Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=106&Form.ShowMessage=2577706

The attached image is a quick and dirty comparison of quality and time using Poser6 and C5 with Transposer to render Jessi with danamic hair. I used the default lighting in P6, and reduced the light intensity for each light by 20%, and turning on soft shadows for each light after I imported the scene into CS. I modified the default hair setting for hair density, tip width, root width, and Clumpiness to the values shown in the image below.

Better results could be achieved by reducing the strand size more, and increasing the hair density. if you campare the above image with the image in the earlier thread, you can see an obvious improvement in the quality of the hair in CS5. This is due to the reduction of strand size and clumpiness used in the earlier render.

Opera - the times for each render may answer you questions about using Carrara for animations with dynamic hair. You amy be able to reduce the render times in CS by tweaking the hair settings more. You could definitely beat P6 render times by a great deal using "shadow buffer" instead of raytracing on each light. I wasn't able to get very good results though, and have run out of expendable time for the day. Good luck!

Thank you for advancing the discussion of this important topic. I am going to go back in on my trial version of Carrara and attempt to take it further. Yes, the images here are closer together; the Carrara image is getting closer to the resolution on the strands, but still not quite there, so they would need to be pushed. And yes, raytrace on such strand hair resolved this tightly is going to blow out render times. I would say you need the 'other kind of light/shadow', what Poser calls "depth Map Shadows" and Carrara i believe calls 'shadow buffer'. But with all due respect, I don't think the statement that one "could definitely beat P6 render times by a great deal" is a sure thing at all. I've already put an afternoon into this, and while I got the ratio down to something better than your 14:42 above, Poser was still well in the lead. I'll post back here in the next 24 hrs with more tests of my own, especially now that you have directed me to the way of getting the needed resolution over to Carrara. Thanks greatly for that. Meanwhile, I went searching for renders at the Eovia website of anything remotely close to my style of close-in work, and did not find anything. That's not the fault of the gallery posters; it is due to my choice of unusual focus. More later. ::::: Opera :::::

Getting closer to a decent render time.

Oh, my system specs are:
Laptop with 2.2GHz P4, 1Gb PC2100 RAM

At this point, I don't yet know how to get beautiful skin tone and soft shadows in Carrara, so while they are there in my poser image, they are NOT there in the Carrara image. I am assuming that once I'd learn the tools, I could get similar results in Carrara without affecting render time very much.

So, on to dynamic hair: Thanks to DustRider I followed a path that involves turning the settings inside Poser before importing into Carrara. That was the key. I gave her more strands, reduced the width of tip and root (but not as much as DR did) and most importantly, reduced the clumpiness. Clumpiness is the key.

I am reporting that using the transporter bridge, indeed changes you make to the Poser pz3 are reflected in the Carrara file. Pretty damn cool.

Anyway, what I'm showing you here is about the 14th render I did, tweaking both in Poser and in Carrara. The hair renders are not yet apples/apples. I think they could get there, but I have to say I am already near the top of the settings in Carrara.

At the end of my experimenting I attmepted to turn on just a small amount of GI, namely AO only, with modest settings. Ah, now way Jose. I turned the render off after 1/2 hour and it was not even 1/4 of the way thru the hair yet.

I can't put any more time in this this weekend, but may resume during the week.

One significant issue: If I can get Carrara to at least MATCH poser's output and render time with this type of tight close-in work, then that to a certain degree constitues a partial "go" signal, with the idea of purchasing a dual core or dual processor machine or two, which Carrara takes advantage of.

::::: Opera :::::

Great operaguy. Yes...you can tweak textures and lighting more in carrara. Soft shadows should be easy. You have alot of lighting options...save presets when you get ones you like(looks like colored lighting).May try irradiance or hdr also to see if they will work for you. I haven't done too much with those so I don't know about speed. I do know GI is for accuracy...not speed.

btw...there is a pdf on sss settings for carrara on the yahoo lists. It's just under 700k. I would upload it, but for the life of me...I don't see the rules etc... Too much stuff on here. So don't know if I could upload it. :)

Regarding the hair oversaturation. Did you try to adjust the gamma?

