Octane Render for Carrara (OR4C) Public Beta now released..

argus1000

3DAGE said:

quick animation test...
http://youtu.be/jWN7UY7ADxk

I can't see the animation, 3dage. It says the video is private.

3DAGE

should be working now ,. my bad. ....you-tube's video upload stuff confused me

argus1000

3DAGE said:

should be working now ,. my bad. ....you-tube's video upload stuff confused me

Thanks for trying, 3dage. I have to be honest though. I don't know if it's the hairstyle or the renderer, but this hair looks like a blob of jello to me. Nothing personal here.:-)

argus1000

Mythmaker said:

[Here's a rough animation render...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqi9TgAEh_0

The animation is kind of short. Barely one second. I didn't have time to see anything.

3DAGE

It's like jello because it's styled using the shaders, so it holds the shape of that style, to a certain extent.
and yes,. the hair is rough, ...I'm crap at being a hairdresser. ...Phil W is your man for nice hair styling

I'm doing another animation with V6 and longer hair, (still nasty hair) with no real styling,.. but anyway,.. the animation should be the same as what you'd get in Carrara, it's not a different sim engine, it's just a different rendered output and shader.

but now we should be able to create images which use hair and Depth of field, plus animations with camera and object motion blur DOF etc

Jonstark

PhilW said:

I've just been doing a quick test of trying to get a nice shine on the hair, using hair grown on a vertex sphere. If you use the Edit Shader button under the Effects tab, it adds a new Octane shader to control the colour and shininess of the hair, but the original shader can still be used to control things like length, frizz, wave, clump, etc.

This uses Octane's Glossy on the hair with Index 1.3, Specular 1.0, Roughness 0.2 and I think gives a nice shine. Obviously you need to have a decent bright light in the scene to give the shine, this isn't going to work with very diffuse lighting. To make it shinier, increase the Index (or set it to 1.0 for metallic hair!), Roughness controls the spread of the highlight, lower gives tighter highlights. But I think this is a good starting point.

That's awesome Phil, looks very good indeed and thank you for sharing. However I can't seem to find the effects tab/edit shader button you mention, is this somewhere in the Carrara shader or is it part of the Octane window?

I found there is a hair shader under 'misc' among the Octane live database of shaders (1st pic) and it's decent, but not terribly lustrous for shininess. So far I still prefer my own home-cooked octane material shader based on specularity material (2nd pic) but by far the best would be to preserve my Carrara shader setting and simply add to it like you did (that way I get to keep all the cool Carrara shader aspects such as clump, kink, wave, etc etc) I just can't seem to find where to do this like you mentioned (probably because it's early in the morning for me and I'm not thinking clearly yet :) )

Jonstark

Whoops, just realized where to find the Edit Shader button, so obvious I'm smacking myself :) In the assembly room, when selecting the hair model, the Effects tab there (same place I turn off collisions for other items) there's a button to Edit Shader there.

JoeMamma2000

argus1000 said:

I have to be honest though. I don't know if it's the hairstyle or the renderer, but this hair looks like a blob of jello to me. Nothing personal here.:-)

With all due respect to those who have put so much effort into the Carrara hair, I think an objective "man on the street" would find that any Carrara hair renders don't look anything like human hair. Again, nothing personal here, as argus1000 said. It's not the users, it's because the Carrara hair feature is just, well, terrible.

And if you look around the industry to see what's being used for real hair sims you'll quickly see that this is yet one more area where Carrara is decades behind the times.

Don't blame me...argus1000 started it... :) :) :)

3DAGE

I agree,. That's what i inferred at the start of this,.

Carrara's hair sim is "erratic", and any animation rendered will be the same no matter what render engine is used.

that's why I was puzzled that the question was asked ...would it animate ?,... and what would that look like.
it's just seemed logical to me, that it would animate, and would be the same spazzy hair we get currently,

argus1000

3DAGE said:

Carrara's hair sim is "erratic",

I disagree here. Did you look at my hair sample? I find animated dynamic hair in Carrara quite satisfactory. It looks like human hair too.
https://youtu.be/vGkNQixH8c4

PhilW

JoeMamma2000 said:

argus1000 said:

I have to be honest though. I don't know if it's the hairstyle or the renderer, but this hair looks like a blob of jello to me. Nothing personal here.:-)

With all due respect to those who have put so much effort into the Carrara hair, I think an objective "man on the street" would find that any Carrara hair renders don't look anything like human hair. Again, nothing personal here, as argus1000 said. It's not the users, it's because the Carrara hair feature is just, well, terrible.

