Attached Link: http://graphics.ucsd.edu/~henrik/images/imgs/diana_closeup.jpg

"seems that most of the new features are really only existing plug-ins that have been "included" inside the package"

Hmm. At a glance I'd guess that less than 10 percent of the new features are available as plugs elswhere unless there are some great plugs out there I haven't seen. This sounds like a great upgrade to me. Read the thread five below this one. 140 plus posts, many using the beta, with helpful info.

Message edited on: 10/29/2005 04:47

Message edited on: 10/29/2005 04:49

I don't know whether C5 uses real SSS or not... but now I'm curious: do you know which commercial programs do use "real" SSS? I see that the image you linked to was made by a researcher with software he wrote, so are there any commercial products that do it the "real" way?

What do you mean for "real" SSS? Maxwell Render from next limit for example is based completely on real beahaviors of material and light interaction... -TOXE

Tunesy, I'm talking about what I consider the "big" features, such as displacement mapping. I'm not talking about some of the incredibly lame things that are being served as new features (Fresnel and anisotropic effects: come on, get serious, I can't believe this wasn't supported by Carrara prior to version 5!). Toxe and rendererer, what I see in the pictures displayed as examples of SSS in Carrara 5 don't exhibit any SSS effect, but only basic absorbtion (aka "back scattering"). Real SSS means that the renderer can handle light scattered inside the object in all directions, not just absorbtion. THis is essential to render skin or marble correctly, for instance. So my question is, does C5 really handle SSS like in the picture by Jensen, or is it just a marketing "approximation"?

The statement: "the new features are really only existing plug-ins that have been "included" inside the package." Is not correct, none of those features that you mention came in from "existing plugins" all were develop inhouse by the Eovia development team. The Micro Displacement Mapping does an excellent job supporting Zbrush 16bit displacement maps. Here is a link to show how it works. http://www.eovia3d.net/attachment.php?attachmentid=8774 All the other shader additions: Anisotropic lighting Fresnel Sub-Surface-Scatting etc. Just needed to be standard within the application. Side note: Translucency is coming for the final release as this is just beta. The Poser support is much better than Vues. It has Native poser support. It load PZ3, CR2, etc. Including: Morph targets. Poses, Comforming Clothing so you can do use all of them inside carrara with out having to have Poser installed in your system. New Particle System that can also use objects as particles. A subset of that technology is the surface replicator and the replicator. Any surface or part of an object can be use as a particle emitter. Ambient Oclussion is new. Irradiance mapping truly speeds up GI animation rendering. Support for Matchmoving Software. Support for RLA/RPF for After Effects and Combustion. Advance modeling technology from the Hexagon Engine now in the Vertex Modeler. Something that Vue can't do at all. Re-design User Interface. Re-Desing UI for texture room. Volumetric clouds. and much more. So it isn't just a bunch of plugins added to the application as you mention. Later Ringo

ROFL Ringo, no need to copy-paste the eovia website. I've read it all. And stand by what I said. BTW, saying things like "Poser support is much better than Vue" does sound a bit like a loose statement, esp. considering Carrara 5 doesn't even support Poser 6! I'm not interested in "evangelism". My question isn't about whether Carrara is better than Vue (I wouldn't drop Vue if I got C5 - I'm very happy with it, thank you), but whether SSS is really SSS, or only just absorbtion. That's the only thing that would justify me getting the C5 upgrade.

Petshoo, after your explanation, i think that Carrara don't have a real SSS, i think that is something like poser firefly rendering. BTW, if you need advanced render with "real" interaction, you can buy Maxwell at $ 495 for only a few days:-) This is not "evangelism" (that i'm not interested too)... BTW, if you switch from Vue to Carrara don't expect an incredible better quality, the two rendering engines of both apps are good and at the same quality or almost (don't know wich it's the better, i have the Vue cd still in my Lightwave pack:-P. -TOXE

Thanks Toxe. I wouldn't "switch" to Carrara, since I don't believe in there being a "perfect" 3D app. To be honest, I've been rather disapointed with Carrara 4 Pro, but real SSS is something that would have convinced me to upgrade. If it's just simple absorbtion, I'll wait and see. Marketing almost got me; I'm glad I asked :-)

The 3d market is driven by facts, not marketing. We can have almost always the possibility of a trial version, so we can touch with hand. I've made a mistake only one time in the last years, but AAARRGH! 700 dollars in the drain!! -TOXE

Hey TOXE, what was that $700 mistake?

