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This is how I like to light scenes, for the most part
Have you tried putting an HDRI in Background and using Skylight in Render settings. This is similar to using and UberEnvironment in DS as far as I know. If you do this, you need to reduce Ambient Lighting in the Scene settings (Assemble Room) to zero, or at least very low.
It also works without an HDRI.
Just a spherical map or a BiGradient works well too. But HDRI actually cast more light into the scene - or so I'm told. I get well-lit scenes with just jpg, png and bigradient too.
You will get more directional light with an HDRI. Using Bi-Gradient or a Jpg will give fairly uniform lighting, so the results can appear a bit flat. With an HDRI, it encodes the intensity of lights into the scene and so you will get more realistic and more vibrant results. There are lots of free ones available on the net in addition to some good and reasonably priced sets on Daz and elsewhere.
Yeah I love the look of hdri lighting, but often just like indirect lighting, render times get too long for animation. I plan on building a second computer, that might get to where I could use hdri lighting for animations. I appreciate all the suggestions. But I still think that Carrara's ambient light when used as it's name implies (for ambient light) doesn't really look that great, and could be improved. This is a feature request thread right?
I'm working on an animation for the nightclub I work at right now. It's 3 minutes long, it's about 2 min and 20 seconds per frame render time. At 24 fps this is 4320 frames, that works out to about 5 or 6 days round the clock render time.
Have you tried Ambient Lighting together with the Ambient Occlusion setting in the render room? That's really the only time I use Ambient Lighting and it can look pretty good and still renders fast.
As for render times on animation - I hear you! It's always an issue. I once worked out how long it took to render my "Trick or Treat" animated short. For five minutes screen time, it took around the equivalent of a month of continuous render time!
And then you spot something you want to change . . .
Well, that was spread over 5-6 months actual time, and for a project like that, I always render to individual frames so that if there is something you pick up, you can just re-render the affected frames without having to redo the whole scene.
I would consider acceptable an average time between 4 and 6 mins/frame ( 10>15 frames per hour); currently I am rendering my clip under 5 mins/frame with 4 machines and 20 cores only, 4 seconds (120 frames) each render session. Most important to have a few machines working in parallel and a lot of ram (min. 8 Gb per machine) to avoid bottlenecks or carrara crashes/freezings
Yes I always aim for 5 mins per frame or less. Now that I have Octane, that is another potential route to fast renders - I have recently rendered some heavy city fly-overs and fly-throughs with Octane and it was producing great looking results at 30 secs per frame!
you lucky guy with performing GPUs !
curious to know if octane has optimized its direct lighting kernel as thea did: in thea adaptive biased engine as 1st engine + direct lighting as 2nd, work greatly for simple animations, in less than a minute you get accurate shots without noise or such
That city animation was done with Octane's Direct Lighting kernel, which as you say is faster than the other more photoreal modes but still produces excellent results. Not sure about optimization - I just use 'em!
issues with glossy and transparent surfaces if I remember correctly
When using Direct Lighting in Octane you do get reflection and refraction but not caustics with transparent materials, and you get absorbtion but don't get proper scattering (so materials which mimic sub-surface scattering need Path Tracing or PMC). The lighting is similar to having Carrara's ambient occlusion mode, with some selectable parameters. For some scenes it can be pretty indistinguishable from fully photoreal modes like Path Tracing, and it renders that much faster so it is great for animation.
mmh, issues with realistic foliage and water then. about glare or similar?
Do you have an example? Octane will struggle with lots of trees as it doesn't have "nested replicators". So if you have a tree with say 500 leaves and then make a forest with 500 trees, Carrara understands this and has two levels of replicator, each with 500 instances, no problem. Octane doesn't support having one replicator nested within another, and tries to resolve this by "flattening" it and sending 500 x 500 instances of the leaves = 250,000 instances. It can get out of hand pretty quickly. Carrara's Octane plugin allows you optionally to flatten the tree so the individual tree is a larger object, but you don't get the huge numbers of instances.
