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There haven't been a lot of software updates to buy over the last 6 months, so I saved and got a Titan X. Did little else other than install it unfortunately... no apparent different just doing plain old Windows things, but my huge stereoscopic Vegas projects weren't crashing any more which was good (aha... so it WAS a VRAM issue after all!) and I tried briefly IRay, the Octane demo and IClone's Indigo again. What I noticed was these all seemed more viable as a rendering method now . Nothing instantaneous... no magic puff... its done. But it was rendering at least as fast as I think Carrara would do, perhaps even a little faster. It struck me as "interesting".
I have not bought into the photo realism stuff at all, and so agree with Headwax on that point. Actually a lot of the unbiased rendered I find particularly unappealing compared to the Carrara renders... BUT I am starting to rethink my strategy in that direction.
I don't know how to use Iray correctly or LuxCore either, but I'm realizing that I could and probably should at this point, for reasons Dart already mentioned, and because its another tool that has its place. And while I prefer to work in Carrara, running out of memory at 4Gig and its lack of speed when dealing with multiple figures in different generations... well those are real problems I need solutions for.
I picked up some Iray "things" on sale and been watching SickleYield's vids on YouTube, and ramping up for a serious push on LuxCore too. Lets see what happens
- Don
Alas, I'm a Mac user, and there are no high end Nvidia options for Macs. Which means we're stuck with CPU-only renders. I tried to do an Iray "God rays" render on my "vertigo" scene, and I cancelled it when it only reached 12% after a week!
Wendy (and anyone else who is interested), You do know that you can export an HDRI spherical map directly from Octane? I think this may be in a different format than that usable by Carrara (and maybe Daz Studio), but a quick trip to Photoshop to change from an EXR to HDR format (I think I got that right) sorts that out.
Dart - I thought yout examples were interesting but the backgrounds looked rather washed out. If Daz Studio allows you to change the gamma of a background environment inage, you should try using that to get more contrast into the background.
Here's a scene I've made to test the render that took all day yesterday, which is only seen in the background - those bright buidings and sky.
Hmm, well, the sky is your light, if you go indoors you still need light at least if you don't have any windows.
Sure, IRAY is good at "unbiased" rendering (there is no such thing as unbiased rendering to be honest, all renderers compromise), but you can get close with Carrara also with an HDRI background, turn on indirect lighting, sky lighting and ambient occlusion, and it's pretty fast also (full indirect lighting will be a bit slow).
I'm still not knowing enough about getting just the right settings in Iray. For Carrara either, for that matter. I've always created lighting designs for all of my stages, and then each of my main characters are saved with a subtle highlighting rig to help them 'pop' a bit.
This is a test HDRI that I've just made, trying to get this stuff into my head.
For this test, I'm just using the hdri at default illumination and my characters are just plopped in there with nothing except for their light rig and cameras. I'm amazed at the results... I really like this image, so I wanted to put it up before any post work.
EDIT: This render was done in Carrara, using an HDR radiance image for the scene background and the scene lighting, using Global Illumination and Indirect Lighting. The HDR was made to be a somewhat dark setting with low-watt room lighting and panels and displays being the only other illumination. So I set it up in Carrara using the shaders to talk to indirect lighting engine, and let that Radiance image format know exactly where that light is coming from. What a fun experiment this has been so far!
In DS, I'm forgeting how to link lights. Otherwise, if I use IBL and scene lights together (in Iray) the scne lights also brighten the image background. So I need some practice in DS still... but I have to say that Iray totally rocks on my workstation. I don't have a compatible graphics card, so I'm just using my cpu, which has eight 3.1GHz cores, and it just rocks with Iray so far as I've seen so far.
I've been experimenting making HDR images for IBL.
Using Carrara as my HDR photo studio, I've been tinkering with different ways to mess with the Global and Indirect lighting, mainly to have something of an atmosphere for Iray. Carrara has the capability to create absolutely massive scenes and then render them to wonderful things - something I have no clue how to do in DS yet, except this way. This has been taking an awful lot of time. 8,000 x 4,000 is a time-consuming render. I've heard many folks say that even this is pretty low resolution for backgrounds, but for what I've doing it works just fine. How fun. Here is an image taken from the actual thread over in the DS dicussion on this. This is my first successfully made HDR radiance image. It's really cool how that format works, especially when used for IBL!
The image above has had propeller blur and lens flares added in Howler so it didn't look so static. Still working on how to get materials to glow in DS. I've been using the ambient channel to try, but it doesn't really Glow like I can with Carrara.
Usually HDRIs don't have enough light range. So if you turn up the illumination settings, all the lights get blown out. This is even harder with non-hdr-pictures for illuminating the scene.
So for just a quick test I converted from your Badlands product the background picture to HDRI and enhanced the sun light range just a bit to keep the darkish mood. This way you get enough light for the hdri background and the foreground as well.
Render time was about 3 minutes (in DS, not Carrara).
If you watch the SickleYield vid on YouTube it discusses how to convert regular DS materials to IRay.
When you do that additional shader channels become available, and you can set some materials to Emissive... which may help with what you're going for? Anyway... FYI
- Don
You have some great ideas there Dart! Right after Iray came out, someone made some nice sky/cloud HDR's in Vue that work quite well. Nice to see that with a little tweaking, we can get good "fake" HDR's with Carrara!
