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Forgot I had these too, thanks for the reminder! I think they would probably work great, just a matter of changing the texture from a Lux texture to an Octane material. I'll have to give it a spin :)
Yup just tested some of them, and they work just fine, as long as you switch the texture to an Octane material :)
You may have been just behind me on this one, but your way ahead of me on the next few questions :bug:
For anyone interested in seeing more Octane renders, but didn't look at the Sept. Carrara Challenge, I thought I'd go ahead and post these here. Both images were done via the Octane plugin for Carrara, and all setup was done in Carrara as well. The girl with the donut is Genesis - V5 with a lot of additional morphs (still not happy with the hair), The Guard is G2F - V6/G6 with a lot of additional morphs. The girl in the stockade is V4/G4 with - you guessed it a lot of additional morphs.
Both images are lit with an HDRI and one additional mesh light used as a rim light. Most materials were at least slightly modified to work well with Octane (many DS/Poser materials need a bit of help in Octane, just like they do in Carrara). Be sure to click on the images to see all the details - they are large renders.
I don't use Octane obviously, but perhaps some of the things that can be done in Carrara to make trans-mapped hair look good can be done in Octane.
Translate this to Octane as best you can. Highlight and Shininess will need help. I use either the bump map or Trans/Alpha map in the Highlight channel and adjust the intensity to suit the scene. I set the Shininess with a numeric slider to 5% or 6%. I use a Multiplier in the Translucency channel and use the color map in one slot and preferably the bump map in the other slot.
The next trick is really a lighting a trick, and I don't know what Octane can do. I usually back light or create a rim light to separate the hair from the background. I restrict the lighting to the hair model, the figure model and whatever clothing models that are conformed to the figure if I'm afraid of unwanted shadows. You can force a rim light and still have it look motivated by the scene as long as you're mindful of the other light sources. I find studio type scenes fairly easy to force rim lights, as people are used to seeing the lighting tricks studio photographers use in their portraits or other shots.
This render is a good example of forcing a rim light. The main light from the explosion, cast the shadow, but the rim lights that provide the highlights on the left and right of the figure suggest it is from the blast, but are actually spotlights restricted to the figure and her clothing and props.
It pains me to say this, but I'm starting to think Octane just won't be a workable solution for me, at least with my current rig.
It seems that I can have up to 2 V4/M4 fully clothed characters in a single room scene (as long as the room isn't too complexly furnished), but anything beyond that I'm having great difficulty making fit into the memory limitations.
I'm struggling to understand why this should be so, since I should have the exact same memory limitations for TheaRender gpu+cpu (2G NVidia gpu memory) yet for unknown reasons I have no trouble whatsoever doing much more complex scenes in Thea (like for example loading up a full house/apartment, with all rooms fully furnished, plus up to 4 fully clothed V4/M4 types... actually I might go even further but generally don't do a lot of scenes with more than 4 characters so I haven't tried it yet). I can't figure out why I have so much less stuff in an Octane scene before it seems to hit the wall. And several times now with any scene with 2 characters fully clothed in it, I've noticed that the time between loading up the Octane render from Carrara and the time it unfreezes my computer to become useable is anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes, which is doable but a real pain.
I might have to put Octane down til I've upgraded my rig to something with a much better Nvidia card/cards with more memory, but I was really hoping to use this now, and I'm hoping there's just something obvious I'm missing on why Thea GPU which should have the same limitations is able to cram so much more in the scene... any ideas? Any ideas on how to make my scenes less memory heavy? I'm pretty sure I can get nearly identical results even if I were to shrink my textures down in half as far as size, but I don't think that will save a ton of memory...
It definitely sounds like something is wrong, the loads times to Octane at max should ony be a few seconds (except with Howies scenes). The attached image shows my memory usage on the scene Iv've been working on for the challenge - it's only at about 1.4Gb (the blue) for the scene in Octane with 1 G2F (4K textures - just bump and diffuse), Stonemasons Enchanted Forest, the clothing, Hair, and of few other odds and ends (that are primarily using procedural textures). Also note the red bar - that is VRAM being consumed by OpenGL in Carrara and other applications I have open, I usually set OGL in Carrara to 256k texture limit to conserve VRAM.
