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It would definitely have really good speed performance. I'll defer to Si Fi Funk for recommendations for animation, I do mostly stills. Having only 1.5Gb will be a definite limitation, though some people seem to do quite well with 1.5Gb. Linvanchene has some excellent tips for managing texture/memory use in the DS plugin here: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/19492/P15
For a general idea on memory usage, take a look at the last two images in my gallery at rendo (link in my sig line below). Gaurdian of the Chalice took almost 2Gb, and Gypsy Girl took right at 1Gb. It really depends on how complex your scenes are, and if you can use shaders instead of texture maps.
Hope this helped, and didn't just create more confusion.
Edit: I forgot to add that with Luxus on sale, and the shaders from PhilW, it could be an inexpensive way to give unbiased rendering a test run. the hybrid renderer in Lux uses both CPU and GPU, and is about 2x the speed of CPU only. Not as fast a Octane, but it seems to work quite well in the latest version of Lux.
I think you are limited to Nvidia cards with cuda cores for Octane. I also recommend 4GB, because you don't want to limit yourself to small scenes. Actually a lot can be done in just 1GB if you compress your objects (remove unneeded polys and textures), but this takes time. I tend to work with large scenes so 4GB a minimum.
Dustrider - I think using the built-in HDR lighting is sensible, it's quicker than PMC raytracing with daylight. I'm going to play with the HDR lighting some more to see how I can fake indoor scenes and have enough speed to consider animating.
[EDIT] I think I need to learn more, not convinced it is quicker now. Or perhaps it is under certain circumstances, I don't know enough to know which circumstances yet.
From what I've read, and what little experience I have with Octane and Lux, optimizing the lighting for the scene is key to keeping render times to a minimum. Typically, sun light should be the fastest, but only for the right type of scene. For example, if your doing true interior shots, just letting the outside sun give direct and indirect light in the room will give a great natural effect, but will also require a lot of extra time for Octane to calculate all the bounced light in the room.
For unbiased rendering in general, typically I get good performance with HDR images (sometimes SSS mats don't do as well), but often they don't quite do enough, and I use an additional mesh light or two. Also more lights equals slower render speeds (samples calculated per second), but that doesn't always equate to longer render times because a well lit scene takes fewer samples per pixel to arrive at a clean solution. If you think of your render/image like the film if you were taking a photograph, low light or a poorly lit area takes a longer exposure time to get a nice, non grainy, clean image.
I'm definitely no lighting expert, and have a lot to learn yet as well - but learning is part of the fun .....usually.
I'm now less confusing. :cheese:
Thank you a lot.
Glad it helped!
Still messing around with SSS shaders. Thought I'd see how the Stanford Dragon would turn out in Jade. Not as good as the renders posted in the Octane forums, but this is without a doubt the best one I've ever done. HDR lighting again, took a bit longer to cook, about 90 min.
That is impressive
I am testing Octane with my GTX660, impressive stuff, i do find that it is a new way to learn a different interface for rendering but the test i am doing with simple object is amazing.
Octane is a great GPU render, i am puting i think for a next year purchase.
Cool Denis !!! ;-) I'll do it in few days. Could you, please, share your test?
Max.
Cool Denis !!! ;-) I'll do it in few days. Could you, please, share your test?
Max.
I am uisng the demo version and i will when i get the same render settings that Carrara on some of my simple work. But still an impressive rendering power software.
For those who are interested, I'm playing with octane since more than a year now. I use octane standalone and carrara. Everything is exported from carrara (obj) and all the materials are set in octane.
I use a gtx 660 (2gb) and an i7. Never had problems. I always use the pmc kernel and all these renders are done within 1 hour max.
Here are a few examples.
We have a similar setup:
I use an Intel i7 930 at 2.80 Ghz
6 gig of ram (planning next year to double that)
GTX-660 at 2 gig of ram.
Wow
very impressive job !!! Dimdedi
I use I7-3820 CPU @3.60Ghz, 16 Gb RAM, GTX 580, W7 64bit OS. I'll install Octane demo version next day.
thank you Sbilf. Octane'll work fine on your configuration. Apart from the graphic card, but that is slightly different, I have the same workstation. If your motherboard has a graphics chipset, it is useful to activate it for the screen display. As, while octane renders an image, the system is not slower and can be used for another task. The best solution is still one second graphic card if the motherboard allows it.
