Help required please with new graphics card choice for use with Carrara 8.5 Pro
Musicplayer
Posts: 515
Hi Folks,
I am building a new computer and will be using Carrara 8.5 pro as I did on my previous machine that had an Intel i7 4770 CPU and a separate graphics card with 2 or possibly 3Gb of VRAM.
I found that some large scenes in Carrara struggled when I tried to move them around the screen, and the beautiful large sets by Howie Farkes almost came to a standstill. I therefore assumed this was a graphics issue because I never had any problems with my Carrara renders.
I would really appreciate your suggestions regarding what VRAM my new graphics card should have.
I am currently running another thread in the Commons related to my new x99 chipset computer build, and because this question is specific to Carrara, I have placed it here, and would like to keep those topics totally separate from this thread to avoid a "double thread" discussion.
Many thanks. :-)
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good day,
The open GL video card is only used for the preview window. I have a 4GB card but still with Howies sets I do not turn the view settings up to show the full textures or I slow down. I have read other threads here that if it gets sluggish or lagging in the movement you may want to set it to wireframe mode to move it then adjust it to a slightly higher view when you are ready to manipulate an object or setting.
My machine has 16 GB of RAM so the rendering like you is not a problem.
you could try using a dual video card setup shich could then be utilized quite sucessfully with either a lux render or a octane render engines.
The issue you're experiencing is a large amount of data being channeled into the visible work space.
This certainly is not a Carrara-specific issue. In fact, Carrara seems to handle large data scenes better than some.
I would not recommend going out and purchasing a new card for this issue as you will likely become disappointed to find it will not disappear with system upgrades. Instead, we artists have to make sacrifices to our working view to continue working in them if they contain a lot of data. The "Show Object in 3D View" box is designed to help us out.
There are many culprits to this. One quick example is the ocean primitive. Crank the size up and set it for high resolution waves and you can witness the working view drop to a stand-still if it's already full of calculations. So I leave the resolution setting lower until I'm ready to render. I also keep the size as small as I can for the needs of the camera.
If you need visual aids to navigate through a vast area that is making you sluggish, you can set target helpers or something similar into the scene to help guide you through, so that you can keep a lot of the heavy details turned off in the view while you work. Grouping and hiding from 3d view then becomes essential to the workflow for such scenes - and then you'll see it still appear in the render.
Thank you Chickenman for your prompt reply.
As my old graphics card had approximately 2 or 3 Gb of VRAM (cannot quite remember) I had considered a new one with 4 Gb. However, after reading your post, you have such a card and still experience slowdown. So I had considered a 6 Gb card in my last ditch attempt for sorting this glitch, until reading Dartanbeck's post which appears to suggest this will happen even with higher VRAM.
I probably need to look at other ways of working within large scene sets, rather than trying to 'throw' large amounts of VideoRam into the work flow at such a high financial cost. This is especially true, as I have no problems with CPU based renders in Carrara or Luxrender.
Cheers. :-)
The issue you're experiencing is a large amount of data being channeled into the visible work space.
This certainly is not a Carrara-specific issue. In fact, Carrara seems to handle large data scenes better than some.
Many thanks Dartanbeck for your quick response.
Firstly, I would like to confirm what you have said that.... Quote : "This certainly is not a Carrara-specific issue".
True, I have also experienced this slowdown with some large forest scenes in Daz Studio 4.6 Pro.
I was concerned to read that this was not going to be a simple fix with more added video ram, but grateful that I have found this out before spending money on a top grade GPU. I do not use Octane render, neither have I been tempted to use GPU rendering in Luxrender.
Possibly, I may need to start a new thread seeking advice about handling large scenes in Carrara/Daz Studio with average GPU VRAM.
Sorry Dartanbeck if you have already covered this in one of your excellent tutorials. Maybe I have missed it and you have a link somewhere to this very subject. ;-)
Cheers. :-)
An important added note :
I also feel that is very important to mention to the readers of this thread, that as my question is Carrara based, I have used Howie Farkes large Carrara scenes as an example of where my computer screen working view lagged. This certainly does not infer that there is any problem with Howie's products.
I have bought several of Howie's stunning and beautiful scenes, and want to make sure my next choice of graphics card copes better with larger scene demands both in Carrara and Daz Studio.
Kind regards.
Many thanks Dartanbeck for your quick response.
Firstly, I would like to confirm what you have said that.... Quote : "This certainly is not a Carrara-specific issue".
True, I have also experienced this slowdown with some large forest scenes in Daz Studio 4.6 Pro.
