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Can you run a regular OS on them, or do you have to run a server OS?
I may be missing something here, but if you are rendering in Octane, it doesn't matter what shaders your host program has, as you will ultimately be using Octane shaders anyway. It is possible to do SSS with Octane (I think it does it rather better than Carrara's SSS implementation).
You would have to check the specs on your preferred OS. There are usually limitations on consumer OSes versus server OSes. For example, if you really want to have 4 TB of RAM and 256 processors, you'll need Windows Server Datacenter Edition.
(fun Windows trivia: consumer and server Windows share the same kernel code and have since Windows XP)
I may be missing something here, but if you are rendering in Octane, it doesn't matter what shaders your host program has, as you will ultimately be using Octane shaders anyway. It is possible to do SSS with Octane (I think it does it rather better than Carrara's SSS implementation).
I'm not running Octane.....yet....
Maybe I should have said "planning to run Octane..". I really think that something like Octane levels the playing field on the render side of things. Carrara has native access to Poser and DS content which is a huge plus point, and we know from the demos already published that Octane for Carrara will support instancing/replication, which is very powerful. So I guess I'm just not sure what the draw of Lightwave would be - it's your call of course!
You would have to check the specs on your preferred OS. There are usually limitations on consumer OSes versus server OSes. For example, if you really want to have 4 TB of RAM and 256 processors, you'll need Windows Server Datacenter Edition.
(fun Windows trivia: consumer and server Windows share the same kernel code and have since Windows XP)
No such limitations in OS X as I recall. ;-P
Lighter fluid.... Where did I leave that lighter fluid...?
No such limitations in OS X as I recall. ;-P
Lighter fluid.... Where did I leave that lighter fluid...?
It's a good thing we be mates! (say that with an Aussie accent, it helps)
Apple definitely does not produce server-class machines and OSes. Fanboi or not, they have their niche and will not challenge the enterprise space. You know this but you cannot admit it to yourself! ;-)
It's in the modeling for me. So many great tools that Carrara either lacks completely or can do but with great difficulty. Carrara was my big step up from hand-coding in POV-Ray. It was awesome! LightWave is my next step up.
You hit the nail on the head though...I still use Carrara because of the Poser content. I've wow-ed some colleagues at work with V4 cheesecake renders, so this weekend I'll try to even things out with an M4 beefcake scene instead. :cheese:
Any news on when this might be available?
I'm curious too :-)
Hi,
here is the draft from the Octane Render manual for Carrara:
http://render.otoy.com/manuals/Carrara/
rk.
Thanks for the link (happy dance)!! It looks like several sections are "blank", but what is there looks great so far! The beta must be getting very close to public release. I'm off to read some more!
Just taking a look at the manual that's coming along makes me very excited for this. *Very* excited to see such progress, and I can't wait :)
Seems to close ahead!
Let's see...
So...I can't tell how it actually makes renders look better. It looks like it is primarily giving you a live feed into what your render will look like. Is it actually doing something to improve the final render?
Thanks!
Unbiased renderers work in a different way to the older renderers such as Carrara's native renderer. What Carrara's renderer tries to do is to go through the image, pixel by pixel, and tries to work out what color that pixel should be in the final image based on what the surface is, what light hits that surface, are there any reflections or transparency involved, etc. Things get complex when you try to model things like indirect light, that is light bouncing off other surfaces in your scene, and soft reflections, because the light can come from any and all directions. So for every pixel calculated, you need to calculate a huge number of secondary light paths to do that accurately, and each of those may need a huge number, etc. Things can get quickly out of hand and you would end up with truly enormous render times. So you have to make some shortcuts, and that produces artifacts and potentially unrealistic renders. You may have also seen my extensive discussions on gamma correction too.
An unbiased renderer approaches it very differently. Rather than trying to calculate each pixel fully before moving on to the next, it uses a sampling methodology. It will calculate the effects of individual rays of light, randomly choosing directions where there are choices to be made. And it does so across the whole image at once. So you very quickly get an image of your scene, but at first it is very grainy. As the render progresses, the random sampling evens out to produce a more and more accurate and lifelike version of your scene. In theory it can run forever and you will get more and more subtle nuances in the final image, but in practice at some stage, the grain will have gone and you will have your final image.
