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I have an Nvidia GTX 960 card, its just to 'NEW' to work with the older version of Octane.
Octane should work with that - have you ensured you updated to the latest drivers?
Having said that, although it can be more work to set up, you can get Carrara's native renderer quite close to Octane in some circumstances (I tried to attach the image but this **** forum wouldn't show it, so here is a link)
https://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/-carrara-render-comparison-/2636373/
Yes I tried everything. I searched all night googling why this wasn't working. I found several instances where people on the OTOY forums said they were told to upgrade to a newer version because 1.2 didn't support thier newer card. Ill make a post myself and see what happens.
@philw It's funny but the Carrara image looks more natural to me in that comparison.
I looked at the OTOY benchmark and the student version would work if I dropped down to a GTX 560. With my card I would need 2.x or higher.
Good point.
Okay, devils advocate and all here. If Carrara can get so close to Octane why use Octane and drop 400+ USD? Is it the speed with which it renders? coupled with the ease of the engine itself? Just curious is all.
For me it is a combination of factors:
- Carrara's renderer can get pretty close with simple situations, but for complex indoor scenes with multiple light sources, it would tend to struggle in comparison;
- Octane can be very fast to render;
- It is easier to set up Octane, realism is more or less a given, while with Carrara you need to set up more things and there is more to balance between realism and speed;
- Octane gives instant and interactive feedback, so you can adjust lighting and materials on the fly, in essence you need never do a "bad" render;
- I firmly believe that unbiased physically based renderers are the future of 3D, so the learning you get from using them will stand you in good stead for the future.
But I accept that the price tag will mean that it is not for everyone - but once you have used it, I think it would be difficult to go back.
I don't have anywhere near the hardware that I would need to use Octane, which means that I use Carrara's native renderer exclusively, so I can only echo the points Phil has made about why people want to use un-biased renderers. There is also the fact that many of them can use the fast graphics chips in their video cards to get much faster renders than relying strictly on CPUs.
That being said, I find that Carrara's native renderer is much faster and has better rendering out of the box, as compared to 3Delight which is Studio's old, biased, default renderer.
If you like, I have a ShareCG account where I put various things that I do, and make them available for others to download and play around with. The earlier items are more proofs of concepts or scene files created to share with others and are based on forum discussions and aren't really finished, or are meant to demonstrate a concept or educate users on how to possibly do things in Carrara. The Fantasy Village Terrain could be a good place to start to see how to fake outdoor GI lighting as an example.
The later items, such as the Fantasy Village terrain, Holiday Lights, Martian War Machine and V4 Procedural Skin Shaders are more polished, but still meant to help educate the new user, or show off some method or trick that I thought was worth sharing, or even just given away as a thank you.
http://www.sharecg.com/pf/full_uploads.php?pf_user_name=evilproducer
@PhilW Thanks for the reasoning, I like to hear why someone uses a particular software. I finally got Octane 1.2 to work, used an old gaming laptop. Unfortunatly it only has a 1gig Nivida card built in. So any scene with anything more than a nude figure would go close or over the 1gig mark and I would recieve an error. So not usuable for me.
@evilproducer Thank you for sharing that link and why you use the native renderer. I have since put in a refund for Luxus since I've tried many times to get it to work with no success. It won't even send the file to Luxrender anymore and I've uninstalled and reinstalled several times - thinking I must have done something wrong.
Long story short, Ill be natively rendering as well. At least for now. Ill check out a few of those scenes you've made available so I can see how you did things. Should help fit the blocks together for me.
To be perfectly honest, if I had known from the beginning how to render with the right settings in the render, assembly, and texture rooms, I would likely never have felt the need to spend the money on unbiased rendering engines (and I spent as much on TheaRender as I did on Octane by the way), because with the right settings, Carrara's native engine can actually get that close (as exemplified by PhilW's picture linked above). To make an analogy, it's like solving Pi; unbiased render engines will solve Pi to infinity, while biased render engines will solve Pi to certain number of steps. Carrara's native renderer is so good it will solve Pi to like 25 steps, or in other words it will do light calculations so realistically that the difference between a Carrara render and an unbiased render can be so negligible it's hard to spot. The trouble is, as much as I love Carrara, I really didn't learn how to render with it until after PhilW came out with the Realism Rendering course through infinite skills, and by that time I had bought several unbiased render engines.