I was concerned to read that this was not going to be a simple fix with more added video ram, but grateful that I have found this out before spending money on a top grade GPU. I do not use Octane render, neither have I been tempted to use GPU rendering in Luxrender.
Possibly, I may need to start a new thread seeking advice about handling large scenes in Carrara/Daz Studio with average GPU VRAM.
Sorry Dartanbeck if you have already covered this in one of your excellent tutorials. Maybe I have missed it and you have a link somewhere to this very subject. ;-)
Cheers. :-)
An important added note :
I also feel that is very important to mention to the readers of this thread, that as my question is Carrara based, I have used Howie Farkes large Carrara scenes as an example of where my computer screen working view lagged. This certainly does not infer that there is any problem with Howie's products.
I have bought several of Howie's stunning and beautiful scenes, and want to make sure my next choice of graphics card copes better with larger scene demands both in Carrara and Daz Studio.
Kind regards.
I agree Howie's scenes are great but due to the excellent material and the size they are resource intensive for the preview unless you do the above mentioned methods.
They are extremely well thought out and executed. I wish I could model like that.
Some things to do to speed up the Assembly Room window when using large scenes that use lots of detailed replicated objects such as a Howie Farks scene is to select the replicator and see if it is displaying a mesh, if it is, change it to bounding boxes, crosses or points. If the replicator has tens of thousands of replicated objects, even if they're displayed as bounding boxes, crosses or points, enable Hide Object in 3D View. The replicator will be hidden from view in the Assembly Room, but still render when you render the scene.
Terrains can slow down the responsiveness in the viewport as well. Open the terrain editor and check to see if the preview is set to the same resolution as the rendered resolution. If it is, lower the preview resolution. Note that if you are in the process of placing objects on the terrain, then wait to lower the preview setting until that part is done.
Other things to help performance are to work in an untextured view, lower the texture map size in the Interactive Renderer, lower other settings in the Interactive Renderer such as turning off transparencies, or reflections. Note that the Interactive Renderer only controls the software or OpenGL view in the Assembly Room. It has no effect on the Render Room settings at all.
Thank you so much evilproducer for your explanatory post with diagrams, very much appreciated. As a fairly new Carrara user I find diagrams extremely helpful.
At the moment I am going "cold turkey" as I have no rendering capable computer to use, but I am busy selecting all the parts for my new computer build so I can start rendering again.
I must admit I do use Daz Studio quite a lot because what you see in the display window is what you get. Carrara is very different, even in textured mode a lot appears to be in a wire frame format, and I find it hard placing objects on the ground. I usually have to do several test renders before they cease to appear floating or buried in the surface. I guess this comes with practice.
However, I am looking forward to trying out these suggestions.
Cheers. :-)
Glad to help! :)
It is extremely helpful when manually placing objects on the terrains to make sure the preview and render resolutions are the same. You can always lower the preview resolution later.
For non-terrains, there is the collision detection icon you can enable (disabled in screen shot). Be aware that it can also slow things down when enabled all the time as Carrara is trying to detect collisions every time you move an object.
I also forgot to mention that changes you make in the Interactive Renderer are scene specific, meaning that changes you make are only for the scene you are working on.
Yes, terrains are another one.
Higher preview settings can truly bog down the working view.
But lower the setting, and you don't get an accurate view of where the actual, rendered surface will be! Yikes!
Here's how I handle that, and a lot of my larger scene woes:
I'll use lower resolution for all terrains that are not going to be rendered up close. Almost always. And then I keep them that way. I just don't care if they are slightly less detailed because they still look fantastic. User's choice on that one though.
But I always like to use the resolution that I'm going to render at.
Once I get my background terrains in place, I hide them from view. I know they're there.
Howie does an excellent job of grouping, so that we can do the same with his. He has actually made entire regions of an environment. So in addition to hiding from 3d view (working view), we can actually even delete areas that are never going to be seen in the shot.
Save As is a wonderful thing. And when you already own the product, you can always fix it if you accidentally save over the original by just renaming it, and then installing again.
Already mentioned by evilproducer, you can set replicators to show its work to be displayed as dots, crosses, boxes, or the actual mesh of the replicated objects. Additionally, we can deselect the little box that says "Show in 3D View" and hide it until render time comes.
Here's the thing: Anything that can be a resource hog in the scene should be hidden in that manner. If you need to add some visual representations, trying tracing the shape with simple primitive cubes, spheres, cones, or planes, etc., so that you can keep the heavy pieces from slowing everything down.
That's the idea.
