IRAY for Carrara......where is it?

protovu

Inquiring minds want to know. For that matter, what else is, if anything, is in development for Carrara? Or are we headed to the basement.........forever?

Diomede

Because there are already existing unbiased render workflows for Carrara, we will just have to see whether Daz would be willing to go to trouble to have Iray for Carrara as well.  We'll see.

There are plugins and other workflows that allow unbiased renders for Carrara.  Before Studio had Iray, there was an unbiased render thread in the Commons. Many artists that use Carrara contributed to the thread.  Check it out.

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/50021/un-biased-reneder-thread-post-your-renders-reality-lux-luxus-lux-octane-render-and-others/p1

 

There is also a discussion of octane, lux, etc. in several of the existing "thinking about purchasing" threads.

Here is one quote from PhilW in one such discussion

For me it is a combination of factors:

- Carrara's renderer can get pretty close with simple situations, but for complex indoor scenes with multiple light sources, it would tend to struggle in comparison;

- Octane can be very fast to render;

- It is easier to set up Octane, realism is more or less a given, while with Carrara you need to set up more things and there is more to balance between realism and speed;

- Octane gives instant and interactive feedback, so you can adjust lighting and materials on the fly, in essence you need never do a "bad" render;

- I firmly believe that unbiased physically based renderers are the future of 3D, so the learning you get from using them will stand you in good stead for the future.

But I accept that the price tag will mean that it is not for everyone - but once you have used it, I think it would be difficult to go back.

protovu

Thank you, Diomede. This is very helpful.

May I ask regarding Octane:

You mention it is fast. For animation,  would you say that compared to Carrara's native renderer, it is similar in speed (once one gets dialed into Octane).

Have your found mixer shaders behave well. Sometimes I need shaders to mix between 4 or more textures.

I have demoed Octane on an earlier machine, and was a little put off that I could not access Octane shaders to experiment with. One useful Carrara shader function has been

layers: animating their placement, size, and what goes on within them. Can layers be animated in Octatne?

Thank you for your help. I will pour through the link/thread you forwarded.

Lotharen

I would love to see iray built into Carrara. It would certianly make a great selling point. Only time will tell from what I've been reading.

TangoAlpha

I imagine Daz would need to negotiate a whole new licence to put Iray into Carrara. For one thing, Studio is a free product, whereas Carrara is sold for profit. For the number of units they expect to sell and the low price they sell it for, it may simply not be commercially viable.

protovu

Carrara has been such a good tool for me, but the lack of big-boy features has been wearing me down for years.  I am being driven to Blender in this regard. Really just a handful of features would go far to kicking Carrara to a next level, and it would be my preference to stay with Carrara. Been with it since Raydream!

Lotharen

protovu said:

Carrara has been such a good tool for me, but the lack of big-boy features has been wearing me down for years.  I am being driven to Blender in this regard. Really just a handful of features would go far to kicking Carrara to a next level, and it would be my preference to stay with Carrara. Been with it since Raydream!

You render in blender? How do you do that? I would love to see some renders you have done with it.

protovu

Not yet. Just getting my bearings in Blender. My work is all Carrara native render. www.protovu.com. Also protovu on youtube and vimeo.

At least in terms of speed, Carrara native has been really great.

PhilW

Octane render speed is dependent on a number of factors, including which render kernel you use (it has a biased mode as well as unbiased, it is faster and generally looks good but does not support certain features), image size, lighting, scene complexity etc.  And of course how powerful your graphics card is.  Plus as it uses the standard unbiased render strategy, you get a very fast but noisy image which then gets less noisy over time, sometimes that noise clears very fast, other times not so (again dependent on factors like those above), so it will also depend on how much noise you can tolerate in the final image. The noise reduction is exponential, you get very fast improvements to start with, and then the improvements get slower and slower - in theory, there is always noise, however it gets to a stage where any further improvement is imperceptible. So the user can choose when it reaches an acceptable level, which can vary dramatically from scene to scene, and I would say that for animation, you can get away with more noise (and hence faster renders) than you would probably use for a still image.

But given all those caveats, overall I would say that Octane renders as fast or even faster than the Carrara equivalent, and to a higher quality/better lighting for that render time.  Have a look at madcatlady's videos on YouTube for an indication, she (Wendy, or JaguarElla on these forums) renders these very fast but a little noisy, but I think renders them at a few seconds per frame!  And if you've not seen her videos before, get ready for considerable wierdness!

Jonstark

Speed question is difficult to answer, because it will depend on your rig.  Carrara native is probably one of the fastest biased renderers out there, especially if you've got a multicore machine.  Octane speed will depend on what type of gpu video card you've got.  My laptop only has 2GB in its nvdia card, so definitely on the low end, but even so in most scenes I would say Octane is faster than Carrara native.  We have some forum members who have 2 Titan cards and I'm betting Octane probably screams its so fast.  :)

I honestly don't know if layers can be animated in Octane.  I would think so, but I haven't tried.  Hopefully someone else more knowledgable than me will answer that.

protovu

Thank you , Phil. I will check it out.  My noise tolerance may be extremely limited, but I will need to take another look at Octane.

Jon,  I am on a new dual Xeon (thanks to previous forum advisement) that sets the Carrara native render bar really high regarding speed, particularly since I am mostly Network Render enabled. (Mostly, because some files just don't play well with NR.)

 I am gearing up towards another round of Octane demo which will I am hopeful about. I would be very interested to know if there are Carrara-niks who are Octane network renderers, and what their experience is like.

Do they need matching vidcards on separate machines? Multi-machine liscences for Octane? I need to get back to the Octane site, I know. This info probably all there, but it would be great to know if any Carrara-nik is using these functions.