I was recently browsing some galleries and was blown away by renders being produced by a renderer called Modo202 (see image above). I downloaded a demo a copy and was amazed at how fast the example scenes were rendered and how realistic they looked (the one above is a straight render with no postwork using an example scene that came with the demo).

But, there were two major problems with it 1/ Its pretty  expensive (over $800) and 2/ it's VERY hard to use - I've been playing with the demo for  two days now and still can't work out how to texture things!

My question is. Can Carrara produce images like this or are there any renderer plugins that would allow you to produce this quality? I love the simplicity of Cararra but images I have seen  still have that "Computer generated" look.

Thanks

 

It sure looks very good. We could download the demo and see if we can get the scene out of it, into Carrara. I think Carrara can produce results as above, but the renders will take considerable time. And good lighting and shading should be taken care of. The render looks like it has an hdri based lighting, with global illumination, and fresnel in the shaders. Nothing Carrara does not offer.

Hoofdcommissaris,

I tried that! Exported the scene from modo  as an obj and then rendered in Cararra but the result was nowhere as good. I'll have another play with carrara and try some different HDRIs

Just render some of the stuff in the Carrara Browser>Scenes!

Yes, Carrara can do that. ;-) The unrealistic part of working pre-made scenes is that all of the experimenting and adjusting have already been done so it's tempting to think, "Wow, all I had to do was click the render button." The magic elves have already done their work. :D

OK then, here's the challenge! Can Cararra users post their un-postworked Carrara work (or post a link) that demonstrates Carrara's ability to do scenes like that above. Remember, there should be absolutely no postwork - not even lighting fixes. If I can be convinced I will delete the modo demo and save myself 800 bucks!

 

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=388341

Here's a render I did way back with Carrara 2. The liquid shader is very bad , and could be done much better now, but otherwise the basic idea is there. Of course Carrara 5 Pro has some tools to make this better in other ways also. Carrara has the ability to do photorealistic renders, if the user knows the software, and what "photorealistic" actually looks like.

Patrick,

Very nice!!! and this was all done with cararra 2????

OK this has definately inspired me to go and revisit cararra pro 5.1 again

(*puts credit card back in wallet !)

 ps. to me, photorealistic means being able to show the picture to someone and them not realising that it has been computer generated.

Attached Link: http://www.kenzden.com/images/crop.jpg

Stealth,

Here a render I did back in C4Pro when GI and HDRI were first implemented.  The HDRI file was created using C4Pro, HDRShop, and Paint Shop Pro 8.  There are NO lights in this scene.  The lighting was driven by the HDRI file only.  The size of the file (1300x1440) is cropped from the original (which was 4400x2200) and took a whopping 48 Hrs to render (this was even with a Dual Athlon 1.3GHz machine with 512 MB of RAM).  I took the original BMP and compressed it in a JPG which accounts for its small size.

Ken

I have a couple renders at http://www.shonner.com/drafts/realistic_carrara_renders.htm

50% of your photorealistic render is your lighting.  The other 50% is your texturing.  Here are some more at http://www.shonner.com/drafts/indoor_rendering.htm

 

what many people don't realise, is whatever the render engine, be it poser, carrara, bryce, 3dsmax, renderman, and many more, as long as the tools exist you can make anything

poser may take endless nodes and drag down the time, but the power is there
carrara has the ability to program new ones, making it easier, list goes on

the question falls more to "how much work will it take to acheive it?"
i'd lean towards carrara 5 at the moment, but thats me :)

Attached Link: Gallery Image

Well, after a LOT of experimenting today I've finally come up with an image that I'm happy with.  Plesae click on the link to view the image I have just uploaded to the gallery. There is absolutely no postwork involved here apart from the addition of the sig. Shonner you are right, lighting and texturing are critical. I found that even changing the HDRI has a major difference in the quality of the render so my advise is invest in some good quality HDRI files. Thanks everyone for inspiring me to look into this - I think I may just have saved myself going out and buying modo. Carrara is back in my 'cool' books!

That render didn't take much effort for modo to do.  But Carrara would be at its limit to render the same.

I just ordered modo.  I'm going to export that scene into Carrara and render it.  It should make for a nice Carrara challenge.

My small contribution to discussion :)
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1329283

Shonner,
I commend your enthusiasm but you can export that scene  from the demo version. I did that and then tried to render it in Cararra but it was nowhere near the quality of modo. Let me know if you figure out how to use the textures in modo - its definately a powerful application - the render times are unbelievable, but I wouldn't put its user-friendliness at the top of the list.

What?!  I could have just downloaded the demo and saved myself some cash??!!!  Just kidding.