And if you look around the industry to see what's being used for real hair sims you'll quickly see that this is yet one more area where Carrara is decades behind the times.

Don't blame me...argus1000 started it... :) :) :)

I don't argue that Carrara Hair could use an update to make it better, easier to use, and certainly to make it easier to animate (not that I'm holding my breathe on this one). But in my view, it certainly looks better than mapped hairs in the majority of cases, and with care, you can get some good and realistic effects. Carrara Hair is not "terrible", it is one of the best hairs sims found on budget 3D programs, and many specialist hair plugins for the "big boys" cost more than Carrara on their own. And having the option to use it in Octane is a big plus!

PhilW

argus1000 said:

3DAGE said:

Carrara's hair sim is "erratic",

I disagree here. Did you look at my hair sample? I find animated dynamic hair in Carrara quite satisfactory. It looks like human hair too.
https://youtu.be/vGkNQixH8c4

Argus - did you use a proxy or other technique for this, the movement is pretty good and no jitters that plague the rest of us! Or maybe it is your settings for the simulation?

3DAGE

If you find it's doing what you want , then that's all there is to it,. it works for you. you're happy with it. done deal.

I'm just stating my own personal opinion,
I think it could be better.

But all of this detracts from the main point of Octane being able to render hair,.. and that also means grass, and other fibre based stuff.
that's' the breakthrough here....., not whether carrara has a good or bad hair sim

getting shaders for octane hair which work nice,. and also figuring out how to link the hair shaders to an underlying UV /texture, is the next hurdle.

PhilW

I have messaged Sighman to suggest adjusting the auto-conversion of shaders specifically for hair so that getting a nice shine is easier to do. He is usually very responsive to such requests and it shouldn't be too much of an issue. I know that he will be looking at the UV mapping too, but that may be a bigger ask.

argus1000

PhilW said:

Argus - did you use a proxy or other technique for this, the movement is pretty good and no jitters that plague the rest of us! Or maybe it is your settings for the simulation?

It's ridiculously simple, Phil. I just followed the instructions in Jonstark's tutorial and downloaded the proxies and the hairstyle he posted at ShareCG. I almost didn't bother about the settings. They are already set by Jonstark. Don't applaud me for nice hairs. Applaud Jonstark.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/51604/

Jonstark

PhilW said:

argus1000 said:

3DAGE said:

Carrara's hair sim is "erratic",

I disagree here. Did you look at my hair sample? I find animated dynamic hair in Carrara quite satisfactory. It looks like human hair too.
https://youtu.be/vGkNQixH8c4

Argus - did you use a proxy or other technique for this, the movement is pretty good and no jitters that plague the rest of us! Or maybe it is your settings for the simulation?

Argus should feel free to correct me, but I believe that's the hair I put together and put up on sharecg for free use (or at least it looks like it :) ) which does use a low poly proxy and has specific simulation settings to avoid jitters. I'll try to dig up the link, but I'm at work at the moment (just on a break) so could be a while.

Edit: Argus beat me to it :) Thanks Argus.

Mythmaker

PhilW said:

I've just been doing a quick test of trying to get a nice shine on the hair, using hair grown on a vertex sphere. If you use the Edit Shader button under the Effects tab, it adds a new Octane shader to control the colour and shininess of the hair, but the original shader can still be used to control things like length, frizz, wave, clump, etc.

This uses Octane's Glossy on the hair with Index 1.3, Specular 1.0, Roughness 0.2 and I think gives a nice shine. Obviously you need to have a decent bright light in the scene to give the shine, this isn't going to work with very diffuse lighting. To make it shinier, increase the Index (or set it to 1.0 for metallic hair!), Roughness controls the spread of the highlight, lower gives tighter highlights. But I think this is a good starting point.

Good tips there PhilW.

And so I made a new master shader for the hair, using the above values as a base.
I also trimmed the messy fringe a bit, re-simulate with thinner strands, then rendered a slower video... Nothing fancy yet, just Windows movie maker mp4...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxOMJBs7zDE

@3Dage - YouTube uploading process is quite bewildering indeed!

Times like this I wish Daz3D forum allows external links of gifs.

Jonstark

PhilW said:

I have messaged Sighman to suggest adjusting the auto-conversion of shaders specifically for hair so that getting a nice shine is easier to do. He is usually very responsive to such requests and it shouldn't be too much of an issue. I know that he will be looking at the UV mapping too, but that may be a bigger ask.

