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Hi Sci Fi Funk.
Not a lot of trouble to get it working really once you have everything installed.
You use the script to output to Blender from Daz, which then auto launches Blender with your current Daz camera and lights if you want.
You have to change the renderer (drop down at top), set the Thea output folder, save and the click export to Thea (unless you want to set up dynamic hair in Blender first).
Then Thea launches and you have access to its easy to use UI and to its browser library for trees and stuff.
Actually its browser works a lot like Carrara, you save models and shaders to libraries for future use.
I demoed Octane to compare against Thea when I was looking for a stable rendering solution and Theas extra engines and material editor won it for me, plus I just don't like nodes.
If any one is interested I can do a short tutorial for my Daz/Blender/Thea workflow.
I would like to see a tutorial.
Thanks,
Craig
Thanks Woodscreation.
Would love to see your workflow in action.
Does it take animation from DAZ? I'd love to add Blender to my c.v.
Cheers
woodscreation, I'm also a Thea user, and extremely happy with the quality of that engine. I chose it because Lux was too slow and I didn't have the hardware to drive Octane, and the Thea demo really impressed me with how quick it was to render. And you're right, the way it's setup is similar to Carrara in some ways, building a library of materials was relatively easy.
I"m interested in your workflow, even though I don't use either Studio or Blender. My current workflow is to build the scene in Carrara, export as .obj, open the .obj with Thea, and retexture. It doesn't take that long to do if you already have your material library built in Thea, but I am certainly looking for ways to speed this workflow. I wish there was a Thea plugin for Carrara in the works :)
I will get a workflow example to you soon.
I have been a die hard Carrara user from way back and never really used Studio much or Blender until recently, but Carraras export options are poor to say the least, and I really had to change after my last project was a near disaster.
I do my modelling in Hexagon still though and that can go straight into Thea without the Daz/Blender route.
And yes, animation is supported.
Many thanks. Look forward to seeing it.
I endorse everything said about Thea; actually I own thea sdk so if someone skilled wants to work on a applink I will be ready to roll
If you are talking about an exporter for Thea then, count me in.
Si Fi Funk - Thanks for the video link, I'd completely missed it!
Jonstark - You asked a questions about "The Captive" render I posted in my gallery at rendo, in the Carrara forum there (thought I would just post here to avoid "issues" with some of the gang there). I think you could do a similar, or nearly as complex image in Octane with a Kepler based card (144 color textures max). The full village takes 59 color, and 9 gray scale textures, and only consumes 297Mb of ram. If you didn't need the whole village loaded, you could save 1/3 to 1/2 your texture slots. You would probably have to be careful on what clothing you used, staying away from things with a lot of texture maps. But with careful planning it should be doable on a kepler based card with at least 4Gb of ram. I couldn't do it on my card, as it's Fermi based and limited to 64 color textures..
I've attached a 2 min. straight out of the box sample render.
Jonstark and Woodscreation - Thanks for posting the info on Thea! It looks quite interesting. I'd also like to see a workflow tute. Would be great to have a plugin for it, the option to use CPU or GPU would be great!
Thought I'd post this for anyone interested. The link below is to an image I rendered in Octane via the DS plugin. Took about 40 min. at 2500x3000, sorry for the nudity, but I really liked the way the lace turned out on the top. Unfortunately it's a bit difficult to see, even in the "full size" view. so I attached a higher resolution sample here. Transmap lace like this always brings DS/3Delight renders to an extreme crawl, and really slows down Carrara as well. No post-work on the image other than re-sizing and adding the sig.
(warning - modest nudity) http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2489672
actually I started few months ago to look around what I could have pulled out, unfortunately I am not enough skilled to work with carrara sdk so the bridge between them remains in my dreams. A willing coder would be appreciated indeed
Dustrider, thanks for the answer, it definitely gives me an idea of the complexity Octane can currently handle. Also, beautiful render there, not sure at first there was any nudity but looking closer I'm guessing the laces in the panty-area might show just a whisper of a shadow of something... :) Gorgeous work.
actually I started few months ago to look around what I could have pulled out, unfortunately I am not enough skilled to work with carrara sdk so the bridge between them remains in my dreams. A willing coder would be appreciated indeed
I'm currently trying to learn C++ but I'm just absolute beginner trying to start learning, and I expect it will take a lot of time/effort to get to the point I actually can do anything. For what it's worth, in the back of my mind one of the things I was hoping was that someday I would get enough mastery to try to put together a plugin/exporter for Thea (really more of a pipe dream at this point) :)
I'm currently trying to learn C++ but I'm just absolute beginner trying to start learning, and I expect it will take a lot of time/effort to get to the point I actually can do anything. For what it's worth, in the back of my mind one of the things I was hoping was that someday I would get enough mastery to try to put together a plugin/exporter for Thea (really more of a pipe dream at this point) :)
I would start to analyze deeply a mtl file exported by carrara and one successfully imported in thea and find out the differences to understand how to improve the exchange; this could be easily done with a txt reader. then you may export the camera ( you should find a good script on the web, maybe in python) and finally add thea interactive renderer in carrara ( oh my, Fenric and co where are you?), that's it: the beta is ready to be tested. Easier said than done :)
Still having too much fun with Octane. Exported a Buddha model from Carrara and rendered in Octane using a slightly modified Jade shader. Took quite a while to clean up, about 1.5 hours, stopped at 4,000 s/pix using the pmc kernel.