In Octane you can set the number of samples per pixel to stop at, but you are free to stop it and save your image well before that if there is no more visible changes and refinement of your image. In practice this is likely to take at least 100 samples per pixel, but may run into thousands of samples for complex lighting and materials. The stop value is of most use for rendering animations, so that it will automatically move on to the next frame once a certain level of samples has been reached.
Because it is physically based (and automatically makes things like gamma correction without needed any settings), the resulting image is often indistinguishable from a photo, provided your lighting, model and materials are accurate enough. In effect, it forces good practices on the user by not allowing anything else! You may find that there are fewer settings to be made in terms of render settings and material definitions, because it will not allow you to define things that are physically impossible (as Carrara will just let you do!).
It is possible to set up Carrara to do most of the things that Luxrender and Octane do, but it means doing things in a different way, and it may mean longer render times. That has been the focus of my new Carrara training course (sorry for the shameless plug...).
The other thing about Octane specifically is that it uses GPU rendering rather than CPU rendering. The ability of GPUs to calculate light rays is driven primarily by the gaming industry, with more and more powerful graphics cards able to run ever more complex game graphics. But as 3D artists we can harness this brute force rendering power for photoreal rendering rather than gaming, through programs such as Octane.
On my PC, I have 8 CPU cores, but my Nvidia graphics card has 386 Cuda cores. Now there may be differences in what a GPU core can do verses what a CPU core can do, but you do the maths - Octane is seriously fast to achieve realistic results! One downside is that you are limited (currently) to the memory on your GPU card. I have a 2GB card and that can handle most things I have tried - texture maps are the main limiting factor - but there are plans to allow Octane to access textures in main memory as well, which will overcome this limitation.
And as you say, because you get very fast feedback of what your lighting and materials will look like in your final render, albeit sometimes a bit grainy, it is easier to adjust and fine tune things to perfection rather than having to go through a cycle of adjust/render/adjust/render...
Sorry, this has turned into a longer than expected post but I hope it has provided some useful information about why Octane produces such realistic renders.
I have a 27 inch iMac,3.2 Ghz i5, 24 GB Ram and 1GB NVIDIA Geforce GTX 675MX graphics card.
Will it be good enough to run Octane for Carrara?
I think so scottidog, but the 1GB will mean a limitation to the size of the scenes you can render.
I've got a laptop with an Nvidia Geoforce 745 , 2GB, and I'm able to run TheaRenders GPU engine no problems. I've even loaded and rendered some pretty big scenes where I wondered if I would push up against my 2GB limit, but so far everything has rendered fine. I don't have Octane yet, but I will be getting it when the plugin for Carrara is released, and I'm pretty sure the requirements are going to be similar.
You can fit a lot of scene into 1GB, so might not be much of a problem :)
Jonstark, Thank you.
Do you run windows on your Mac? Unfortunately Octane is Windows only, so you would need to send your mac to the "dark side" to use Octane. Your video card will run Octane, but 1 video card with1Gb will be very limiting until the version supporting the use of system ram is released (this is a feature that is slated for version 2.xx some time). But, there are many who have used 1Gb cards, you just need to think about conserving RAM a bit more.
Windows only? That's sad. Don't use windows on my mac.
Is there an alternative that runs on Mac OS?
Just to clarify, Octane will work on Windows, Mac and even Linux. However I believe that the initial release of Octane for Carrara will be Windows only based on the initial call for beta testers being Windows only. That doesn't rule it out for the future of course.
Thanks PhilW for clarifying that.
Thanks Phil!! I looked before making my post, because I thought Octane had Mac OS support now, but evidently I ended up on an old FAQ page. I'd much rather "stand corrected" than be putting out false info!!
For anyone interested, here is the Octane 2.0 features list page: http://render.otoy.com/features.php
If you haven't checked lately, it looks like the manual for the Octane Render for Carrara plugin is just about finished. Hopefully this means it will be out s**n (and not DAZ s**n). You can find the manual here: http://render.otoy.com/manuals/Carrara/
dustrider, thanks for the heads up.