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There are a couple different ways to add a realistic sky to an existing scene, select Scene in the Instance palette, and make sure the Effects tab is selected. You should see a heading for, Atmosphere. If you mouse over the icons in the atmosphere heading, you should see one that says Presets. If you select it, it will open a window with different presets. You want to make sure Realistic Sky is selected. Choose one of the thumbnails and click Okay. The heading that says Sky, are not realistic skies. They are an older, more primitive implementation and don't work in the same manner as the Realistic Skies.
The other method is to again, select Scene and the Scene Effects tab. Then select the Misc. tab in the file browser, and the Realistic Sky directory. Click and drag the desired thumbnail from the browser and drop it onto the atmosphere heading in the Scene's Effects tab.
I like to disable the ground option. If an object is below the ground level, it is not visible, including lights. Also, if you wish the horizon to be lower, the default unit of measure is in inches, which is pretty tiny. If I want the horizon level lowered, say, 100 feet, I just type 100 ft into the field, and hit Return. The foot value will be converted to 100 ft worth of inches for you.
Inserting a sunlight, or changing the default Disntant light into a sunlight, will tie it to the Reaslistic Sky Editor, and the color of the light will change to match the position it is in, in the sky. Also, the light is tied to the sun disk in the RSE.
If you use a Realistic Sky in your scene, and enable Skylight in the Render room, the sky will act like an Imabe Based Light, similar to an HDRI. Note that if you are using an actual HDRI in your scene and you want it to provide illumination, then you will also want to make sure the Skylight option is enabled in the Render room. Carrara is very versatile in this way. A Realistic Sky (under Atmosphere), HDRI, image, color or color gradient, used in the Scenes Background can all act like an I.B.L. You could even use a Realistic Sky in conjunction with a color, color gradient, HDRI or image in the scene's Background to enhance or add a special effect to the Realistic Sky.
Please note that for my screen shots, I have some custom skies and directories, so your default installation will look different. I'm also using C7.2 Pro, so there will be some minor UI differences.
Thanks evilproducer! I will try it again on my next day off. I'm doing my 3, 12 hour work days now and don't usually have the energy to render after I get home.
I used to do 5 - twelves all the time
then goto the bar till 12 or 1 .
O the good old days .
One of the biggest differences that threw me when I switched to Carrara 8 Pro from Poser 7 is the vastness of Carrara's render space.
With its built-in atmospheres, fog or clouds and sky - not to mention the incredible terrain editor and plants designer, Carrara's render engine works so perfectly with these things that you can easily switch from having to find just the right background images to rendering full scenes of 3d assets - and for me, that took a bit to wrap my head around because I was doing almost everything with the Millenium Environment, which gacve me the capability to rotate the camera around without running out of landscape. When I loaded the Mil Environment into Carrara, it was this tiny little cylinder billboard that seemed clumsily tiny! LOL But it's still easy to use. Just get the rendering cameras down into the environment and you're good-to-go. But the point is that, in Carrara, the ME sort of becomes obsolete. I still break it out once in a while because I have lots of nice setups for it.
A small example: Load in a character that normally takes a bit of horsepower to render. Go ahead and set up the shaders to be really realistic-looking but now drag the camera back, placing the character into the background of the render - or even just mid-way - and you'll see that Carrara can speed through that render in a heartbeat! After having built up a nice collection of goodies (3D Content) I've found it a real pleasure to be able to place out fully realized filming stages for my animations, and then see those scenes render out in just a minute or two... amazing.
So I started building these stages and light them accordingly, just worrying about the environment itself. Save to the browser in an organized catalog.
Load in my figures and design out my characters, set up the shaders and even optimize a few costumes for them, give them their own highlighting light rig, and save them individually into their catalog in the browser.
Now I can be working on a character and, just when I decide to fire off a render, I just load in one of my stages and render! For my animations, this is a huge boon. I can work out my animations in an otherwise blank scene and shoot test renders onto a blank background with simple lighting. Once I'm happy with the animations, load in the stage scene, tweak out anything that needs a little adjustment - often nothing to do here other than to put some vehicles or background people in motion, but some scenes are saved with that done already.
