Octane Render Effects
namtar3d
Posts: 238
I recently bought Octane for Carrara and although at first I had my doubts about the price, after a couple of hours using it, I was amazed.
However I am a beginner, I am still learning to use the plugin.
I would like to know how the following effects can be achieved in Carrara by default:
Lightcone
Distance Fog
Aura for glowing efects.
Godrays.
I will apreciate any help.
Post edited by namtar3d on
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Namtar,
I'm preparing a detailed answer for you now. Just give me 15 minutes.
Namtar,
Welcome to Octane and unbiased GPU rendering. You will never look back.
A few things I suggest for any and all new Octane for Carrara users.
1. Spend some time (several hours or even days) in the Standalone version of Octane. To master the concept of Octane one needs to know how the stand alone works and then they are better able to appreciate how these tools have been presented in the Carrara plug-in.
2. Have fun with testing, don't set out early on with too many finished artwork goals in mind. Octane is just too powerful, so much fun can be had simply exploring without the pressure to publish.
3. Models that are not properly modeled will not render properly in Octane, due to the physical simulation. So a pane of glass must have some degree of depth if it is to render properly.
4. You are going to have to pay a lot of attention to all light sources. It is best to always model your light sources in physically accurate ways, avoid using point lights. Anything can be a light source, so long as you enable it as an Emitter. The lights provided by Carrara have Octane related options in the Effects tabs. But I find that I'm usually better off taking a sphere and morphing it into a light bulb shape and adding a blackbody Emitter and going on from there.
5. Make sure you know which kernel you are rendering with. By default, Octane is set to render in the Direct Light kernel. This kernel is not unbiased. The two unbiased kernels are Pathtracing and PMC (Populated Monte-Carlo). In certain circumstances, PMC can be faster, it arrives at fully bright caustics faster than pathtracing. PMC also seems to produce a cleaner image faster, with fewer firelfies than Pathtracing. Standard pathtracing will take longer to resolve firelfies becaaus all pixels are treated with the same degree of emphasis. Where as PMC focuses more rays on the darker areas where convergence takes more rays, so it produces less overall noise than pathtracing. For my mind there are not specific advantages to pathtracing over PMC, its just that pathtracing was the original unbiased kernel that everyone got used to before PMC really caught on. That said, pathtracing or PMC, you will be in unbiased territory which is what you want.
6. Everything comes down to the Render Target. To find this, you need to go to the Instances Tab at the bottom right. Select the full "Scene" parameters. Scroll to the bottom and you will see a Render Target button. Click onto that and you will find the way to alter the render kernel, as well as other paramters such as Imager and Post Processing.
7. Octane can only render in OBJ. It cannot render in .3ds or any other format. Carrara automatically converts splines and primitives to obj before exporting to Octane for rendering. You'll need to manually convert imported models in formats other than OBJ.
Now to your questions.
Lightcone: I assume this is a spotlight? You can easily model a spotlight for yourself, including the outer housing and the bulb and glass cover. You might also use the Carrara spotlight but use the Octane controls provided in the Effects tab.
Distance Fog: Not going to lie to you, atmospheric effects require some degree of understanding and familiarity with Octane Standalone. Atmospheric mediums are completely scale dependent, they do not fill the entire volume of the "world" as they do in Carrara or Bryce or Vue. Unless you have a burning need for it at this time, I think you should focus on learning other things that will matter much more. I'd come back to this one in a couple of weeks. But if you just HAVE to know, then do the following:
A. Create a New Scene at standard scale. Add in a few objects at varying distances from the center so we can track the behavior of the medium we are going to introduce.
B. Select Scene from the Instances Tab. Scroll down to where the Octane controls are located. There is a "Medium" section with an Enable button, check it. Then click on Edit Texture.
C. Now you find yoruself in the Shader room and as you notice at the top instead of reading Multi-Channel it reads Octane Medium. This is good.
D. Choose Scattering. Set Scattering Direction -1. Set Desnity as 0.13. Leave the Absorption color Black. Leave Scattering color as almost black.... Lightness 10 to be exact. Avoid all color saturation for now.
Now exit the Shader Room
E. Under the Scene tab again in the Octane Medium section, there is a slider Medium Radius in meters. Type in 50. You should now be seeing some difference between objects close to the camera anmd farther away. This is a tricky and fiddly feature, so again, have fun and explore.
Godrays: Remember, you need to represent ideals as physically accurately as possible. So if you want Godrays you need to create the circumstances where they will naturally arise. Since we already built an atmospheric medium, all we need now is to use this to create the look of Godrays.
