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Ok, if people want random Bryce render's, here's one I did a while back that I was pretty happy with:
And another for those of you who want a change of pace from sci-fi:
Although I love working in DAZ Studio (even more now I have Octane), I also bought Vue for landscape renders. Here are some ABSLOLUTE beginner shots and tests with Genesis inside Vue. I find it very easy to use, just a shame they're not planning any external renderers like Octane. I might revisit Carrara when Octane is available.
Peter.
Vue 4 - render time 14mins.
A monochrome render, straight from Bryce, No postwork
That's some really nice work!
Just want to show a simple render of Stephanie 6 made in Vue Complete 2014 with render settings set to Ultra.
Rendering time 56 seconds. Materials of Stephanie 6 in Vue was injected by Skin Vue Elite.
Evilproducer,
Thanks again for your unwavering support of my Bryce work, I greatly appreciate it. I really like the atmospheric effects you've used in that Carrara scene. I wonder if you used displacement for the dead branches on the palm to the left? Anyhow, very good. I expect someday I'll get myself for sully acquainted with Carrara.
JonStark,
Much thanks to you for your positive feedback. I do put a good deal of effort into Brycing.
Sean,
Those are both particularly nice renders. I love the zany activity in the first one, and the mood you've set with the lighting on that balcony is fantastic. Very nice.
Chohole,
Everything you make is amazing. But by now I'm certain that is no accident.
Bigh,
Looks like you used basic ambience instead of more advanced indirect lighting solutions like ambient occlusion or full GI. The most expensive rendering effect probably was the transparency of the leaves of the grass, but even that was mitigated by the general simplicity of the scene, there were not layers upon layers of leaves all transparent at the same time for the sun's rays to pass through. In such a state Bryce could produce the same render in the same amount of time. The issue really isnt making a swift render, its making it swift while still employing the more render intensive effects like AO and GI. The lens flare effect could not be applied in Bryce, but Carrara could do it.
Artini
Vue is very capable. I like the way characters appear in this software. It has good sss too doesnt it?
Edit:
Peter,
These are fantastic examples of how capable Vue is. Genesis looks great in all of these shots.
Thanks Rashad. I don't have any dead branches on the palms. I did do my own rough approximation of a Date Palm, by using the plant editor to modify the palm preset to make it short and squat. I also used a surface replicator constrained to the trunk's shading domain to place little bark objects. You can see the process here:
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/42599/P90/#632779
The other possibility is that you mean the vines which I describe here:
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/42599/P90/#632813
I actually didn't use displacement at all in the scene. I was going to use it on the ruins, but I was running short of time. I may go back and revisit the scene and add displacement just because I think it would look better. Carrara has the cool ability to paint displacement in the VM and save it as a map, or not. I know it's not the only program that can do it, but I found the implementation very easy to learn and use.
...Rashad, beautiful work there.
Those last couple rival work I've seen done in both Carrara and Vue.
So how do you manage such incredible work with only a maximum of 3GB RAM available for the application due to it being only 32 bit?
Yeah, I am one of those who cannot afford to drop 600$ on Vue Studio plus more for content and other plugins to bring it up to the level I have Bryce and Carrara at. Blender is out as I just cannot wrap my brain around it's cumbersome UI.
I've been pushing Daz Studio as far as possible, however it is just not designed for terrain/environment generation. Rendering with its GI (UberEnvironment) is excruciatingly slow even on my new system. I have recently gone to working with AoA's advanced lights, however as good as they are, there is no GI so the AO tends to sometimes be a bit overpowering.Turning down the AO unfortunately causes surfaces to render rather flat and look unrealistic. I have also taken to a lot of kitbashing to create scenery using props like First Bastion's Rolling Plains and Hilly Surround along with various different shaders (like AoA's new Grass and rock shaders)
This brings me back to which application to use for more expansive scenes. Bryce is simpler in that it has the bridge with both Daz Studio and Hexagon, however there is no posing ability once a figure is loaded. Carrara has the posing abilities, but as mentioned above, there are fitting issues with clothing content and Genesis2 (which I primarily use). I also have run into shaders and transparency maps not always translating over well. Not even sure that SSS will work as many of my characters (as well as the basic G2 characters) use it. Overall in the past, I felt that I had better success with Daz shaders translating over to Bryce than I do in Carrara.