Now I can save the final scenes, ready to render. Just before bed time, add them into the Render room's Batch Queue, set which camera to use, render settings and the name and place of the saved animation render, and let it all happen as I sleep. Very, very cool!
THanks Dartanbeck! I'm getting ready to learn how to use this program....I wish I had a little more money I would have purchased one of the Infinateskills Carrara videos lol. I love what I'm seeing in the program so far, there is so much you can do! The ability to render an entire scene without needing to composite a background is amazing! Makes my life so much easier.
I have another question. I'm having trouble getting things to go where I want when I bring them into the program.
Example: I loaded a premade desert landscape - that worked no problem. Then I bring in V4, I couldn't find her for the longest. She was WAY below the landscape and was really small....I could never get her up 'on top' of the scene to try things out.
How can you make things appear in the general location that you want them? So your not hunting. I keep thinking I much be doing something wrong. I so much want to do a test render to post here but things seem to be alluding me at this point.
Select your object/character and "Edit/Send to origin".
Most of the preset landscapes are built at 'large' size whereas for poser/studio content you need to have 'medium' sized scenes instead. Putting V4 into a 'large' scene will mean she will roughly smaller than an ant, and very difficult to find.
A tip I learned here (I think from Dartanbeck?) is that when you have a huge scene all set up and start working with the characters in it, it sometimes helps to switch the scene magnitude from Large to Medium (click on Scene in the Instances list, then go to the Interface tab at the top to find this option) If you don't then when you zoom in on your V4 and try to move her she will jump across the scene like she's teleporting because the speed of camera and object movements is tied to the internal scale of the scene... in a Large scene a tiny camera movement might be 100' which is no good for setting up and posing characters.
Also, when aligning charactes and buildings with terrains, keep in mind that you are probably not seeing the final terrain shape, just a lower res preview of it. You can click on the terrain then go into the terrain editor to change the preview resolution. If you don't do this, then you may think you have something standing right on the ground and then render only to find it is floating above or partially buried. Just don't keep the terrain preview size too high for very long as it can slow down response times in the Assembly room.
There is also a free plug-in by Fenric that lets you send one object to the location of another that I use constantly - I don't have the link handy and I'm on my out the door to go see The Martian, but if no one else has posted it when I get back, I'll find it.
You can also use Large scaled objects in a medium scene. They will just be huge in relation to the scene, but the working grid will be more human scaled.
Also as MDO2010 said, you can change the scene magnitude, but the grid will remain the same size. Also any avatars for the cameras and lights will remain large, although this does not effect the function. They can be scaled down if they are blocking views, etc. with no problems.
If you change the scene magnitude, you can resize the working grid by going to the menu bar and selecting View--> Grid. This will open up the control panel where you can change the default sizes. The grid cell size in a medium scene is 1 ft. In large scene it is 100 ft. See the screen shots to see what I changed to get a medium sized working grid in a formerly large scale scene.
The default camera was left in place, which is why the final working grid is so small in the final screen shot.
The only reason for the different scaled scenes is to make it easier to build a variety of scenes. They're really just changes of perspective, with changes in the scale of movement and size for what you add to the scene. You can use large scaled terrains in a medium scene, but they will be miles across, which can actually help the perspective of your scene if you are at a character level perspective.
Thank you all again! I have managed to get a landscape down with V4 in the scene, dressed and posed.
I have a buch of poke thorugh that I'm trying to fix with 3D paint and an alpha channel. The problem I'm getting here is when I paint her elbow's the paint is also going on her face - I can't figure out why this would happen.
Any idea's?
When you enter 3D paint, you get a menu asking you which areas you want to paint on. V4 has mulltiple texture maps. One for the head. One for the torso. One for the limbs. You probably have both the head and the limbs checked. Here is a thread on addressing poke-through. It has 5 different suggestions.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/29483/five-ways-to-fix-poke-through-without-using-conforming-figures/p1
Hope it helps.
Daz studio has a MUUUUUUCH better rendering system than Carrarra does, it's more realistic, easier sss and much faster, carraarrararra has an archaic rendering system that's at least 5-8 years behind so unless you want to cough up 40 bucks for a lux render bridge that's pretty much an inferior iray...
iRay is at least 5-8 years beyond that archaic neo scanline rendering engine...No, having bought both, I would have to say the only reason why you would get cararra is for it's modeling capabilities and physics/dynamic hair because even it's landscape program is on par with bryce's which itself is another relic from the past that terragen/world builder has surpassed long ago...
