Using StarBright with Carra Pro 8.5
MMHouston
Posts: 3
I upgraded to 8.5 and now the Digital Carvers Guild StarBright plugin won't show stars - just a black background. i cand add the Scene Background effect and adjust the pqrameters just fine but every render has no stars.
I like the StarBright plugin because I render a lot of in-space scenes so I'm tempted to fall back to the earlier version of Carrara where it worked.
If anyone has had this issue and found how to solve it, I would like hear what the solution was.
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Dartanbeck has a wonderful Starry Skies product you can find free on his website
https://www.dartanbeck.com/gallery/downloads/starry-sky-for-carrara
just loaded up a basic scene in Carrara 8.5Pro
on a PC
no probs
Got it to work okay in 8.5 Pro as well !
Make sure you're using the correct version of StarBright plug-in. It must match your platform (win/mac) AND Carrara's version.
If it does not match, then download the correct one from the DigitalCarversGuild website ( http://digitalcarversguild.com/os.php )
Yeah... I didn't have any problems getting it working either. Thanks again Eric W!!! You ROCKS!!!
Currently rendering tons of promo images for Starry Sky Iray for DAZ Studio.
Once I get the main product finished and all of the promo and instructional work completed, I'll load it into Carrara and see what I can do about making a Carrara adaptation for it - should just load and work though, with a touch of Shader tweaks.
Either way, the original Starry Sky for Carrara works really well, I think. Especially when animating space scenes - I think that having 3D stars blows away anything we can get with projected images of space.
To help keep space from being completely black - as it is in Starry Sky for Carrara - unless we put it in a scene with an atmosphere or other sort of background scenery, the new one has a nebula prop with a few material presets (Iray) that I could easily transfer to Carrara shader presets if anyone's interested. There's also an add-on - Nebulous Wonders, which uses the Outer Space Globe*and/or the Iray Environment (HDRI) Dome as a variety of surrounding nebulosity effects, that turned out looking really cool!!!
There are presets for loading the various effects either to the Outer Space Globe or the HDRI Dome as well as presets that load Starry Sky Iray with the effects loaded into both the render environment dome as well as the Outer Space Globe, as well as presets that load the dome effect leaving the Outer Sapce Globe dark and refractive, for a really cool Dark Space effect, but with that touch of nebula effect peaking through the darkness.
The Current presets load the same effect onto the globe as the dome - when both are used for the effects, but using the individual Outer Space Globe and Render Dome presets, we can mix and match for a massive variety of nebulous looks - and the Outer Space Globe is within the Starry Sky Iray group and is fully animatable in all ways - as is the nebula prop, which also has a few subtle morph dials.
One of the Starry Sky Nebulous Wonders presets looking straight ahead through a 65mm camera - but the nebula surrounds the entire scene - looks Really Cool (I think)
The Outer Space Globe and Nebula Prop are part of Starry Sky Iray, whereas the Nebulosity Effects are the Nebulous Wonders Add on.
The original Starry Sky for Carrara was made when I was still brand new to Carrara - so I did a bit of over-thinking. For the brighter stars, I added lights to them - which is what gives them the starry glare effect when we load that. But when not using that effect, I actually delete all of those lights (look for stars that have a hierarchy - which is a parented light). For the glare effect, I select all of those star lights and reduce the distance effect of all the lights waaaaay down so they don't actually light anything.
Again, I was over-thinking it - but having them there if we need them, and deleting them if we don't is still much easier than Not having them, and then deciding that we need them. So I never saved it without the lights as an update. I'd just rather have them there and tweak or delete them than to not have them at all.
In both Iray and Carrara, there are a few things that I like about this system far beyond using images of space as a background or surround:
A - Parallax
Even if only slight, having a touch of parallax during space travel makes a Huge difference in the outcome of the animation! Even more so, Not having parallax sells itself as a stagnant image.
