Project Dogwaffle Howler
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And thank you for those folks who signed up! I hope you have your questions ready! And hope you can make it, too, Chickenman.
I have registered and will likely be able to attend due to the weather we are expecting as we are going from +11C to -25C overnight and with rain going to freezing rain to snow I dont think I will be doing much other than opening up the chicken coops and closing them tommorrow.
Might have my daughter watching it with me to see if it will fit her workflow for school as she is taking the illustration and concept are coures at a college here.
Awesome! Look forward to seeing you there!
Our Temps were in the negatives for the high for the last 2 days. And the lows in the REALLY negatives, I don't know the conversion numbers, but -21 degrees F, without the windchill factored in.
I really enjoyed the session and learned a lot about howler in the short time we were in Class.
Very well done Tiffanie.
Thank you so much chickenman! I appreciated your comments! I can't wait to see what you and your daughter do with it in the future!
Paul and I are hoping to do more webinars on Howler in the future, so if you have ideas on what other things you might like to see, let me know!
Looking forward to them!
Bravo, Tiffanie!
Bravo, Tiffanie. Well done webinar. I'm itching to put the lessons to good use.
So Tiffanie and I have been working on figuring out the OBJ Export from Howler's 3D Designer and have made some wonderful headway!
As both of us have witnessed, exporting a highly detailed terrain (or whatever) results in millions or more polygons. Yeah... beautiful piece of mesh, but yikes!!!
We've made a wonderful discovery. In 3D Designer's panel, up at the top of the main page is a setting called Sample Rate. It's set to 1 by default, which results in really nice, high levels of detail. AA, GI, Occlusion, these are all great for making the resulting image made from the internal render very nice, but I don't think it has anything to do with the actual quality or resolution of the mesh. But Sample Rate has a big impact.
Tiffanie sent me an OBJ she exported made from a small 256 x 256 bump map. I set Carrara on the task of loading it and, over two hours later, I aborted Carrara with Task Manager.
I took the same bump map (thanks to her sending that along too!) into Howler and, this time, set the Sample rate in 3D Designer to 4. Here's the thing, though: Changing this from it's default of 1 makes the mesh look pretty low res in Designer, afterall... it's a small window we're seeing. So I almost didn't want to try it.
That being said, before doing that I opened the More panel and cranked up some pretty detailed erosion while the Sample Rate was still at 1, and stored the erosion map to Howler's interface (and later saved it for use as displacement) and then turned erosion off again, set Sample Rate to 4 and exported the OBJ.
This time I loaded it into Carrara, disabling auto-scaling along the way, and it loaded in a snap! It also has some pretty fine mesh for a terrain. I ended up not using the erosion map due to its 256 x 256 being so pixelated at this scale.
Here's a look at the mesh resolution
And here's the render
very elegant, thanks for sharing - love that render -
wish I read this three hours ago when I exported terrain from pdhowler - at 1.28 gig -
tried to import it into Carrara - which stalled for about an hour, then crashed - lucky I can run two instances of Carrara
I then doanloaded Blender which stalled on import for about ten minutes, then I decimated it (well reduced it by 20 percent)
exported it out of blender which stalled for ages
but managed to do it,
now Carrara has stalled trying to import the smaller obj :)
Tiffanie's, the one that still didn't load after more than two hours, was only 7.4MB, but she said it results in hundreds of millions of polygons.
Holwer (3D Designer) does have a warning about this in the working window.
Just don't let the lower detailed appearance in Designer wreck your idea of exporting. As seen in the mesh res SS above, that lower resolution is still fairly high for a terrain - and we can always go even higher on the Sample Rate for a lower rez mesh and bring it in and SubDivide it if we need higher counts.
That was my first attempt to put snow on Terrain in a shader. I can tell I need practice in that. I finally gave up, it's so late here. Geeze, Dart... go to sleep already!!!
thanks!!! Carra is now stuck at 100 percent :)
Don't forget you can untriangulate that mesh for a significan't reduction in polys (it won't quite be half, but not far off).
Absolutely. Even decimate it if it's a background piece. I usually use some pretty low rez topology for terrains and use shaders to help them along - shaders and perhaps replicators.
I certainly appreciated Dart's insight and discoveries on this! And the mesh still looked fantastic in the render he did even without the texture file added. (it tends to look a little pixellated in Daz, too I have found, unless it's way back in the background. But this opens up whole new worlds with Howler and exporting objs. Especially, since 3dDesigner can do all kinds of 3D objects besides terrain! Getting ready to try his technique and see how that works for me.
Thank you for attending, and thank you for letting me know that you enjoyed it!
I'm hoping to do more in the future, so it's good to know that people liked my presentation style.
My next one will use an even higher Sample Rate to get the ploygon count even lower. I like to optimize things via shaders anyway, and the mesh turns out so nicely that I'd like to mess with it a bit in Carrara's vertex modeler. For one, TangoAlpha's comment was already on my mind: Un-Triangulate the mesh first, then maybe sculpt in my own additions, whatever.
Why even use this when we have a Terrain Modeler in Carrara?
Because Howler exports a much easier mesh to work with. Carrara's Terrain Modeler tends to poke sharp points in the air, Howler doesn't - at least not the way I did it.