Hi-res textures on V4/M4 (or Genesis) can take up a lot of VRAM, especially if there are separate textures for color, bump, specular, displacement, and transmission. I've had a single figure with all the texture maps take up close to 1Gb (no clothing). Some clothing can be very memory intensive as well. Reducing texture sizes can be very helpful for saving RAM.
I just happened to think of this, and what your experiencing with the hangs sounds somewhat familiar. With the scene in the attached image, the little flying drone/droid robot thingy I made in Carrara. I didn't UV map it, and just set it up with Carrara procedural shaders. When I would import it into the scene, things would get obviously slower, and act very unstable. While editing the shaders, Carrara/Octane would always hang or crash. I read somewhere quite a while ago that Octane can't use models without UV maps. So I began to wonder if no UV mapping on my model was the problem. I did a quick and dirty UV map for the model, imported it again (what seemed like the 100th import), and amazingly I had NO more crashes and working with it in the materials room was MUCH faster! Maybe some of the models you are using don't have UV maps? It's just a thought, but might be worth looking into. If you had a lot of objects without UV maps it could make Octane really slow (and unstable). I think that Carrara may be generating some UV mapping on the fly when the scene is exported to Octane, and the instability comes in when Carrara gets "interrupted and confused" when the user does something in Carrara during the UV map generation process while exporting to Octane. That just a wild guess, but it fits with what I was seeing.
I've got to blast now but I hope this may help a little.
Jon, actually it is almost certainly the texture sizes and not the geometry that is causing issues. It your characters have multiple 4k textures it can soon mount up. Halving the texture sizes to 2k won't make a lot of difference to your render quality unless you are doing close-ups (in which case you are unlikely to need multiple characters and detailed backgrounds) but each texture will only take up a quarter of the size (2k x 2k = 4MP, 4k x 4k = 16MP). I think it would be useful if Sighman could include some sort of setting that would automatically downsize large textures, I read the other day that another Octane plugin has this, but I don't know if that is a function of that particular plugin, or if there is something that Sighman could tap into to do this.
Thanks Philw and dustrider, I appreciate the input. Most of the texture sets I use are 3500x3500, but chopping that down to 2000x2000 will still help a bit. I see a lot of them range between 1mb to 1.5mb each, I'm also not seeing any reason to use specular maps in octane as it does fine with natural spec effect on it's own, so I'm just using bump maps and diffuse maps, but I will try cutting the textures down to 2000x2000 to see if that makes a dent in the memory size, hopefully that will help.
I'll also take a look at seeing if I can find any discrepancies in the uv mapping for anything in the scene, can't figure out why I'm getting this super long freeze-your-computer-so-you-can't-use-it load time for most of the more complex scenes, but that may be it if there's some wonky uv map going on somewhere.
This is sad news indeed. Hopefully the advice the others have offered will prove useful.
I am myself still getting to grips with it all, but I do think they are correct that texture sizes could be the issue. I agree with you that it will probably turn out that the only maps we need for characters are Diffuse and Bump, the other effects such as specular and sss should be derived from the shaders and the way they would interact naturally with the light. I even think you can get away without using bump mapping in some instances, mere skin roughness provided by a voronoi procedural noise could be enough.
I have yet to explore human figures, but I feel confident it should be doable without too much pain.
I have to admit I've pretty much fallen in love with Octane and cannot imagine going back. I spent around 3K building my current workstation of dual Xeon quad cores e5420 2.5ghz several years ago. But that was back when CPU rendering was the only real option. In the last few weeks I've purchased two nvidia Geforce Titan Black Superclocked cards. I'm expecting the second one to arrive tomorrow. Combined that's $2200 dollars. Then consider the price of Octane and the OR4C Plug-in. I expect to purchase the Daz Studio version too as well since I really need fully perfect and stable Genesis 1 and 2 support. So that tacks on an additional $650.
