OctaneRender for Carrara 2.23.0077 [Preview]

Wed May 27, 2015 2:37 pm

Thanks Phil, I could not have explained it better myself.

Wed May 27, 2015 5:06 pm

@PhilW we are definitely looking forward to the tutorial on hair. That image is marvelous BTW nice draping on the necklace, it works for close up. lots of users forget about these things.
BTW wasn't there a draping plugin for Carrara floating around. That way I don't have to drape it in Marvelous Designer and import back to Studio or Carrara.

@Sighman Thanks for the great update, did you give anymore thought to using Carrara cb file for saving materials. I know octane format is best to save for octane plugin, but was just a thought.

Wed May 27, 2015 6:02 pm

Tugpsx wrote:@PhilW we are definitely looking forward to the tutorial on hair. That image is marvelous BTW nice draping on the necklace, it works for close up. lots of users forget about these things.
BTW wasn't there a draping plugin for Carrara floating around. That way I don't have to drape it in Marvelous Designer and import back to Studio or Carrara.

@Sighman Thanks for the great update, did you give anymore thought to using Carrara cb file for saving materials. I know octane format is best to save for octane plugin, but was just a thought.

You can thank Mihrelle for the necklace, I just loaded it and it was good to go!

Wed May 27, 2015 6:42 pm

Phil,

Thanks for explaining that. It's good to know that Carrara hair already beats Octane hair. I guess the only area where special primitives might be necessary would be for the Volume Objects coming out in a few months. Fun fun. Off to learn Carrara hair!

Wed May 27, 2015 7:18 pm

Tugpsx wrote:@Sighman Thanks for the great update, did you give anymore thought to using Carrara cb file for saving materials. I know octane format is best to save for octane plugin, but was just a thought.

I'm not sure what you mean. You can already load and save the Octane shaders as .cbr files. They are just master shaders like any other shader in Carrara. What more are you looking for?

Thu May 28, 2015 2:36 am

Sorry I meant render target. http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=79&t=45675

Thu May 28, 2015 4:48 am

Tugpsx wrote:Sorry I meant render target. http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=79&t=45675

I fixed that a few releases ago.

Thu May 28, 2015 5:26 am

rashadcarter wrote:Phil,

Thanks for explaining that. It's good to know that Carrara hair already beats Octane hair. I guess the only area where special primitives might be necessary would be for the Volume Objects coming out in a few months. Fun fun. Off to learn Carrara hair!

In a nutshell, since we can use Octane materials on Carrara hair, and because we can easily and quickly build very realistic hairstyles inside of Carrara and then do quick hair simulations in Carrara that give extremely realistic motion and movement, I think Carrara hair wins by a landslide on this and I can't think of any reason to try to pull Octane-built hair into a Carrara scene when we can still get all the realistic-look benefit of the Octane hair material just putting it on our existing Carrara hair. I noticed there are some Octane hair materials included in the free Octane db under the 'misc' section too, but I actually like Phil's approach still better (and thanks for sharing it btw Phil!).

Carrara hair does have a few limitations, but mostly the hair sim is on par with the stuff we see in CGI movies done by Pixar, and far far superior to anything else in the hobbyist price-range Whenever I see someone in the Carrara forums decrying how Carrara hair isn't very good I'm actually embarrassed for them showing their profound ignorance, as in the case of one recent post by a notorious forum blowhard who I won't name (rhymes with 'yo momma'

). Also everytime I run into a limitation in the hair simulation, I find there's another way to achieve the effect realistically by altering the simulation settings in some way; at least so far I haven't run into any limitations that couldn't be overcome.

The Carrara dynamic hair system ought to be one of its biggest selling points actually - in my humble opinion there's a ton of focus on dynamic clothing for realism in renders, but far more important for realism rendering (again imo) is dynamic strand hair. There are lots of good conforming clothing outfits that can look plenty realistic, but as far as prop/character hairs there really are only a very few that look sorta-ok verging on realistic, and then only in still renders. Do an animation with any prop/character hair and instantly it looks pretty fake/bad. Carrara's excellent hair now being renderable in Octane is just a huge leap forward for both Carrara and Octane, makes me want to break out in grins

Thu May 28, 2015 7:20 am

There isn't such a thing as Octane-built hair, it just renders what it is given. In this case, Sighman is able to read the Carrara hair data and pass this to Octane in a form which it understands, which is Octane Hair Primitives. If you look at the stats when rendering Carrara Hair, you will see a large figure against the number of hairs. So it is not a case of either/or, when Octane renders Carrara hair, it is using its Hair Primitives.

I am still very excited that Sighman has got this working - I was half expecting that it would never be possible, or if it was, it would be months or years away. Three cheers for Sighman, what an excellent job he is doing!

Fri May 29, 2015 10:32 pm

Latest shader tests, this uses some backlighting which the simple glossy material didn't react to as I wanted. I tried adding SSS without much success, then tried a specular material, which looked great, except it was very slow to render and quite noisy. In the end I tried a Mix material of the Glossy and Specular, which is getting there and was faster to render than the pure specular. Still work in progress!
P.S. The light at the back of the head is a sliver of the light I am using for the backlighting, not an intense highlight - just so you know!