Do you Iray?
Dartanbeck
Posts: 21,543
I've just started messing around with rendering with Iray, and found out something pretty cool!
Being more of a DS topic than Carrara, I put the post in there
Just an FYI for those whom may be interested.
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Comments
nope. and feeling ready to retire 3de and RSL efforts.
concentrating all my study on rara.
:) and if i ever haz the money for it, the standalone vray to work with blender, was 500 last i checked.
Thanks for sharing Dartanbeck!
Pleasure!
When one is part of DAZ 3D, and they come out with something as awesome as Iray render possibilities, it's just too hard to ignore, even as a Carraraist! ;)
Another thing that's difficult to ignore is the fact that Genesis 3 is one top-notch piece of technology. So instead of ignoring it entirely until someone comes up with a way for it to work in Carrara, I'm learning how to render in DS so that I can check out this amazing new line of figures.
I'm still using M4 and V4 for the most part, and slowly incorporating Genesis and Genesis 2 into my work, and I'm not finding myself wishing for more. I really like these less-than-brand new figures and their addons. M4 and V4 have so much support content that I'm still finding it a lot easier to use them than anything else.
Like Misty, I am very into Carrara. Mostly set in my ways to do all of my everything in Carrara. I just like it much better. Kudos that Misty can use Blender too! I've installed it a while back and opened it a couple times, but in the time it took me to figure out that I just don't know my way around and have no clue what to do with it, I could have finished an entire animation in Carrara, so I just stick with that.
DAZ Studio, being what it is, and who I am, I just feel like I really should get with the program and figure out how it works and start trying it out more. I have been using DS, just not for rendering. I love the Content Creation Tools and aniMate 2!
I don't Iray and I don't Octane either. I am still not unbiased. I am still a Neanderthal, not yet a Homo Sapiens.
yeah I do
http://www.facebook.com/wendy5/videos/10207439345095816/
one with a Carrara spherical render on the dome, I even make HDRI with picturenaut and two different camera exposures in Octane
not terribly good HDRI's though
Wow! That is a great render, Wendy!
Sorry iray it has no attraction to me... and I for it ;)
I like Carrara's native render engine over anything else I've tried.
I just can't get over how much I love Carrara's volumetric clouds! I'm making a new spherical map to play with in Iray (and Carrara) and am having a lot of fun perusing my clouds as I wait for this long render.
Yes, for me attempts at photoreal are boring. ;)
I love your artistic style! It is what has helped me to decide to get further away from realism for my future animation project, which IS still in the works. ;)
Less relevant to the DS forum, for this example spherical map I'm making, I've loaded in mmoir's distant city from his BMF Landscapes pack, which is gorgeous! I don't know if any of you have ever loaded this thing in and just focussed on the city part and checked out how Mike built this thing... but it's a gorgeous piece of work. Very nice buildings placed beautifully into a nice chunk of some major city.
So I've loaded in the distant city part, using a base scene from one of my EnvironKits, removing all terrain, and duplicated the city all around the camera. I'm still waiting on this render. Spherical maps do take a l o n g time to render. But it's looking really cool so far, as I peruse around the very large image!
Nice work Dart :)
What particular landscapes pack is that ? Looks pretty amazing
I can only see these http://www.daz3d.com/mmoir
ot :) while we are on other soft-wear, this is my first superfly render with the new radical morph transfer automatic bone centre adjustment tool in poser 11, it only took 12 seconds to render :)
Wow! One messed up dude! But... twelve seconds?!!! Yikes!
To answer your question, it's this product I was talking about: Carrara's BMF Landscapes Pack
Having only the ground plane left to render, only threeish + hours to go! This is the part that requires the highest resolution, otherwise it gets too pixelated.
Iray's setting to 'draw the ground' will add a shadow catcher to the scene so that everything you put in the scene will cast a shadow onto the invisible ground, over the background map. Pretty cool, eh? At least that's how I think it works ;)
thanks Dart, yes I have that of course, didnt realise it had a distant city, thanks for thje heads uup!
Man, load in just the distant city, select it, center hot point, send to origin, and check out the cool liitle city scene Mike's built! It's freaking awesome!
Was it some form of dark or anti-matter?
Yeah, that really tore me up with glee when you've first introduced Carrara's shadow catcher to me... So cool!
In the example I've mentioned, it's only a simple check-box to draw the ground of the "Dome", they call it, which seems to me to be the same type of thing that Carrara uses to map spherical backgrounds, but with a few more options. Like, if you have lights in the scene 'and' you're using the "Dome", you may select to use just the dome, just the scene lights, or both. There are also options for the dome to be finite or infinite, which I haven't experimented with. I've left it on the default of "Infinite".
DAZ Studio, I've learned from Wendy, has a substantially powerful situation for dealing with Shaders. I'm sure there's a way to use shadow casters on other things, but "I" wouldn't know (yet) how to do it.
thats cool DartanBeck!
BTW I haven't really done a lot of digging with any of the renderers about size, if someone was wanting to render fairly large renders for printing 300 dpi 20x24 since Ram is an issue most things I have seen with octain, iray, luxcore IPR all seem about screensize max. Is that the case due to VideoRam or just most don't have a need to render larger sizes. Just curious if you have seen anything on that, I guess I should pull up DS and play around with Iray and see.
I've seen others discussing it. I can't remember the rules though.