I'm dead broke. No one is getting anything for this holiday I've spent it all on myself darn it. Am I a bad person? Of course. But a happily bad person. I think this year I will give the gift of crafts. Hand made gifts are so much more meaningful, like ash trays made of clay. At least no one can return it for a refund on the day after.
I wanted to share some results from some of my experiments.
The first render is an interior WIP. I have yet to populate the outdoors. This is an Open House style layout designed to avoid walls blocking views. Most of the models were made by myself which is why most of them are rather crude. Octane has amazing lighting but without quality models it still won't look totally photo-real. Render kernel was PMC so indeed if the models had been of the right quality the output should have been convincing as a photo. This render cooked a long time to remove the noise from the bowls and the like, roughly 20 hours or so.
For comparison, I have included a version of this scene rendered long ago in Bryce 6. Admittedly, Bryce 7 could do a much better job if it than Bryce 6 did due to several new lighting tools added in Bryce 7. Still, I consider it a reasonable example of why Octane is so awesome. The Bryce render took over a day, maybe more, I cannot remember anymore. It was lit with fake GI to speed rendering.
At the time it seemed realistic to me. Compared to the Octane output however, there is no comparison.
Feedback is greatly appreciated. Thanks all for your time.
Rashad - great examples and comparison! I have to say that I would not go back after using Octane (even though I have spent a lot less on hardware!). I still use Carrara renders a lot for things like hair, but the availability of Octane as well really enhances Carrara for me. I have attached an example of a recent render - my latest attempt to refine skin SSS.
The next series of renders are testing Octane's instancing via Carrara's Surface replicator tool. All Carrara needs is a way to paint instances directly. In the meantime, I really love Carrara's instancing and it seems to work quite well with Octane. For me the backlit shots are quite realistic looking. Render Kernel for the outdoor scenes is Direct Light Ambient Occlusion. The Victoria models are placed mostly for a scaling reference. No work has been done on her at all.
The render times for the outdoor scenes was around 20 minutes for 3000s/px which was far more than needed. These images were acceptable at 300 s/px.
Bryce has instancing that is simplistic in a manner similar to Octane. This has proved very useful to me in Octane. For efficiency reason when working in Bryce I've developed a trick of building Eco-Tiles, patches of roughly 50 feet wide areas of grass and plants all condensed into a single mesh and instanced about the scene as a single mesh. The result is uber-complexity without much fuss except that the tiles models themselves are usually a couple million polygons and therefore cost a bit in ram. I need further experimentation to know if it is better to instance small things a billion times of to instance more complex meshes fewer times. Either way will get the ground covered.
For comparison, I have included a recent done in Bryce 7. The Bryce 7 render could have been much better. I faked the translucency with gradient mapped onto the leaves so that the ambient wouldn't be perfectly uniform and would hopefully appear more natural. IT is also lit with fake GI. To render the scene in Bryce with full GI, soft shadows, and translucent leaves would have taken the better part of a week and the results would still not have been truly photo realistic. The Octane renders by comparison, completed in less than 20 minutes each and include ambient occlusion, dof, translucency, and soft shadows. All said and done, Octane has just rocked my world and I love it. I feel like with Octane there is an equalizer. Now I can get the same level of quality from home that Pixar gets. That's very empowering.
Feedback is appreciated. Thanks all for your time.
continued from the previous post.
Thanks!!
Yes, I like the look on her legs and some other areas of folded skin.
Generally when working with OR4C, do you use Carrara shaders or do you work with Octane Materials? I'm currently unsure if it is efficient to use Carrara shaders for certain types of things. Maybe it is better to work directly from within Octane to get the best possible results out of the Octane engine in cases where SSS is involved.
My wireframe view is totally black because I use Octane Materials for pretty much everything. I find that I often end up with 2 versions of shaders, the Carrara shader and the Octane shader. I could skip the Carrara shaders and work only with Octane shaders, but if I then try to render the scene in Carrara I get gray nothing because none of the textures are defined in Carrara terms.