Ren_mem said something about accuracy and not speed... I'm all for the best looking render and not the speed of the final render. The nice thing with Carrara is you can set up to batch render and go to bed. :P Going to go look for that sss setting pdf... thanks! Christina

you can do batch render with poser, given a license of PoseNet. I did not try the gamma adjustment, will put that in the mix for my next attack.

yeah but I stll think carrara has better renders....

does you opinion that Carrara has better renders extend to the type of close-in high realism spoken of in this thread? If so, could you post a comparison image. I am passionately seeking another artist working in this mode, but in Carrara. I want to see Carrara's quality in this style. ::::: Opera :::::

Wonder if it's worth asking what "cheats" the Poser render system uses, that makes it do so well on faces and hair (and, in general, less well on other things).

On the top of your last pair, there seems to be an anisotropic effect; the skin is lighter in the direction of the viewer. This is generally true for human skin, because of the way the pigmentation in depth works on it.

Another thing is that it seems the Poser render engine is letting hairs "drop out" gradually as they approach certain limits. Would there be a way of simulating effect in Carrara with carefully tailored transparency?

Message edited on: 02/12/2006 13:57

I've had much better and faster renders with Carrara than with Poser; but I can't really imagine trying to use Carrara to render with one processor, actually. With 2 Mac G4s, Carrara seems able to do a lot more in a less time. My own Mac experience, anyway.

The anistropic effect you mention comes from use of shaders deliberately intended to induce that look. The shader functions have only been in Poser a few years, and we are still digesting their power. A vendor in the Poser market, face_off, develops user-friendly python scripts which ingeniously analyize the entire scene/lights/textures and sets up shader trees with values; you can accept his results and/or go in after executing the run and tweak values, as well. It affects displacement and bump-map strength also. He has a way of inducing fake SSS with this product, as well, which can be seen strongly in the attached render. Click on thumbnail for larger version:

Click on thumbnail for larger version:

The hair drop-out effect I like very much. It is achieved by setting different values for strand_root and strand_tip. There is also a value for "polys per strand" which tells the render engine how often, up and down the strand, to recalculate position values.

Here is an animation of mine that exploits this:

Long version: 24 MB Quicktime
Short version: 5 MB Quicktime

As to if these features should be thought of as "cheats", if true, let me be the most dishonest of us all!

::::: Opera :::::

Message edited on: 02/12/2006 18:46

CarltonMartin, Does your determination on speed include any close-in work like these portraits with/without strand hair?

If you go to the galleries and set it for Carrara/People, you will see some examples of Poser in Carrara.

Did it, thanks for the suggestion. I am enthusiastic about two things: 1) anastasis20 posted some great HDRI images of Miki which confirm my belief that Carrara will be an terrific tool for outdoor close-in realism. 2) anastasis20 in the same gallery post has an indoor image derived from a ring of spots. When next I attack Carrara as a tool for my genre of render, that's where I am going to start; it's a fine image. ::::: Opera :::::

"It is achieved by setting different values for strand_root and strand_tip. There is also a value for "polys per strand" which tells the render engine how often, up and down the strand, to recalculate position values. " The question is, then, why the clumpy hair in Carrara renders. Is this value setting not maintained in the import?

This is a different approach attempting to get Poser dynamic hair into Carrara and achieve the same quality, and also maintain quality of realism on closeups.

Baseline image:
Poser 6, dynamic hair, non-raytraced shadows from three spotlights.
Rendertime: 6 min, 35 seconds

When you import into Carrara thru Transporter, the dynamic hair comes along. But it is problematic to get it back to the fine resolution you can achieve in Poser. My first trial was instinctively to change the raytrace lights over to shadow buffer (they default in as raytrace). I spent more than a day attempting to get Carrara shadow buffer lights to get to a great render, but was not successful. This does not mean it can't be done.

Yesterday, i decided to try a different scheme: stay with raytrace. Without changing anything else, I got a REALLY FAST render, 2 minutes and 20 seconds. Here is the render:

The problem: the hair is not resolved to the fineness I want, and of course the shadows are not soft and beautiful.

In the next render, I kicked up the anti-alias, object accuracy and shadow accuracy settings to good/1/1 and turned "Full Raytracing" on for two lights. Render time 5 minutes, six seconds.