B - The Twinkle Effect
How long we let the render engine work for each frame determines how many of the smaller, most distant stars show up in the render. Low (fast) render settings will have much more twinkle during animations than High (Slow) render settings, but we always see at least a little bit of natural star twinkle. In reality star twinkle is cause by atmospheric quality as well as darker matter or other visual phenomenon from keeping the light from being in focus each time our eyes adjust - causing a twinkle. In our renders, it's caused from tiny spheres being far away from the camera, which causes render glitches that work in our favor - as they truly happen in very much the same sort of visual response - and was actually quite unexpected when I started working on the initial Carrara version years ago, but my beta tester and I liked it, so I made sure to keep a bunch of stars (Outer Star Field) toward the limits of the camera's ability to render minute detail.
(Early WIP of Starry Sky Iray)
C - Sharpness
That turned me into a Nebula/Galaxy hunter for a number of years. My wonderful antique RV-6 Criterion Dynascope is bored right now, but Rosie and I have been talking a lot lately about putting it back into full use again. For that I'll surely need to fasten my seat belt because deep sky observing is absolutely breathtaking - even through such a modest telescope.
(Image of Trifid Nebula from SPACE.COM)
D- Versatility
Having 3D stars in various groups works really nice for Sci-Fi rendering - especially animations. I wanted it to be easy to control - so there are various Star Fields, which are each a grouping of thousands of low-poly 3D stars that surround the scene fully - each being placed differently according to hand-made maps I made for replication distribution. So there individual star fields to control individually or all together in scale, translation and/or rotation - and that is entirely independent of background, backdrop, and any type of lighting we might have in the scene.
In Carrara, Volumetric Clouds and the fog primitive can be used to interact as nebulae or space dust or gasses or whatever.
Carrara's Volumetric Clouds - (below)
Carrara's Volumetric Clouds - (below)
Carrara's Fog Primitive - (below)
Carrara's Realistic Sky Atmosphere - (below)
In Iray, I really love how I can use the HRDI dome (often hidden from view) to light the ships, station or whatever scene I'm using, and just add stars to it - which also has a refractive outer space sphere that we can use to add darkness, and ghost lights we can add for hero definition - all individually so each scene can be considered independently - which is really nice!
Most of the animations I've done with it for watching a star ship travel through space, I leave the ship in place - rotating it a bit here and there for navigation, and animate Starry Sky around the ship - either moving it across the scene or, more often, just rotating it along the vertical axis.
Being 3D, we can also get clever and create our own inventive ways to represent FTL travel - how that might look. Star Trek style? Star Wars style? or maybe we have our own vision in mind - perhaps based on String Theory ideas? The sky is no longer a limit!!!
Here's the crazy User's Guide for Starry Sky for Carrara. I love this! At that time we still had The Art Zone, and Howie Farkes, Mike Moir, and others had a Wealth of cool notes about their products - suggestions for different ways to use the product. I totally loved that! I'm glad that I made mine into a PDF so it didn't get lost in the digital archives when The Art Zone went down!
For the page backgrounds I printed up a viewing star map - just like the ones I use when I observe, and whited out the center. I still love the effect!
This one has some cool shots of Starry Sky Iray in its early stages as well. Just FYI, it's basically Starry Sky for Carrara for Iray - which took a Lot of work. The original was made when I was pretty young at working with 3D, and this is a culmination of years of experience to make an Iray version of it.
Since taking these renders, I've had epiphany after epiphany as I optimized it to a point where it's a Really Cool Iray product - for those of you who go both ways! ;)
There are five different material zones for each star field of stars. Adjust one of the materials changes the appearance of many stars. In the original Starry Sky for Carrara, I took great care - spent many Many hours working out the distribution of these, so that changing one material zone's shader makes sense in the appearance of the sky. Those material zones have been translated to Iray surfaces:
Constellation and Extra-Solar Patterns Star Fields
The Inner and Outer Star Fields
So there are only Five material zones for all of the stars, but since they're each individual star fields, we can alter them individual if we want.
The placement of the stars took a l o n g time for me to get to what I thought looked right - being an avid galaxy hunter at the time of making it. The manual does a better job, I think, of explaining what it is and how it works. But in a nutshell - we load it and render.
Wow. I started a bit of a babble. After submitting it I thought it just looked like a great big chunk of words, so I started editing it. I guess I may have gotten a bit carried away?
DCG's StarBright works! It makes stars in many ways. PD Howler also has a really nifty star-making render that can also be animated. So we have plenty of cool options!
I Like them all!