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Rendering Computer
MusicPlayer,
Do keep in mind that you can render in Carrara. I find it to be even easier on my older systems than DS.
Try not to get into a philosophy where everything has to be cranked to the hilt. But even if you do need some of the higher settings, try letting the Batch Queue render your shots while you're away. Here's how I have always worked with Carrara, as I've always been very low-tech on the computer side of things:
Build a Stage
I collect content from DAZ 3D. I do. And I use the environmental pieces and props and set up a scene as a stage for my renders. At this point, I do keep in mind what the main focus might be when I use the stage, but I never worry too much about that yet, because for my needs, it will likely be visited periodically with different things, different people, whatever. So I'm just focusing on a location.
Often this will only be a single product, like the Generic Sci Fi Corridor, for example, with perhaps some additional props. I start with the main piece. But no matter how many products I need to build my stage, I always follow this procedure:
- Load in one product
- Edit > Remove Unused Masters > Consolidate Duplicate Shaders
- Tweak every shader on that single product
- Light the Scene - Another subject entirely
- Set up various cameras for different angles of shot
- Set default render settings for the scene
- Save to the Browser
- Complete the stage and save again, often at several various points along the way
Now I move on to another stage. Doing this gives me a huge selection of stages to chose from when I need to shoot a scene. And they each have their shaders consolidated and optimized and have a well thought out lighting design - often saved with more than one lighting scheme.
These stages are great practice too. Not just in lighting, setting up scenes, tweaking shaders and conslidating/removing unneeded data, but also for practicing with render times at various settings in the Render room. Instead of seeing how high I can push the limits of my computer, I test how low I can go on the settings to still give a reasonable-looking render in an efficient amount of time.
Whoa... sorry for the l o n g post! LOL
I think you should also check this out: How to Build a Big Set for 3d Animation in Carrara Tutorial - by Sci Fi Funk
It takes us in another take for building large scene entirely, using content. Very nicely done, he puts an enormous amount of work into his scene setup routines.
I have an incomplete listing of his cool Carrara tutorials here, which I plan to get updated when I can find some more of that stuff they call time! :ahhh:
At the bottom of the post, however, are direct links to his Tutorials and Episodes YouTube channels.
Hi Dartanbeck,
Thank you so much for your detailed reply, packed with lots of interesting information. I also spent quite some time looking at the link you kindly gave to Steve's amazing tutorials on his YouTube channel called Sci FI Punk.
There was certainly no need to apologise for the long reply. I love long replies, especially when somebody, like yourself and others here, take the time to teach and pass on their knowledge to people like myself who want to learn.
One thing I was curious about was your current computers specs for working in Carrara, if you wished to share.
Kind regards. :-)
Uh ohhhhhhhhhh...... Now you've done it! ;-)
Uh ohhhhhhhhhh...... Now you've done it! ;-)
Yes, I always give credit where it's due. ;-P
LOL
ep knows how I love to carry on and on... and on....
Carrara Serenity (my Carrara work station) is:
AMD Zambezi 8, eight core cpu at 3.1 GHz - I never overclock
The motherboard handles that and is capable of up to 32GB RAM, and is a MSI Military spec (larger, higher quality capacitors and such)
16GB RAM with heat sinks
ATI Radeon R7 2GB graphics card, though I am truly an nVidia GeForce fan and noticed no difference in Carrara's performance to this from my older 1GB GeForce GT570
1TB main HDD, as I like to keep all of my content and files on the same HDD as my operating system (Silly? Perhaps)
Antec 300 two (the 'two' is in the name, it's a second version of the 300) PC case with all intake fans filtered
Acer 21 or 22" monitor, don't remember which
Windows 7 64 bit Home Premium
My other Carrara machine is the laptop I bought specifically for running Carrara. I built Serenity specifically for Carrara as well. Carrara and my endeavors with it, including DAZ Studio, Hexagon, Project Dogwaffle Howler, PaintShop Pro, VideoStudio Pro, Sony Vegas Home HD Studio Platinum are mainly my favorite things to use a computer for. I try to play games once in a while, and then realize that Carrara is a lot more fun for me, so I never finish the games. Ever.
My Carrara Laptop
Core2Duo (early edition when they first came out) cpu
4GB RAM
GeForce GT240 M dedicated video card
(Dedicated video means that it doesn't share PC RAM for video, as the card includes its own)
Windows 7 64 Bit Home Premium
The one I'm typing on now is an Acer AspireOne 10.1" laptop with Windows 8 64 bit, which I like for surfing and such. It's my night stand entertainment machine, and what I bring with me to waiting rooms and such. Having this makes me glad that my other machines are Windows 7, simply because I like the more no-nonsense interface of 7 when I'm working on my 3D stuff. But I like 8 enough, too.