A. Continuing with the scene we just created, now you need to create a small room for our Godrays to arrive within. So create a small room using primities so that it is hollow inside and that has a hole cut out of the center of the ceiling to allow light to enter the room. Place your sample room at world center. Make sure in the Render Target that you kernel is set to either Pathtracing or PMC.
B. Now we need some Sunlight. In the Intances tab, select Scene. Under the Scene tab, select Atmosphere and enable Realistic Sky. Enter the Sky lab and place the sun at an agle other than 90 degrees. Exit the Sky Lab.
The more "panes" you have in the cutout above, the more distinct the Godrays will appear as the shadws from the beams create the cut out of the Godrays. Again, everything involving Atmospheric Mediums is tricky. I suggest studying other things first.
Aura for Glowing Effects: This one is easy. In the Render Target you will find a tab called Post Processing. You want to enable post processing. Then you will see options such as Bloom, Glare, etc. Bloom creates a spherical glow around light sources and brighht reflections. Glare is like a bloom, but tihe highlights are in beams, like the rays we see off the sun. What's awesome is that you can adjust these parameters as the render progresses and it doesn't cause the render to restart. In fact, even a completed render cna have its Imager and Post Processing effects altered and it will not cuase the scene to redraw.
a lightcone is basically the same as a godray just not from the sun and the simplest way to do both is to plonk a vollumetric cloud in the path.
Octane 3 only
one big one occupying the space of the render enveloping the camera.
a bit OT but worthy to watch for octaners that missed it
Yep, coming soon for Unreal Engine as well, it's gonna be like having real time studio powerhouse on your PC, exciting times
indeed, not clear for me the embedded for free thing, need an octane licence or not?
Everything indicates that it's gonna be free
...and/or That Freaking ROCKS!!!
Can any of you experienced folks provide some perspective on this development?
For example, what does this mean for people who are currently doing animation in Carrara?
What does this mean for current IRAY users in Daz Studio?
I know it's early in the process, but can you speculate where this Unity/Octane/timeline project is going?
For example, when I hear that it will be free for the basic user, it sounds like a repeat of the Daz model, but at a higher level.
Or, am I wrong?
It also appears that Daz very much wants to be a player in this new product, so I think that discussion is allowed.
Well, Unity (at least the Personal version) is free already, but the inclusion of Octane which normally sells for hundreds of dollars is a big deal. And they seem to be moving from a mostly games based environment into "story-telling" for film, TV and online, and the integration of Octane is a part of that.
"What does this mean for people who are currently doing animation in Carrara?" - well nothing really if they carry on using Carrara, and the same goes for the iRay in DS question. I know that Daz has launched a sister site called Morph3D.com which sells repurposed assets for use in Unity and other gaming engines. Daz is first and foremost a content company, so broadening their sales base is a good move.
I have never used Unity, but my feeling (and I am open to being corrected) is that for simple character rendering or rendering simple animations that it would be more complex to set up in Unity and (to date) the render quality would not match Carrara or DS, but that the gap has been closing and the inclusion of Octane could be a real game changer. Unity is not a modeller so the modelling side of Carrara would still be useful, even of you intended to export to Unity for final rendering.
ToeJam (Wendy) may have a view on all this as she definitely uses Octane for Carrara, and I think uses Unity as well.
Yeah, as far removed from that side of things I am, I believe that this whole Unity thing is exactly what Morph3d is made for - so it'll make for a whole new direction animators can travel for shooting their digial media.
I've seen some amazing demonstrations on the environmental systems that Unity is capable of, as well as some of the other competing game engine systems. It's all growing fast, and growing well. With the game engine rendering capabilities, we're talking real-time rendering. That's hot!
It's all tied in with VR/AR - so it'll all be growing and making for a lot more choices.
morph 3d characters are meant for gaming where fps counts; they are completely unusable in real time or movie productions or such, due to their low res textures
as far as I understand unity will be a tremendous pro tool jointly with octane if the hair department would be implemented
carrara and unity work well together via fbx importer especially on the shaders side, it could be a viable solution for the pipeline
I find the development really exciting for Unity users. It's not just the ability to use Octane for real time rendering in Unity from sometime next year that's awesome, but there's so much more coming to Unity, for example, Timeline, their video editing and effects compositing solution which has been in the works for a while. External plugins made some of these possible in the past but from technical demos and most especially from the Adam demo, their in house demo project made entirely in Unity (
) there is cause to be excited for Unity developers who have a bias for animation and film as a medium. I've been quiet around here for over a year thanks mainly to the fact that I've been learning programming and other tools, chief amongst them being Unity. It's an awesome platform and it would be great to see Daz finding even more ways to integrate its offerings into a Unity 3d based workflow, especially now that Unity would be an immensely viable option for more things than game development. One thing they could do would be to put us all out of our miseries and sell Carrara to Unity once and for all so it becomes the bundled in modeller for Unity. The folks at Unity would sure know what to do with such a powerful addition to their already powerful arsenal, and daz would sell more content, since that's all they seem to care about anyway.