I just popped in here to see if this discussion was going on. This looks to be the version that's convinced me to finally buy Carrara after watching it develop for several years now. The lack of support for zBrush displacements and subdivision meshes had mainly held me back. Also, I like that it doesn't just host Poser files, but claims to actually convert them to a native format. I'm very impressed, but I don't use a previous version.

There are a couple simple acid tests that Cararra's new SSS could be put to - for instance, render a SSS object, with another object inside it (like the bone within a finger) and see if it occludes the translucency. And I'd love to know if the scattered light will illuminate other objects. Oh, and hi - this is my first post in these forums, though I've followed them for some time. If I'm feeling crazy, I may even upload some artwork to my gallery someday. :)

No word on symeterical for VM or other modeling room in Carrara 5 so I am not impressed at all as a modeling user.

Thanks mmoir and whkguamusa. THat's what I thought - simple absorbtion (and clever marketing). Considering how disapointed I was with C4, I'll hold off for now.

petshoo, absorbtion such as this is regularly referred to as SSS in 3D apps. Most people consider it as such, because true physically correct SSS is extremely slow to calculate. It's not really a novel tactic to advertise it as SSS in my opinion.

Some render engines, like Vray, require you to use GI in order to process physically "correct" SSS. Yet, in the end, only a highly trained eye would notice the difference between real SSS and fake SSS (if it's done right). I don't see the big deal over that really.

Message edited on: 10/30/2005 03:20

Correct SSS is not so slow to render, but it's complex to developp. Which is why it's much easier to do a simple "trick" and call it SSS. The "big deal" is that to render skin, marble and other SSS materials correctly, you do need true SSS. And you don't need such a trained eye to spot the difference. One simply looks a lot better than the other! And if you do animation, the difference simply becomes blatant!

Peshoo, I said I didn't know exactly how SSS is done that doesn't mean it is simple absorption unless you are getting your answer from the screen grab Wayne posted.

"And if you do animation, the difference simply becomes blatant"? ...if you do animation it's a lot less important. If you do stills then there's a stonger arguement for more 'realistic' options. I suppose some people like to put individual pixels under a microscope in an animation, although I personally could care less. But we're beating a dead horse. You've made it clear you don't like Carrara, petshoo. Don't buy it...

Petshoo I have a great answer to your SSS question. The answer comes from Charles Brissat Lead Enginner of Carrara. I asked him if this is what Carrara 5 uses. http://graphics.ucsd.edu/~henrik/papers/bssrdf/ http://graphics.ucsd.edu/~henrik/papers/fast_bssrdf/ His answer is YES!!!!!!!!!!! >>> charles@eovia.com 10/30/2005 3:09 AM >>> The Sub-surface scattering is the exact implementation of those articles. Charles

quote: "The "big deal" is that to render skin, marble and other SSS materials correctly, you do need true SSS. And you don't need such a trained eye to spot the difference. One simply looks a lot better than the other! And if you do animation, the difference simply becomes blatant!"

Really? Well, then I guess Steven Stahlberg's technique for skin is not very good then? He never uses true SSS. He employs clever use of gradient and falloff maps to simulate the effect, and his work on skin is truly groundbreaking.

What application are you using that employs true physically accurate SSS for skin? Even MentalRay's Fastskin SSS shader isn't actually using physically accurate scattering. If you try to use the physically correct SSS shader with mentalray, it's much much slower to render.

Physical accuracy is not really as important in animation as it is in stills, because you don't have the opportunity to scrutinize it. For instance, Radiosity, which is a physically accurate lighting solution, is usually too slow to use in heavily animated scenes, which is why they employ fake tricks like bounce lights and texture baking for such things in production situations. Major studios use AO, which is not physically accurate, for production. Hollywood fakes physical accuracy all the time, and no one really notices.