So it's a bit of a tradeoff, better posing in scene but more work to fix shaders and clothing firs in Carrara or having to pre-pose all my characters in Daz Studio first, but having to do less work correcting shaders in Bryce.
Carrara does have SSS, but it is not map based.
Well looking at all the various images here it looks like all three tools are up to the job of handling current needs - provided the user is also up to the job of mastering the tool they go with.
Which doesn't make picking any easier...
Budget pushed a Vue upgrade off the table for me for now. I have to also get my models up to date - so even in my 3D budget, need to be sure there's room for multiple options. Was planning to put this purchase off for a while until the sale this month knocked Carrara down to $65...
Now I will still have to decide between Carrara and Bryce - and Rashad proves that if one is willing, Bryce is amazing.
The ability to keep posing things once imported into Carrara is a mixed blessing... Because content also imports the rigging, it can import it wrongly... I had to repose an outfit this morning because it came in with shoes stuck halfway through the feet... I'm not sure if the same error could happen in Bryce (I don't know what info it imports) - if it can then Bryce could leave you stuck at that point. If not then at least for still images this is a win for Bryce.
For now I'm going to play with relearning Carrara and trying to be 10% as good as some of you in here... if I can get 10% of what I'm seeing posted in here, I'll be happy.
I wish Vue hadn't gone so expensive over the last few years. It was starting to ramp up as I left - and I only managed to get Vue 6 from some kind of 'upgrade while we're in early beta' offer... That said I will have to compare Vue 6 infinite to my modern tools and see what happens when I bring newer figures into it...
(On the other hand the price of current Vue means less competition for a hobbits in trying to decide. :) )
Here's what I managed to get out of Carrara in about a day of fiddling with buttons that I sometimes remembered and sometimes didn't:
The figure in that is the new Xiao Mei - a morph of Aiko 6. But not HD textured that I know.
I am using Vue 4 - so your version Vue 6 infinite should work fine .
...which is probably why skin of the characters I transfer over looks so pasty. I also get no bump or displacement to the skin at all, the eyes are blank, and eyelash transmaps render solid. As I do not have access to all the morphs I use (since most are in the Daz Library and not the Poser runtime) I have to set up my characters in Daz first then import them into Carrara.
...which is probably why skin of the characters I transfer over looks so pasty. I also get no bump or displacement to the skin at all, the eyes are blank, and eyelash transmaps render solid. As I do not have access to all the morphs I use (since most are in the Daz Library and not the Poser runtime) I have to set up my characters in Daz first then import them into Carrara.
You're using Genesis? I know there were some issues with multipliers in some of the eye domains or something like that. I don't have the latest version of Carrara, so I don't use Genesis. In the V4 days, the usual culprit was light through transparency in the render room not being enabled. I've also had trans maps for the eyelashes not coming over in V4 skin sets, but those were third party freebie sets and so the shaders may not have been properly set up in Poser quite properly.
Bump maps are really common. You would think that that would be easy to get right, unless the D|S shader system does something different with them that Carrara doesn't quite know how to translate. Usually for me, if Carrara doesn't load an image map, the slot if fails to load in is the Highlight channel. You would put a gray-scale spec map in that spot. The other one would be in the reflection channel, which is something I never worry about as I prefer "real" reflections.
I have to say, I really like how Carrara handle conversion of materials from Daz Studio.
I wish Vue could handle such a conversion automatically as well, especially for the clothes.
I also like the lighting setups in Carrara. Below is Carrara 8.5 Pro render of http://www.daz3d.com/zyra
Rendering time: 2 minutes 26 seconds
That's curious. The eyes and lashes came in perfectly for me.
I noticed I had too much bump map in a number of things brought in from Daz Studio - but not in my figure.
SSS - sub surface skin shading?
If its not map based - how best to set it up for a figure used in Carrara? (perhaps carry that question over to the carrara forum?)
You're using Genesis? I know there were some issues with multipliers in some of the eye domains or something like that. I don't have the latest version of Carrara, so I don't use Genesis. In the V4 days, the usual culprit was light through transparency in the render room not being enabled. I've also had trans maps for the eyelashes not coming over in V4 skin sets, but those were third party freebie sets and so the shaders may not have been properly set up in Poser quite properly.