Here are my thoughts for my next test:
The I'll bring the thing into Carrara and test using the various higher resolution maps in the shader - erosion for sure in Displacemment, but perhaps include the Bump/Height map in there as well. Try using the Texture Map (tweaking using Howler to create different White on Black zone maps) to help dictate the distribution of snow, vegetation, and perhaps sand/soils and such. Let rock and stone cover everything else.
I don't really mind how the experiment turns out because this is some of my favorite "Relax in Carrara and Howler" type of stuff to do.
For anyone following this stuff, I'd like to point out that we can also turn of "Perspective" mode in 3D Designer and still emboss whatever it is we have open. This might be an interesting way to create fun new textures for anything we want. I've been getting a lot of different ideas on maps to bring into this thing - whether or not the end intention is to export an OBJ.
Sometimes just some cool new maps is all we need! ;)
here's some data
I dropped my texture down to 256 by 256 and imported it to howler
made a terrain and exported it
sample 1and sample 4 are the same size 7591 kb (maybe I am picking the sample from the wrong menu?)
neither imports into Carrara which siezes
I import one of the obj into blender, imports without trouble
I export the terrain obj from blender and get an obj size 13,673 kb
this obj imports into Carrara no worries
apologies for not doing the seminar tiffanie_gray_aceaa3bc71
when I heard Dan was sick and went and bought the latest howler instead
cheers!
Yeah, it explains in the 3D Designer window that an OBJ file is nothing more than a text file. It's the number pf polygons produced (which can be nearly the same number of lines of text, I think?) which causes Carrara to have difficulties. Maybe Blender and Carrara have different default OBJ import methods/default presets?
What I did was to make sure to check "Disable Auto-Scaling" in Carrara during the OBJ Import dialog, otherwise I just left everything else at their default from the default preset.
I really wasn't aware that the file size of the higher resolution obj would be the same as a lower one. But that would explain why Tiffanie's 7.4 MB file has millions of polygons.
The one that was exported at Sampling of 4 should import into Carrara. Try it with Auto-Scaling disabled.
thanks Dart, pretty sure I did with autoscaling disabled but No Joy - will try again later :) cheers!
Sorry for your woes. I only had that one test and it was successful... bummer if it was a coincidence.
Oh... and like I said too... for the actual OBJ export, I was leaving Erosion and anything else that might further complicate the mesh turned off. I also (but failed to mention) didn't go crazy with Amplitude, knowing that I could scale the z axis in Carrara, or whatever.
For my test I let the shader do much of the heavy lifting.
In my example thoughts I was pondering raising a bunch of those details to a high level - but only to use for maps. Then, when it comes time to export the OBJ, dial everything way back and increase the Sample Rate.
I'll be doing some more experimenting when I can. Machine is busy rendering a water simulation.
I did one that was 1024 x 760, followed what Dart had said. Imported it into Hexago (no problem) and then did decimate to 10%. I exported that obj and imported it to Carrara, didn't have any issues with that. But, Since I'm so Carrara un-savvy, couldn't figure out how to get the texture to look right after import, it just made "rays" from the center of the mesh, to the edges.....Ah, well, I guess I need to sit down with Carrara and do through a few videos. But, it is the number of polygons that seems to be causing the non-load issue. And decimating them (after following Dart's suggestions) seemed to really help.
@Headwax: Dan was in a tight spot, and I sure don't hold it against you to help him first!
I wonder if Hex changed the UV mapping when it decimated? Did you check the box in 3D Designer to do the UV thing? I can't remember how it's worded... UV something.
I had fun including howler in my new YouTube tutorial for the cool new Fluidos fluid simulator for Carrara. Hower just freaking Rocks!!!
Waiting for Vegas to finish crunching the data.
"Rays" is a good indicator that the UV map got broken. Carrara's UV editor is a bit (= very) basic, but you should be able to rebuild the map.
@ Dart, No, I didn't I should as I try this again.
@TangoAlpha, Thanks! I'll give that a go, or else I'll just redo it in Howler and see if that fixes it.
This has become an interesting experiment.I am going to have to buckle down with Carrara if I'm going to do much more, though, I'm just clicking and poking, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't! lol. I feel like when I first started DS and Poser.
Yes, there's a lot to learn! It's worth it, though... at least for me it was. Learning Howler is becoming just as essential to me... I'm really glad I finally took the leap and went Waffle!
Here's that video I made for Fluidos. Starts in Carrara with the build and results of my Simulation (Fluidos for Carrara), then goes into Howler to turn the creation into stock footage for use in compositing, then into HitFilm Express 2018 to composite the result with a full scene animation.
I did my very first Carrara render! And I got the Howler obj and texture to import...
I had talked to Dan, he said that 3dDesigner creates 2 triangle per pixel....yeah, you heard that right! lol So, anyway, I created a 160x160 canvas, used 3D designer, and exported the obj. Then i took the orginal "tiny" height map, and resampled it up 3 or 4 times, and then made my normal size texture map. Saved that out, after adding errosion, noise, etc. Just doing it quickly.
Imported the obj into Carrara, went in REALLY fast, then did some z-scaling there. Finally, fiddled around till I figured out how to put the texture on the obj, and then took a render. I'm no Dart or PhilW, that's for sure, but I did get it to work! Go me!
Bravo!