I would wait until it's on sale because it is a good entry-level program however, it looks as though it's on it's way towards the backburner, so unless Daz implements iRay/G3 for Cararra, it's a safe bet that it's pretty much relegated on the same par as Bryce/Mimic/Hexagon...I do hope they prove me wrong however.
Hehe, Thats the one I'm referenceing....this way seems to be the fastest and simplist of those. I just figured I was doing something wrong. I think I tired that but will give it another go just to be sure. Does the size of the Alpha map matter?
Edit: Still happens even with the head and neck unchecked. I'm painting the elbow - it shouldn't paint on the face too. I even checked to see if Symmetry was on and it was indeed off. I'm at a loss here.
Edit 2: When I bring V4 into the scene she is still invisible. When I switch to scaling and move one of the handles she pops into view from a VERY small version of herself. I'm using a medium scene so what could be making her come in so small?
It's good to be proven wrong sometimes...Well somewhat, anyways as the rendering solution didn't come from Daz, but this kind gentleman!
I can dig into Cararra properly now as my investment in this program can finally take shape!
I don't want to get into a war about this (again
) because this has been done to death in this forum -a quick glance through the past threads will show many covering this topic in great depth, but while I cannot argue that Carrara's renderer is no longer cutting edge in it's class, saying that Iray is intrinsically muuuuuuch better is obviously hyperbole. I never understand the speed argument - on my machine, a render that Carrara does in 20-30 minutes takes 5-6 hours in Iray and looks exactly the same (I've tested this many times by just loading various sets with their default settings and hitting render).
I regularly see Iray renders that look like they were done in Poser circa 2007 and there are professional studios that use biased renderers. I don't even know what "neo scanline" means so I can't comment on that part.
I am also not sure how LuxRender is an inferior Iray, but honestly don't care since I don't use eithe except for occasionally playing around, the statement just stuck out to me since it contradicts everything I have ever read on the subject.
"Better" is entirely subjective, "easy" is a matter of preference and differs from person to person, and render quality ultimately comes down to the artist, not the software.
Very well said, Mark !
In CG, there are two basic categories: still images and animations.
The one who makes still image can dream to approach the reality (to make a render and to believe that it's a photograph).
Me, I make animations with semi-realistic characters (DAZ and Poser characters), these characters are still very far to looks like true people of the real life and this is why I love the renders of Carrara, it manages to recreate an atmosphere quality in agreement with the actual CG characters.
If you have a render too realistic, public requires that all must be realistic, if there is something of synthetic in an image which seems realistic, it doesn't have more credibility and it doesn't have any more any value in the eyes of the one who looks at it.
On the other hand, if the image remains typically “synthetic”, it will be very appreciated with its right value.
It is not a war of softwares but a question of personal appreciations.
I bought Luxus when I purchased Carrara and I've not been really impressed with it. The reason is when I attempted a render with a preset woodland scene none of the leaves rendered - so I'm assuming it can't do that which seems kinda pointless when one of the main features is the ability to create landscapes.
Of course I could have done something incorrectly and thats why they didn't show - someone with a better grasp on the program will need to clarify.
I've seen some amazing renders that I assume have been the native Carrara engine. The only frustrating thing is the lack of tutorials that are free to help newbies out. I just can't plunk down 100 bucks for a tutorial (even though I think that tutorial would really benifit me). I used all my saved up money just to get Carrara and the few extras I got with it (and the extra's did not equal the price of the tutorial).
I have no idea how those amazing renders were made, not with out spending more money. So far that is my only gripe. I'm slowly getting used to adding things to the scene and working with the interface but I am a LONG way off from where I want to be.
I'm not sure if Ill ever tackle animation - I've thought of it but I want to get the basics down first. Then Ill see what I want to do.
There are free tutorials on youtube. Just search for Cripeman Carrara tutorial. There is a list of more tutorials in the information manual that is stickied at the top of the forum. I'd also recommend looking through the WIP threads of the monthly challenges. The nice thing of the WIP threads is that you get to see HOW people set things up, etc., not just the final image. There is a list of monthly challenges linked at the top of this forum under the title Learning tips and tricks...