Unfortunately, and for the first time in my computing career, all of my current video cards are ATI, so I'm using cpu for Iray. That's probably a big reason as to why my Iray renders take so much longer than my Carrara renders. However, when I tested on my workstation last night (instead of sleeping! LOL) my render was like 1980 x 1080 or something like that, and it chugged right through.
I'm not used to this whole PBR thing, and don't really know much about it. So I was grateful to find out how easily I was able to just jump in and start rendering with DS. The first few times, I thought nothing was happening, and just canceled out and gave up. But there's actually a quite a bit going on before we actually see anything happen on screen. Then Bam! A soft, ghostly, yucky image appears and it slowly add detail.
But once I start looking at the various controls related to rendering in DS, it's actually a lot more robust than I had originally thought. It's going to take some studying to actually get good at it, but playing right now is really quite fun - and simple.
The simplicity I speak of comes from a total lack of need to add lights, but we can use lights instead as well. So I decided to take that thought over to Carrara and see the speed difference. So I took some of what I've learned from Phil's wonderful Realism Rendering course, and pumped out some renders made using the heavy-hitting features in Carrara's awesome render engine - Global Illumination with Full Indirect lighting. I was amazed to see how fast Carrara can be with that and, like what I was doing with Iray, was incredibly simple and fast to set up. Just add a background, and render subject, and let the render engine calculate how the lighting should realistically behave - and it did a great job. I did, however, have it set to Object Accuracy of 2, Shadow Accuracy of 4 so by rights the render should have taken longer with better accuracy settings. But even with that considered, the extra time is a more-than-fair trade of for the simplicity and consistency.
Personally, I don't need to be able to render huge images nor do I need the simplicity of GI/IL since I have a just-as-simple set of Carrara files that help me to use lighting setups for near-instantaneous renders for my animations. I'm doing this to help myself wrap my head around the times of progression around me. Some of those Gallery images being highlighted along the top of the Galleries page are mind-blowing awesome! Some are 3DLight, some Iray, Reality, Octane, Luxus, Carrara(?), Bryce, Poser, and who knows what else. Maybe even some Blender Cycles renders in there.
Although I'm a total Carrara nut who is totally sold on the idea of only needing Carrara and Howler as my main animation workshop forever, I have been glancing over at the release notes as DAZ Studio has progressed over the last few years, somewhat while following the development around Genesis, and am super-impressed with what DAZ 3D has been doing with DS. DAZ figures being so top-notch as to be used for major films productions is truly something to be proud of and, as a PA, pay attention to.
So many millions of people using the software goes far beyond the idea of it only being because it's free. It's also because it's just plain good!
I've been using DS since I've discovered how fun and easy it is to produce supporting models for the Genesis line. Mainly when they decided to offer the whole Content Creation suite along with the free version - making Pro the free version. Finding those tools was amazing. It's so cool how fun it can be to make parts for heroes and monsters and... whatever. aniMate 2 was also a big draw for me. The view port drawing of DS is so fast that it works great for viewing the motions of aniBlocks and, perhaps, using the powerful tools of aniMate 2 to tweak or even write new aniBlocks. So I was kind of bummed out when I thought that I couldn't use Iray because of my only having ATI cards. I just recently found out that Iray will just use the cpu if I don't have a compatible video card, so I immediately wanted to try it out.
That is where I am right now... a brand spanking new Iray user. But now I also wish to learn the 3DLight engine as well.
DS having such a robust set of Shader options (not to be confused with material editing) I would also like to get into learning how all of that works as well. All-in-all, I want to learn DS and continue to add it to my workflow. This will bring Genesis 3 into reach for me no matter which direction they decide to take Carrara into. To me, that could be any number of ways and I can hardly wait to see what that is. Whether or not they decide to go for further Genesis support, or whatever... I just love Carrara. It has so much going for it just the way it is that I could be fine no matter what. But I'm hoping for more than that. If, in an effort to get Genesis 3, 4, and 5 into Carrara, they decide to create some sort of Carrara <> DAZ Studio bridge, I want to be able to leverage every part of that marriage that I can - so it would then really pay off that I'm learning DS. But if not, it at least fits into my pipeline helping with the Genesis and earlier figures that do work.
Ooops... babbling again? I thought so! LOL
Sorry!
Dartanbeck,
this is gonna break your big heart but I must sadly inform you, most those complex DS shaders and shader mixer recipies, functions, nodes, bricks etc are 3Delight render only
Chin up buddy there are iray bricks too and MDL a system of scripts for using with iray but is a whole new fish to tackle and learn, are some docs on it and info at Nvidia too.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/59018/playing-around-with-iray-mdl
Awww...
Kidding. Yeah, I want to dig into 3Delight as well!
I see that DS4.8 ships with some MDL examples from nVidia as well as some other Iray presets.
I know that Iray is huge to learn completely. While I do intend to get good with it, I'm not going to charge into it with too much hurry. I've made a flexible list of places to begin my research which all have their paths to expanding knowledge. So I'm looking forward to this new task, and it actually has a separate allocation to my Carrara endeavors, so it should work smoothly and progressively. Another cool aspect about this whole thing is that it's expanding my interest into more aspects of my own favorite Renderer, Carrara.
Kind of on track with all of this, Wendy, have you ever used one character as the main actor, and then rendered the face animations of a different figure entirely and composite the one face to the other actor?
not me but I have seen it done using Crazytalk