I am not a frequent poster in these forums. In fact this is my very first post. But I have worked with Carrara long enough to be quite aware of its strengths and weaknesses.

Anyhow here is a very exciting development by Intel which, I believe, could benefit Carrara's native renderer a lot, if its implemenrtation in Carrara is indeed technically feasible.

http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/embree-photo-realistic-ray-tracing-kernels

This library has been implemented in Cinema 4D R15 native renderer and it looks like it resulted in some significant speed improvements in C4D's already blazingly fast renderer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJd-WEtkg-Q

Carrara's renderer has, in my opinion, 2 major deficiencies: 1) it does not process light as accurately as, say, Lightwave or C4D and 2) Its Global Illumination is so slow that it's mostly useless in complex scenes.

This library could be a great way to rejuvenate Carrara's renderer and bring it on par with other 'big boys'.

I am truly puzzled by the total lack of interest in this remarkable development by Intel. This is a set of routines that, if implemented in Carrara, could boost its rendering speed by several orders of magnitude, while improving its rendering quality significantly.

Yet not the slightest interest, not even a 'Not bad, I'll think about it.' comment.

I am starting to believe that the problem with Carrara is not Daz, but Carrara users themselves, because they are not using Carrara in any serious project, therefore having a ten-fold or twenty-fold render speed improvement is of marginal interest to them

That may be the reason why Daz is ignoring Carrara. After all, if Carrara users don't care, then why should Daz?

Whoa, that's fascinating, sounds like it could lead to a tremendous render speed improvement.  To be clear, would this be added to/phased in with the existing Carrara render engine, or is it it's own render engine that would need to be added to Carrara?  If it can simply be added to the existing rendering engine, seems like that would be a bit of a task but if it is a whole new rendering engine that would be much more of a task (as it would have to be programmed to recognize and render the existing Carrara shader system).

If the render speeds were significantly improved for Carrara 9, that would definitely be a selling point.  If we're talking gigantic speed increases (you mentioned in the other thread it could be as much as 2000% increase, that seems overly optimistic but who knows) then it would make Carrara 9 upgrade a must.

Thanks Jon for your reply. The lack of interest to this thread was such that I was starting to think that it's useless to even talk about Carrara's future

Anyhow, most, if not all, ray-tracers use a light ray sampling technique called Monte-Carlo method. The maths details are complex, but you can check them out in the links below.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Carlo_method

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_ray_tracing

Carrara too uses the Monte-Carlo method for rendering. I know, because I read it in a RDS 2.0 or RDS 3.0 product brochure a very long time ago.

The bulk of Carrara was written at a time when a 100 MHz Pentium II with 64MB RAM was the cream of the crop. So I assume that their implementation of the Monte-Carlo method is (or was) a scaled-down implementation so it can run fast enough on the computers of those glorious times. Even  more so that Carrara (or RDS) was designed for hobbyists and semi-pros market with limited computer equipment budget.

The Monte-Carlo sampling routines are buried deep inside Carrara's renderer, and I doubt that they have undergone much improvements since the RDS glorious times.

Intel has designed a new implementation of the Monte-Carlo method that takes full advantage of its newest processors graphic architecture. In their video presentation they claim that their implementation of Monte-Carlo method scales very well to mutiple cpu's/cores/threads and I have no reason to doubt their claim.

These routines will not replace Carrara's native renderer. They will only replace the underlying sampling routines upon which the native renderer is built. Intel has done it very intelligently, as demonstraed by Cinema4D's demo.

Replacing Carrara's scaled-down and outdated Monte-Carlo routines with Intel's state-of-the-art implementation should not take more than 6 months for a developer who knows what he/she is doing, especially since Embree's source code seems to be really small.

The reason I say it could speed-up Carrara's native renderer by 2000% to 3000% is a guess based on Cinema4D's demo where they claim a 300% speed improvement using Embree. Given that Cinema4D's renderer is super-fast, probably 10 times faster than Carrara's, I guessed that these routines could well speed-up Carrara's renderer by as much as 3000%.

I agree with you that if Embree finds its way into Carrara's native renderer it would be such an added value that upgrading to C9 will become a must.

More details about Embree:

http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/embree-highly-optimized-visibility-algorithms-for-monte-carlo-ray-tracing

http://software.intel.com/en-us/videos/photo-realistic-rendering-at-researchintel-days-2011

Good share!

