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Comments
Have you created any tutorials on the 3D Paint feature? :coolgrin:
well, this is an example where a physically based shaders editor like Substance designer can make the difference; I can't figure out how to make foliage maps realistic in carrara.
Moreover take a look at the video: http://www.allegorithmic.com/substance-modo
dynamic interactivity and full integration look amazing
Looks to me like the thing keeping your plant colors from looking realistic is the use of ambient light and maybe color saturation.
The link you posted looks cool, but I don't see how it is very different than Carrara's shader system aside from the presets (which according to the video are procedural) that affect the look of the image map. I can change the look of any shader that uses the same image map in Carrara all at once, I can animate changes to the procedural functions I've added to that image map. I may have to futz a bit with the settings, but for me, that is usually for scale.
There may be some presets that you apply in the Substance that need a plugin to do in Carrara, but the ability to use procedural functions with an image map is nothing new. Neither is the ability to change all instances that use that map at once by altering the shader- unless I'm missing something. Also, most if not all of Carrara's shader functions can be animated.
A streamlined UI and updates to the shader system would be greatly appreciated, but for my part, aside from some marketing hype, I don't see a huge reason to be envious of Modo.
about Modo, look at this picture; lighting and shaders can be achieved in carrara, trees and bushes make me get very envious :-)
I don't get how the shaders are physically based I guess. Do they take measurements of surface properties like IES lights are profiles of real lights? Is it based on an analysis of the image map?
Let me see if I can work something up in Carrara that will impress you. ;-)
ok but take a peek here first: http://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn/pbr-practice
it explains how physically based shaders work along with lighting models
I agree that the Substance Designer and Modo are impressive... granted. I was entirely misinterpreting what Substance Designer was - as a nodal texture map designer, not the reality of it being a shader system.
When it comes down to it, the last thing I would be trying in my life time is to switch to a different shader system than what I have in Carrara Pro. Nothing against other systems. These carefully designed systems are getting more and more beneficial to the CG world at a constant rate now, and it's impressive to see what they're coming up with. That is what truly amazes me about the work that went into determining how Carrara's super-nice system is given to us to control and adjust to our own personal liking. Very friendly and simple, yet powerful and robust.
For an example of what I mean, the image below is the result of changing the two lights that come with the Island Butte product, by mmoir, switching off the ambient setting, replacing it with gamma correction, and simply turning off all of the global illumination. This messes with the creating artist's original intention, so it's arguably not as nice as it would be if I just opened the file, aimed the camera, and shot the render.
I did those changes to make the render time faster on this most mediocre dual core laptop, as I am so much more used to the speed of my eight core, each core being faster than these.
That is a quick, yet huge example of how Carrara allows us to tweak the render engine and lighting to meet the needs of an older or smaller machine. This is not so easy to do with some render environment systems, simply due to how much control the developers leave in the hands of the user, and how easy or friendly they make those changes accessible.
So I did this render only for the sake of this example, and I'm not entirely happy with some parts of it, but am very impressed with the default shaders and scene setup of this product. Mike Moir is a fantastic Carrara Artist, where his art helps to teach us to use Carrara in many different ways. His products tend to beg you to experiment with new things. His shaders are very well thought out, as are the models and placement... very efficient. So they make for an excellent personal study of Lighting, Shading, Rendering, Modeling with Replication, Modeling with Duplication, use of many Carrara features, Composition, Atmosphere, and Camera use, along with a whole lot more. That is why I pester him on occasion to make more of these things. They are something of a tutorial that require no words, but he always includes helpful advice in his included Tutorial folder for each of his products.
Ooops... I didn't expect to turn this into a Mike Moir advertisement, but the words I spoke are true in their regard. This render was made from a quick switch from some well thought out settings to something that more closely resembles my quick test settings for timing out animations, and for that... I think it turned out pretty nice.
With any software we need to take a strong consideration of how to set up the shaders for the lighting used, and how to set up the lighting for the camera positions used, and then how intense we need the engine to calculate everything to maintain efficiency for the project. Carrara can turn out some amazing renders. But much more, it can be set up in so many ways for either speed, realism, or anywhere in between, which seems to me to be more helpful by design in those regards than any other renderer I've tried. Granted, I haven't tried them all, not even close. But the Texture Rooms nomenclature used in channels and possible abilities are really friendly to learn - to learn how they affect light and render times and have the possibilities to create so many combinations easily and in a sensible manner, albeit a bit different than the popular nodal based systems, which are also sensible and fairly simple to figure out. But since Carrara starts you off with many nodes already set up and ready for use, but being shut down by having a setting of "None", it takes a lot of the guess work out of a complex setup, leaving your imagination free to select from a well-named selection of settings to apply easily from a drop-down. It's like a nodal system that already has all of the nodes connected to the right spots. So to help myself learn a bit more about shaders and lighting them, I thought that it would be beneficial to purchase products from the pros like mmoir, Howie Farkes, Magaremoto, Ringo Monfort, Dimension Theory, GKDantas, 3DLust, PhilW, and others and seeing how they set their stuff up. What I've found to be incredibly refreshing is that NONE of these folks copy procedures from one another. They each have their own unique styles. So learning is accelerated.