Finally, here is a render with raytrace settings pretty well jacked up all the way. Render time 19 minutes, 47 seconds. It is much closer.

It looks like I could get the hair to get close to Poser's. I'd still have to solve the issue of beautiful soft shadows and to get shaders to produce realistic skin and SSS in Carrara; the shaders did not come over from poser.

::::: Opera :::::

You should try turning on "soft shadows" with raytracing. Experiment with the settings, sometimes in big outdoor scenes I turn it up to 1500. Close up should probably be much less, say 20 to 100. It may increase render times.

Patrick thanks for the tip.. I usually turn soft shadows way up as well, hadn't thought about decreasing it for close ups... will have to see what it does to my render times... since I do alot of close ups. C~

i tried turning on soft shadows with raytracing and rendering at several settings. It blew out the color, made the hair translucent, and I lost strand definition. I then also tried gamma correction, but it made everything worse. enigmatic, if you do a lot of close-ups, can you contribute any images roughly in the manner of my baseline image in post 20 and give your render times? ::::: Opera :::::

I guess I'll have to take the cellophane of my copy of Poser 6 and see what's up with all this new stuff.

There is definite potential for the two programs to work together like a tetter totter. If I weren't so fanatical about the quality of hair, 2:20 for that first render in post 20 above would seem spectacular. ::::: Opera :::::

Working with Dynamic hair in Carrara 5 right now myself. Learning a few things. Haven't messed with the hair options inside Carrara yet. I'm wondering, though -- seems like you'd achieve the Poser look if there was a way to blur details below a certain size (like, fine hairs). I wonder if there's any render or post workaround that might do this?

nomuse, Yes, I caught your drift in that direction above in post19. You are onto a good idea if you can find where to control it. Meanwhile, I tried a few 'overall' attempts in that same vein. The first day I worked on this issue I used all shadow buffer lights. I couldn't get good results. Yesterday I switched to all raytrace, but for a while i tried to work with one shadow buffer light on top of the the other raytrace lights, just so I could get a blur slider. I guess I was thinking the same as you! However, it blew out the fine resolution of the strands in general and threw off the specular. See, this is no easy thing....one wants the realism of thousands of finely definded hairs, and even shadows under the strands (you don't really see them, but they are there) and that's why in poser you achieve the effect with very tight anti-alias (min shading rate) and small bias on depth map shadows with big maps. The other element that shouts realism is when a few wispy strands or very thin groups hang down into the air or against a neck...and you see the very tip resolve to an extremely thin point, like to one pixel. As you can see in my last example above, you can almost get there in Carrara by staying in raytrace and cranking all the settings way up, and I bet with another two days or so the proper combination of controls and settings could yeild an artistic equivelent. However, the render time....blown. There still might be a low rendertime solution in Carrara. I am chiefely handicapped by lack of my own time to pursue it, and my inexperience with the program. I can think of half-a-dozen ideas to attempt, such as moving lights in or out, going down to two lights with shadows, going back to all shadow buffer, exploring shader nodes, etc.. Please let us know what you find out. ::::: Opera :::::

That's about what I'm seeing, too -- terrible render times in Carrara to get same effect. Since Carrara's render engine is in general more efficient, what this means is that basically we're having to add cycle-consuming stuff to an accurate render to make it pleasing -- whereas Poser is apparently using optimizing tricks that cost in accuracy but work very well for figures and hair. I think I'm on track of fairly decent hair -- cranking hair count to over 10,00 in Poser, making it thinner in Carrara, using soft shadows. What I am worried about now is that GI is going to totally skew everything -- as well as go into Bryce-like render times.

I am glad you are persisting because that means my findings are not in isolation, not probably due to my ignorance and stumbling around in Carrara. I hope to see your final attempts at some point, thanks. I hope you'll report both before AND after you bring GI into the picture. I have to laugh every time I do a Carrara render, because the progress tiles go lickety split until they hit the hair, and then bog down, but when it gets below the hairline, the last two or three rows of tiles rush forward like mad and then your'e done. Which, of course, makes me highly desirous of attempting some trial runs with hair at a distance (where it looks fine without these drastic settings), outside under HDRI/AO/GI. Should be terrific. ::::: Opera :::::

The more I use it, the gi seems less useful for animation of poser characters. While it can look really nice, the render times are often prohibitive. Let's hope we'll see improvements in this area. an idea, make it a real pro version, and write code to offload processor intensive stuff to advanced gpus like the x1900 ati and 7800 nvidias. I know other software is starting to use these mammoth cards to do more than speed up display times and qualities. cause let's face it, during render time, the video card becomes useless to us, but make it a helper to the rendering and it is reborn, and makes it easier to justify a $500-$600 card. I wont buy one over $300 now, but make it assist in calculation of rendering and I'm in for double!