If for example I created a product I wanted to sell here at Daz that was intended for rendering with the OR4C, I'd be forced to include two versions of each material for the optimal output in each engine. Because even though the scene may be for sale intended for use with the OR4C plug, a Carrara scene still needs to be render-able in Carrara's native engine.
When I looked at Luxus for Carrara I get the feeling that there is only one shader per material. I assume (as I don't own it) that Luxus for Carrara only gives you Luxus materials to work with? Not sure. Looking for answers if anyone has the time.
With OR4C we have both materials, which is good but could be potentially costly down the road.
So many things to consider.
Fun fun.
Thanks!!
Yes, I like the look on her legs and some other areas of folded skin.
Generally when working with OR4C, do you use Carrara shaders or do you work with Octane Materials? I'm currently unsure if it is efficient to use Carrara shaders for certain types of things. Maybe it is better to work directly from within Octane to get the best possible results out of the Octane engine in cases where SSS is involved.
My wireframe view is totally black because I use Octane Materials for pretty much everything. I find that I often end up with 2 versions of shaders, the Carrara shader and the Octane shader. I could skip the Carrara shaders and work only with Octane shaders, but if I then try to render the scene in Carrara I get gray nothing because none of the textures are defined in Carrara terms.
If for example I created a product I wanted to sell here at Daz that was intended for rendering with the OR4C, I'd be forced to include two versions of each material for the optimal output in each engine. Because even though the scene may be for sale intended for use with the OR4C plug, a Carrara scene still needs to be render-able in Carrara's native engine.
When I looked at Luxus for Carrara I get the feeling that there is only one shader per material. I assume (as I don't own it) that Luxus for Carrara only gives you Luxus materials to work with? Not sure. Looking for answers if anyone has the time.
With OR4C we have both materials, which is good but could be potentially costly down the road.
So many things to consider.
Fun fun.
I think the auto-convert generally does a great job of converting Carrara's shaders into Octane materials, so if it looks OK, I tend to go with that rather than delving into Octane materials to make things compatible between Carrara and Octane renders (and avoid the issues you mentioned if you just set the Octane stuff and not the Carrara!).
But for skin I use an Octane material set to a Mix material between glossy which gives the surface shine and Diffuse which allows you to set SSS, so you need a mix of the two to get both effects. I have set up a few other human specific Octane materials for things like cornea and eye surface. If you have the Carrara shaders set up, you can get the Octane conversion as a starting point by using the menu command (or Shift-Ctrl-M).
Yes, I think that you can only define the one material with Luxus, so if you set up a specific Lux shader, that won't work in Carrara. To be honest, once you have Octane, why would you want to use Luxrender?!
Thanks EP, I will definitely give your suggestions a try .... actually, in the entry I'm working on for this months challenge I am using a specular map for the hair. The hair actually came with one, but it looks like it's just a gray scale version of the color/diffuse map. I think it does help in Octane as well as Carrara.
I'll have to revisit the V5 Ponytail again with some of your ideas to see how it does (I did have a rim light - which normally helps).
Hi Rashad!
Those are some great comparisons, but I've got to admit, the Bryce renders are extremely good, especially the first comparison. The vegetation in Octane is outstanding, I hope everyone looking at them knows that you need to click on the images to see the great quality of the renders! I really like the one of the flowers, the model/texture details plus your use of DOF make it feel like a photograph.
I'm 100% with you there! With Octane I'm doing things that would have simply been time prohibitive before, and probably would not have had quite the same quality. The renders speeds are truely awsome for unbiased rendering, but I think one thing that often gets over looked is just how much more efficient the work flow is when setting up lighting, shaders, and the scene in general. I typically leave the Octane Render View Port open while I'm setting everything up because the instant "final render" feedback is a huge boost to productivity (well, actually in my case it's a nearly instant feed back - I'm sure with your set up it is instant).