Or maybe you were talking about the translucency of leaves? You would probably need Direct Lighting (or PMC) for that.
Hi there!
I have some requests:
1.-Fix V4 bending and morphing.
2.-Fully compatibility with Genesis figures and DAZ contents.
3.-Particle destruction (like Pulldownit for maya)
4.-Autosave
Daz would say that fix for that was Genesis and then Genesis 2...
The biggest element of incompatibility is with the Genesis 3 series, which we know they were working on but seems to have stalled.
We can dream but I don't think there is any way that will happen. It is more likely they would include something like this in DS than Carrara as that is where the development is. But Pulldownit is a $400 plugin...
Not unless they can get saving vastly faster than at present, or it would just interrupt workflow too much.
yes I was talking about translucency, transparency and in-scattering with octane DL via carrara
Feature Request - Octane to come as a standard choice of engines... for free! Oh... and with a bonus one of these
1.-You're right, but still could be a fix for some bending issues in V4 model in Carrara. Especially tights and arms, they bend pretty weird :(
2.-Sad :( There's a lot of Genesis 3 characters i would love to use in Carrara
3.-I know, :( i'm just dreaming
4.-You're right.
When you have an animation like this,. with a keyframe on each frame,. rather than thinking about moving each keyframe manually to follow a specific curve,.
Think about reducing the number of keyframes,. and use "Tweeners" like bezier to create that curvature.
Using a tweener between two keyframes allows you to adjust either of those to keys and /or,. the tweener type / settings,. to adjust the curve more easily than would be possible for an animation where every frame is keyed.
Hope it helps :)
Which would be an Awesome fix. If we could get a way to have full-save as well as partial save options, that would be awesome! For example, if we could create a new partial save which requires the use of another save to be opened again, we could actually store edits to a mesh in a save without including the roiginal mesh save - so we could make shaping add-ons for other Carrara PAs products without including the primary product.
But even more so, if we could save only what has changed into an existing save, we could get more rapid saves where which an auto-save feature would then be a boon rather than an impossible burden.
Okay, now who's dreaming? Good seeing you Namtar3d! Loved your ideas!
These animations were created in puppeteer, that's how it creates keyframes, one in every slot. I've tried the Reduce animation filter but it doesn't seem to work, it just deletes everything. I've thinned them out by hand, but try doing that for 3 axis of every bone in a skeleton over a 3 minute animation, talk about tedious. Also I don't use tweeners in the sequencer, I do all my smoothing of key frames in the graph editor, because it gives you much more precise control of your curve than messing with those tweeners. The "smooth" animation filter works pretty well to smooth out puppeteer animations, but to change them, I still think my idea of a new tool would be the quickest way.
It seems a lot of people on here want to be teachers...
Tweeners in the Graph editor,. are exactly the same tweeners in the main sequencer,
it's a more detailed view.
as for manual reduction,. I have done that a lot for motion capture i create,, or anmations I create, so i'm aware that it's not an instant fix.
much of the time you should be adjusting the main sections of the figure,. Hip ,abdomen, chest, neck ,head, arms.
if you're adjusting a lot of keys,. then it' usually
Hands and fingers are much easier to deal with,. but still a pain
However,. I wasn't trying to tell you how animate,. just pointing out historically why it's unlikely to happen.
having people who are willing to help is a good thing,. and there are many here who have years of experience with carrara and other programs.
if you don't need any help, that's fine. others, with less experience, may benefit from it.
Just trying to provide work arounds as I think the chances of most of the suggestions in this thread actually being implemented aren't particularly high.
Autodesk Carrara 9
say goodbye to mistakes
say goodbye to tutorials for $99.95
No!!! What mistakes are you talking about? I said "goodbye" to Autodesk a couple of years ago and so happy with my lovely Carrara!
And say hello to getting fleeced for the rest of your life...I read recently they are going all subscription Adobe style.