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Thanks a lot for the information, I will test it out when I'm back home.
i am already very impressed about the quality and render time, images that took abou 4 - 8 hours are finished in about 10 mins now, well it still haven't rendered the hair.
but I want to ask, do I need to install all updates or just the latest version of the plugin and octane?
my second question is, I saw that there is some kind of rendering mode called beauty, is there also some other mode available there or will be?
best regards
chris
Just to add this,
thats why I asked if I need to install all updates or just the newest as I don't have that octane hair part in the effects tab.
You can get the latest version here:
http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=79&t=47064&sid=2f88273d7193d2d328497d60cccc86d1
You only need to install the latest version.
The "Beauty" pass is the full image. You can also define various other render passes, defined under the Render Passes section of the Settings Window, so that you could for example generate separate images for direct and indirect lighting, or separate reflections and refractions, and then balance them in a compositor or Photoshop.
my current version is 2.23 for stand alone and 2.17 for the carrara plugin, this was from the website so i think i need to update.
Thank you very much for the link Phil
i always get an error now when i want to render in octane mhhhh very strange.
But just to get it right, could someone maybe make a video tutorial for how to set up the octane hair materials and so for me?
Is it just with hair that you are getting the error? Have you tried just loading and rendering a dynamic hair without changing the texture - the default conversion is OK, just not great. It may help to isolate where the issue is.
in the beginning i have just copied the carrara top shader for the hair and paste it into the octane shader after making the check in this octane hair shader so that it will be the same, not sure if that's ok or not but after carrara got the error the second time and crashed i leaved the hair like it was before so that the figures will have bold hair like yesterday, normally it should work but than i got the same error and carrara crashed, maybe something changed now with the Carrara Hair shader since the update.
Another issue, i have loaded stoney creek now just to see how octane will handle it, set it to full hd and used high settings, now i got an error that the scene is to complex to load in octane.
I will start with a simple scene now
i still have the issue with the black eyes, i don't know but maybe it's something that i have no alpha on the eyes reflection.
I am still not sure about how to set the eyes reflections but i think that isn't the only problem as the eyes now was fully white, so i have delelted the eyes reflections and the iris now is dark but normally it should be green color mmhhhhh
this is the scene now without reflection shader, i have forgotten to change the rings on the right hand as they are a bit out of the fingers and i think i should also change the materials of the jewelry to get it more shiny and a bit golden
Three things.
1. Make certain you are working with PMC Kernel. By default Octane loads with Direct Light enableds, this is biased. Use Pathtracing or PMC (Populated Monte Carlo). PMC is prefered because it is ususally much faster to produce a clean image compared to Pathtracing alone.
2. The Render Kernel for Direct Light has specular depth set to a very low value, maybe 8 or so, and it could well lead to the black eyes as the transparency of the cornea might be blocked by the low ray depth setting. You will notice that with PMC the default specular depth is 24 producing much cleaner transparencies. If you decide to work with Direct Light you will need to raise the specular depth setting in order to clear up transparent objects. But this step tends to remoive some bias which increases rendering time slightly.
3. The physical reality of Octane makes transparent materials tricky. Depending on the angle of view, sometimes completely transparent surfaces can appear dark. Maybe this is something we can explore together as a team in this thread; how to get the best results from transparent specular objects. I would suggest using something like a calm water material for the corneas and tear.
Memory
Octane cannot handle the leaves of Carrara trees. Octane only allows one generation of instances, not multiple. Carrara natively treates the leaves on trees as instances propogated on the surface of the branches keeping memory low. Carrara native then makes second generation instaces of the trees themselves keeping memory as mow as possible. But this trick breaks down completely with Octane. To remain compatible with so many different apps opinions on how to implement inistancing, Octane has no option but to treat each leaf as real geometry and the entire tree itself becomes a single geometric instance increasing the momery needed for a single tree by many factors. Needless to say, the workflow for rendering with Octane differs greatly from the workflow of rendering with Carrara native. Typically I find it best to use trees that do not rely on instancing to place the leaves onto the branches, such as third party plants modeeld by myself or by using Carraa trees that have been exported and re-imported as static meshes. There is also the option under Effects I believe that allows one to Make the trees "flattened" for Octane rendering. but I havent put this to much use because I tend to start off with fully custome modeled trees as static OBJs so I'm not sure how well it works but you should give it a try.