I expect a lot of plug-in. I do not think carrara's hairs will be (technically) taken into account but if it manages replicators, I can barely imagine the scenes that will be achieved!
It seems Octane can become a very viable alternative render engine for Carrara users and yes if they can get replicators involved that opens up a whole new world of possibilities. I think also although Octane is not cheap its also not prohibitive and I like the plugin opportunites if you own more than one 3d suite.
Also --it runs on linux which is very nice indeed. I have the demo running on Linux Mint and it seems pretty happy so far. I do not know what I am doing in Octane so I have not tasked it much for sure but running on Linux is nice. Wish Carrara had a linux version -----Smiles. (hint for DAZ).
Hey don't forget about Cycles or Arion or Indigo or... :) There's a whole bunch of unbiased render engines out there, though some are so pricey they probably don't bear serious consideration for most of us Carrara users.
Not to make it more complicated or anything... :)
just to be a little bit exhaustive about unbiased renderer, I would mention arion and lagoa (and maxwell as well) if you need realistic hair and corona renderer as a viable choice for archviz (freeware); anyway no one of the renderer in this thread may rival with arnold and clarisse for animation purpose (both biased and cpu-based); so we have a pletora of possibilities for any taste
just to be a little bit exhaustive about unbiased renderer, I would mention arion and lagoa (and maxwell as well) if you need realistic hair and corona renderer as a viable choice for archviz (freeware); anyway no one of the renderer in this thread may rival with arnold and clarisse for animation purpose (both biased and cpu-based); so we have a pletora of possibilities for any taste
I thought Arnold Render was private only and couldn't be bought for any amount, and in fairness I had never even heard of Clarisse before... or Corona! :) The wiki on unbiased render engines mentions Mantra, but as far as I can tell that's for Houdini only.... Truly there is a veritable ocean of unbiased render engines out there.
Though for most purposes, there are a lot fewer of the unbiased render engines that are really in consideration for those of us using Carrara (we're too thrifty and smart to spend tremendous amounts of money when we don't have to, don't you know). If I had to narrow it down I would guess:
- Thea
- Octane
- Arion2
- Lux
- Cycles
- Corona
- Kerkythea
- Nox
are the ones that are economically feasible for the hobbyist/independent professional market. Actually that's quite a list, and a lot of them are freeware :) Any that I missed?
And anyone who wonders about how awesome Octane is for renders should go to the Renderosity galleries, and search by 'most viewed'. Every single render on the first page of results is by RGUS, who uses Octane to render. And they are all pretty 'wow' :)
I home I try Octane because I have a Geforce GTX 660 on it, impressive and quick
At work I play with a Ultrabook from Sony and I am testing Thea Render, very impressive. (not to change the thread subject)
I have this for spec: Core i7-3537U @ 2.00 Ghz / 8192MB RAM / Windows 8.1 / Intel(R) HD Graphics 4000 with 1792 MB.
The render is still impressive.
So I say that Octane and Thea are very on top of my list.
Since I do own Cinema 4D, if I get the stand alone version, work with both, Carrara and Cinema 4D
just to be a little bit exhaustive about unbiased renderer, I would mention arion and lagoa (and maxwell as well) if you need realistic hair and corona renderer as a viable choice for archviz (freeware); anyway no one of the renderer in this thread may rival with arnold and clarisse for animation purpose (both biased and cpu-based); so we have a pletora of possibilities for any taste
I thought Arnold Render was private only and couldn't be bought for any amount, and in fairness I had never even heard of Clarisse before... or Corona! :) The wiki on unbiased render engines mentions Mantra, but as far as I can tell that's for Houdini only.... Truly there is a veritable ocean of unbiased render engines out there.
Though for most purposes, there are a lot fewer of the unbiased render engines that are really in consideration for those of us using Carrara (we're too thrifty and smart to spend tremendous amounts of money when we don't have to, don't you know). If I had to narrow it down I would guess:
- Thea
- Octane
- Arion2
- Lux
- Cycles
- Corona
- Kerkythea
- Nox
are the ones that are economically feasible for the hobbyist/independent professional market. Actually that's quite a list, and a lot of them are freeware :) Any that I missed?
And anyone who wonders about how awesome Octane is for renders should go to the Renderosity galleries, and search by 'most viewed'. Every single render on the first page of results is by RGUS, who uses Octane to render. And they are all pretty 'wow' :)
I would add Indigo between arion e lux and delete cycles for it's not a stand alone version afaik, otherwise you should also consider iray and a bunch of unbiased renderer for sketchup.