My plan is to import the scene as OBJ into Carrara and make custom Carrara shaders and lights for it rather than try to use modo's.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1329586

Though not the most photorealistic image ever, it did come from Carrara. Also, keep in mind this is only ambient occlusion with a sky light. I have a Full GI image coming soon from the same scene.

Though I didnt model this scene it does show that good models, texturing and lighting are prequisites for photorealistic. Carrara can certainly do photorealistic renders. Much better than what my image shows. But as others have pointed out, lighting and texturing go a long way towards getting there. Modeling comes into play as well. As demonstrated by the image from sslide24.

I have to offer a disclaimer about the image l posted. The original scene is part of a challenge posted on 3dallusions.com earlier this year. The original model is credited to Branko a.k.a. 'd.sign'. Just wanted to be sure and give proper credit. I brought the original model in as a obj file and textured it. Then set the lighting. Carrara did all the hard work!!

Donnie

I'm gonna try that living room, too, in Carrara.  Right now I'm naming all the objects and fixing the normals in that scene.

Cool Shonner. I enjoyed your work on the Evermotion Kitchen from a while back. Will be nice to see what you come up with.

Attached Link: Kitchen scene

Here's a link to those realistic kitchen renders.

I think there are a few key things to watch when trying to get renders as realistic as possible.  First off the included shaders with Carrara need tweaking.  I have yet to use one which didn't need adjusting.  Mostly I adjust the reflection, highlight, shininess and bump channels.  Sometimes I add a bit of translucency to certain shaders as well.  The example of the cup and saucer in the first image on this thread looks fairly straightforward.  Also keep the lighting as realistic as possible.  Not a lot of beginners know this but our sun is not white.  It has a faint yellow tinge to it.  Changing the sun light color just a tad, makes a huge difference in the final render.  Also even coffee mugs have a very very slight translucency to them.  Subsurface scattering also makes a huge difference.

People are another matter.  To get realism from a poser import, you need to make sure that it looks real in Poser first and then edit the shaders Carrara creates on import.  Adding a bit of bump here and some translucency there.

Basically picture in your minds eye what the real McCoy looks like and experiment until you get it right.

As has been said, lighting, materials and texturing are the key. Good renders come from knowing how to get good renders, rather than the software. If you're interested in reading about it I can recommend 'Digital Lighting & Rendering' by Jeremy Birn, published by New Riders.

I put this together to demonstrate how a decal design would look.

Attached Link: Here's my living room render

It's about as realistic as Carrara gets for an indoor scene right now.

I am working on a scifi seaside retreat scene right now in C5 Pro.  I think it looks pretty good so far but it is going to be a bear to render.

Shonner, great stuff as usual.  Love to see the Veloute and EnhanceC settings for the shaders if possible.

EnhanceC needs more tutes to help me to get  a better understanding of it's workings.

bwtr,

I no longer have the texture settings for that scene.  I've been re-doing them.  For the curtain I used Veloute 2's Tile:Weave feature with default settings.  I used it as a blender to mix two Carrara colors together (green and yellow) to get a 70's color pattern.

The table and ottomans used the default Enhance:C Basket feature to blend two colors mixed together.  Then I mixed that with some fractal noise to dirty it up some.

I had to UVmap the curtains first so that Veloute 2 would texture it.  I don't remember if I had to UVmap the table and ottomans for Enhance:C or not.

Thanks Shonner, that gives me something to work on. The whole idea of the curtain shaping and a uv map is another  matter!

The curtain used a horizontal wavy polyline that was then smoothed and extruded downward to make the height of the curtain.  I had to reverse the normal on them so that they were pointing into the room instead of out the window.

I exported the modo scene as OBJ and rendered it in Carrara.  I created the Carrara textures as close as I could to the modo textures.  I used Amapi Pro to fix the normals of some of the objects.

Scroll down to the bottom of http://www.shonner.com/drafts/indoor_rendering.htm to see the render speed differences between modo and Carrara.

Excellent work Shonner. Is it possible  to turn up the brightness from within Cararra on the HDRI to bring it closer to the modo image? There definately isn't much between the two images. Shows what you can do with Cararra in the right hands! Thanks for restoring my faith in it.

I didn't use an HDRI background.  Just a faint shade of dark gray for the skylight.  I didn't think modo was using HDRI for their scene.  I'll look again.  I thought their scene was lit just by the bright square polygon to the left of the objects and a darkened skylight surrounding the scene.

I will try again using a brighter Anything Glows value (say 200% instead of 100%) and increase the photon count from 5000 which I forgot to do.  I normally crank it up to 20000.  If I increase my skylight brightness, it washes out the Anything Glows lighting.

Of course this will increase the render time in Carrara far beyond 1.5 hours on my system for a 640x480 image.  modo can already render the scene in less than 7 minutes.

