ if you are a PC member, so you just need to buy the PC membership first for 24$, then you can buy Carrara 8.5 Pro for 65 instead of 171$.
It also include Michael 5 and Victoria 5 Pro suite worth a lot more.
PC membership includes coupons worth more than 24$ and a lot more: http://www.daz3d.com/platinum-club-plus

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Major upgrades that affect you:

Features Introduced in Carrara 8.0

Pro - 64-bit support for MAC and WIN OS - Work faster and smarter as you take full advantage of your computer's 64-bit hardware.
Pro - Negative Lights and Photometrics - Now you can work with negative lights and photometrics (IES) for even greater control over your lighting.
Render Time Optimizations - Get more than 200%* improvement in performance when rendering complex scenes using your high-end MAC or Windows system.
Rendering Options - Achieve a new level of realism in your scenes with Soft Shadows, Blurred Reflections, Blurred Transmission, True Ambient Lighting, Caustics, Global Illumination, Ambient Occlusion, HDRI, Motion Blur, Subsurface Scattering, Shadow Catch, Transparency with Absorption, Depth of Field, and more. And, with Multi-Pass Rendering you can retouch or edit images without having to re-render.

More info: http://www.daz3d.com/carrara-8-5-pro
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It looks like the Carrara render engine got a major update from 7 to 8 that may help you and if you get Luxus that is quite cheap anyways, you have a complete toolbox to do anything, especially after reading the composting thread above.

Aunty Betty

Many thanks 3drendero,
Sadly the trial of version 8 for Mac found on the link provided crash each time I attempted to save out an image to check out the multi-pass renders. Hmmmm.

Kinda hard to make an assessment at this juncture having no available trial version of Carrara 8.5 to test.

evilproducer

DAZ does have a 30 day return policy, unless they changed it.

Chohole

evilproducer said:

DAZ does have a 30 day return policy, unless they changed it.

No change, DAZ 3D still has a 30 day return policy :coolsmile:

3drendero

Still think that you should upgrade to carrara 8.5 pro during the current sale for 65+24$. So much value for the money...
Check the full list of the new features here:

http://www.daz3d.com/carrara-8-5-pro

Dartanbeck

Aunty Betty said:

I cannot find any in depth video tutorials on working between Carrara and LuxRender using Luxus as a bridge and therefore can make no assessment on whether the work flow and methodology appeals to me or not,

Any good information you have in that department would be greatly appreciated.

I'd love to do one if I could, but I am still a huge fan of the default photo-realistic render engine of Carrara - it's where I choose to live. I did buy Luxor for Carrara and intend to learn to use it one day, but I'm not in a hurry. Spheric Labs was just so cool toward everybody wanting the plugin that I wanted to support his enthusiasm any way I could... so I did.

I love how easy and intuitive it is to make materials in Carrara's native Texture room. A buddy bought "Digital Lighting & Rendering" by Jeremy Birn for me and that wonderful book has opened my eyes to many good practices regarding lighting, which makes a HUGE difference in a render. The Realism Rendering video course I've mentioned earlier, by Phil Wilkes, translated much of that information into Carrara-specific practices as well as adding a wealth of Phil's own heavy investigation discoveries. So that's the direction I've taken. I know that there is a rather large swarm of folks going for the other render engine designs these days - and for good reason. But for me, it's the amazing render engine that drew me into becoming a Carrara artist in the first place.

Phil Wilkes has also put in some time with Luxor for Carrara and the Luxrender engine, and has created a Luxus for Carrara Resource Pack, which provides shaders and a few objects for Luxor use in Carrara, just in case you might be looking for some pre-built Carrara shader presets.

FifthElement

Dartanbeck said:

I love how easy and intuitive it is to make materials in Carrara's native Texture room...

I was never a big fan of it, there is so many more elegant ways to implement texturing, too much clutter if you ask me ...

Vue IMO has far more intuitive texturing, needs improvement though, but nodes part makes it for me, very big fan of that approach.

Hi Aunty (was it Mark ?), I remember you from the old Polyloop forums, best Carrara community ever, I was sad to see it go :(

Aunty Betty

Thank you evilproducer, chohole , 3drendero and Dartanbeck.
Since starting my enquiry thread I have so saturated myself with learning Blender Cycles that I feel I am now as comfortable with it as I am with texturing and lighting with Carrara.
The education and information to be schooled so quickly with regard Cycles coming as it did from the abundance of videos online.
A comparative search for Lux render videos brings up little of pragmatic assistance that I could find and a search for Luxus sadly less again.
For me this has been a big deciding factor in my journey of collating information on which to base a decision.

These days I base all my software decisions on watching videos of people operating the software and giving appraisal - it tells me in a moment whether the methodology suits my bent.
I am far too old in computer years to wish to be a pioneer of space without adequate ground support and a throng of other global astronauts for company

With regard simplifying learning curves, i.e Carrara +Luxus+Luxrender vs Blender (singular) , I have decided to lean toward monogamy for the sake of an easier life.
The fluidity of working with Carrara I shall continue to utilize for when speed over quality is of the essence, relying on Photoshop to take up the slack on Carrara's limits.
Carrara I have historically found does not like to be pushed too hard with regard complex lighting calculations and sadly does not give out any warning or squeaks that it is troubled to digest it's calculations - preferring instead to roll over and die. I use Carrara for large print work and know by experience what it will and will not do. Fixes and solutions out with a software's comfort zone tend not to be a pleasurable experience and moreover slows progress.

Time now to lie in the long grass , watch the clouds blows and feel the daisies grow between my toes

Thanks for all your kind assistance.

5thElement - hello to you - yes that's me alright from way back in the Polyloop days. Vive la France!!
Vue is fabulous I only have an old version 6 infinite so I'm guessing much has changed. Whilst I loved Vue , the time required for high quality print rez renders back then made it very slow on a standard computer. I have been playing with Blenders use of particle systems for environment generation which is straightforward to work with . For creative scenic work I have seen posted on the internet Vue and it's artists predominately excel. Getting back in touch with Vue in the future is something I'd like to do when I've upgraded my Hardware to take advantage of the changing demands. At the very least for background work. I do still use Vue on occasion but fall back on texture libraries and ecosystems presets I wrote years back. I also use Vue to generate textures for export as image maps for tiling over landscapes in other Apps. It's really quick for generating great landscape textures. Good skies in my old version still take an age to render which is a shame as the skies are great.
.
Nodes yes Blender cycles I have found to have a good nodes system as well as a great addon to working fast with it http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/Nodes/Node_Wrangler .