Thea is the commercial evolution of Kerkythea I suppose
Octane astonishes me every time, I'll be waiting for a fur department like Maxwell render and then will be perfect. Thea is the most intuitive and versatile of the crew imo
Hi
Jonstark, Magaremoto thank you very much for your valuable information.
My pleasure, beware you'll be addicted soon.
@ Jonstark: here you can find a script in maxscript to be opened with a txt reader useful to start (?!) how to make mats conversion even in visual studio
the last time I asked for arnold, the price was 9,000 USD+ vat; I hope things are being changed since then
http://www.racoon-artworks.de/CoronaMatConverter/CoronaMaterialConverter.html
Thought I'd try one of Stone Masons scenes in Octane, and I was able to do it with plenty of room to spare. Scene set up was done in Carrara, then exported and rendered in Octane. It was a lot more work than using the Octane plugin with DS, so I'll probably just use DS and Octane until the Carrara plugin is available. But it was a great learning experience to set up all the shaders in Octane. I really like how detailed the hair came out (you'll need to open the full sized version here to see it: http://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/15440), and the jade shader for the Dragon.
Impatiently waiting for the Carrara plugin :roll:
Hey Dustrider,
one more time: cool job !!!
Ciao, Max.
Thanks sbilf! I'm definitely having too much fun with Octane. This render took quite a long time for the bracelet to "clear up" though, about 14 hours (3300x3300). No doubt due to all the curved geometry in the scene, combined with a rather difficult/complex situation with small portions of the back of the bracelet being exposed to both direct and rather intense indirect light (due to close proximity to the arm).
Overall, this scene had some pretty complex light calculations to solve. For example, if you look closely on the full sized render, you can see a very light green color cast on the figures lower legs from the nearby leaves.
Yes, but i've see others curves...looking the girl!!! ;-)
I see light green color on legs, but this is a normal in real life, or not?
Max.
14 hrs does seem like a lot but the long render time has to do with many things. Like what is in the scene, polycount, what method of light calculations, materials (glass, SSS, Caustics), plus the size of the render. The render was 3300x3300 which is very large. I guess he is looking to print it maybe. I wonder how fast it would render at 1920x1080.
Yes and no. It is normal in the real world, but the color cast on the skin would not be quite as obvious in the real world as in this image. It shows that my shaders aren't quite dialed in perfectly. But it also shows how an unbiased renderer faithfully reproduces how light behaves in the real world (and the importance of creating good shaders).
Poly count for the scene is fairly high - right at 1 million. The face/triangle count for the Stanford Dragon alone is 871,414. There is a total of 71 objects in the scene, most of course are off screen (lots of trees and vegetation). I could have done quite a bit of optimization by deleting objects that didn't add to the image (objects not in the view-port) and greatly improved render performance, but this was a "stress test" to see what could be done, and what kind of performance I could expect with a "fully loaded" scene. This scene only took 938Mb of video ram, I thought it would take a lot more (used about 3GB in Carrara).
The large render size was a test too, I wanted to see how long it would take to bring out all the details (like hair), and the caustics effects for the "jade" materials. I was surprised that the dragon actually cleared up faster than the staff or bracelet, even though the dragon was "thin" enough that you can see effects of her thumb through it.
Just for fun, I tested it at 1080x1920, with about 1/5 the pixels it's a lot faster, about 2.5 hours. I might try the scene in Lux to get a speed comparison, I'll just have to wait until I don't need to really use the computer for a couple of days (or more), just in case it takes a loooong time.
That's really, Really cool, Dustrider! Very cool!
I was thinking about how Dimension Theory was talking about the fact that human skin has a certain percentage of reflection to it after noticing: I saw a person sitting on a bench, and another person strolled up and sat down right next to him and, sure enough! The light from the second person's leg was reflected over to the first person, and I could (accidentally) see the reflected light onto the first person's leg. Something I just never totally noticed before, so it stuck with me afterwards. So... yeah... I think that the reflection of the leaves looks quite real indeed. Looks a lot like what I saw the other day.
Very nice render there Mr Dustrider!
The skin is pleasing and the steps, and ground have come out particularly well imho.
Very good indeed. The bot is outstanding. The colour matching to the atmosphere is excellent.