With my Carrara laptop I would design my stages as mentioned earlier. When I wanted to shoot (design, then render) an animation I'd load my characters into a stage and set up the animation, then tweak the combined light rigs and cameras for what I wanted to shoot, then save it to the browser under the same location as that particular stage, in a new folder describing the animation.
Then I would close the scene and add it to the Batch Queue in the Render Room as many times as I had separate camera angles saved within the scene and then go through each within the queue and set the render setting to the correct camera and make any necessary changes to the other settings (each scene in the queue can be set up entirely different than how they are saved), and run the queue. Then I would go to bed and let it render. Wake up, go to work, come home and have supper, check the progress of the renders in the queue. Most of the time they'd all be completed, but sometimes not.
If I want to work in Carrara and some of the queue wasn't finished yet, I'd abort, and remove the completed scenes from the queue and reset the one that was aborted, and any that followed. Now I was free to work away on more stuff to add to the queue. Worked really well!
Now I continue in that same fashion, but Serenity often gets my shots finished before I wake up. But the last one (yesterday it finished) took 72 hours for the single shot.
Carrara's photo-realistic render engine uses cpu cores, not graphics. So having the eight cores at 3.1 GHz makes renders (of the lower render settings that I use) just fly right through! The 72 hour one was done to help answer a forum question, and used higher render settings than what I'm accustomed to using.
Wow, thanks Dartanbeck, interesting post.
Two things "struck me" when reading your computer specs. Firstly your advice to me in an earlier post....quote : "Try not to get into a philosophy where everything has to be cranked to the hilt"....I see what you mean because I am very familiar with the animation etc you do in Carrara, and yet I do not see any 'expensive' high end machine.
Secondly, you use laptops. I have always had the impression rightly or wrongly from other forum comments, that laptops are generally slow for 3D rendering purposes.
I do not play computer games, or at this moment make videos. I do however use a multitude of various 3D software, and Luxrender which throws up other CPU or GPU needs.
I have waited hours and hours for a luxrender to "finish" to what I considered a reasonable point to stop. So, I am not opposed to waiting for lengthy renders, but would like a machine that would help reduce these long times.
In Daz Studio, for instance, a simple scene with a character and a couple of spots or distance lights, can take a minute or two for it to render. Change the lights for something more serious with Uber Environment etc for example, and that render can take over an hour.
I have found that the usual 'culprit' for this has been the rendering of the characters hair, which can easily account for 45 minutes of that render time.
I have seen many comments regarding workarounds of how long hair render times can be reduced, but that is another topic entirely.
I am certainly not doing my artwork for professional reasons or use, at the moment, so I guess waiting for renders to finish is not that bigger deal. However, finding that I now need a new computer, I want most of my 'bases' covered so my new workstation will cope reasonably well, whatever is thrown at it. (and I don't mean physical objects) :-P
I think if I was only going to use Carrara, then the process of choice would be a lot more straightforward.
My initial quest for this thread was about choice of a graphics card, and I think answers have shown that it is more about the way people work within Carrara, rather than throwing large amounts of Video ram into the equation.
So I consider my question answered, and the problem of slow moving large scene views has also been solved.
Many thanks for everyones advice, it is much appreciated. I am now very eager to get building that workstation, and start rendering again. :-)
Right. The best bang for the buck for a new computer for Carrara purposes is the number of cores in the cpu, and then making sure that it has (or can upgrade to) enough RAM to feed those cores. I went with an eight-core cpu, as that was the highest at the time without being very wealthy. Mine was cheaper than a high-end graphics card by far! So I thought that I should have at least 8GB RAM - 1GB per core, but during the pricing process I've decided upon 16GB for 2GB RAM per core of cpu.
In fact, Serenity was built by me from a single order of parts from Newegg for about (now get this) $1,000.00 US!!!
But that's not all: That grand also included anOEM copy of Windows 7 64 bit Home Premium and the Sony Vegas HD Platinum software bundle (Movie Studio HD, Sound Forge, DVD Architect, Pile of extra sound FX and music loops)!!!
But it didn't include a monitor, keyboard or mouse.
I am VERY happy with my machine, even though it's already been a while since I've built it ;)
Here's an article I wrote on the subject:
► How to Build Your Own Carrara Workstation
..and then this:
► Buying a Workstation (for Carrara)