I deal with the materials/shaders much like Phil does. If they look great without conversion to Octane Materials, then I don't manually change them (keep in mind that they are always "converted" by the plugin when they are sent to Octane). If they need "help", then I convert them and edit the Octane materials and leave the Carrara materials alone (unless I want to render in Carrara as well, or set up a shader for use in either renderer). But as I become more familiar with Octane for Carrara, I find I am leaving fewer materials "untouched" so to speak (but that's also true when I use "external" content in Carrara's renderer), there almost always seems to be at least one minor little thing that I could make "better".
I'm looking forward to seeing more great renders
Great renders Rashad, and I'm seriously envious of your rig, it sounds absolutely amazing (and adding *another* Titan? wow)
One of the brilliant things about the way sighman has structured the Octane materials within the existing Carrara shaders is that we don't lose the Carrara shader at all, it just sits in the top channel, exactly as it was but superceded by the Octane material in the second level. What I've noticed is that if I render in Carrara, the renderer will see and use the original Carrara shader, but if I render in Octane it then the second level Octane material is what will render, so it means I don't have to have a separate Carrara shader and Octane shader for anything, I can have both in one shader. For me though, I do believe I'm going to have to assemble a library of low-resolution Octane shaders vs high resolution Octane shaders for closeups, just because of the memory limitations I'm running into. I seriously doubt that's something you would need to do though, with a rig as awesome as what you're currently running.
For most things, I've just been using the auto-convert function that's part of the plugin rather than making a whole new Octane shader, the convert seems to work pretty darned well already.
As far as Luxus goes, it also has it's own Luxus shaders that are added into the Carrara texture room, and it's a matter of choosing a Luxus shader and defining it. The main difference is that the Luxus shaders are separate animals from the Carrara shaders; unlike the Octane materials it doesn't preserve the original Carrara shaders so you would definitely have to keep a library of both Luxus and Carrara shaders IMO.
Just playing around with Octane and Genesis to answer a question in another thread. Nothing special, and just let it run to about 350 s/p (path tracing), but I thought someone might find it interesting. Just seeing what sort of system resources are used when rendering a Genesis ! and a Genesis 2 figure via the Octane plugin (4.2Gb).
I'm loving the results that everyone is getting. Patiently waiting for the OS X version.
Ok, not so patiently.
Took the plunge after several weeks messing with the demo and bought and activated Octane for Carrara.
Demo worked fine, but the real thing doesn't render at all, doesn't seem like it even detects anything in my scene. Not sure how to resolve this, I was better off with the demo version... :( Anyone else run into something similar? I've explored everything I can find in the settings, nothing seems to fix this, just get a gray screen that doesn't render. Oh, and lesser problem too, can't download the online material database without it freezing everything and I have to bring up windows taskbar to crash carrara to escape..
Solved my issue. Apparently the install/activation of the actual Octane plugin somehow unchecked my GPU from being used. Went into settings, then the devices tab and clicked the checkbox next to my GeForce card and now it's rendering ok :)
Glad you got your problems solved .... and congratulations on getting the full version!!! I hope you are able to enjoy Octane as much as I have, and that you find it a good addition to your 3D tool kt.
Here are couple more images.
The image the three girls was just done to experiment with Carrara, Octane, and Genesis a little more, so it's not a top quality render by any means. It has one Genesis 1, and 2 G2F figures, and took 6.2Gb of RAM while rendering in Octane (according to Task Manager), so I looks like a good rule of thumb might be that it will take a little over 2Gb of system RAM per figure. But, the image only took about 1.7Gb a video ram to render in Octane.
Just to see if Carrara had held on to a few items in RAM of the clothing and hair I had tried, but didn’t use, I re-loaded the .car file from the image above. Wow! it only took 2.6Gb of RAM before starting the ORVP (Octane Render View Port). After Starting the ORVP the RAM usage jumped up to 4.8Gb - almost a full 2Gb less than before! I know Carrara has a habit of not clearing everything from RAM, but this shows that with Genesis it may be fairly important to save, close Carrara, then reopen to avoid wasting RAM.
The other image was done just playing around with volumetric lighting effects in Octane. I liked the way it turned out so I thought I'd post it. I used a specular Octane material with scattering enabled on a cube primitive that encased the scene (except for the camera) and the Octane sun light for lighting (and one small low intensity mesh light for fill lighting).