Thanks! Ill start checking those out.
The Carrara Cafe also has a very large tutorial section covering many areas!
http://carraracafe.com/tutorials-2/
The renders I do, are all made with Carrara's native renderer and usually use a fake GI or partial GI.
I think maybe the problem is the leaves are a replicated object and I'm not sure Luxus supports replication. Octane does support 1 level of replication, but can easily get choked on trees that have multiple levels of replication. You could try turning the original tree into a real instance (though that will of course make it more complex/slower to render) but I believe that then Luxus would be able to see the leaves. I haven't used Luxus in a little while, and to be honest I was only using it for portraits/indoor rendering, so I never even tried to render a tree with it, but that's my best guess as to why the leaves aren't showing.
If you want Carrara renders that look like Octane/Lux/Thea/Cycles/etc (in other words look very close to unbiased) Carrara can do that closer than any other biased engine I've seen so far (just my opinion). PhilW's Realism Render course http://www.daz3d.com/carrara-realism-rendering-training-video will get you to where you want to go quickly. I know you mentioned you don't have the extra money to throw at new courses, but bear in mind you can also buy a subscription directly on infinite skills website for like 25 bucks that would give you access not just to this course, but to his other Carrara training courses, and I highly highly recommend them. I spent many years avoiding purchasing them because I thought the price was so high and I figured I could learn it myself with help from the forums, and I learned tons, but then I placed in one of the render contests and got one of the courses as a free prize, and I was blown away by how much more I learned (and how much more Carrara can do) than I ever thought before. Just throwing out there as an option that basically for 25 bucks you could go to infinite skills site and have access to watch all of these training vids (it's a monthly subscription which you can choose not to renew, so as long as you're willing to binge watch it all within a month, you could theoretically get all of the Carrara courses for 25 bucks, done deal).
If $25 is still out of reach at the moment, I can give a few pointers for settings to get you closer to matching unbiased quality. First in the Assembly room, select 'scene' then take the ambient light down to zero.
In the render room I generally uncheck 'depth of field' (because I don't generally need/use it), probably want to check 'use full ray tracing', do check 'gamma correction' and set it to 2.2, antialiasing can be increased to 'good', object accuracy to .05 pixels, filter sharpness to 100%, if doing an outside scene where you need the realistic sky and sunlight to light the scene (or alternately if you've got an hdri lighting the scene, which is done by adding the hdri as a background in the assembly room 'scene' tab) then check 'skylight' (and don't be afraid to hike up the intensity if needed), check 'global illuination' but I do recommend leaving 'interpolation' checked (unchecking it will increase the render time, but I have tested on multiple scenes and see no discernably difference when leaving it checked at at its preset 20%), check 'light through transparency' (very important in any scene using skylight or global illumination as otherwise the global light won't go through transparencies), I like to kick the photon count up to 20,000 - 30,000 (doesn't cost that much more render time but gives more samples to make the lighting more accurate), photon map accuracy I like to hike up to 20 - 30%, lighting quality at least 'good' but better at 'excellent', and I like to take the 'accuracy' down to 2 pixels, then down at the bottom of that menu I usually take the tile size down to 16 (I have a multicore renderer and by breaking the cores down into smaller bucket sizes It usually means faster rendering as no one core gets stuck rendering anything too complex for very long.
If you use global illumination, then you can light your scene with mesh lights (by taking any particular mesh and making it glow, it will emit radiosity of the glow color, which then bounces off other objects in the scene, giving inverse square light falloff for very accurate lighting). The drawback is that this kind of lighting won't give any specular effect (though it will work fine with reflections, the highlight/shininess is a digital invention to simulate blurred reflectivity and giving specular effect, whereas in real life this effect is simply down to reflections and blurred reflections. While Carrara can do blurred reflections, it will slow your renders to a crawl so I don't recommend doing this, though it is possible as long as you take the max depth of the blurred reflections - which you would be setting in the texture room for the object - down to a max depth of 1, still I think it's usually better to pair mesh lighting with low intensity regular lights that will set off the specular highlights of any particular texture). Hopefully that will get you started in the right direction. I've got a post somewhere about skin settings I'll have to try to dig up that might help you (or might not, depending on your needs).