Are you using Anything Glows or a luminous plane?

Could you post the object with the fixed normals? Thanks, Donnie

I'm using Anything Glows on a plane object because the default glow channel isn't bright enough.  I don't think I can post the object model because it's (C) modo stuff.  I've modified more things like the liquid object wedged through the glass mug instead of just placed inside it.  And I used Amapi Pro to scale the scene larger so that the cup is 4" instead of .02" tall.  This will allow for better lighting measurement so I'm not trying to deal with .005" shadow radius and such.  I can just use 1".  I brightened the background another 5%.  And I'll be using Best light rendering and see what happens.  I should end up with a better image to do postwork on.

You can use a value in the glow channel. (0-1000). Or you can use a multiply and multiply your color by a value. That way if you want a really bright "red" light you can multiply the red and it still puts out red light. No problem on the posting. I tried opening the object in Lightwave, to redo the normals. For some reason, Lightwave kept crashing with the object. I replaced the saucer and cup with one from Carrara's objects. Interesting exercise.

Also, if you turn on Gamma correction it helps. The manual says the Gi takes into account the gamma adjustment. I am testing that now. I am rendering some without gamma and then with gamma. Then I am going to adjust gamma in post on the non-adjusted render and see if I can match the Carrara adjusted image. If so, then the gamma correction is just that, simple gamma. If not, then it truly does take into account the gamma when calculating the GI. I know I get a lot cleaner renders with it on. It is much easier to set it in Carrara. Otherwise I have to render, then adjust it to see if is right. I prefer doing it in Carrara and it doesnt add much to the render time.

I leave Gamma turned off because the Carrara manual said at one point that it was to be used only on Mac's and not on PC monitors.  I can always bump gamma to 1.20 in post if I do need to.  I'm trying again with 50000 photon count.

Well, I read that part about Mac and PC monitors. But if you read on further it says that gamma is used in the GI calculation. It is on page 838 of the manual. I just tried to render with gamma and without. I took that image and did a gamma adjust in Irfan View. It is not the same. The manual says on that page that the gamma correction is taken into account for calculating GI with regard to textures. Either way, I dont like having to post gamma every image, I just let Carrara do it. Maybe someone can get Charles to explain better just what the gamma does with regard to GI.

Well, in about 3 hours I'll know if this teatime scene renders without me having to do any postwork.

This render ended up taking more than 5 hours to complete.  I used Best lighting this time and increased Anything Glows to 200%.  Increased the background skylight to 15%.  And re-sized the modo scene to actual size so I could work with measurements like 4" intead of .02".  Anyway, it's beginning to look more like the modo render.  But by taking a hit on render speed.

I was unable to get the facets corrected on most of the scene. It crashed Lightwave repeatedly. I couldnt correct them in Carrara either. So I put some different objects in. The textures are not exact either, or finished. The tea cup is still showing facet problems but I left it in, since it is the biggest rendering hit anyway. Light through transparency in GI is turned off as well. But all things considered, not bad for a 5 minute and 30 second render. Lighting can be improved to match Modo better, but it goes up to over 8 minutes for that. n particuliar, the shading errors around the base of the tea cup and the other objects improve, but again, that is over 8 minutes. In Modo on my machine it renders in 2:15 seconds. So, Carrara is at least 3-4 times slower. I will render a best lighting option, or turn the interpolation up later and post that result. I used the plane as a photon emitter and a value in the glow channel. I also used a light sky light. You can see where my gamma is at also. Now, I will be the first to admit Carrara is not near as fast as Modo. But I dont think it is as bad it appears at first.

Here are the settings I used for this one. When I get back in later this evening I will post a better lighting version.

You will notices some other errors as well. The spoon sticks through the dish. Also, the top of the liquid in the tea cup is not visible. I turned it off for some reason. I will put it back in when I re-render tonight. The spoon also has some nasty normal problems as well. As a result, I had to turn subdivision way up on it and the tea cup. If I had the proper models, it might even be faster, since I wouldnt have to use so much SDS.

For comparison here is a render without gamma correction. Same settings otherwise. It took 7 minutes and 33 seconds to render. Big difference.

Beautiful work Shonner. It is truly amazing how fast Modo renders. You are a lighting master!

Here's mine using dbigers' settings.  Render time was 26 minutes.

Five minutes and 33 seconds. Here is a final one. I couldnt fix the spoon, or the pot. I put a new pot in, obviously. I did clean up a couple of things. Same settings as before. I am using a value of 256 in the glow channel of the plane on the left side. I tried it with Anything Glows, but couldnt get a real clean render without artifacts with these settings. Seems the glow works better for this scene. In my other tests I found the same thing to be true. Donnie