Bump maps are really common. You would think that that would be easy to get right, unless the D|S shader system does something different with them that Carrara doesn't quite know how to translate. Usually for me, if Carrara doesn't load an image map, the slot if fails to load in is the Highlight channel. You would put a gray-scale spec map in that spot. The other one would be in the reflection channel, which is something I never worry about as I prefer "real" reflections.
...for one character I am using the Teen Julie5 map with the Skin Overlay for her freckles. Both are Daz products. Another uses a skin map by Thorne/Sarsa which I removed a tattoo and eyebrows and substituted my own (since the latter were too dark for the fair haired character depicted) that is also sold in the Daz store. I also routinely employ a number of different morph resource kits for Genesis/G2 as well as Zev0's Growing up morphs to give the characters more individuality. This is why I import the characters from Daz Studio rather than set them up in Carrara as these expansions do not show up in Carrara as they install to the <[drive]:/Daz3D/Library> rather than <[drive]:/Daz3d/Content/Runtime> folder tree. Since Carrara only maps the latter, it makes me wonder if it doesn't also depend on DSON to interpret the weight mapping (which could then explain some of the issues people have with Genesis/G2).
Nonetheless, a bit disappointed as I invested in a number of Howie's beautiful sets as well as Dartenbeck's Woodlands kit for various scenes in my story.
That's curious. The eyes and lashes came in perfectly for me.
I noticed I had too much bump map in a number of things brought in from Daz Studio - but not in my figure.
SSS - sub surface skin shading?
If its not map based - how best to set it up for a figure used in Carrara? (perhaps carry that question over to the carrara forum?)
Sorry. SSS stands for Sub-Surface Scattering. It can be useful for many surfaces, but skin is a big one. Think of holding a bright flashlight against your hand, or seeing someone back-lit by a bright light, and the ears look red. You could also look at how the light from a candle flame interacts with the wax candle.
Small chance of a fix? Much content from Daz has both Studio and Poser installations for the same content. Installation in the traditional Poser runtime structure goes to MyDaz3DLibraryRuntime folders, with the familiar subfolders for characters, props, poses, etc. For older figures such as A3 or M4, you can load them into Carrara from the browser tray from the poser style content folders. However, Genesis and Genesis related content is not installed in that Poser folder structure. It can be loaded directly into Carrara, but not from the runtime folders.
In my browser tray, installation created both a folder called MyDaz3DLibraryRuntime and also a folder called MyDaz3DLibrary. I can load Genesis, Genesis 2, and related content (clothes, materials, hair, poses, etc.) directly from the browser tray folder for MyDaz3DLibrary. It will not work for me from the MyDaz3DLibraryRuntime folder.
For Carrara-specific shaders for Genesis (such as those sold by Ringo), they may be under the shader tab of the Carrara browser tray, rather than the MyDaz3DLibrary folder.
In addition, you can save out presets from Daz Studio, which will be in another folder in the content tab of the Carrara browser tray.
Unfortunately, I can't give any screenshots to illustrate at this time because my computer with C8.5 and genesis has passed away.
Kind of a long shot because I probably misinterpreted you, but worth a look. Check to see if you have a folder in the browser tray called "My Daz 3D Library" that has a subfolder for people and within that for genesis and within that for characters. Genesis, its characters, materials, wardrobe, poses, etc. should be able to load from there.
Oh yeah. I think this was just showing up in Vue or Poser or something when I left in 2006. I just got the name off. :)
I'm going to have to dig up some tutorials on it for Carrara because I remember it looking amazing and it might explain some of the renders I've seen that look really nice.
I ran the thing in Carrara to search for runtimes, and then I went through them all manually to make sure they were all the ones I wanted, and added in a few Daz-specific ones it had missed.
I'm not sure exactly on the issues you're having - but you should be able to get every runtime you can see in Daz to also be visible to you inside Carrara.
Ok, for the first time loaded Genesis2 in Carrara, and I can confirm it's got some problems (at least for me). I was able to load the G2F clothes to it ok, but I also happened to have a G2F character from Silver (I bought it for the V4 morph, but it comes with the G2F stuff too), and I was able to apply it ok, but when the clothes immediately had pokethrough. Then when I tried to render I only got 'an error has occured'. Had to delete the G2F character to get things back to normal in my scene.
