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I did do a simulation.
What I was saying, Octane renders the fur beautifully but nothing can save me from Carrara's jittery sims :lol:
draping works beautifully but animated sims not so much.
I mostly do not simulate hair by the way esp head hair, only did to see how Octane rendered it.
I'm not certain it's worthwhile to do a hairsim for furs, unless the kitty happens to be walking through a tornado-level windstorm the hair shouldn't move or sway that much. Looks like the hair stiffness or shape stiffness or both is set pretty high, and the air dampening set a bit low, which may explain the bouncing back and forth, but I think for fur I wouldn't do a hair sim at all, the motion of the creature moving will cause the hairs to look in movement enough, especially as the angle viewed by the camera of each hair will change from frame to frame against other nearby hairs.
I've been testing and testing to try to find decent physics simulations settings for a short hairstyle I made recently, and I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that short hairstyles just don't move much, and might be better off with no simulation at all. Long hairstyles can look quite natural with a hair sim, swaying with the movements of the person or the wind or whatever, but its tricky doing a simulation with anything that is short and still requires volume, it's very easy to get bouncing back, or jitters etc.
I've just ventured into the hair department a few days ago. Something I'm not too clear about... (related to what Sighman said, also PhilW and EP discussion above) is the difference between
Octane rendering animated hair geometry as shown in Assembly room
vs
Octane rendering animated hair geometry as shown by (???)
So, is it right to say, there is still a gap between geometry rendered by Assembly room best openGL display, vs "final quality" hair geometry?
I did note a visible difference between hair thickness rendered in Carrara native renderer vs Octane as is. But I thought that's a function of shaders...?
Mythmaker - Octane picks up its geometry from what is displayed in the Assemble Room. The main thing to check is the percentage of hairs displayed - if for example you have a hair with 100,000 hairs but only 5% displayed, then you will only see 5,000 hairs when rendered in Octane. So make sure it is set to 100% to get what Carrara would render. This can slow down the responsiveness of the interface, which is why it is there in the first place.
P.S. It has nothing to do with OpenGL or any other display settings. Setting to 100% will ensure that what Octane renders is the same geometry as Carrara would render. Sighman updated again late yesterday and has fixed the thickness issue.
Going back to what Misty asked about thickness- Carrara's hair shader does have thickness channel where the root and tip thickness can be defined. Since I don't have Octane, or intend to get in the near future (unless my investment in the Lottery comes though ;-) ) I don't know how the shaders in Octane work.
I had a non-Octane thought about hair and other volume primitives... Carrara hair is treated as a volume primitive when it is rendered (or at least that's the render pass it shows up in), yet it can be displayed in the Assembly room and hair editor, that means there is a basic geometry to be rendered by OpenGL, otherwise sigman couldn't transfer it to Octane. I am wondering if it is possible to add a basic geometry or reveal (if it is available to Carrara internally) other volume primitive geometries in the Assembly room, such as clouds?
Hi Mythmaker :)
There's no actual "geometry" in Carrara hair, (unless you count the Guide hairs) whether it's rendered in Carrara, or in Octane,.
That's the main reason we can't just create a hairstyle in Carrara and "convert" that to real geometry.
Basically the hair in Carrara, and most other 3D programs is a "Rendering effect" based on the Guide hairs.
Octane will render what you see in the viewport,. ..so does carrara,. but there are some differences right now, which is to be expected since it's being rendered in a different render engine.
As for animation / simulation,. that's never been an area which Carrara has excelled at, but Octane will render it anyway.
an jon's point about fur is also applicable to figures with shorter hair, ...not much dynamic action going on with short hair.
I think this is a great addition to Octane for Carrara,
Quick tests.
Sighman has updated the Octane plugin already so that the various thickness parameters, including the root and tip ones in the shader, are correctly passed across to the Octane renderer. Hair in both Carrara and Octane can be thought of as a succession of two point polys, making a line which curves through space. The volume is added at render time by applying a thickness parameters. This is what Sighman has been able to pick up from the Assemble Room - there was someone (and I am sorry but I can't remember who) who mentioned in some other thread that they had accessed this and exported it so they could render in another application. I suggested that he contact Sighman as I could see the application for Octane, and he kindly passed across some code to Sighman. Damn, I wish I could remember his name, he deserves a lot of credit!
