Problem with large scenes
Superdog
Posts: 765
When I load scenes like 'Country Lane' by HowieFarkes into Carrara it slows to a crawl. I can't understand why this is happening because I have 16GB RAM, a very good graphics card and an adequate processor. How can I optimise Carrara so that I can use these scenes? In contrast I can load and work with large scenes in DAZ Studio with no problems.
System specs:
Win 7 x64 (latest updates)
16GB RAM
AMD Phenom II X6 1090T
nVidia GTX 780 (latest drivers)
Carrara v8.5
I've tried lowering settings in the interactive render pane but it doesn't help. Using OpenGL not software.
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Comments
The Assembly room view relies heavily on the graphics card and OpenGL. There are some ways to optimize the performance.
The other issue is that Howie's scenes are very complex and use many replicators. Many times he has these replicators display the full mesh of the replicated object or tree. You can speed up the assembly room view by choosing to display as bounding boxes, crosses, points, etc.
Another thing you can do is to uncheck the Show Object in 3D view option. Not to be confused with the Visible checkbox. Deselecting The Show Object in 3D view will only hide the object or replicator in the Assembly room view. A good use for this is trees or replicators in the background, or replicators that place leaves, stones or other litter on the ground.
For general speed boosts not just related to Howie' scenes, first off, work in an un-textured view, the next is to use the Interactive Renderer. To access it, click the little icon at the top of the Assembly Room window that looks like an Up arrow with a circle around it. If you click it, a window will open with a bunch of options. The most useful to me, regarding Assembly room performance, is to lower the default texture display. Carrara wants to display the highest your card will do, but I find that lowering it helps performance. Some other adjustments would be to disable reflections and transparency.
Changing these settings will only effect the Assembly room, and won't have any effect on the final render settings!!!
Some people have had luck speeding up the Assembly Room view of Howie's scenes by using the Interactive Renderer to switch from OpenGL to Software.
Thanks for your help. Switching off Show Object in 3D on all the trees helped immensely. I'm using Octane Render and now I can move around the scene easily. The only problem is that adjusting any object in the scene that's been switched off isn't possible. I'm very new to Carrara so maybe over time I'll learn all the workarounds.
Someone pointed out to me recently that Carrara 8 seemed to handle Howie's scenes with much better interactivity than C8.5 seems to do. If you are not using any features in 8.5 and have a copy of an earlier version of Carrara installed, it might be worth trying that and see if that helps. If you are using Octane Render for Carrara, just copy the Octane folder in Extensions from where it was originally installed, there are no licencing issues with using it for multiple installs on the same computer.
Does anybody know how Octane Render deals with Howie Farkes Master landscapes?
Not sure what you mean by "Master" landscapes, but in general there are issues with rendering Howie's landscape scenes in Octane Render for Carrara due to the number of types of trees. Carrara handles trees very efficiently, in that there is replication going on within each tree, and then the trees can be replicated themselves, so there are (at least) two levels of replication going on. Octane can only handle one level (at the moment - this may change in the future). Octane Render for Carrara offers a couple of options of how this is handled - basically you should choose the flattened option when replicating lots of trees, and unflattened if you have a single complex tree as a featured object - see the documentation here:
http://render.otoy.com/manuals/Carrara/?page_id=494
Country Lane seems to work OK on my 2GB card, but most of the others I have tried would require adjustments to make them work (or a bigger GPU memory).
Master landscapes ... I meant landscapes. All Farkes landscapes are works of a Master, as your City Scene. too. By The Way,
how Octane Renderer deals with The City? I have it and i m planing to use as soon as i can.
Thank you.
Thank you, very kind! The issue with both Howie's scenes and my own Night & Day City is they use very Carrara specific features, or in the case of the City product, a Carrara plugin. Octane actually has a very similar feature but there is no automatic conversion (at the moment) from the Instance Randomizer plugin to Octane's Random shader feature, although they do something very similar. So the City product will not work in Octane as it should. I have done a "proof of concept" that it can be set up to work, but it will require a lot of work to convert it currently. But one of the things that I have in mind is to revisit my products and make an Octane specific version of it available to existing users. You may have seen some shots in the promo video of my English Village set, which I have partially converted.
As a "by the way", once you have a scene loaded and rendering OK in Octane, you can use the Free Camera mode to move the camera around and select interesting viewpoints in a very interactive way, this works great with a partially converted version of my English Village scene and allows much better interaction than I ever got in Carrara directly.
It does seems a shame that Carrara 8.5 can't handle complex scenes without everything being switched off. I can load a lot more objects into DAZ Studio without it slowing down. I know DS doesn't use replication but I would have thought that saved on resources rather than used them up.
I'm also a bit disappointed that the plugin can't render everything in a scene. It kind of defeats the purpose of buying Carrara ready made scenes! In the 'Country Lane' scene one of the plants doesn't have any materials for some reason even though the plugin has allocated them. I thought, like with DS scenes I've bought, that commercial Carrara scenes would work straight out of the box. Maybe the idea is to know how to adapt them so they'll work in Carrara on every system but it appears that even quite high powered systems can't handle them. For those of us who don't have a lot of experience it's very difficult to know how to fix these problems. I was interested in buying more HF products in the sale but will now hold off until either Carrara or the plugin's performance improves. My plan to move over to Carrara from DS doesn't seem viable now sadly.