That would be awesome, thanks Phil :) I popped up the render node which lets you see right into the Octane shader nodes and change them to a master shader, never knew any of this stuff was there as part of the plugin before, pretty cool but also pretty complex too.

PhilW

argus1000 said:

PhilW said:

Argus - did you use a proxy or other technique for this, the movement is pretty good and no jitters that plague the rest of us! Or maybe it is your settings for the simulation?

It's ridiculously simple, Phil. I just followed the instructions in Jonstark's tutorial and downloaded the proxies and the hairstyle he posted at ShareCG. I almost didn't bother about the settings. They are already set by Jonstark. Don't applaud me for nice hairs. Applaud Jonstark.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/51604/

I will indeed!

argus1000

Jonstark said:

Edit: Argus beat me to it :) Thanks Argus.

Now if you would only post that male hairstyle that you promised a while ago...

Jonstark

argus1000 said:

Jonstark said:

Edit: Argus beat me to it :) Thanks Argus.

Now if you would only post that male hairstyle that you promised a while ago...

Been working mostly on trying to get the shaders for it right, now got to do some Octane shaders for it (been working on it in this thread actually), but otherwise it's pretty close to ready to go, should have it up by this weekend if not sooner :)

PhilW

That link to JonStark's hair animation model is as follows:
http://www.sharecg.com/v/79903/gallery/5/3D-Model/Basic-Dynamic-Hair-for-Animation-Testing

PhilW

Did I say how much I am loving being able to render Carrara Hair in Octane?!!

evilproducer

Mythmaker said:

PhilW said:

I've just been doing a quick test of trying to get a nice shine on the hair, using hair grown on a vertex sphere. If you use the Edit Shader button under the Effects tab, it adds a new Octane shader to control the colour and shininess of the hair, but the original shader can still be used to control things like length, frizz, wave, clump, etc.

This uses Octane's Glossy on the hair with Index 1.3, Specular 1.0, Roughness 0.2 and I think gives a nice shine. Obviously you need to have a decent bright light in the scene to give the shine, this isn't going to work with very diffuse lighting. To make it shinier, increase the Index (or set it to 1.0 for metallic hair!), Roughness controls the spread of the highlight, lower gives tighter highlights. But I think this is a good starting point.

Good tips there PhilW.

And so I made a new master shader for the hair, using the above values as a base.
I also trimmed the messy fringe a bit, re-simulate with thinner strands, then rendered a slower video... Nothing fancy yet, just Windows movie maker mp4...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxOMJBs7zDE

@3Dage - YouTube uploading process is quite bewildering indeed!

Times like this I wish Daz3D forum allows external links of gifs.

You can upload animated gifs directly to the forum when you post a topic or response. The allowed file size is also quite generous. I personally try to limit my frame rate and dimensions as a courtesy to other forum users and their connection speeds. I also tend to choose to have them loop.

evilproducer

Really nice work everybody!

Mythmaker

@EP, yes am aware of the anim gif capability in daz3d forum...but gif anims are not HD sexy I much prefer to offload the bigger gif anim file sizes to Imgur for example... May put in a request...

@PhilW I can relate...and always like your naturalistic render style, this latest one included

And big thanks to Philemo for his generosity. Jon's tips-rich videos. And of course, Sighman, again!

As to critiques of hair tool sophistication, no tools are perfect, so keep it coming (and don't forget to submit feature improvement request tickets too!)

As to critiques of hair "realism"... Me, I've concluded after much research of Frozen/ Tinkerbell, overall visual consistency triumphs hair-splitting hair realism. Am just so glad we can move on from fussy transmapped hair with unmatching perfect crystaline eyeballs! Yay.

Thus I don't sweat visual perfection, only seek most efficient + iterative animation workflow. SO glad I don't have to choose between unbiased render vs dynamic hair anymore. Yeeepeee.

Next...
figuring out if 6000 hairs renders as fast as 120000 hairs (seems that way, which is odd)
also
if 24 segments renders as fast as 36 segments!

WendyLuvsCatz

.... I just wish Phil Wilkes would stop uploading photographs of real ladies to the forum .... :lol: its supposed to be for renders .....

PhilW

Sorry, Wendy, I won't do it again... ;-) :lol:

Chohole

wendy♥catz said:

.... I just wish Phil Wilkes would stop uploading photographs of real ladies to the forum .... :lol: its supposed to be for renders .....

+1

3DAGE

short stuff