Note though that all the above are not ironclad absolutely-have-to-do-it settings, just that in my opinion this will get you very close to comparable output with unbiased render engines. This may not at all be the best approach, depending on the type of scene you are rendering. If you set the gamma correction at 2.2 it will enable linear rendering with Carrara's native renderer, which will help it be more mathmatically accurate in its lighting calculations, but it also will very much influence how you set up your lights and textures, as it's very easy to 'wash out' or 'flatten' your textures and lights. There are many many carrarists who don't use the gamma correction at all and achieve wonderful realistic results, and I do not claim it is inherently superior to use it or not use it, I mention it only because you mentioned you are trying to emulate the way that Reality/Luxus/Octane render, I have a number of unbiased render engines (Luxus, Octane4Carrara, Thea, etc) and they all by default have gamma correction set to 2.2, so if that's what you're aiming for it might be helpful to start with settings in Carara's native engine that are similar. As always, the more you render and get used to Carrara, the more your own style and preferences will emerge, and you'll no doubt get comfortable finding your own 'fav' settings and approach, all of the above is just to give you a headstart in getting closer to an unbiased render result.
Thanks Jonstark, lots to digest there!
I did manage to get Octane 1.2 with my student email. However, I can't seem to get it to work. Keeps saying I have No Cuda GPU's.
Octane does require a specific type of GPU graphics card to run, since it's a GPU renderer, so not every computer can run it.
At the risk of repeating others (or myself at this age!).....don't be shy. In addition to the fantastic Cripeman's Tutorials on Youtube, Phil Wilkes has an invaluable set of tuts you can purchase through DAZ which have been produced on/by Inficinte Skills. If not for them, I would have still been playing in the shallows and afraid to jump into the deep end! They often go on sale, so if you do not want to pay full price right now, wait a bit. But I did pay full price for the initial set and have never regretted it. I often return to them for guidance.
http://www.daz3d.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=Phil+Wilkes+Infinite+Skills
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Cripeman+carrara+tutorials (you may have to adjust your search to CRIPEMAN CARRARA when in the Youtube site, this is the Chrome window address)
Happy Carraring!
@Jonstark I have the proper type graphics card - it's and Nvidia GTX 960. However, I found out last night that Octane 1.2 (The Student version) doesn't support such a new GPU, kinda silly since anything new for school is bound to have a good graphics card expecially if your going into graphic design.
@SileneUK Thank you so much for those links. I'm going to be saving up for those I'm sure. I blew the last of my hobby money just getting Carrara and Luxus though, so it may be a short while before I can purchase those.
So, Octane's power will be out of my reach for a little bit longer. I really want to purchase it one day since it will work with Daz Studio and Carrara. I've decided to use both for now until I see a reason to stick with one or the other. I love the atmospheric effects and particles Carrara can do, not to mention the landscapeing! SO much to play with and SO little time.
Yes, it was rather biased, but it is an opinion, and my opinions are rarely static, and are never personal as I only consider it a program, people on the other hand I hold in much higher esteem..But yeah, I'm not too impressed with the fact that it's basically the same dated rendering engine since version 6.5/7? and thankfully I bought it at a major discount...If there was a harsh tone to my comment, it was directed solely at the lack of the program's continued evolution in an industry that relies and bases itself on a kinetic and perpetual innovation with itself, an antique guitar appreciates in value, an antique program will sooner or later get deleted..
But to answer that comment about iRay's varying quality, I can agree on that point, as the best work is usually done when one can master their technique in lighting, so yeah, it is not much the tools as it is the artist...To a point, I mean, crayola crayons and play-doh can't hold a candle to oils and Plasticine. ;^) But yes, there are strengths to the program, but it's frustrating to see them being neglected so much, particularly when a lot of folks have invested so much into it.
And by Neo-Scanline, I basically meant a modified scanline, I do thank you for the absence of snark, as I often come across quite bold in my comments, mostly because I attempt to inject verbal inflection while pecking out my thoughts on the keyboard, and am somewhat passionate (And extremely expressive) like most artists...So yeah, I only seem harsh, but am pretty friendly (To a fault) offline..
You need a Nvidia GPU, If you have an AMD GPU then, like me, you're SooL..