Dust Rider,
Thank you so much for the kind remarks about my Bryce renders!!! I hope soon to have much more to show.
Phil,
Good question. I had never used LuxRender before I got into Octane. I love everything about Octane, no doubt. But LuxRender is free. So as much as I do love Octane, I acknowledge that many people (myself included truth be told) cannot afford the things needed to run Octane. I will be in serious debt for a while, not that I regret it (I'd buy 5 more gtx titan blacks if I could afford it). For people like that Blender's Cycles and LuxRender are the only real options.
I played around with LuxRender for the first time and was surprised how good it really is. WOW. IT is nothing to be ignored. And because it is written now on OpenCL, and it has some adoption among CG artists, I will be interested to see how much it grows.
I think the lack of an interface is the biggest issue for Lux. That and the fact that there is no way to use the standalone for anything, you almost certainly need a plug-in even to import a mesh. Unless I missed something, I don't see the option to import a obj directly into standalone. Major issue for sure. I'm sure I'm just clueless and a reasonable solution already exists.
Love Octane though. I just want to be able to share with as many people as possible and the open CL platform is impossible to ignore.
Edit:
Phil, thanks for answering my previous inquiry. I forgot to tell you that I too used a Mix Material for the leaves in my previous renders, one Diffuse (for the Transmission) and one Glossy. I am not surprised you decided to use Octane Materials instead of Carrara materials for something involving SSS with human skin, because I think that is probably the best way to fully unlock what Octane can do with these types of materials.
I forgot to mention this earlier, but for the DS plugin you would only need to puchase the plugin. You only need to purchase the standalone once, unless you plan on running two instances of Octane. This makes getting second (or third) plugin much more affordable than the initial purchase.
A little tip for those running Nvidia titan / Titan Black:
In the Nvidia control panel, 3d settings. Switch double precision to none.
I did this on my titan black and the base clock speed went from 920Mhz to 1045Mhz and ran cooler.!!!! A nice 10% speed boost.
Double precision is for allowing the Titan to perform double precision floating point calculations, but Octane only operates single precision floating point.
Cheers,
S.K.
I forgot to mention this earlier, but for the DS plugin you would only need to puchase the plugin. You only need to purchase the standalone once, unless you plan on running two instances of Octane. This makes getting second (or third) plugin much more affordable than the initial purchase.
I knew about this. Thanks for the reminder. I probably stated that phrase incorrectly. When I quoted the $650 it was with a new power supply to run the titan blacks, plus the roughly $100 more for the Studio plug-in.
Initially I had a 700 watt power supply. I decided to get a titan black and upgraded to a 100watt device which cost me about $250 only a couple of weeks ago. After seeing how awesome Octane is with rendering speeds I decided on a second titan black, and therefore I already find myself already in need of a more powerful power supply so I just bought a new one at 1350 watts for $350.
If anyone needs a very very nearly brand new 1000watt power supply I've got one for cheap. I'll part with it for $100. Any takers? Send me a PM.
Hmm it just occurred to me that my offer to sell something not sold by Daz3d might be against TOS. I don't see anything specific that references this type of casual offer but just in case, I am not going to be surprised if my post is edited. My apologies to the moderators ahead of time if I offend.
Okay so...
Right now I have a scene that is heavy in replication. Carrara seems slow as all heck to navigate. The screen is so unresponsive that I cannot even drag items by the cursors to move around the scene, I have to enter all values manually in the Motion tab. I have hidden everything I can from 3d view and still no luck. Is this to be expected, or does running OR4C with complex scenes lead to this slow down? Any feedback is greatly appreciated.
Do you have a lot of trees in your scene? If you do you should grab the latest test build and turn off high res trees in the octane preferences. In Carrara are you running with textures enabled in the assembly room? If you are try switching to Gouraud shading mode. If you are using replicators switch the display style of the replicator to bounding boxes. Finally, do things speed up if you close the ORVP?