Hopefully you have at least a 4gb card. If Howies scene takes 2gb in Carrara native, it will take at least that much in Octane but it could take even more since Octane cannot use the instanced leaves trick. This is why most people are trying to go for the 6gb card or more. I should also add that the memory for OR4C is within the Carrara paging file, so if Carrara itself uses 2gb for this scene it will appear as 4gb in the task manager due to the activity of the OR4C.
I don't know if I will be able to afford it as thats a bunch of money (I can nearly get a 19" monitor tablet for that price). The renders look great. The question is if you wanted to do print resolution images. I get the impression this does things at more screen resolution, even 1080p monitor resolution isnt much on the printing side of things. Going higher rez is that based on your graphics card memory? I only have a 2 Gig card. Or is that just for textures and that it can produce larger images?
Now i have used octane shader for cornea and eye surface/reflection but i am still not that happy with it as the eyes still looks dark.
anyway, it's worth it's money.
I have just 2x Point of View GeForce GTS560ti Ultra Charged Edition with 2GB each card, CPU is i7 920 and 9GB DDR3 RAM, so not bad at all i think.
With the latest versions of Ocatne (2.x), you have the option to use out of core textures (meaning the texture data can be held in system RAM), leaving more room for geometry, etc. on your card. It's hard to say for sure, but with my old system, with 3Gb of video RAM, before out of core textures, I usually rendered my images at around 3,000 x 3,600, so I would think you should be OK with you 2Gb card. I just did a quick test, and an image rendered at 3,000 x 4,000 consumed about 241Mb of Video RAM. I think you should be OK if your scenes aren't overly complex or have a lot of "heavy" geometry.
Try using Fake Shadows on the Eye Reflection material and the Cornea (it is an option in the Specualr material), this should help a lot with the darker eyes.
I don't know if this will help, but attached are the settings used for eye reflection and cornea in the attached example
Dustrider is using a different approach to me - he is using a Glossy material at very low Opacity, while I am using a Specular material. Whatever works for you!
For cornea and reflection I also have used a speculation map, well on cornea was glossy.
after searching google I found out that I am not the only one having problems with that.
but I think it's very difficult as I need to use a different shader for those things and settings are different than normal Carrara render, if octane could use the default Carrara settings or convert them it would be much easier
http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=79&t=44489
i used These settings, but does anybody know what else can affect the eyes in the octane renderer?
The sample image I have used have no special light or background, just the normal Carrara empty scene, loaded my figure and rendered.
another interesting thing I found out was if I just add some, maybe sunlight and as brighter the light is as shiny get the skin like a wet look
The settings in the link are a good start, but I would check the smooth and Fake Shadows boxes, the latter will make the eyes noticably brighter. Refraction index of 1.8 looks a bit high to me, I tend to use from 1.33 to 1.5 but it is easy to play and see which you like.
Other things that will affect how the eyes look - well, I can think of two key things. First, there is a parameter called something like Cornea Bulge in most figures, turn this up to 1.0 (100%), the default cornea is much flatter than real life, so the reflections don't look right. Which brings us to the second point, any highlights in the eyes are reflections, so you need to give them something to reflect! The default Octane scene is just surrounded by white (or light grey), and so you won't get good hightlights in the eyes, in fact they may well look a bit milky as they are reflecting a uniform light. This is where HDRIs are very useful - instant environment! And you can easily adjust the brightness and the rotation of the HDRI map in Octane to give the lighting, background and highlights that you require. If everything looks good except you don't have good highlights in the eyes and they are looking a bit lifeless, think about placing a small shape which either is white or has a low emission to give the eyes something to reflect.
Very interesting thoughts about the reflections and background, I will test it with an hdri today and see what happens, I will also play with the highlights and reflections generally in the eyes.
Do you believe that your bright eyes will work with this? Well, maybe not on g2. But the eye settings before was your recommended setting from realism rendering.
Are you planing to make a tutorial for octane in Carrara too?
The Bright Eyes product essentially faked reflections in the eyes, and so was a reliable way to get nice reflections, but they do not react the same as a true reflection, particularly in animations. As Octane is a physically correct renderer, I think the better solution is to use real reflections in the eyes rather than trying to fake it.
Yes, I have considered doing training for Octane Render for Carrara, but as the product is still formally in beta, there could be other changes (although I suspect nothing too major). I am not sure how many users there are, but it is certainly under consideration.
let me know if you decided to do it and than when it is available as i will definitely buy that! :)
looking back to my Carrara history, nearly everything i know and have learned was from your trainings videos and also from this Community with the help of all the great artists here, why i also want to say thank you all for all the help! :)
And you was right Phil about the HDRI, i used an HDRI Background image now and it worked perfectly but maybe i need to turn down the shine a bit as it affects it a lot.