Clouds are a true volumetric effect and don't have geometry as such, apart from defining the volume for it and you can already see the bounding box in the Assemble Room. Out of interest, Octane has some cool looking volumetrics planned for release 3 later this year, including clouds, smoke, fog, etc. and also stuff that looks like porous rocks or sponges.
Philemo
and he may yet come up with an obj exporter :coolsmile:
I don't have a problem with animated/simulated dynamic hair in Carrara's regular renderer (see clip). But would you do us a favor and post a sample of animated/simulated dynamic hair in Octane?
https://youtu.be/vGkNQixH8c4
This is a wonderful new ability. Sighman might be a genius.
I think Carrara hair in Octane is great.
However, I have been told that Octane has its own native hair system. I would like the ability to access that via the plug-in if possible. I am considering asking Sighman if he might include "Octane Primitives" similar to the LuxCore Primitives we have in the other plug-in. Right now there are two primitives needed for Octane, one for Hair objects and another for Volume Objects once version 3 ships.
Personally what I want is access to all of the advanced feature of the stand alone without ever having to actually open and operate the stand alone. Does anyone else think these primitives for Octane would be a good thing?
I should state that by providing primitives that are unique to Octane, the control parameters from those unique tools can be kept separate from the Carrara native tools that look similar. Am I making any sense? Is there a better way to give Carrar users direct access to Octane specific tools like hair and volumes?
Feedback is welcome. Thanks all.
Oh great, I've done something wrong and I don' t know what. (This is why I never do updates...)
I downloaded the latest version of Octane, then I downloaded and ran the latest Octane for Carrara file, but now when I start Carrara it completely fails. Not just the error messages that Octane mcx plugin has failed, but Carrara itself is failing too. Anyone got any ideas, or maybe a step by step on how this is supposed to work? I really am anxious to test this out...
Do you have LuxCore installed as well? I keep finding that if the LuxCore has expired then Carrara won't open. I tend to keep files open for days so I dont always notice when it has timed out until I open a new file.
I'm not sure if I have LuxCore installed; I guess I must since I have Luxus and tested it back when, though I haven't used it anytime recently. I didn't know LuxCore ever expired though, since it's free? Maybe I need to update it though... ?
The error message that immediately flashes upon trying to startup Carrara is than a procedure entry point for Octane could not be found in the dynamic link library, so it seems from this the culprit is somehow my Octane plugin or the way I've installed it...
Tried several times, then tried deleting Octane plugin from Carrara, but noticed that all the files in the Extension folder for Octane were still there. Deleted them by hand, and now Carrara will open up but of course there's no Octane. Tried installing but they don't appear and still no Octane...
Obviously I'm doing something very wrong here, but not sure what
HI Jon :)
Check which folder you're installing into, I got the same thing when i installed it into C85.1 pro, (final release) which is where octane is set to install to.
my octane plug-in is set up in a different Carrara folder.
Hi Argus :)
Working on an animated hair thing right now.
Definitely says it is installing into the right folder, only place I've got Carrara 8.5... I'm really at a loss
Wait a minute, although it didn't reinstall anything into the extensions folder that's visible, now it looks like Octane's back, but asking for me to activate it again. Got to go find my sn info I guess...
Weird, now it's working. Even though I have no extensions for Octane in my extension folder... Strangest of all, I have no idea what I did differently (other than deleting anything that said 'octane' from the extension folder).
But I guess if it works again, I can't really complain. Took some time to find my old email confirmation, then lol when I realized the direction is to sign into my Octane account to find the SN, much like here at DAZ I guess.
This update to include Carrara hair is a HUGE big deal!!
Big thanks to Sighman for implementing this, and Philemo for finding a way to export the hair into a mesh (if I'm right in understanding how this is done).
This kind of leapfrogs Carrara to the top of the unbiased rendering solutions for realism, imo, because the one big failing that most unbiased renders have is they make prop/character hair look horrible. So Blender hair can look great in Cycles, and now Carrara hair can look great/realistic in Octane, and... well that's about it :) Plus Carrara hair can simulate/animate naturally. So this is a big, big win.
