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Carrara and Luxcorerender ?

Omega ManOmega Man Posts: 78
in Carrara Discussion

Hello, I once bought Carrara 8.5 at a sale price but did nothing with it.  Could someone please explain to me what the current status is with Luxrender.  I understand Luxrender is now called Luxcorerender and works for Blender only.  If I buy the plugin Luxus for Carrara, will it work with Carrara for the very latest version of Luxcorerender ?  Have I missed the boat entirely and the workflow all outdated anyway (did everyone turn to Octane) ?

As I look for learning resources, sorry for name dropping, but two user names which pop up over and over again are Dartanbeck and Joe Pingleton.  Are these the last two main users left of Carrara !?  smiley

Thanks for any advice.
 

Comments

  • chickenmanchickenman Posts: 1,202

    see this thread for Luxcore  https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/3790911/#Comment_3790911

    luxus still works from what I understand.

  • Bunyip02Bunyip02 Posts: 8,605

    Just a few threads worth checking out, lots more to look through as well:-

    https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/15970/carrara-information-manual/p1

    https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/45254/learning-tips-and-tricks-from-prior-carrara-challenge-wip-threads#latest

    https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/284446/carrara-challenge-43-ᴥ-the-horror-ᴥ#latest

    https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/281516/sidestufffromotherside-01-halloween-hair-day/p1

    https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/158646/carrara-non-photo-realistic-works/p1

    https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/137451/post-your-renders-let-s-rock-2018#latest

    https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/235511/wacky-modeling-in-carrara#latest

  • Omega ManOmega Man Posts: 78

    I can see people are using Carrara with Octane, but I have confused myself over GPU options for Carrara.  I understand there may have been name changes, but is it true that Carrara currently has three GPU options ?


    1) Luxus for Carrara from the Daz shop, then find and download Luxrender 1.6
    2) Octane from Otoy

    3) Confusion - I saw somewhere a GPU standalone "something" which did not require Luxus for Carrara, and there was a also a Joe Pingleton demo which I am now unable to locate on Youtube.  What was that one please ?  The demo looked really good, so is it worth considering this compared to Octane ?

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,567

    Joe did some nice demos for LuxusCore for LUXcore. Not sure if he did others. Probably.

    Did it have a realtime feedback render window in the Assemble Room working view? If so, it was likely LUXcore.

    The first response (above) leads to the LuxusCore discussion in this forum. From within that thread, here's a quote from chickenman taking you directly to where you can get the plugin (free):

    chickenman said:

    Here is the link to the Luxcore that never times out it is windows only.

    This is not LUXRender but LUXCore they are different and currently LUX Core works but your results will very.

    Looking back through this thread to see what has been achieved with it and the settings used maybe helpfull not to mention the link to CarraraCafe document.

    https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/1722001/#Comment_1722001

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,567

    PBR takes a bit of getting used to in Carrara. New learning curve for shaders. Worth it? If PBR is what you need, I'd say it's probably very worth it.

    That LuxusCore discussion thread has a lot of Q&A regarding shaders and lighting, and the Unofficial LuxusCore Manual at Carrara Cafe is a nice read.

    Here's the first demo video from the author of the plugin, SphericLabs

  • Omega ManOmega Man Posts: 78

    Thank you so much Dartanbeck, that helps greatly.  At some stage this year I will face the crossroads of whether to tool up with CPU and hope to speed Carrara's built in renderer for photoreal, or go into Octane and invest in a decent GPU.  One issue is Octane's licensing not totally clear (many questions on their website).  I know there is a renderer called Reality for Poser - was there ever a prototype for Carrara, or did I confuse myself again ?  Deep down, the road is looking like Octane.

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,567

    I'm not much of a Daz Studio buff, so I might be wrong, but I think that Reality was for Luxrender, wasn't it?

    I own Luxus for Carrara, and think it's pretty cool. But I have a better CPU than GPU, and have really come to love setting up shaders for the default Carrara Photorealistic render engine. That's not to say that I'm not going to really get into Luxus for Carrara and the newer LuxusCore for Carrara in th future.

    When I was first getting into rendering in 3D and Carrara, I was a foreman of custom stonework for a large (for this area) landscaping firm.