Let my guess: you have the full version.
My demo version only loads Octane Formats...
Eddy
Octane load only Octane files, but can import OBJ nodes (demo or full)
I did not note it before - thanks for that hint.
Eddy
Nice one Dustrider. What lighting did you use?
Wow this is an amazing render.
I have check octane and Thea and I see that we do have great plug-in (or options) for rendering.
Eddy wrote: "Let my guess: you have the full version.
My demo version only loads Octane Formats…"
Sorry, I should have included that I exported as a .obj, and imported as a .obj node in Octane. Correct, I used the full version, but the demo can import object nodes as well.
Si Fi Funk wrote: "Nice one Dustrider. What lighting did you use?"
Still being lazy, I used the "Octane Studio 05" hdr to light it, and the Jade preset in the materials Live DB.
Can't really take any credit for the render though, it was almost a pure load and render setup.
In case anyone is interested in doing their own either with Octane, or another renderer, the Buddha model I used is available here at DAZ (I got it as a PC freebie a while back) - http://www.daz3d.com/buddha-statues
For anyone looking for an inexpensive Kepler based card with 4Gb of RAM, with a smaller form factor, and that will work on a system with a 350W power supply, this would be a good entry level card (curently $105 for a new one, $70 for refurbished at Newegg):
EVGA 04G-P4-2647-KR GeForce GT 640 4GB 128-bit DDR3 PCI Express 3.0 x16 HDCP Ready Video Card
It has 384 cuda cores, but since it's Kepler it's a bit slower (1/2 to 3/4 the speed) than a Fermi based card. But, you have 144 Color texture slots and 64 grayscale slots compared to 64 color and 32 grayscale on a Fermi card. It definitely won't give you nearly the same speed as say a GTX 560, but you get greater memory and texture capacity.
Hi,
good job Dustrider.
I'm a bit confused...Octane, Luxus, Thea... :roll:
I already own: EVGA GeForce GTX 580, CUDA cores 512, dedicated video memory 1536 MB GDDR5, latest 331.81 drivers. Then I shouldn't spend money on new hardware.Octane might be a right choice? My main interest are the animations (also mixed with live-action footage).
Thank you
Then I should be fine with my GTX 660 at 960 Cuda cores.
Any hope for those of us with AMD Radeon cards? Should I just go look for other GPU rendering solutions?
I think you are limited to Nvidia cards with cuda cores for Octane. I also recommend 4GB, because you don't want to limit yourself to small scenes. Actually a lot can be done in just 1GB if you compress your objects (remove unneeded polys and textures), but this takes time. I tend to work with large scenes so 4GB a minimum.
Dustrider - I think using the built-in HDR lighting is sensible, it's quicker than PMC raytracing with daylight. I'm going to play with the HDR lighting some more to see how I can fake indoor scenes and have enough speed to consider animating.
[EDIT] I think I need to learn more, not convinced it is quicker now. Or perhaps it is under certain circumstances, I don't know enough to know which circumstances yet.
Hey don't forget about Cycles or Arion or Indigo or... :) There's a whole bunch of unbiased render engines out there, though some are so pricey they probably don't bear serious consideration for most of us Carrara users.
Not to make it more complicated or anything... :)
I think the integration with Carrara promised by Octane makes it something of a front-runner in my eyes, but yes, there are a whole bunch of other options out there. Exciting times! My issue is that I work on a laptop, and while it has a suitable Nvidia graphics card, it seems to overheat when using Octane, so after a while the laptop just turns itself off. I have found a temperature monitoring program which I hope will help warn me of this so that I can pause rendering (haven't actually tried it yet) but if anyone knows of anything else that may help, I'd be keen to learn. I realise that options are somewhat limited with laptops.
There are a few threads on the Octane forums asking for opencl support. It seems like the most recent responses from the developers indicate they are interested in it, and want to include it at some point. But I haven't seen any indication on a timeline for it.
Octane is currently at version 1.2, and from what I've read, it sounds like 1.5 will be out in the Dec.-Jan. (maybe Feb.) time frame. Otoy hasn't given any real indication what new features it might include. Opencl might be on the list, but it's hard to say.
EDIT-Actually, they have announced the new features for 1.5 here: http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=36737
As usual - I always find what I'm looking for after I open my mouth!
You might want to give hybrid rendering in the latest stable release of Lux a test run (1.3.2) with Luxus if you have it. I did the attached image in Lux using the hybrid rendered in about 60 min. earlier today. I didn't experience any of the memory issues or problems with the image clearing up like I had in the last version. The hybrid render was a little over twice the speed of GPU only. Overall, I'm pretty impressed with the improvements in the hybrid renderer, Unfortunately, I haven't found the right combination to get Buddha to render in SLG yet.
My Lux shader fu isn't quite up to snuff, this was as close to Jade as I could quickly get using a Lux translucent glass material. The almost instant feedback with Octane when working on shaders is where it really shines. You can do in a few seconds to a couple of minutes what will take quite a while with Luxus/Lux (go to material room, edit shader, go to render room, start render, wait for Lux to load scene and render long enough to see results, close Lux, go back to material room, repeat until your happy with the results).