I've been playing with Iray quite a bit ..... well I haven't had a lot of time this fall, but using it when time allowed. It's not quite as fast as Octane, and quite a bit mor CPU intensive in GPU only mode than Octane (it consumes two full CPU threads when rendering in GPU only - Octane doesn't harcly even touch the CPU while rendering), But for the price, it's pretty hard to beat for "PBR" rendering. There are of course things you can do in Carrara that Iray doesn't do, but it's still a great tool to have in the tool box!
Like using any render engine, I end up investing quite a bit of time editing shaders to get everything looking like I want. The plus with Iray in DS is that the shader editing can be a bit faster than in Carrara. DS has also gotten a lot more stable on my system, and is about the same as Carrara for stability now. Some things are easier in DS, some are easier in Carrara. I decided it was time to learn DS a bit better, and so far I like it pretty well, but I do miss having the modeling room for minor tweaks (I find d-formers in DS to be a bit cumbersome).
Below are a few of my better images from Iray (the "Morning Coffee" image is probably my best one). Be sure to zoom to full resolution - reduced they don't look nearly as good
Morning Coffee
Are We There Yet?
Palace Guard
May the Force .......
thats a spiffing good morning coffee image!
Yeah... agreed!
Wow, aspin... that's pretty cool! I've never made an HDR from a single image, though I know I can.
Don, Thanks! I didn't realize SY had videos up... subscribing to that channel!
I must admit, I have not been at all inspired to switch to PBR. I'm only doing it now to figure out how it works since I have DS Pro anyways - might as well check it out. It's pretty sweet how incredibly easy it is to operate which, I suppose, is the actual magic behind it. No complicated light setups. But after working in DS a bit more I've discovered that it just doesn't handle nearly as much content (total polygon count) before bogging right down - at least on lower-end systems. Carrara just rocks right through. If it starts to bog down, I just set some stuff to not show up in 3D View, but still render, and it speeds right back up.
On that note, if all I need to do is to shoot a render of something, DS/Iray is really nice. But I still find it easier in Carrara. I blame most of this on my experience - totally new to DS, been having a blast in Carrara for years now. I'm still messing with DS. It has impressed me enough that I feel it deserves some study.
When it come to me having fun in Carrara, I really enjoy not using HDRI or GI/IL, since I'm always focussed on getting those frames rendered ASAP because there's a lot of 'em. I love the control that I get with my custom lighting solutions.
EnvironKits - I've set up the lighting to be more user-friendly in these kits as opposed to making them fast. For example, they have soft shadows turned on on the Sun Light - I never use soft shadows unless the shot absolutely demands it. Most of my animations just don't need it. I'll change the light angles to the point where softness is unneccessary. Also in order to achieve softness in the shadows of the artificial GI light rig, I have 88 lights in there, where I use much, much less for my own stuff.
On that note, can you save 32 bit images in Carrara? I think I've asked before and I think the answer was no, but thought I'd ask again. ;)
Test to see if I've figured out how to link to a single post: Cripemans Tutorial Video Index
EDIT: Bummer. It just doesn't work, does it? :(
no it did not work
Is that a forum post?
Click on the time stamp the one over there and open in new tab
<<<<<---------
Under the Avatar and then select the URL from the address bar up there ^ ^ the bit where it says www.daz3d.com forums etc and then use the Rich Text Editor Tools to add it to your Post.
Like this http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/969140/#Comment_969140
If that was true, DAZ would make the export to HDR long time ago, would be easy for them and would shut up folks like me (who is requesting it from the beginning) once for all...
I believe they simply cannot do it, it would take a lots of effort and it would not be flashy feture enough for any upgrade, every other software does it, including big old dinosaur Bryce
Is that a forum post?
Click on the time stamp the one over there Under the Avatar
<<<<<---------
and then select the URL from the address bar up there ^ ^ the bit where it says www.daz3d.com forums etc and then use the Rich Text Editor Tools to add it to your Post.
Like this http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/969140/#Comment_969140
Thank you SO much, chohole! It works! Cripemans Tutorial Video Index
Yesterday I've gone through the entirety of the ►►► Carrara Information Manual ◄◄◄ and fixed all of the links.
I hope that it's all working properly now - that was a lot of work! LOL But not as bad as I'd thought it would be. Turns out that the original links to posts within a thread use the same post number information as the new system, so I only had to reformat the link information. For example, my Dynamic Hair article within that thread had a link address of "www.daz3d.com/forums/viewreply/235934/" so I had to go in and change that link code to "http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/235934/#Comment_235934"; and it works. So I wrote "http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/xxx/#Comment_"; to a notepad page and left that text selected so that I could quickly go to it and copy it, then go to edit the link, select everything before the post target number, and paste. Then remove the "/" at the end, copy the number, and paste that where I have "xxx" in my "http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/xxx/#Comment_" thingy. Probably sounds worse than it is, but it still took me most of the day to fix! :|
There are a lot of links in there, however, so if anyone finds links that don't work properly, please just let me know.
Again, Chohole... thank you SO much for all of the hand-holding, help, and just going above and beyond to research ways for me to fix this thing. You are truly an amazing, wonderful person and we are all very fortunate to have you here! Love and appreciation from Dartanbeck! :)
Aw Shucks
you're very welcome, glad to help.