The Image Below
Aside from the few pergolas on the rooftops and the one along the pool in the foreground, the building is reflective panes. You're not looking through an empty building, you're seeing a reflection of the ocean and sky, the building and gardens and statuary. What an excellent example of how to play with lighting, shaders, camera angles and render settings. If I wanted to stick with these settings, I can see that I'd want to adjust the shaders for some of the leaves to help make them more defined. The Gamma Correction is helping to wash them out, and they may even have some translucency aiding in that. The point being, for the simple purchase of a single piece of software and, perhaps some kind "donations" to those whom make some of those fantastic plugins available, there really is no need to spend your life studying new software as Carrara was a substantial - albeit low-cost - investment that can provide a lifetime of CG bliss. An enormity that should not become 'dated' as long as you can always find ways to complete the look you want. It DOES take the commitment of learning and discovery. The more you find of what Carrara has to offer along with other ways that things can be done, the less limited you are as an CG Artist... which is also true with most other CG renderers... just that Carrara's built-in simplicity and automated modeling features seem to fool folks into thinking that it is somehow less capable. I am beginning to learn otherwise.
Wow... I type too much, huh?
Sorry. Things got busy for me yesterday. I did read the article and it helped explain it to me. Thanks for posting the link to it. It sounds as if that shading system is meant more an unbiased renderer?
I do still think that you could get nearly the same results with Carrara.
Looking at your response again about my comment about ambient light, I went back and looked at Phil's thread about the 2.2 Gamma setting and he does say that it is best to use it with GI and no ambient light. Also, if you use a Mac, you may want to try 1.8 instead of 2.2 as they handle it a bit differently.
Personally, I'm not a huge fan of the 2.2 gamma thing. I read Jeremy Birn's book, Digital Lighting and Rendering, and the chapter where he describes the Linear work flow, he advocates not setting the gamma in your renderer to 2.2 gamma correction if you're doing postwork, as image editors and video editors apply it themselves. I'm going to re-read that one again so as I'm more clear on some things. Interestingly there were some things in that article you linked to that sounded as if they from the book, particularly the conservation of energy regarding light values, specularity and reflectivity.
gamma is a nice addition in carrara but I find it useful only in specific circumstances as it tends to affect colors, expecially from 1.8 upwards. Nonetheless it is really important to control the output of surfaces with albedo and, generally speaking, all overexposed surfaces. A color exclusion function should be needed.
Ambient is being used by each biased renderer if you want to simulate the actual participating medium called atmosphere; without it you'll always have scenes set on the moon. It's funny play around with all carrara functionalities and find out what happens, definitely I'm not a fan of unbiased renderers because they have limited range of action, but that's another subject
Good ol' infinite Carrara ;)
Not having time to make my own scenes right now is a bit of a fun time to play around with rendering some of the scenes I've purchased. It's very cool to see how these experts work with lights, volumetric atmosphere, shaders, modeling, and render settings.
This Master has done a beautiful job of capturing the look of what we've experienced today, here in the magical lands of Wisconsin.
wait until you get old - then you will move down south
like so many of us have :-)
Perhaps. My wife and I both enjoy the lower temps up here though. Fresh, crisp... and the water... oh the water!
Here's another from the genius mind of mmoir. BMF Country Path scene. I added the included background city and duplicated it and the far distant mountains. Aside from that, I just changed the aspect ratio and slightly changed the placement of the camera. This is a really cool setup. Many plant models, trees, grass models and hair/grass... versatile and easy to work with.
Here's a render using one of your sets Dartanbeck ;-)
They come in very handy.
super job - love the mood
thanks bigh
inspiration from Pendle Hill :-)
Sorry. Things got busy for me yesterday. I did read the article and it helped explain it to me. Thanks for posting the link to it. It sounds as if that shading system is meant more an unbiased renderer?
I do still think that you could get nearly the same results with Carrara.
Looking at your response again about my comment about ambient light, I went back and looked at Phil's thread about the 2.2 Gamma setting and he does say that it is best to use it with GI and no ambient light. Also, if you use a Mac, you may want to try 1.8 instead of 2.2 as they handle it a bit differently.
