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A word about pricing. The beta price for the plugin right now is EUR99. The price starting in early January 2016 will be EUR149. Alpha/Beta 3 versions of the plugin (to be posted sometime during the holidays) can be used with a Version 2 license until March 1, 2016. At that point you will need to pay for an upgrade to version 3 or switch back to version 2. I'm not sure what the upgrade price will be but it will be in line with the DS and Poser plugins. The version 1 -> 2 upgrade price was EUR39. I will speculate the 2 -> 3 upgrade price will be similar. Note that this does not include the upgrade price for the Standalone. Version 2 of the Standalone costs EUR299. Version 3 will probably cost EUR399. The upgrade price will probably be EUR99. Again, this is my speculation but the price formula will be V2 + upgrade = V3.
You must own and activate a Standalone license on the computer where you want to run a plugin but you do not need to have the standalone installed.
I bought the DS upgrade today too
standalone you can use ol readycam lua script on the Octane forum its quite easy if I can use it.
Great that the version 3 is on the way soon, and your upgrade pricing looks very fair.
I hope, was burnt before
Hi all,
This question seems late, but I need a little help. Can anyone (likely PhilW) explain to me exactly how to apply UV mapping to the hair? Right now all my hairs appear to be the ame color, even thought I have two different color swatches. Feedback is appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Nevermind. Solved!!!!
I just bought Octane today, before they raise the price. Still, with the Canadian dolllar ar US 0.72, it cost me a pretty penny. I guess in the big leagues now, oh, oh, oh...
Glad you sorted it!
I found a new odd Octane bug
genital georafts do not render in octane for me, I get a gap, even conforming another to it to keep UV mapping
deleting and reloading scene it persists too
You have to reload the scenen in the Octane IPR by using the curved yellow arrow. But what I've found is that regardless of what Octane is doing the placement of geografts is broken in Carrara generally. IT changes the vertex numbers which destroys any hair that has been painted. Scary stuff.
We really do need geografting and HD morhing to operate reliably in Carrara or there's really no point in integrating Genesis 3 since most of its morphs require HD to look good at all.
I don't know why I didn't buy Octane for Carrara before. The results are stupendous! Here, I didn't even use Octane shaders. The render took only 45 seconds on a single nVidia GeForce GTX 780 video card. Compare it with Carrara native renderer. WOW!
Welcome to the fun! You will never look back.
I just wanted to say thanks to Sighman for such a well integrated plugin,.
The added support for carrara's lights, and the integration of the "render target" panel into Carrara's UI ..( Scene / Octane render target / Edit ) rounds off an excellent plugin.
It's funny to think that i was once happy exporting OBJ's from Carrara into the standalone Octane,....
Many moons have passed since then
Working with Octane in Carrara is a creative pleasure
Look at the difference between Octane for Carrara and Carrara's native renderer.. The two pics have been taken with the same settings. The only difference is I added an Octane shader to her hair. Look at the color nuances of her skin. Look at the quality of the strands of her hair. They are all realistically separated. Of course, I used Phil's "Eye surface for Genesis" for the shine in her eyes.
And I don't even know how to use Octane yet. This is right out of the box.
Argus, great example and the more you use it, the more you get to appreciate it. It is difficult in fact to get a "bad" render out of it!
Just a question to be sure we are in a fair comparaison : For the Carrara render, were the ambient light set to 0 and Gamma enabled ? Octane does that as a default, Carrara not.
No. Ambient light was at 5 and gamma variation wasn't on. Here is a render with the native renderer where the ambient light was at 0 and Gamma variation was at 2.2,
The Octane render is great Argus, but I'm sorry to say that the native renderer and lights are clearly not set up to mimic real world lighting, such as if you used Skylight or Indirect light. Also, it looks like some of the lights you are using don't have full shadow intensity. The lighting is very flat and clearly set up for fast renders. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's apples to oranges.
There are things to do to get better renders out of the native renderer, and still get decent render speeds per frame.
