Does Carrara Render Fast?
Steve K
Posts: 3,235
I was talking with the other animation team in the recent 48 Hour film contest Houston (two animations of 38 videos - a five minute video in two days). We were comparing animation software, he mentioned the programs he uses which I am not familiar with. I said I mostly use Carrara plus a little Poser. He looked surprised, saying they were slow to render. I agreed about Poser, saying I use it only when I have to (special model features like ERC). But I said Carrara can render pretty fast if you're careful about the settings and the scene content (no high poly trees, no advanced lighting, minimal transparency, etc.) Maybe 5 seconds per frame or faster. The only other program I have much experience with is Vue, a great program but I think slower than Poser to render (yes, lots of render options, but anything realistic is slow - still good for stills as Carrara backgrounds with shadow catchers).
Comments on these and other programs for render speed?
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Comments
From Carrara it depends on the CPU and the network if you use network rendering, so with 10PC's and everyone got a decent i7 cpu can be very fast, if all those would have AMD's threadripper they even can be faster but for animations i wouldnt recommend Carrara or it's native renderer, so with Octane for example you can get pretty nice results in a short time but for animation i think my favourite still is iclone.
Asking "How fast does a program render?" is like asking "How long is a piece of string?" As you say, it can depend a great deal on what you're trying to render. I can make Carrara scenes that will render in seconds; I can also make a scene that will tie my computer in knots for days. Reflections and complex lighting (especially if you turn on Sky Light and/or Indirect Light) will drive rendering times up.
Generally speaking, I think of the Carrara renderer as fairly fast, particularly on modern CPUs where Carrara can use multiple threads simultaneously. But AFAIK, Carrara only uses the CPU to render -- it doesn't benefit from a fast GPU. A GPU-based renderer on a machine with a fast GPU may indeed render much faster than Carrara, even on complex scenes.
Saves time if some shots dont need fresh irradiance maps. Reusing irradiance map saves time in light calculations.
If something not in cliseup then simplifying textures saves lotsa time. For example a park bench use a simple diffuse color instead of texture maps
when saving scene inventory save a long shot shader preset
Setting a complex scene up with the idea of rendering the elements to be composited in a video editor saves lots of rendering time as well. Most CG films and older analog FX films use/used this method. Both of these videos were rendered and composited.
I should have mentiond that I use a single Core i7 machine of fairly recent vintage, so its pretty fast. Also, I generally render 1280x720, 24 fps. I've also got a couple of other Core i7 machines of somewhat older vintage, but Carrara allows saving a file completely self contained ("Save All Internally"). So in a pinch I could use those machines to render a file set up with the main machine (attached to an external drive with all my content). It doesn't usually come to that since the render times for, say, a ten second scene animation (probably about average) is not that long (at 5 seconds per frame, 20 minutes). I do take breaks (mostly to make more coffee), although the contest producer says "that's not doing it right".
Again, detailed background images with shadow catchers, Carrara's mocap "clips", and good results with simple lighting are big pluses. AFAIK, nothing similar is available in Poser or Vue, the other programs I use occasionally.
Also, I use Particle Illusion for effects, a 2D program that can overlay any still image (a great time saver) or video and renders basically in real time, sometimes faster. Really. Examples in this 720x480 video - growing vines (on a still), bird flock (on a still), welding sparks (on a still), submarine smoke (on a still), submarine wake (on a still), train smoke.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdOd9ckzAjs&t=1s
Sounds right. As I mentioned, both Poser and Vue render quite a bit slower no matter what (realistic, not preview) settings I use. I intend to do whatever necessary to keep Carrara 8.5 running, e.g. keeping a Windows machine for it even if Windows somehow becomes incompatible. (I've done this with other semi or actual "Abandonware" in the past, e.g. Adobe Pagemaker). So far no problem in Win10 ...
cores helps.
seeing the price on i5 hexacores coming down to the 500 range.
my day job just gave me 1. still trying to run carrara in a strict cyber security dayjob to see if it beats my ryzen7 8 core. i cant remember the cpu giggahertzes
thinkin a 6 core with ssd drive might be fast enough to use as a content lib file server.
did the paintcan preset, under packaging, caustics enabled. 2 minute:08 secs
Indeed. I have not bought less than a Core i7 (four multi threaded cores = 8 cores in Task Magager) for many years, currently have three that can run Carrara.
I'm still running Carrara on an 8 year old i5 iMac (4 cores total). Except for test renders, where I'm just interested in placement & composition, I always render to "promo" standard, so a minimum of 1000 pixels high x whatever aspect ratio, and high render settings. I don't care about speed so much as quality - I'll happily let it render for several hours to get the results I want (regardless of software / render engine).
The thing I miss most in Carrara is the progressive buildup 'scatter' style of rendering most PBR renderers do. Carrara can only crawl slowly down from the top to the bottom (and that means, since if I want to check something it's ALWAYS at/near the bottom of the frame) I often render with the camera inverted!
That is soooo clever TangoAlpha!
(I'm on a 2010 iMac, with 4 cores total also...)
Ha! The same thing (need to check the bottom of the render) frequently happens to me. As DD said, very clever solution.
Still 4 cores/threads here as well. And only 8 gig RAM. But CPU and memory prices are getting so low, I'm running out of excuses to upgrade. :)
Yes, I do the same when I need high quality stills (which BTW the 48HFP contest allows from before the start of the contest). Crank the lighting parameters way up, etc. But for the animations ... two days is not much time.
And I *think* the scatter style of rendering is what Poser does in Superfly mode? That's what it looks like, anyway.
camera inverstion. kewl
The annoyihng thing is turning the monitor upside down to compensate . . . .