Message edited on: 10/30/2005 10:29

"You've made it clear you don't like Carrara". All I said is that I'd been very disapointed by Carrara 4, but that true SSS would have made me upgrade immediately. All I've seen until now looks like basic absorbtion, but I'll be glad to be proved wrong. I don't really care about physical accuracy. All I care for is image quality. And again, (sorry to insist), I have seen no example of SSS in Carrara 5 to date (only basic absorbtion).

After looking at the paper by Jensen et al (carefully avoiding all the integrals:-) it would appear that an accurate computation of SSS is beyond the practical capabilities of todays PC's. So everyone uses some approximation. The question is really whether or not you like Carrara's (Jensen's) particular approximation. Not whether or not its "TRUE" SSS. Just my 2 cents.

Sorry, what I meant by "true SSS" is a simulation of what is referred to as multiple-scattering. As I said, I don't care about physical accuracy, but I want to know if the so-called SSS is really SSS (as in multiple-scattering) or just absorbtion. Show me a picture that exhibits mutliple scattering as in the statue above, and I will be happy :-)

Petshoo. See my answer above. The specs to the image that you point is exactly what Carrara 5 use.

...it's pointless, Ringo. He's arguing just for the sake of arguing. He started this thread with a blatantly untrue statement: "seems that most of the new features are really only existing plug-ins that have been "included" inside the package" Then he goes on to "if you do animation, the difference simply becomes blatant" which is just wrong and frankly falls into the category of 'Animation 101'.

Comparing Jensen pg 7 fig 9,b,c with the image posted by petshoo, Jensen's model looks pretty good to me. I'm done....

The implementation of subsurface scattering in Carrara is real sub-surface scattering. As far as I know it is state-of-the-art. It is not a simple absorbtion calculation at all. Of course it is only an approximation like every 3D rendering but that is exactly what 3D rendering is, a simulation... As far as I know the model is used is quite accurate and can be used at a decent speed. Full Monte Carlo integration of subsurface scattering was the old way to do subsurface scattering before more advanced technics appeared. It usually gives the same result (basically you won't see the difference in 99.9% of the cases) and is much much slower (if you like to wait a day for a rendering...). It does assume that the object does not contain another object inside it which is a limitation but from what I have seen a lot of the other implementations have the same limitation. Charles

...very cool. Thanks for the insight, Mr. Brissat.

Yes, sailor_ed, the image I posted is by Jensen - so I guess it makes sense :-) Thanks indeed for the insight, charlesb. THis is very interesting and what I wanted to hear. Sorry that some people here seem to have a problem with anybody asking questions. Sorry I don't share your blind enthusiasm; as I said several times, I was very disapointed with Carrara 4 and SSS is the only thing of real interest to me in C5.

...I deleted my last post because it was probably a little too pointed, although it was quite accurate ;) Sorry.

"If only end-users with highly trained eyes also came with highly trained tongues." LOL...no user manual for that ;)Gotta get a thicker skin. Thanks for the info charlesb....it is real important to get details...I know betas gotta get done, but people are curious. Which is always good.

I downloaded the C5Pro beta yesterday. I have been using Carrara from Ray Dream days (though I used trueSpace more -- hardly used Ray Dream was too clunky).

Carrara 5 Pro, so far, is the best upgrade ever for this product. Going from rev. 3 to 4 was a bit of a disappointment for me, but this version is worth it!

Carrara's equivalent to V5I ecosystems (which I purchased 7 months ago), surface replicator, has some real advantages. For example, you can create 3D "shadow instances" (so to speak), of objects, or real instances that can be manipulated. If you have a close-in scene with a lush background, you can populate the background with thousands of shadow 3D objects to save resources. You can then populate the close-in area with true instances that can be precisely manipulated (you can convert existing shadow 3D objects to real instances).