The advantage that Octane has over the native renderer, in regards to animation isn't really about the quality of the render, but about the speed to achieve a GI look. Octane can get the GI look fast due to using the graphics card. The time to achieve the same, or comparable look with Carrara's native renderer would be prohibitive for animations.
yes speed with realistic daylight is why I use it
Carrara renders nicely but at a time cost,
some things are still better in Carrara engine especially stuff with lots glow for lights that need not be emitters like spaceship panels in dark rooms, dark indoor scenes give me a lot of grief in Octane but Carrara excells at it.
transmapped stuff definately is better in Octane though too
messing with 3
It's true. I don't use Skylight or Indirect light. But in my previous post, I use 3 point lighting (see pic). I don't see how you can call that "flat" lighting. And the shadows are the way I like them. Never full shadows.
And I disagree with your assumption that: "The advantage that Octane has over the native renderer, in regards to animation isn't really about the quality of the render, but about the speed to achieve a GI look ". I think the quality of the renders generally improves with Octane, even without GI,
I'm not arguing that the quality of the renders doesn't improve, but the shortcuts to get speedy animations with Octane and other un-biased renderers makes the quality no better than GI renders in Carrara, which are very good. That is where the speed of using a graphics card comes into play. The same quality render in Carrara's biased native renderer can match Octane, especially scenes that are optimized for animations, but at a tremendous render time per-frame.
I meant no offense about saying the lighting looking flat, but to my eyes it does look flat. What I mean by that, is there is very little shadow contrast, and also very little contrast to separate the subject from the background.
Look at the two renders you posted. Specifically the shadows. The Octane render has more contrast between the light and the dark. This isn't entirely due to Octane. The same level of contrast can be achieved in Carrara's renderer even without GI. Since you said that you had turned off the ambient lighting, it could mean the shadow intensity of the lights is set to less than 100%, or you are using a shadow buffer somewhere.
Finally, I never said the video or story were bad, just that the light looked flat, and I disagree that it is because it is Carrara's native renderer Vs Octane. I think it is because of choices and compromises you made to get a faster render. There is nothing wrong with that at all. We all do it. You will find yourself doing it with Octane as well, in certain situations, just as Scifi Funk does with his videos.
3DAge,
Wonderful to see how the environment looks with real atmospheric haze in Octane 3. I soooo wish I was on the alpha testing team for this product. Encouraging indeed.
Argus,
Octane is a brilliant render engine in virtually every way. As Phil observes, you will never look back. Like you, I was impressed from the first moment I started rendering. Being less familiar with Carrara native, I had nothing to "get used to" in adapting to another render engine. Since my purchase, I havent used Carrara native renderer but once or twice for reference.
Having been on the giving end of lighting advice many times, I can appreciate what Evilproducer is explaining and how difficult such advice can be to offer. It took me some time to realize that things that were obvious issues for me as a viewer often were not issues to the original artists, until one points it out and explains why the issue exists. We must accept that sometimes other people can see things that we cannot and allow them to make us aware of those issues so we can correct them if we see fit.
Technically, one should be very careful in comparisons between Octane and Carrara Native. For one thing. Octane's default render kernel is "Diffuse." Diffuse is a biased rendering solution. It is quite similar to full GI in Carrara and other packages...except that it is usually better because of some under the hood advantages such as better scattering (environmental feelers) of rays than most biased engines. But Diffuse is nowhere near unbiased. For that you will need to use Pathracing or better, PMC (Populated Monte-Carlo) for optimal results. As Evilproducer described, very few people render animations in Octane using unbiased settings, they most often resort to the Diffuse kernel (which also offers an AO which is lighting fast) but which isn't much better than Carrara native, except that it is slightly better, as stated above. More in a moment.
The secret to realism is quite simple...INTERACTION. The more accurately the different aspects of the render interact with one another, the more realisitic the results. The "global" term in the global illumination description is the ideal that in some way every surface in the scene (globe) affects the rendering of the other surfaces in the scene via one of the three major forms of interaction. Surfaces can "interact" with one another in several ways, primarily by casting shadows onto each other, but also by reflecting the colors of other surfaces and also by accepting light emissions from other surfaces. Therefore, the aspect of shadow casting and receiving between surfaces is essential. Objects need to cast shadows onto one another.
"Flatness" is the optimnal word to describe an image that lacks adequate shadows in the places where they should be. Shadows, along with lines and curves...give an image the appearance of being 3 dimensional and "real." For far too long in the CG industry, having worked with biased rendering solutions that were glacially slow to handle shadows accurately...we have learned the wrong lesson...that shadows are a bad thing and need to be baked away or avoided altogether with tools like ambience. For some people it seems more logical to use less intense shadows at the start than to use additional lights or GI to correct the shadows later. Plus those additional lights and full GI rigs take more render time which doesnt agree with animation speed rendering needs.