That looks amazing - and rendered in real time? Astonishing!
As someone who uses Unity, can you comment how easy it is to get into having had experience of Carrara and DS?
well it's not properly rendering in real time as we can imagine, for what I can see unity makes extensive use of lightmapping that is to say it precomputes lighting and bakes textures automatically according to the lighting preset, this pre-process may take a lot of time. Moreover it's not easy to tweak a lightmap for a realistic result, there are many variables and many elements to be used
On the contrary the camera effects and the PB material editor are pretty easy to use and give a realistic result, U5 imports natively fbx assets from almost every software and its UI looks intuitive and vaguely familiar to carrara users; it doesn't seem to have issues with gigas of maps and meshes and since I started to test U5 potential - one month ago - never crashed or freezed
I'm just curious to test unity and octane/brigade together definitely
what I improperly and briefly exposed before can be fruitfully understood here:
https://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/09/18/global-illumination-in-unity-5/
Phil , Dart, and Magaremoto, thanks for responses!
My experience is that new programs or packages always sound amazing until you get down to the details, and the limitations become apparent.
DADA_universe, you certainly have my attention. I could care less about games. I've also seen comments in other threads where Unity is being used just for basic still renders.
Well, I hope you start posting more, as exactly how Unity fits into the 3D puzzle is still murky, at least to me. Interesting perspective, thanks!
Wow. DADA_universe, thanks for posting that video
And now we have new contender in the field, major production tested Octane's younger brother, Cycles (from Blender), is finally released as stand alone app, still free as it always was, and almost as fast as Octane (according to some), it already made it into Cinema 4D, good times ahead
I would say it's not that different, meaning- you just have to find the time for it. The tough part for a non-programmer is wrapping your head around programming, of course if you worked in a studio and had a team of developers taking care of that end, then you could focus your powers on the art side of things and grow your knowledge from there but you would ultimately need some basic understanding of coding in C# or Javascript (or the Unity version called UnityScript). An easy way to get in for a non programmer would be to follow available tutorials on using Unity for non programmers. There's one released recently by Unity, where the basic scripts needed are provided as a download and you simply follow the steps and attach what's needed where and how its shown. I'd say 3 months of going hard at it would leave you less mystified about the user interface and unity's logic of dragging in game objects and applying scripts / behaviours to them. If you're figuring out how to program at the same time, I'd say allow for 9 months to one year to get to an intermediate level and add 'X' months extra to get really proficient. I have seen people create really awesome content within two to three years of using Unity. For Carrara / Daz users, you can create 2d games in Unity using animations exported out of Daz / Carrara as png sequences and used in Unity as sprite sheets, ditto importing 3d models made in Carrara as assets into Unity, export licenses would be an issue for assets bought from the Daz store, whether kit bashed or not. For 3d animation in Unity, things would get more exciting from next year I suppose, but a lot is already possible at the moment with some experimentation. I would advise not to watch random turorials on Youtube if you're curious, the thing to do would be to follow a structured syllabus, I found the course by http://www.walkerboystudio.com/wbstudio/learn-unity/ very helpful when I started out.
Actually some of the motivation to find some courage and jump in with Unity was from this forum, Wendy in particular had shared some experiments she was doing and we'd discussed a bit about it on the free software thread started by Headwax. Then I started a course in Creative Technology last year and with my background in 3d and storytelling, I just found a comfort zone in Unity and found myself staying there. Here are two projects done with Unity, the modelling was done in Form Z but could easily have been Carrara models. They were exported as .3ds and imported into Unity. In one I used a free environment kit from Unity's Blacksmith project (their first short film that showed off Unity 5's potential, you can check it out here:
) and plunked the building into the scene. Then I animated the camera in Unity to create a flythrough. In the other, I set up Google's Cardboard VR Camera and recorded myself navigating around the building from a first person perspective, same way first person shooters would be made. The frames were captured in real time using a script, but there are other utilities that can be used to do the same thing. The quality could have been better if rendered with the graphics card but Windows 10 broke the graphics card driver for my Dell laptop so I'm making do with less till I can replace the computer.