Im not trying to initiate some Carrara vs. V5I debate, but as an all around application, Carrara 5 Pro beats V5I hands down! (BTW, Im writing this on my 3 GHz PC as my other workstations are each rendering large V5I files).

Carraras Poser imports are superior to V5I, and while Carraras rendering engine has less minute user control, it is much easier to achieve a quality render. I spent 3 days screwing around trying to get a decent 6000 X 3300 pix render with V5I, and it was not a huge file! Vues render to disk is not very good. My Windows Task Manager would show an initial resource load of ~ 225 MByte. This would (over about an 8 hour period) balloon up to ~1.95 GByte then V5I would simply go away without any fanfare! I was not setting the render option anywhere near the max.

It is true that some of the added features were available as plug-ins, and I have all of the major ones. But Eovia integrated them in, and greatly improved their functionality, while using fewer resources.

I wont go into more, but Carrara 5 Pro seems much closer to a high-end application than rev. 4, and the new interface is almost a piece of art!

After about 5 hours of playing with the beta, no crashes!

Message edited on: 10/30/2005 18:09

Thanks for that information. I was kinda making the comparison, as I think others were because Vue is popular and I think they are close in some ways feature and price-wise. I think it also helps to compare to what you know. Like reading reviews. If anyone should know carrara it should be the users in the forums...that's what I like about the forums here. I have always found carrara to be stable, which is definitely important.

LCBoliou, Can you tell me what if any changes have been made in regard to procedural options, since the material editor has been changed?

The organization of the new material editor kind of threw me off a bit. Not 'cause it is bad, but because it is quite (organizationally) changed. I haven't spent much time with it yet (I don't have the install on this box -- my other 2, with C5Pro installed are busy with V5I scenes!) The functionality seems pretty much the same, however?

I do know that Carrara now has true displacement textures. I use the Anything Grooves plug-in, and it does the same thing; however as I previously stated, the full integration of the feature seems much better than the plug-in, and I suspect the resource efficiency of the Eovia implementation will be much better.

One thing charlesb might comment on, is whether or not the surface replicator hooks in to the Carrara plant editor to generate a random tweak for each created object instance? This would produce the random individual variations within a Carrara plant species when populating instances. I cant check that right now, and all my playing around with this tool involved rotation and scale variation should have just replicated some trees without the rotation & scaling changes would have my answer.

As I get more first hand experience/information, I'll pass it on.

Message edited on: 10/30/2005 20:04

I bought the upgrade, downloaded it and have to echo the same as LCBoliou...Carrara 5 Pro, so far, is the best upgrade ever for this product. As for the comment "and the new interface is almost a piece of art!" ..."almost" would be the key word here. I still dislike the navigation tools. That darn zoom, pan, etc... are not as fluid to use as the ones in other apps like C4D or LW. If they would just change that I would really be a happy camper. Ok I said my peace. Off now to enjoy C5.

Hi, the surface replicator create identical instances of trees. The reason is that this way you can instantiate 10,000 tree without using 10,000 times more memory. However you use several different trees with the replicator (3 or 4 for instance) and it will distribute them randomly. It also can change the scale of the trees slightly. This is enough to create something not to repetitive. Charles

What do you think is so different in the way camera manipulations work in Carrara and Cinema 4D or LW ? What is a problem for you exactly ? Charles

I thought this was very nice replicator example. Looks believable. http://www.eovia3d.net/gallery/showimage.php?i=388 LCBoliou, thanks...I was hoping for more procedural functions and curious about any other possible changes.

I like Carrara's camera panning icon for up/down/left/right. It moves the camera the way I think it should move. Not backwards the way Hexagon's panning icon moves the camera.

Yeah some apps...do a push/pull thing(kinda opposite the way I want to go). I think carrara's are more intuitive for me too.Interesting that it is diff in hex tho. I haven't tried it yet.

In Hexagon, as long as I keep thinking that I'm pulling down on a rope in order to raise a statue I'm carving higher off the ground, I can handle using its Pan Mode icon. But it's still a pain though because left/right directions are backasswards.