    My first trainee (whom has now taken my place) was an art major and was in the process of building a new gaming computer. Curious, I asked him how difficult it is to build ones own PC, so he guided through the process. I must say... it's really fun and gratifying!

    The Carrara machine I have now is (finally, after six years of running wide open for days on end) on its death bed, but after I built it, I wrote an article about it in my ►►► Carrara Information Manual ◄◄◄

    ► How to Build Your Own Carrara Workstation

    Technology has really grown since I built that one six years ago. Now we can buy laptop computers with an 8th generation i7 CPU with six cores that hyperthread to 12 logical cores, 16GB or more RAM, and a GTX 1060 for not much more than $1,000

    However, for that same ~$1,000, I've found that I can build a new AMD tower PC with a Ryzen 8 core CPU, which hyperthreads to 16 logical cores (hyperthreading in both occasions takes place on the motherboard chipset/cpu, we don't have to ask it to) with 32GB RAM (upgradable to 64) and a GTX 1060 GPU - and that estimated figure includes new harddrives and Windows 10 Home 64 bit

    Both of the above options are more than capable of using either PBR or Carrara's CPU-using render engines - even both. But being unexperienced with GPU rendering, I'm not sure how well the GTX 1060 performs for that sort of thing - but I do know that it'll do a helluva lot better than anything I've owned so far.

  • Omega ManOmega Man Posts: 78

    I built my machine a few years ago I7 3930K, if I remember correctly 6 cores which goes to 12 logical.  It felt like some sort of rite-of-passage. smiley  I did see some of your PC build article.  One part which caught my eye was when you mentioned AMD getting the CPU and GPU to talk to each other as if they were all potentially hundreds of CPU rendering cores on the same machine, but I'm not sure how that all panned out (if that was the case it would be pretty much a no brainer for me).

    My Carrara 5 book arrived from Amazon today, so with Phil's dvds I'll hunker down and explore further (I do wish I had Phil's rendering title though).  laugh

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,567

    Yeah, the Realism Rendering course does a great job of converting much of Jeremy Birn's "Digital Lighting and Rendering" book into Carrara terms, along with Phil's wonderful way of digging deeper and showing a lot of other things along the way. maybe you'll find it on Amazon. 

    Your machine sounds like it'll do Carrara nicely!

  • makmamakma Posts: 54

    There is new LuxCoreRender 2.1 available. Is it Carrara ready?

    https://github.com/LuxCoreRender/LuxCore/releases/tag/luxcorerender_v2.1

     

  • 3drendero3drendero Posts: 2,024
    Only indirectly via the old Luxus plugin, the saving the scene in Luxrender 1.6 and load up in Luxcorerender 2.1. Give it a try, have not tried myself. Sphericlabs has not active in the Forum for over 1 year, looks like the chance of updates to Luxus for Carrara is small.
  • Omega ManOmega Man Posts: 78
    3drendero said:
    Only indirectly via the old Luxus plugin, the saving the scene in Luxrender 1.6 and load up in Luxcorerender 2.1. Give it a try, have not tried myself. Sphericlabs has not active in the Forum for over 1 year, looks like the chance of updates to Luxus for Carrara is small.

    That is an interesting solution.  I recently made an enquiry to Otoy about a permanent license of Octane for Carrara via the dongle, to keep everything offline, but apparently the dongle needs updating every three to four months which I think defeats the objective, so it seems worth looking at Luxus carefully.

    Another thing is Grid for Carrara - does anyone use that ?  What does it do that Carrara by itself does not ?

    https://www.daz3d.com/grid-for-carrara

  • Omega ManOmega Man Posts: 78

    I'm finally getting somewhere in understanding the different versions, and managed to find the Joe Pingleton video which impressed me so much.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehnHjI0iIgk&feature=youtu.be

    To simplify things, I guess my real question would be if anyone is still using LuxusCore in 2019 and do you find still find it stable ?

    smiley

  • 3drendero3drendero Posts: 2,024
    I assume that luxuscore is missing a lot of functions, while Octane is feature complete, stable and supported. Still depends on your goal, simple scenes with featured that luxuscore has or complex production class scenes that need Octane. Try them both, there should be a demo for Octane if you have a modern Nvidia gpu.
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