For good measure, Shadows settings should always be at 100% intensity. The means used to correct the deep shadows is what differs between artists, from a 3 point light scheme to a full GI, it's up to you and your speed needs. Realize that 3 point light schemes are not robust solutions, they are designed for portaits of humans as the primary focus where there is little or no background, and do not function well for more complex geometric considerations such as your sample scenario. When it comes to outdoors, the primary light influences are the sun, the sky and the ground bouncing light back up toward the sky. The Octane render knows this. If you use your 3 point scheme to address these three issues in a Carrara render, then great, except that point lights dont do a very good job of representing skylight nor ground level light bounces. Which si why Carrara offers full indirect light (ground bounces) as well as skylight without using points at all.
If you look carefully at the Octane render, you will notice much deeper shadows...and therefore more realism and 3d depth. Look at the soft diffuse shadows along the base of the steps. Look at the grass along the fence in the Octane render...very dark due to shadows cast by the fence itself. Those same shadows are missing from the Carrara native. Not because Carrara cannot do it, but because in this case the settings chosen are designed for speed and not for accuracy.
To truly compare you need to re-render in Carrara native, but crank up the settings for photon count, AA quality, light through transparency, full raytracing...you get the idea. You would want to turn off all ambience from the scene settings as well as ensure that all shadows settings for all lights are 100%. Will such a render be beautiful with full shadows and full GI...yes! Will it take several hours to render...yes. Could Octane produce a similar or better image in one tenth the time...yes. Could Carrara native, even if allowed to render for a year, ever reach unbiased quality...nope...never. There are some things Octane will always do much better than Carrara native because Carrara native wasnt designed for such purposes.
Carrara native is awesome because for its time..it offered very fast results with little obvious detriment to quality. But as our eye for quality increases in detail over time, Octane and other more modern engines show a clear advantage. And being faster engines, it feels better knowing that fewer trees are being cut down to produce the energy needed for this render.
Carrara native is not out of the game yet. Speed it up at the programming level, remove some bias under the hood, and there's no reason not to use it all the time. That's my opinion.
HI Rashad :)
It's open testing as far as i know,. there's a Beta Carrara plugin on the OTOY carrara plugin forums, and the Octane 3 (stand alone) testing version is also available.
anyone with version 2 can test.
there are some issues with intersecting clouds, and the atmosphere,. more noticable in spherical renders, and it can obviously slow down with more to calculate.
On Carrara Octane,.. Lets agree that. ... Both are good at what they do, and Carrara is better off with more choices,. whether that's Luxrender, Octanerender, or Carrara's native renderer, they can all create "near photo" quality images with the right shaders and lighting.
Words of wisdom, Rashad and Evil Producer. Words of wisdom.
3dage - that render in V3 looks very impressive. Are you exporting from Carrara to the standalone version? As far as I am aware, the Carrara plugin doesn't support Octane 3 yet?
HI Phil :)
No exporting required ,. there's a version of the Carrara 3 plugin up on the Carrara plugin forum
Octane_Carrara_3.0.0.0
I also downloaded the Stand alone, for testing but so far i've only opened an old OCS export in that, to make sure it worked
Argus, I just want to make sure that you know that I didn't mean to upset you. I apologize if I did. I think the videos are really cool, original and have some nice stories. It is also refreshing that you use characters that don't look like super-models or cartoons. I was only commenting on a technical aspect.
Great - how on Earth did I miss that!!
I only foundi by accident,. I had been using version 79
there was some discussion about using lights in carrara, in octane,. and (I think Wendy) posted a pic of the UI for Lights with the "new" octane options,, to enable carrara's lights
I checked in carrara, ...no panel,. checked the otoy site, and found Vers 82 for OR2., and the new beta for 3.
One note,. since i've installed 3, and done some test scenes, i'm getting an "end of file" error loading any of those scenes back up after saving.
I've never had any "end of file"errors before this,. It could be somthing else,causing it, as a quick test with a plane and a sphere seems to reload
more testing required