Also loaded Genesis, which seemed to work fine as I put it through it's paces. Was able to autofit V4's clothes to Genesis1 without problems, but when I tried to put M4 clothes on M5 it didn't give M4 as one of the drop down selections for autofit (has it always been like this and I never noticed?) The M4 clothes still seemed to fit pretty well, but it was weird to me not seeing M4 as one of the drop down choices (or rather M4 was a drop down choice, but there was no sub-component drop downs to indicate pants, shirt, etc). With it's own clothes and V4 clothes, everything seemed to work fine on Genesis1 at least.
I should also mention I run on a Windows laptop. I understand mac users sometimes have a more interesting and less stable experience, though that may just be with older versions of carrara.
Oh wanted to comment on some of the renders too.
Sean Riesch, both very nice, I'm really digging the wrecked spaceship converted into a sci-fi Robinson Crusoe/Swiss Family Robinson home. Very complex, every time I look I see something else I missed before. And the quality, like Rashad's early renders, makes me say 'wow, is that really Bryce?'. Bryce is obviously a more capable renderer than I've given it credit for in the past. And those clouds are first rate, I would have thought they were Vue clouds actually.
peter.schelfhout, some very cool Vue renders, the middle one is my favorite, nicely complex and yet crisp (even the mist from the lake).
Bigh, another cool Vue render, and that rendertime is much faster than I would have expected for the quality of the scene, really nice work. I know you also do very good Carrara renders too. Do you also have/use Bryce?
chohole, that monochrome render is quite striking, very nice, love the ruined city and the statue.
arcady, I'm impressed that you've hit the ground running with Carrara, that's a pretty nice render for your first try back in using it (is it a bit like riding a bike?) :)
Artini I have to say I never really converted Daz materials to Carrara before, looking at the shirt on the figure it does seem to convert pretty well. Since most of my V4/M4 stuff I load from my poser runtimes, I always have to manually converted my textures to make them Carrara friendly by hopping into the material room. I've built up quite a library of carrara master textures over time, all ready to apply whenever the need arises.
Ach, if only it was that easy. The SSS channel has slowly driven me insane of the past several years, trying to get even a rudimentary mastery over it. The controls aren't intuitive, and change any of them even slightly and it completely changes everything about the way the SSS works. I've seen so many of the best carrara artists who have shared their SSS settings - all wildly different from each other. Still searching for those perfect skin settings, someday someone will crack the code... :)
thank you !
Yes I do have Bryce and use it some .
Bryce hot rod
Vue 2014 Complete render of http://www.daz3d.com/mec4d-the-aviatrix-for-genesis-2-female-s
For anyone still interested, Dartanbeck posted a very informative "What is Carrara" video on YouTube. The link can be found in this thread in the Carrara forum: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/44999/
"What Is Carrara, Anyways?"
A thread I've started in the Carrara forum, here at DAZ 3D, which introduces a video intro that I made to begin my attempt at promoting Carrara, simply by showing the world what it's about... what it can do.
To me, it's not a matter of "this software is better than that", sort of thing, because in my opinion, Bryce users like to use Bryce because of what Bryce really is, and there really isn't anything else on the market quite like it. The same might be said for Vue... I wouldn't know, as I haven't had the pleasure to try it yet.
I have come from a Poser background, but a fairly short one. I first began my trend into 3d art by reskinning assets for the Neverwinter Nights game, and accidentally got noticed by a team working on a rather ambitious "Spelljammer" D&D conversion for it. So they asked if I would become their costume designer.
All of the work I've done to that point was to simply create new texture maps to fit existing models. As it turned out, they wanted much more... they wanted new models! So the lead modeler of the team got me going in G-Max, which was Discreet's (then owner of 3DS Max) free sample version of 3DS, which worked well for game development enthusiasts, and there was a rather robust set of plugins made for it specifically for the Neverwinter Nights game.
Taking a liking to G-Max, my modeling mentor let me mess around on his workstation, sporting 3DS Max 5, the latest at that time. We found that I am with 3DS as I have always been as a stone sculptor in traditional art: I am inclined to feel natural at organic shapes, the human body and dragons most of all.