Oh my, hardware-assisted render would be fantastic. Let the game industry drive the development of these cards and we will follow right behind! Sorry to hear the times for GI in Carrara are not animation-friendly; i have not tried GI yet, myself. I notice you say "for poser characters." What about for buildings, landscapes, etc? Maybe the huge polycount of poser figures is the culprit. That can be attacked, if so. ::::: Opera :::::

bookmark

Bad new so far. I can't get Carrara to do a GI render of a figure with dynamic hair. Has crashed every time I've tried it. Lowest settings possible, saving rebooting and re-opening, latest service pack -- I'm out of ideas and am basically giving up on the idea. I am not happy, either -- this is more crashes than I've had with Carrara since the bad old days of version 1 and 2.

i just think they have not had time to deal with the dynamic hair integration. It's very foreign. I'll try something simple later today. My trial is still running. :: og ::

Thought, I would mention that shadow buffers do not let light thru objects(according to the manual anyway). Has anybody tried anisotropic lighing model w/ some of these speedier rendering options to see if it might help with that poser look?Sorry about your crashing.

ren mem, can you say a little more about how to execute that anisotropic lighting model? Is that a type of light? A shader attached to a light?

I can't do it.....the trial verision has GI turned off! I WAS able to load an animation in thru Transposer that contained dynamic hair, but after making sure there were no lights, I turned GI on....black render! Then I tried the New-->wizzard, saw that GI is disallowed. ::::: Opera :::::

This doesn't seem to be an all-or-none problem. I was able to render a lock against background (using only skylight, no other light or settings), a lock that passed over face, a bit of the top. But somewhere in that hair is something that slams Carrara right to the ground -- crashes without any warning when I try to render into the mass of hair itself.

Good news from Eovia! The dynamic-hair-in-skylight is a recognized bug, and it will be addressed in the 5.0.5 update. (I still wonder if my suspicion was correct that it might have had something to do with the zero-distance polys of the skullcap. In any case, Eovia says they've got it fixed. Yippee!)

cool

Yah on the hair! I can't believe they would turn GI off on purpose. Yeah anisotropic is a lighting model you can choose it from the channels. Choose light model--->anisotropic instead of multichannel. This is for satiny surfaces, looks like the lighting I have been seeing in these poser renders.The down side may be that if you have a layers list shader rather than a shader/domain setup that your whole shader has to be that. Layers list have their pluses, but they definetly have minuses. If you could make a shader you like based on aniso you can export it to a map and use it as a light gel which may make for some interesting looks.

Message edited on: 02/16/2006 16:16

operaguy, you may be confused about the GI. Not sure I interpreted what you said correctly, but w/o placing lights the default of the usual distant light might not be on anything so no light, of course black render. The other thing you described is just a preset wizard, they probably did not include many presets w/ demo. The GI is listed in a section in the render room (ctrl+r)Any option under the global illumination turns this on. Make sure light thru trans is checked at top and in the GI section.I did try the demo myself when it came out and I don't remember GI turned off.

We got sunlight on dynamic hair.

Taking a cue from ren mem's post, I tried again. Initially, I had thrown away the defaulted-in distant thinking I wanted GI without anything else. When this gave me only black, I DID throw a distant back in, but left it far away. More black.

This time I move the distant light right over her head and jacked the intensity up to 2132%. The photon count is 5000. No indirect light, only Sky Light.

Bingo.

This is the render without any attempt to improve anything, either in the Poser export or the Carrara settings.

This is "Kate Dynamic Hair" from Poser. I am going to fiddle some, then run a short animation overnight.