C4D r15 has engaged Embree and it has made a huge difference in my render times. It would  be nice if Daz followed suit. 

Quote - C4D r15 has engaged Embree and it has made a huge difference in my render times. It would  be nice if Daz followed suit. 

Thanks Mark for your comment. This is proof positive that Embree needs to be implemented in Carrara urgently.

As I mentioned in another thread, my recommendations to Daz are:

1. Take the fast mipmap code out of Carrara and trash it. The fast mipmap thingy in Carrara only proves how much Daz developers are out of touch with today's cutting-edge technology.

2. By the same token take-out the 'summed area table' filtering option and trash it too, because it simply doesn't work. Use it and you will see seams appear in the renders, all over the place. This is another one of Carrara's features that have been shipped without being tested.

3. Fix whatever was done to screw-up the Gaussian filtering option that now runs 10% slower than it did in 8.1.1.12.

1. Implement Embree in Carrara's native renderer, spend a full 2 months testing it on hundreds of animated and still scenes to make sure it's bug-free.

5. Ship C9 and see Carrara's sales go through the roof.

Very cool!

They should also add this for pipeline use http://graphics.pixar.com/opensubdiv/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFZazwvYc5o

Whoa, TheaRender 1.3 was just released, and not only is it now rendering CPU + GPU, they've imported Embree to make it even faster.  That thing must absolutely scream!

Sadly, no Carrara plugin for it yet :(  so for now I'll still have to export from Carrara and retexture in Thea when I want to render (not that it takes all that long to do but still...).

I was already very enthusiastic about the new GPU + CPU version of Thea I knew was coming, but I had no idea that Embree would also be incorporated.   My current laptop won't run this new version yet, but I'm very very tempted to do something drastic and run out and spend some money on a new computer so I can get in on the action.

Hey Jon! Thanks for the info on the new Thea. Would really be nice to have a plugin for it with Carrara. It's great that you now have all the options for cpu and gpu rendering, sounds like the best bang for the buck right now.

Since VRay and now Thea have Embree incorporated in them, Octane and Maxwell and Arnold an Lux and every possible renderer in the world will have it incorporated in their next version.

Then 3D apps like Poser, Shade, Lightwave and Modo will use Embree natively like C4D does.

After that even low-end 3D apps like Cheetah3D will incorporate Embree natively.

But Carrara will still proudly offer its users a grotesque 'fast mipmap' technology of the 1990's as a solution for fast rendering which, in the process, screws-up the 'Gaussian Filtering' mode and the the Open GL preview screen, and will claim through a loudmouth-newbie-failed-art-student that this is the best version of Carrara ever.

Just as a an idea and a question,

Could Embree be installed into Luxrender and then we could get it as a plugin?

I have no idea what the proprietary issues are but it's an interesting question.

i would also like to restate what we have covered in another thread which is that Embree appears to be functional on Mac, AMD, and of course Intel systems (info which I learned here that is good to know).

i have issues with Lux (basically just the pain in the neck factor concerning texture conversions), but that doesn't change the fact that Embree in lux would be very cool.

i also don't want to push aside the issue of Embree in C.  My gut tells me that we might have a better chance in Lux though.

At first I feared maybe Embree might only be able to be used by biased render engines, but since Thea can use it I guess that proves it can be incorporated into any renderer, unbiased or biased.  So that would suggest there would be no reason it couldn't be incorporated into Luxrender (in fact I agree with the notion it is even likely that it will be incorporated into Lux, as more and more render engines incorporate it).

And there's already a Carrara plugin for Lux, Luxus for Carrara.  It seems to work really pretty well, the more I experiment with it and learn about how the Lux textures work, the more confident I am that I can develop a library in Carrara of luxus shaders (the plugin adds a new set of Luxus shader types to Carrara that you can select and edit in the Carrara texture room like any other Carrara shader).

Thanks Mark for these 2 renders. The picture quality is great.

From what I have researched, Embree actually works better and faster in complex scenes than in simple ones.

When you mention 12 to 18 minutes render times with Embree, I would assume that without Embree it would have been roughly 1/2 hour to 1 hour. This is a huge time-saving especially for lengthy animations.

I don't have much hope for Carrara to integrate Embree anytime soon, but I am certain that the next version of Poser Pro will.