Message edited on: 10/31/2005 00:04

"The organization of the new material editor kind of threw me off a bit. Not 'cause it is bad, but because it is quite (organizationally) changed. The functionality seems pretty much the same, however?" Understandable. A much more efficient layout. If you work with complex textures you will see the benefit. Lots of simple changes. Control of the raydepth, etc within each texture. Individual shaders can be dragged and dropped into shading domains (see properties tray in texture room, they also can be dragged and dropped with highlighted selection in the assembly room as well) Copy and paste functionality. Real fresnel effect intergrated in textures. Etc. etc. "the new features are really only existing plug-ins that have been "included" inside the package." I think that comment needs more support to it. "I still dislike the navigation tools." The three mouse button setup? Really I'm not seeing a difference in functionality? Perhaps if you explained more. "Sorry I don't share your blind enthusiasm; as I said several times, I was very disapointed with Carrara 4 and SSS is the only thing of real interest to me in C5." I find that comment a bit rude. We aren't having "blind enthusiasm" we just like the new features that are available. I'd think true fresnel, SSS, (possibly translucency shading), ambient occlusion, true microdisplacment (ie. using 16 bit maps), true ansiotropic lighting, irradiance maps..etc might be of interest to you. But if its all about SSS...um ok. scratches head Odd you are so focused on the one feature. A feature that really isn't all that necessary in most renders. Guess you render a lot of milk and candle scenes.

nice. I mentioned radiosity in vue because some people prefer having the option. A scripting language would be nice tho. Carrara is easy to use and quick at most things, but more duplication and automation would be very helpful. It's nice too that there is a batch option, as well as network rendering.Cararra is def a good renderer.

"I already own Vue 5 Infinite, and the "surface replicator" thing looks like a pale imitation of the Vue EcoSystems." From my experimentation with ecosystems I was not that impressed its just a hyped up version of replica (http://www.inagoni.com). I got to thinking the only thing that beats out Carrara's implementation is the ability to say place a rock and have the replication intelligently avoid the rock. This is easy to do using the Proximity shader. http://www.des-web.net/html/proximity.html

Well, if folks accept the idea that a PC can auto-replicate it's way to making art, then we might all as well pack up our art tool boxes and head back to the caves in France. There we can start back on the wall paintings do some real art.

I've owned Vue5I for about 7 months now, and it is probably better at doing pure landscape work; however, after playing with Carrara's surface replicator I'd say that it will work fine for most landscape art. Vue does created unique individuals when it does its ecosystems. I really dont think it would take that much more resources for Carrara to do the same?

To compare Carrara to Vue is a bit...useless, as Carrara's overall capabilities leave Vue way behind. I am very disappointed with e-on's marketing, as Vue5I is likely one of the most undeveloped 3D applications ever released in recent history. It was really a beta, not a well beta tested product when it was released! I think about 12 patches were released over a 5 month period!

I've been hammering Carrara5 most of today, and I only got one exception (don't really know what I did) but the program did not crash, and exhibited no outlandish behavior afterwards. That's damn good for a beta!

My only complaint (which has been one for some time) is Carrara's poor implementation of visible, volumetric lighting with shadows. They won't stream through glass! The light passes through, but the nice foggy beams stop cold. Also, the color of the glass (or other transparent material) is not picked up and transmitted beyond the, glass. trueSpace excels at this, and even Vue5I will do it, but for some reason, Eovia lets this one get through revision after revision?

Sure, I can remove window panes, so (as an example) the multi-pane windows will cast a nice shadowed spray of foggy light, but that is cheesy!

So, when I need that kind of scene, I go to trueSpace, or model in Cararra, and import to Vue.

If someone at Eovia is reading this give us some good realistic volumetric, visible, foggy particulate laden lights! Do this before C5Pro hits the streets. This tired spotlight (and other light effects as well) has been pretty much unchanged from the old RD days!

So far, this is my only real complaint with C5Pro, and it has been ongoing since Carrara 2. If someone can enlighten me (no pun intended) concerning some possible ignorance that I posses? (And yes, all the requisite light rendering functions are active).

Ringo commment about symmeterical modeling for Carrara please. Thanks