Hopefully there will be tricks involving moving the light around and tweaking settings to go after both quality of light and other desired effects, also with the goal of attacking the render time.

Rendertime: 11min, 46sec

AMD 3500+ 4GIG XPPro

::::: Opera :::::

the shadows of her eyelashes on her face are terrific. :: og ::

I think the hair looks terrific there. Did you fudge any of the settings? I was working on fine blond hair so I ramped up number of hairs and ramped down size on my tests. BTW, the GI bug is listed as being with OSX. Windows users may not have that problem. Oh; and as for black skylight renders; you gotta have a sky for there to be light! (Or at least a background).

well, i have no sky select on this render. There is a background, a room prop as you can see. Do I need to throw in a sky? Yes, this is the best dynamic hair render i've gotten in Carrara so far, and i did'nt do nuttin! More tomorrow or monday. ::::: Opera :::::

Naw. I'd like to see how this looks with interobject reflection turned on, tho. My eye expects quite a bit of light to come off that light-colored wall behind her. Do I take it you have ambience in this as well? Carrara defaults at a 20% ambient (which I always switch off first thing).

Yeap, check the ambient light turn it off. Also, try turning intensity/brightness down over using softshadows, aniso light model to see if it gives a soft look you like.The less lights the faster the render.Also using indirect only w/ some other light help over using sky light can give a dusky look.I think the hair looks real to me.Shininess I think matters on the hair alot.

Oh btw the option to control what the light will shine on or effect selectively, is awesome. You can for instance have a light that only lights the hair, but nothing else.

Well, GI is the way to go in Carrara. Not only are skylights (and indirect, i worked with that a little as well) great as GI, but they finally enabled me to get the hair fully resolved with reasonable rendertimes and beautiful illumination/reflection/shadows.

By searching the user manual pdf I found the control for turning off the defaulted 20% ambient. That made a difference right away. The manual tells you the same thing stated above....it's good to have it on for staging your scene, but turn it off for final render.

However, my searching in the PDF and in all the controls did not turn up anything on "interobject reflection." ren_mem, can you say what you meant by that? Also, I have not had time to follow your suggestions in post 41 above for anisotropic, but will pursue at another time. Thanks for you suggestions, they have been very accurate.

For all the results below, I employed only one light and did not move it for the entire run. It is positioned about 'four feet' above her head and about '8 feet' in front of her. While I tried once or twice switching, it is a raytrace distant light.

My research is divided into three after that.

Part A, I adjusted nothing in Poser, but made many small-move adjustments in Carrara, rendering each time. Increasing the power only sent the render time up, so I concentrated on how to keep every control on both the light and the render-features as low as possible, but still obtain excellent results. I found I could not turn Full Raytrace or Indirect on at all, nor did I need to. Just skylights. I finally came to the end of Part A with the render below: Render time, 10 minutes, 4 seconds

In Part B, I adjusted nothing in Carrara, but tweaked hair settings in Poser. This went on for a long time, but the upshot is, I DECREASED the strand count from 12,675 overall to 7,209 overall. Obviously, I did this to lower the burden on the render engine dealing with so many strands. To compensate for thinning out the strand count, I widened the rootwidth from .6 to 2.0 and the tipwidth from .1 to .3. Otherwise, I made no changes to Clumpiness, Kink, etc. Admittedly, I've now got 'spaghetti' instead of 'capelini', but at some point my madness must have a limit! I think it looks good. As a result, I was able to get render time down to 8 min, 13 seconds on the render below:

In Part C, I wanted to drive down the render time further. There was an unsuccessful foray into making the hair not receive shadows, and also changing the setting on backfaces from Smart to Hide to Show and back to Smart. I did have some success, however, with gradually turning down the shadow intensity and the photon count (down to 1000). Here is my stopping point, rendertime 6 minutes, 49 seconds.

[[[ just for kicks, before heading to bed I cranked up all the settings, turned on Full Raytrace and Indirect, and let her rip. The lovely render below greeted me this morning. Rendertime, 1 hour, 28 minutes and 41 seconds. Sigh. It is beautiful, even without any attempt to give her authentic skin. The lighting and perfectly resolved hair and shadows make it fine. ]]]

My hat is off to the Carrara GI render engine.

::::: Opera :::::