Octane is generally faster, though as you've noted it's limited to the amount of memory on your gpu card. I have 2 gigs, which is enough for most scenes that I do (btw you can really stretch how many characters you can put in a scene by getting rid of bump and spec maps and using the diffuse maps in those slots instead, it works pretty well in Octane).
Then again, if I have a reasonably complex scene I have no hesitation using Carrara's native renderer nowadays, and in fact in some ways I have a great love for it. In some scenes I prefer to use Octane, in others Carrara native, and in other instances I will render the same scene and viewpoint in both and take some of the render passes in Carrara for some of the effects and then add it/overlay it to the Octane render.
Ahh so they made improvments so you can render complex scenes. Well, that will have to wait until I can afford to plunk down that much money for Octane + plugin. WIll keep it in mind though - thanks Phil
@Jonstark I have convienced my wife to let me purchase one more item but I'm not sure what to get. The Realism Rendering Course or the Shader Doctor? Any thoughts which my give me more of a leg up?
I can't really comment as I have a vested interest!
did you read this yet -
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/15970/carrara-information-manual/p1
I'm working my way though that....I've read so much in the last week I'm going cross eyed lol.
That's a hard pick, because Shader Doctor is a nice easy one-click solution time saver for transforming poser textures into carrara shaders. It's also very inexpensive, only $10 over on Fenric's site (google Fenric's wolf den and look under the 'trading post' section) and comes with Skin Doctor included, which is very good at making good looking human skin shaders for Carrara too.
On the other side of the coin, PhilW's realism course is also phenomenal (in fact I remember commenting when it came out that both it and Skin Doctor were my 2 favorite products released that year!). You can very quickly get a grasp of how Carrara renders and what settings and techniques to use to get light accuracy very high (and as you can see from PhilW's pic posted above, you really can get renders at near-unbiased quality, even though the Carrara engine is actually biased). He goes in depth on texturing there too, so you will learn how to make your own very realistic Carrara textures for use, while it's not a one-click solution by any means the intrinsic knowledge and understanding of how it all works is extremely valuable and ultimately may be more useful in the long run that a one click solution. The course is actually fairly quick to get through, and Phil's a great teacher (though he has a funny english accent :) ) It kind of depends on how well you respond to training vids like this though, so it's hard for me to say. You might want to go over to infinite skills dot com and look under C for carrara to find his course, and view several of his free videos that are on display for the course (the first 12 videos are free to the public to view, and you can learn a ton of info just from those) to see if his teaching style gels with your learning style (it did for me).
I think if you put a gun to my head I would say I think the Realism course is the more valuable resource, but that's not to say Shader Doctor isn't super useful too.
Didn't realize the latest version supported out of core textures (and I had no idea how that would work til you just explained it), that's very good news indeed. I must not have the latest version then, time to go back to the otoy site and see what the latest version sighman has put out is. :)
Thanks Jon for the kind comments - but "Funny English Accent"?!!
You tell them Phil. English people don't have accents, it's everyone else that has accents.
Too right. Just came back from Maine/NH/Massachusetts. That's where many folk sound like Cliff from Cheers... (that included my late mum).
SileneUK
My aunt's family comes from Quincy. That accent sounds a lot like Elmer Fudd...
Like the Welsh?!
I actually don't have a Welsh accent, as I am Welsh by marriage rather than by desent, and I was brought up in North West Kent and speak typical middle class style. Not posh, not London, just accentless English. But yes Welsh people do have a lovely accent, some areas it is almost musical. There's lovely for you.
Yes, I like the Welsh accent, I was in Pwllheli and Criccieth earlier this year and it was indeed lovely!
Yes those are areas where there is a greater percentage of native Welsh speakers, so the accent is very musical. Down this end not so many Welsh speakers, but it is increasing somewhat. Wales was always our holiday destination of choice, even when still living in England.
Well, hubby and sons are Welsh and we will be cheering on their crippled squad against the Aussies Saturday. That would make a great Carrara render!
SileneUK
Yay! Rochester, me
Home of Dickens, the Romans, the Shorts Sunderland (best flying boat evs) and the River Mudway...
Cymru am byth
My Younger brother lives in Rochester, but was born in Erith, where we grew up. Right alongside the River Thames.
Hehe, I love the English accent (or non-accent as some of you have stated ;) ) . I purchased your Realistic render tutorials Phil and LOVE it so far. I had a render I was working on last night that had heavy shadows despite me placing two distance lights to the front sides of the character. The render settings alone have made a vast difference.
I can't wait to complete it and see what I can come up with. I'll post something soon to show my progress.
Great, glad you are finding it to be useful.