Personally, I'm not a huge fan of the 2.2 gamma thing. I read Jeremy Birn's book, Digital Lighting and Rendering, and the chapter where he describes the Linear work flow, he advocates not setting the gamma in your renderer to 2.2 gamma correction if you're doing postwork, as image editors and video editors apply it themselves. I'm going to re-read that one again so as I'm more clear on some things. Interestingly there were some things in that article you linked to that sounded as if they from the book, particularly the conservation of energy regarding light values, specularity and reflectivity.
I've read the same book (I think you gave me the idea) and I agree that you're supposed to leave the linear space at the end. It would be perfect if Carrara would output images with more than 24 bits. As it doesn't, applying gamma in post is not at good as doing it in Carrara.
Anyhow, I find that using no ambient and gamma give results I like. This is a quick and dirty try with different settings of foliage and I kind of appreiciate the way it goes. The trick when using Gamma is to use only texture and never colour selector. Carrara ungamma textures, not colours. So, if you need colours, just make a small image of that colour and it will do the trick.
Philemo, thanks for posting the example and your observations. Could you explain a little more about the difference between colors and textures in gamma. For example, I tend to use a lot of color gradients and procedural textures rather than maps. Do you think the colors in a color gradient would also be less attractive in gamma?
Something old, something new, something borrowed, something brew
Carrara, painter x3'
My mistake. Colour and colour gradient are "ungammaed" just like texture, at least in a multi channel shader. It's not true with an hair shader. Attached are two picture made entirely with colour and colour gradient. The difference is in the lighting and the shadow, not in the colours.
HW, Love the take on No See, No Hear, No Speak.... very well done!
Nice render, Stezza! You too Philemo!
Here's another H. Farkes straight after load:
OooooOOOOOoooOOOOooooh!
thanks Holly and Dart, there was some great renders before mine that I wasn't polite enough to mention, my apologies, my wife gets the shyits when I am late at night so I keep the typint to a minimimumumumumun
Yahoo, this man is a genius. Thanks for sharing, Dart.
testing foliage and glare; desaturation, sharpen and degamma in postwork
how gamma affects colors here: http://www.cgsd.com/papers/gamma_colorspace.html
and here: http://www.slideshare.net/caffscho11/gamma-and-colour-space
interesting links thanks magaremoto
Hot damn! Mr Farkes has just gone into my wish list... all of him! :-)
(don't worry, there's a comfy chair, and free iPlayer, and... so he won't get bored ;-))
More buy n' load n' render:
I have had Predatron 3d's LoRez Masked Hero figure in my wishlist for quite some time, not just to make heroes, like this, but his LoRez figures lend very well to making many different styles of character in an incredibly versatile workflow. They not only have many built-in shaping morphs and posing dials, but also a wonderful selection on MAT applying files for mixing up the many shader domains, straight from the Pose folder. Really cool!
To get this quick render together, I used the distant city preset from mmoir's BMF Landscape Pack, which is a wonderful selection of low-resolution buildings made to sit in the distance. I did a "Edit > Send to Origin" command to bring them to the center, positioned them behind the figure, duplicated the group and brought that set behind the camera, and forward enough to give my hero guy a piece of a building to stand upon. Pretty slick for something so quick and dirty!
After adding a realistic sky with a visible moon, some lighting, and a volumetric cloud, I decided that Starry Sky would make for the perfact enhancement to the scene.
On the figure, himself, I did my first session with him just playing around with the various mask options and colors, etc., gave him one of the cool poses included, gave him a few dials on his expression morphs and ended up deciding upon this cool head. The cape is a conforming item with three, very easy to pose bones that allow for any sort of cape work I'll ever need for my animations.
After consolidating shaders, I tweaked the shininess/highlight and bump channels. Predatron also includes excellent maps for a lot of shader changing flexibility.
Poor Predatron. Every time I get a chance to send him a post, I'm just praising him up and down for his excellence and dedication to making these beauties so animation-friendly. If you've never tried any of his figures, you don't know what you're missing. So when you finally do, be sure to explore all of the hundreds (thousands?) of combinations that he includes with them. A quick word on built-in pose dials for animation: These great dials make it super easy to use aniBlocks and other animation files, made for other figures. Then you can tweak them to work perfectly using a few well-designed pose manipulation dials, which are well organized into groups on the main figure itself. Using Carrara 8.5, I can sort to the exact type of dials I need. Earlier versions are just as easy, due to the fact that each category lies in its best-fit group.
While I'm babbling praise to Hero Published Artists, I think this render also shows how valuable it can be to collect Carrara scene products. I didn't have to place a single, individual building for this, thanks to Mike providing this cool set of buildings in a pack that would be beautifully complete even if he didn't include them. But he's a genius, and a generous genius. So it's a win-win for my purchasing this cool kit! :)
Ha ha Dart, I didn't read your post but that's a flipping fantastic render - nice work!
(of course I read your post)