Digital Art Zone

  Wow..  I’m not sure whats up with the code on the new release of C8 Beta’s non-photorealistic settings but it’s building strokes is incredibly slow without using much CPU OR memory!  I’ve had it running for over an hour now and building brush strokes is .3% complete.  My system has 80% of it’s CPU still available and 1.2GB of memory still available… 

Computer: Dell M15x
CPU: I7
Software: Windows 7 Premium

Scene:
Howie’s Country Lane
1280x720
Non-Photorealistic Rendering with Diffuse, Highlights, Shadows and Backgrounds
Brush style “Sponge” for all types.  Everything else default.

  Now I really didn’t expect Howie’s scene to render incredibly fast…  But Carrara is only using about 18% of the CPU and 828,000K of memory.  Nothing on my system is being used to it’s max capacity, which is why I’m saying the non-photorealistic settings are not very efficient.  I’m not sure WHAT they are doing, but it’s not much.

Hello Boojumbunn!
Carraras Non-Photorealisitc-Engine is old and not multithreaded I think.
If you want to generate artistic stuff it´s faster to render the scene as photorealistic with poor settings and apply some filters inside PhotoShop, Gimp, AfterEffects or VirtualDub (free). You´ve full control about the style and within Plugins like Fractalius the results will be famous :D !
BTW: You run a good Win7-i7-PC with only 2GB RAM? More RAM would be better and fasten up your system. Hope there´s a nice SSD inside that Laptop?!
Greetings
tezen

  Nope..  My laptop has 4 GB of Ram…    But Carrara is using practically no ram and no cpu.  Thats what so irritating about it.  I gave up after 2 hours passed and me only having 4% of the brush strokes finished. 

    Your right, it is only single threaded..  but even single threaded it should max out 1 core!  Since they are working on the beta I would hope that they also work on the non-photo aspects.  And yes, I can do LOTS of things afterwards..  but at a certain point you just wonder why you don’t use another program… 

  It seems to be directly related to the use of Tree’s built with the tree generator.  For example, Stonemasons Enchanted Forest renders in 30 seconds with the same settings.  Add a tree generator tree and it slows WAY down..  and a handful and it practically stops.

                                                                      Boojum

Tezen is right - this is really old software tech probably dating back to the days of Fractal Design Corp when they made Carrara’s precursor Ray Dream Studio and Painter (before Metacreations, Procreate then Corel developed it!)  The actual functionality of it probably hasn’t been touched since.  Better off post processing in a paint program.

In a 3D program I used in the ‘90s called Imagine you could post process from the render requester - you had the option of calling up a photoshop filter and applying it as a final step to the freshly generated image. Most of the then PS4 filters worked as well as many third-party ones such as Flaming Pear filters. You could use Imagine as a batch processor back in those days.  A nice but not essential tool still it would be cool if Carrara could do that..

  Well, I like non-photorealistic renders.  I do them all the time in Poser using Sketch as well as settings from RuntimeDNA.  I feel these ARE a necessary part of a full fledged rendering program.  But if people feel this is old tech and not needed anymore, should they just remove it rather than having something that doesn’t work as well as competing products?

                                                                Boojum

Honestly if its much quicker to do a “realistic” render and post process I don’t see a problem really unless you haven’t found a ps filter that does the same job. I’ve not played around with the non-photorealistic render in Carrara very much but I have the impression that its almost the same as early Painter and Poser effects -  still available in both those programs. Metacreations days for all 3 programs. 

In the years I’ve been looking at the Carrara forum I’m hard pressed to remember any non-photorealistic renders displayed by users. I guess Daz aren’t going to put time into something almost no-one uses - or appears to use. Too much hassle to even remove it.

    Really?  Well, here is an animation I did using non-photorealistic settings in Carrara 7 Pro…  and I know I posted that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KBxDtwRNs4&list=UUxvlqsI120X0xinEZMh0BDw&index=7&feature=plcp

    As for using Photoshop Filters, I HAVE found some that have interesting effects..  and for only $1000 for the full photoshop (because elements doesn’t have all the features it uses) I could post process scenes… 

    But thats not my point.  If it’s present in the product, and Carrara 8 Pro definitely has it present, then I feel strongly it should be supported.  Saying that if you buy a product from another company for $1000 then you can do it doesn’t seem like the right answer to it not working well in the product you own.  After all, why have a working modeler in Carrara when you can go buy Zbrush?  Why have a working render engine in Carrara when you can buy Renderman or Reality?  There comes a sad point when you decide, Why have Carrara?  I love Carrara and would like it to work well…  and be flexible enough to handle all sorts of rendering types.

    Thats not to say that Daz3D has to get the Non-Photo real working themselves with tree’s.  Maybe it is time for them to remove it and just support Digital Carvers Toon-pro.  But it seemed odd that it would be included but would choke on certain renders.  Even a popup (that you can disable) that warns “You have Carrara Tree’s in your scene which degrade the use of Non-Photorealistic renders” would be nice so that people don’t just hit the wall and then have to debug why their render is suddenly so slow.

                                                                        Boojum

Really.  I can’t consciously bring to mind any non-photorealistic (NPR) renders that I may have previously seen. (Ie. renders done with what Carrara calls their NPR renderer).  I doubt that I’m the only one who would say that.  I’ve now seen your anim so I can adjust that to 1 out of thousands of anims and pics.  Honestly, I find most people in most 3d forums mindlessly obsessed with “reaslism” so I’m not making a judgement call on which renderer I think is best - I’m just saying there isn’t much NPR about.

My bad - I refer to ps-filters as a generic thing. Like you I don’t have photoshop - for something so ubiquitous it is hugely overpriced (like everything that springs from the loins of or for Apple - but hey that’s just my opinion. )  Do you not have any paint programs? They usually have a variety of filters inbuilt and many use the ps standard. There are plenty of low cost options out there. I use Paint Shop Pro and and old version of Painter (still have the paint tin it came in!)  It all depends on precisely the effect your are trying to achieve.

Sometimes I assume people no where I’m coming from - my mistake. For what its worth I agree with you. If NPR is a part of the program it should get a makeover to bring it up to speed - literally.  My point was that in the great DAZ3D scheme of things Carrara isn’t the number 1 priority and when it comes to where they do allocate resources for for it they aren’t going to go where there appears to be no demand.  Now if this thread suddenly filled up with page after page of NPR images and anims plus complaints about lack of progress in this area maybe someone would notice. ..... but I wouldn’t hold my breath!