P.S. @ Mageromoto, lightbaking does not necessarily take that long, it's a rather painless process in my experience given the boost it gives to the scene. When they say real time rendering, it really is real time, at least in my experience, I simply hit play when happy with what I've got and capture the frames as they run on the screen, no lengthy render time to cope with - going to bed and waking up in the morning with apprehension to see how many hours left, or if your computer had blown up from overheating.
Pretty cool stuff, DADA_universe
well, as said these are my very first impressions about U5, in my one month experience when you make changes on GI baking or make "static" several objects, needed to get the baking on them, the precomputation may take a lot on my pc, and so when you create a new lighting map by scratch as well; in addition to this it seems very difficult to create easily a realistic global illumination good for all light conditions; in presence of high sun intensity, tweaking of shadows seems pretty basic and unsatisfactory and, on the mesh side, hair development is virtually non existent. After the coming of octane all this should be replaced and improved at the cost of instant real time
Oh wow!, thank you very much for this answer, very helpful!
Hi there again :D
I'm having too much fun playing with Octane, but again, i need some tips in some topics... :P
1.- SSS on Octane
I've seen some tutorials on youtube about SSS on octane stand alone, but i can't find the way to make the same effect on carrara plugin.
I seen this post on Otoy forums (Atached images), but i can't get that effect on Victoria 4... i hope someone could help me to understand what i am missing.
2.-Eye Shaders
Also, a tip for proper setting for Cornea and Eye Surface. (I make a decent one, but wish to know if there's an ideal setting for it)
3.-Volumetric Clouds
For some reason, my volumetric clouds are always black :( I think this is related to scene scale too, so, i want to know which setting is better for volumetric clouds at poser/daz/V4 scale scene.
I think Dustrider has given you a good start here, but just to talk it through (and apologies if some of this you know already or is obvious):
- The top level is set to Octane Material, and there are two levels below it - Shader and Material;
- where it says Shader at the top of the tree is where you have the shader which will be used when rendering in Carrara (native). It can be completely different and will not affect how Octane renders when using the Octane Material;
- where it says Material is where you define the material which will be used by Octane. You have a choice of Diffuse (a flat material with no shine or reflections, but which contains certain special effects, including SSS), Glossy (the most common material type, allowing shiny and reflective materials), Specular (for transparent materials such as glass and water, but also for "milky" materials where there is scattering or absorbtion) plus there is a Mix material which can combine any and all of the above materials.
- The Mix material lets you set the First Material, the Second Material and a Mix. The Mix can be a simple number (eg 50%, so that you get a 50/50 mix of the two materials), or it can be a map or other function that allows you to vary the mix across the surface of the model. By "nesting" Mix materials, you can create some trult complex materials, but most common materials will not need this, indeed most materials are easier to set up in Octane than they are with Carrara.
- To go to Dustrider's skin example, he has used a Mix of Glossy and Diffuse - Glossy for the subtle (but important) sheen that skin has, and Diffuse for the SSS (because Glossy does not have an SSS component).
- The Glossy is set up with the main texture map in the Diffuse channel (note this is the diffuse channel of the Glossy material, not the Diffuse Material - slightly confusingly!), the bump map in the bump channel, he has used a specular map in the Specular channel (in my view this is not always required, you can use a simple value) and you will need to set Roughness to maybe half way. The specular should be set quite low so that it is not too shiny and keep the bump at maybe 0.2 to 0.3 as well.
The Diffuse material will have the same maps in the diffuse and bump channels. Set the Transmission to white (so light entering the skin is uncoloured) and you now need to set up the Medium to give the SSS - as starter values try Scattering Direction 0.0 (scatters in all directions equally), Density 200, Invert Absorbtion checked, Absorption a fairly intense red/orange color, Scattering set to White and no Emission. To tweak the results, the main adjustments will be to the Absorption Color and the possibly the Density - try setting to more extreme values and see what you get, it will show you what each of the parameters is doing.
- You can also play with the Mix - Dustrider has used 50/50 I think, if anything I would err on the side of more SSS and adjust the Shininess amount in the Glossy material to compensate.
Just to complicate things (just when you thought they were complicated enough!), I tend to use a skin formula that mixes Glossy and Specular, but maybe that's for another day!
Thank you very much! very helpful
My first attempt, before and after.
Great - the SSS makes a definite improvement!