You are right that replication is a hugely efficient way to handle large numbers of objects in a scene, but wrong in that DS cannot handle the numbers of objects in a scene that Carrara can with replication - why do you think that Howie's scenes have never been available for DS or Poser? Howie's scenes push the limits (as do some of my own scenes) and there are inevitable consequences of doing that, but at the end of the day, they produce fantastic results that cannot be matched by most systems.
Also keep in mind that the Octane Render for Carrara release is still classed as a public beta and is still being developed. Sighman has done a fantastic job in achieving the level of compatibility that he has already and this will only get better in time. With some other systems, you need to completely redefine Octane materials, while in the Carrara plugin, most materials are auto-converted really well.
"By the way” .... sorry for my bad english writing. I'm in Brazil and read well but rarely write something.... Can't wait for the new city ready for Octane. Have lots of plan for using it, even before the changes you'll make. In an old thread someone gives nice advices on using the Carrara renderer that helps even today. As soon as I can, I will see your new course on rendering in the Infinity Skills site. Thank you very much.
No doubt the plugin will improve as new updates are appearing all the time so I'm hopeful for the future but just disappointed that there is still some way to go. I think it's good that boundaries are pushed and more complex scenes are available for Carrara but as a novice it's not straight forward using them out of the box. If there were lite versions included it would help those of us who haven't got very powerful systems.
The 'Country Lane' uses about 900MB of my card so it's not the plugin that slows things down. I've created DS scenes using 2.5GB of card resources with very little slow down. The problem seems to be caused by Carrara which seems odd since I have 16GB of system RAM. Why is it that a scene that only uses about 900MB of card resources brings a system with 16GB RAM to its knees? That doesn't make sense to me. Either the OR translation is very efficient or Carrara isn't.
No doubt the plugin will improve as new updates are appearing all the time so I'm hopeful for the future but just disappointed that there is still some way to go. I think it's good that boundaries are pushed and more complex scenes are available for Carrara but as a novice it's not straight forward using them out of the box. If there were lite versions included it would help those of us who haven't got very powerful systems.
The 'Country Lane' uses about 900MB of my card so it's not the plugin that slows things down. I've created DS scenes using 2.5GB of card resources with very little slow down. The problem seems to be caused by Carrara which seems odd since I have 16GB of system RAM. Why is it that a scene that only uses about 900MB of card resources brings a system with 16GB RAM to its knees? That doesn't make sense to me. Either the OR translation is very efficient or Carrara isn't.
There is a viewport bug with Carrara 8.5 and Howie Farkes scenes..
As Phil said, and I myself have also discovered, they work perfectly fine in Carrara 8.1
HOPEFULLY this will be addressed in Carrara version ** whatever, should we be fortunate enough to get it.
S.K.
There is a viewport bug with Carrara 8.5 and Howie Farkes scenes..
As Phil said, and I myself have also discovered, they work perfectly fine in Carrara 8.1
HOPEFULLY this will be addressed in Carrara version ** whatever, should we be fortunate enough to get it.
S.K.
Ok, thanks! I'll reinstall 8.1. Unfortunately this doesn't have the Genesis compatibility. I seem to spend a lot of time lately trying to work around various software limitations. The chances of DAZ updating Carrara any time soon are about as likely as v2 of the Octane Render DS plugin appearing in October. Still, we live in hope! It's ironic that DAZ Studio works great but the DS OR plugin doesn't while the Carrara OR plugin works fine (despite some limitations) but Carrara 8.5 doesn't. It's difficult not becoming cynical sometimes faced with these obstacles.
No one has a crystal ball. It would be nice if DAZ were a little more forthcoming on updates and fixes. In the meantime, there may be some things to do that can make some of Howie's scenes useable.
Carrara can be used like Studio or Poser, in that you can use pre-made content and scenes. The user doesn't need to create anything from scratch if they don't want to.
Unlike Studio or Poser, one of Carrara's greatest strengths (IMHO) is the ability to use the pre-made content and scenes, and then to add your own creations. You could use Howie's trees on your own custom terrains, etc.
There is a viewport bug with Carrara 8.5 and Howie Farkes scenes..
As Phil said, and I myself have also discovered, they work perfectly fine in Carrara 8.1
HOPEFULLY this will be addressed in Carrara version ** whatever, should we be fortunate enough to get it.
S.K.
Ok, thanks! I'll reinstall 8.1. Unfortunately this doesn't have the Genesis compatibility. I seem to spend a lot of time lately trying to work around various software limitations. The chances of DAZ updating Carrara any time soon are about as likely as v2 of the Octane Render DS plugin appearing in October. Still, we live in hope! It's ironic that DAZ Studio works great but the DS OR plugin doesn't while the Carrara OR plugin works fine (despite some limitations) but Carrara 8.5 doesn't. It's difficult not becoming cynical sometimes faced with these obstacles.
I share your pain believe me...I have been thinking the exact same thing...It is exceptionally frustrating..
S.K.