My first test renders using a short hairstyle I've been working on. Noticing that I'm having a very difficult time getting highlights in the hair, I see what looks like highlights in some of the other renders in this thread so it must be possible, but struggling to get it to appear so far...
Oh btw beginner tip is that we have to uncheck 'show guide hairs' in the assembly room for the hair, or it will show them :) Makes perfect sense considering the instructions that whatever is visible in the assembly room is what will render, but nevertheless I forgot to uncheck them at first...
Thanks Wendy - I owe Philemo a beer!
Tried switching to an Octane material. Diffuse and Glossy didn't do much better than the standard Carrara materials, but tried the Specular material and getting much better results (though it does want to slow the render time a bit). Able to change the color of the hair by changing the color of the transmission chanel (for the base color of the hair) and the reflection channel (for the highlights, a much lighter variant of the same color used in the transmission channel). More experimenting to do, and I'm not sure I gave the Glossy material shader a fair try, might try some more variants there too. I guess if Octane has it's own hair being developed, then there probably are some posts somewhere in the Octane forums about what material setting seem to work best for strand hairs.
Ah ok, thanks for clearing that up. I'm overthinking it again, OR4C process is a lot simpler than I thought.
Just installed the latest. Got the thickness response now, really cool. Also getting familiar with native shader (which is already quite amazing I must say) vs Octane hair shader...
Thanks for responding 3Dage. I was just confusing myself, thinking that there's some peculiar Carrara strand hair <----> OR4C geometry translation behavior that went over my head lol... (I've dabbled with ZBrush fibermesh and LAMH so am familiar with strand/fiber/curve base hair concept in general)</p>
Yeah agree... Carrara hair animation process is still quite fiddly, still, at least there seems to be effort to integrate it into the Assembly room. Am getting the hang of it and managed to make some native and Octane hair anim so quite happy so far.
And really nice (clumping?) effect on your 2nd hair!
Jon - I'm guessing here. The OR4C installer auto-generate a /Carrara 8.5 folder into /program files. So if your install path is actually /Carrara8.5whatever (true in my case) you'll need to manually type in the right install path.
Other suspects: I uninstalled (Control Panel route) both previous Octane Standalone and previous OR4C before installing the new ones.
For the latest minor point update, I just delete the .0072 OR4C folder from extension folder before installer-install the new .0073.
I'm also on a stable enough 8.5.1.19 now. All seem to work.
Real life has kept me busy and away from the computer and 3D for a few weeks, but I had to give the new dynamic hair support a try.
Not the best job with the hair (just a sample that comes with Carrara), but I'm so happy to have dynamic hair in Octane, I just had to share my first render using it.
Be sure to zoom to full resolution to see the details of the hair strands.
Here's a rough animation render...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqi9TgAEh_0
Still shot to show anim-friendly OR4C draft quality (before Youtube compression reduce it)
Image is only 700sample/25 seconds. Hair intentionally thick for fast anim render.
Still learning Octane hair shader, so have not done it justice.
Nice hair Mythmaker :)
quick animation test...
http://youtu.be/jWN7UY7ADxk
3Dage glad you like my jagged $10 hair cut lol...
Tried to click on your vid link but it says 'private'
Trying to get some specular shine onto the hair so it won't look like flying mud sticks...
30 second render
I've just been doing a quick test of trying to get a nice shine on the hair, using hair grown on a vertex sphere. If you use the Edit Shader button under the Effects tab, it adds a new Octane shader to control the colour and shininess of the hair, but the original shader can still be used to control things like length, frizz, wave, clump, etc.
This uses Octane's Glossy on the hair with Index 1.3, Specular 1.0, Roughness 0.2 and I think gives a nice shine. Obviously you need to have a decent bright light in the scene to give the shine, this isn't going to work with very diffuse lighting. To make it shinier, increase the Index (or set it to 1.0 for metallic hair!), Roughness controls the spread of the highlight, lower gives tighter highlights. But I think this is a good starting point.