There is another issue i've found out that sometimes Octane can't display normal hair like it is as i got black stripes on the character.
The first i thought it's an issue of the textures and i took a look at the mapping and changed it a bit but it still was there.
Than i took a closer look to the thing and thought it looks a bit like it could be a part of the hair, so i decided to render it without hair and well, the black stripes was gone.
In the images you will see what i mean with the black things and also the render with an HDRI, the same settings like the images i've uploaded, nothing changed, just an empty new scene and loaded my figure with the settings of realism rendering and some adjustments + a HDRI image.
The difference is huge compared to the results i would get out of just a normal Carrara render.
As you try different HDRI maps you will see how much difference they make to the scene, they can really establish the mood, whether inside or outside. This is looking good, as you say you need to reduce the shine on the skin, but otherwise it is looking great!
these are with reduced shine and one is with an outside hdri image
You are learning quickly and getting some great results - and she does have very seductive eyes!
OK new motherboard and my shader live database has vanished, fortunaltely I saved all of the textures in my shaders but too bad if new ones are added.
I reinstalled it
I'm planning to step into Octane hopefully next month and just wanted to check a few things. This is the extent of my understanding at this point and a few questions:
* Does it create Alpha Channels, or more preferably the Index Channel that Carrara multi-pass can create (which can be used to select or create mask each individual object)
* I understand it can't do terrain shaders (or is it terrain objects, or both?) but you can bake the textures and I guess flat map them onto geometry?
* Most shaders will need to be retooled but some shaders will works as is.
* Freely downloadable materials/shaders are available to use "as a start"
* Can it create the multi-pass layers like Carrara can make, Diffuse, Shadow, AO, GI, all that?
* Replications don't work
* Interactive preview is pretty much real time, quality depends on your Nvidia card and size of preview
* 6G Video ram or more preferred, Octane software and Carrara plugin required... you work in Carrara just like before
Hope I'm on the right track here... Thanks
- Don
Alpha channel - Yes. Object ID - Yes. In fact a whole raft of multi-pass layers and outputs are available. You can also asign objects to render layers.
Yes you can map terrains by rendering or baking a texture and applying that.
The default material conversions are pretty good, but most procedural textures won't work (no big surprise there, but some such as checkers do get translated).
There is an online library of materials which can be used by the plugin. This is populated by users so some are better than others but a useful starting point and learning tool.
Multi-pass layers - yes, very comprehensive.
Replications DO work and use proper instancing, so is as memory efficient as Carrara. What is not supported is true nested replication, it still renders it OK but flattens the replication can can lead to memory overload - this happens most with replicated trees, as Carrara already uses replication for leaves on trees. The plugin has a choice of modes to cope with this, but it is still not as efficient as Carrara's native renderer for this (but there usually ways around it).
The interactive preview keeps rendering as you change things in your scene, geometry updates can cause lag but lighting and material updates very quickly. The more powerful your GPU, the faster the noise will clear.
Octane software and Carrara plugin required... you work in Carrara just like before - Yes. The more video RAM you have the better, but Octane now supports using out-of-core memory which only appears to be a little slower than using video memory. I am using a 2GB card and have had very few issues, particularly since out-of-core was introduced. If buying new, I would aim for 4GB minimum.
I hope this answers your questions. For the record - I love it!
Phil
Good info... Thanks Phil, and for the fast reply!
- Don
Hi guys,
I would just like to announce that the Beta period for the Octane Render for Carrara plugin is coming to a close. The beta period will be over by the end of the year, at which time the plugin will be sold at the full retail price. If you have been sitting on the fence, now might be a good time to buy in.
I would like to thank everyone who has bought into the beta, you have all helped make this a better product.
Happy Rendering,
Sighman
Thanks Sighman for the advance notice. I have been using Octane Render for Carrara extensively and it is very stable, easy to learn and use and the results speak for themselves. In my view, Octane Render is the best rendering solution available for Carrara - once used and you will never look back. Highly recommended!
If we buy it now, do we have to pay upgrade prices, when the end of the year Octane 3 is being released? Right now we would buy a Beta 2.x-License.
I imagine since one would need to upgrade to 3 anyway you would, there should be an upgrade path like most software though