Howie Farkes Scenes

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Carrara (Integrated Plugin developed by Sighman)

Howie Farkes Scenes

Postby Sighman » Mon Apr 06, 2015 11:39 pm

Sighman Mon Apr 06, 2015 11:39 pm
Howie Farkes make some amazing scenes that take advantage of many of Carrara's features including terrain and trees/plants. It is usually quite a challenge to fit one of his scenes into the Octane plugin due to the way that Carrara generates the rendering (triangulated) mesh and how Octane deals with instances. This topic will present my attempts at loading some of his scenes into Octane. Please feel free to comment and add your own attempts.

Note that I make no attempt to play with the shaders this is simply an exercise in loading the scene, not in making it beautiful.

Snow Scene (comes free with Carrara in the Scenes -> Misc. category)

The problem with loading Howie's Snow Scene into Octane is the snow covered leaves used on the Spruce trees. The spruce trees are replicated 49 times on the road, 1401 times in hills 1, and 1751 times in hills 2. You cannot render this scene without flattening the spruce trees. However, the leaves on these trees have large polygon counts and you will run into the Octane poly count limit if you try to flatten the tree. The solution for this scene is to reduce the poly count on the leaves, which will allow us to flatten the tree.

Here are the steps I took to render the scene:
  1. Locate and load the SpruceWinter leaf: Carrara8.5\Data\Plants\Misc\SpruceWinter.car
  2. Edit -> Convert To Other Modeller. Select 'Primitive Modeller'.
  3. Edit -> Convert To Other Modeller. Select 'Vertex Modeller'.
  4. Edit -> Select All
  5. Model -> Decimate [98%]
  6. File -> Save As [SpruceWinter2]
  7. Open Howie's Snow Scene
  8. In the instance tree, select: Trees -> Near Spruce Trees -> Group -> Spruce Tree
  9. Switch to the Model room and select 'Edit the master'.
  10. Select the leaf Tab.
  11. Delete SpruceWinter and Add Misc -> SpruceWinter2 [Import Shader - No]
  12. Switch to the Shader Room and select 'Edit the master'
  13. Locate Leaf: SpruceWinter2 in the Shading Domain and click on the button on the far right (with two down arrows) then select the 'Snow' shader.
  14. Switch back to the Assembly Room and select: Trees -> Trees on Hills 1 -> Group -> SpruceTree.
  15. Repeat steps 12 and 13
  16. Switch back to the Assembly Room and select: Trees -> Trees on Hills 2 -> Group -> SpruceTree.
  17. Repeat steps 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13.
  18. Go back to the Assembly Room
  19. Select the Effects tab
  20. Enable Octane Tree -> Flatten for each of the 3 Spruce Trees.
You should now be able to open the Octane Render Viewport and render the scene. (1.6GB)

Country Lane

Country Lane is a perfect example of the 'tree' problem. An Alder Tree has 43,671 leaves and in the background it is replicated 333 times. That creates a scatter list of 14,542,443 entries which is more than Octane can support.

  1. Open an empty scene, Click on Scene then Edit in Octane Render Target to open the Octane Render for Carrara Settings window.
  2. Select Preferences and turn off High Res Trees.
  3. Load up Country Lane
  4. In the instance list select: Background Trees -> Background Alders -> Alder Tree
  5. Select the Effects tab and enable: Octane Tree -> Flatten
Following these guidelines I was able to load Country Lane into 1.6G of GPU memory. You can save a few more bytes by flattening the other replicated trees but the savings isn't much.
WARNING: Do not attempt to Flatten a Fir Tree. The pine needle model is too big and you will run out of memory if you try.

Hedgerow

Similar to country lane you want to flatten all replicated trees except the firs.

  1. Load up Hedgerow
  2. Flatten the following trees:
    Hedgerow->Hedge->Hedge Replicator 1->Hedge Plant 1
    Hedgerow->Hedge->Hedge Replicator 1->Hedge Plant 2
    Hedgerow->Hedge->Hedge Replicator 2->Hedge Plant 3
    Hedgerow->Hedge->Hedge Replicator 2->Hedge Plant 4
    Hedgerow->Hedge->Hedge Replicator 3->Hedge Plant 5
    Hedgerow->Hedge->Hedge Replicator 3->Hedge Plant 6
    Hedgerow->Hedge 2->Hedge Replicator 4->Hedge Plant 7
    Hedgerow->Hedge 2->Hedge Replicator 4->Hedge Plant 8
    Hedgerow->Hedge 3->Hedge Replicator 5->Hedge Plant 9
    Hedgerow->Hedge 3->Hedge Replicator 5->Hedge Plant 10
    Trees->Mature Trees->Birch 3
    Trees->Mature Trees->Alder 3
    Trees->Mature Trees->Alder 4
    Trees->Mature Trees->Birch 4
    Trees->Young Birch Trees->Birch Sapling
    Background->Background Trees->Birch 1
    Background->Background Trees->Alder 1
    Background->Background Trees->Alder 2
    Background->Background Trees->Birch 2
Following these guidelines I was able to load Hedgerow into 2.1G of GPU memory.
Win8/64, I7-4770K (3.5Ghz) 24GB, GTX-980ti (6GB) / GTX-TITAN (6GB)
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Re: Howie Farkes Scenes

Postby khris205 » Tue Apr 07, 2015 7:42 pm

khris205 Tue Apr 07, 2015 7:42 pm
It works perfectly with Country Lane and Hedgerow.

I successfully applied the same technique (flatten) to 'Secret Lake' :
Trees / Scattered Large Trees / Larch Tree
Trees / Scattered Large Trees / Spruce Tree
Trees / Understorey Maples / Understorey Maple 1 – 5

For 'HowieSnowScene' I didn't find 'SpruceWinter.car', but I found 'SpruceTree.car' and 'WinterSpruceTree.car' in Carrara8.5\Presets\Plants\Misc
However, I was lazy and tried to do only the step 20 … and it worked ! I'll keep the other steps in mind, though.

The first results look splendid. Thanks you very much for this !
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Re: Howie Farkes Scenes

Postby wendyluvscatz » Thu May 21, 2015 4:12 pm

wendyluvscatz Thu May 21, 2015 4:12 pm
https://www.facebook.com/wendy5/videos/10206099966372185/?l=3213752506240498237
an attempt with the Japanese tea-garden
I decimated the exported shrubs and trees in DAZ studio and Ultimate Unwrap 3D
still needs work but got most of it in and only 3 samples a frame as wanted to get video rendered in a day, took 18 hours 2880 frames as is.
Win 10 64-bit CPU Ryzen 3 3600g 32GB RAM graphics RTX2080Ti
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