After seeing how much I enjoyed animating and rendering in 3DS, my mentor bought me a copy of Poser 5 from Curious Labs. I fell into a whole new passion for art! It kept me most content until it finally became obvious that I really find a yearning need to create my own mesh objects or, at the very least, be able to manipulate the polygons and create my own morphs. So I started looking for modeling software that could easily work with Poser-style figures. It was mostly the DAZ figures that I was interested in.
I failed. I followed some fairly lengthy discussions on how it might be possible to do so in LightWave, and a few for 3DS, but I was mostly finding that the 3DS community would rather sneer at the idea of using Poser assets, than to actually provide any assistance on the topic - so it was very dead-ended.
The thing is, that I wanted to get into it, but I couldn't see myself actually wanting to have to create all of my own assets! I did feel a need to have modeling capabilities, but I didn't want to reinvent the wheel, and DAZ 3D's figures were fantastic! So were all of their other models!
When I've finally stumbled upon Carrara 5 Pro by seeing someone using it, the software had just recently adopted an importer that allowed Poser content to work directly inside Carrara! Carrara 6 was even better at it. By the time I finally acquired Carrara, version 8 Pro was in beta, and Carrara 7 Pro was on sale to help promote the up-and-coming release of 8. Buy 7 now, and get 8 free upon its release! I checked with DAZ 3D to find out if buying 7 Pro would get 8 Pro and, yes... the answer was: Yes!
Super-long story made a bit less lengthy, Aero in Win 7 64 bit seemed (it was actually a minor message - nothing to lose sleep over) to like 64 bit Carrara 8 Pro beta over Carrara 7 Pro 32 bit. So I never really got my feet wet in 7, just running 8 Pro beta until the official release of Carrara 8 Pro, and I only ran that until 8.5 beta started.
But in both Carrara 8 and 8.5 Pro, I have never been happier!
I can assign my runtimes directly to the Carrara browser, and open Poser-style assets just like it's done in Poser!
But the story goes on. Delving deeper into Carrara's abilities I'm still discovering ways that show how well Carrara was originally designed to assist me in any effect I ever want to make - and it does so in a classy, easy to use fashion!
Anyways, I feel that Carrara has been a well kept secret for too long. So the video that I linked to above is the first in a new series of promotional YouTube features that I plan to release. That first one is in my usual "Dartanbeck Babble-session" style, while my new ideas are much more punchy, with less talk and more action.
Spelljammer? That's awesome Dart, I never knew that. :) I was a very big fan of Spelljammer, even wrote some Novelettes and Novels for that universe back when under the pseudonym 'Sebastian Cain'.
Are there models out there for Spelljammer ships? I'd love to get my hands on one to do a little Spelljammer rendering :)
For those frustrated with Genesis 2 in Carrara, I illustrate 3 uses of the G2F's Aiko 6 character in Carrara.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/44033/P210
The link has step-by-step guides for
(1) loading a character in Studio where it is morphed/clothed/posed and then exported for use in Carrara (similar to how the G2F would be used in Bryce),
(2) loading the G2F directly in Carrara, modeling clothes, then using Studio to convert the clothes to conformable figures, which are then loaded in Carrara and "fit to" the Aiko 6 shape for posing etc. (similar to how clothes could be modeled in Hexagon), and
(3) loading the G2F directly in Carrara, applying Carrara's dynamic hair, saving the hair for future use, and then morphing the G2F to Aiko 6 (which I don't believe can be done in Bryce or Hexagon).
- you might get poke-through with purchased content, you will want to change materials and shaders, and people have identified some problems with some pose sets.
- Bryce's landscape editing tools can be used to finer detail than Carrara's
- Hexagon has some vertex modeling tools that Carrara does not
With those caveats in mind, you can use most of your purchased G2F content, including Aiko 6 content, in Carrara in a similar way to Bryce. You can also model your own content for the G2F, including Aiko 6, and use it in Carrara in a similar way to Hexagon. There are some features that can be used in Carrara that are not in Bryce or Hexagon.
The combination of Studio/Bryce/Hexagon is cheaper than the combination of Studio/Carrara.