Is it just me, or does Carrara suddenly take a loooooong time to render when you have Sky Lighting or Indirect Lighting on, and there's hair or some other transmapped material in the scene? Of course it's not me! Why is that?! (arghhh!)

I've been trying to find ways to get around this, but so far nothing really seems to help. Reducing the size of the texture files doesn't help. Reducing the quality of the lighting effects helps, but only barely. The only way I've been able to get around it up to this point is by not using Sky Lighting at all, and just mocking up a pseudo light dome with Distant lights... which is really just cheating!

So, was just wondering, are there any good tricks for getting around this? Is there some way to turn off render settings for certain objects?

PLease post a printscreen from your render room settings. But Yes Indirect Light take a loto of time to render.

Turning off light through transparency might help, but that would mean rendering twice and compositing (no sky light, with transparency + sky light and transparency off)

Carrara's Sky Lighting and Indirect Lighting are untolerably slow, to the point of being useless for practical purposes.

I did a render of this scene with skylight and AO only. Chandeliers hanging from the ceiling have transparencies in their textures.

http://www.daz3d.com/baroque-grandeur

The render took 3 days on a pro level machine (Dual Xeon @2.6MHZ, 16 threads, 24GB DDR3 RAM). To Carrara's credit though I should add that the render finished without crashing. But 3 days? Most definitely useless.

The solution, as I have stated in several other threads, is this:

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

which gives this kind of results in Cinema4D:

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

Instead of implementing the state-of-the-art technology that Embree is, Carrara 8.5 is gratifying us with a laughable technology from the 1990's called 'Fast Mipmap', which belongs in low-level game engines to speed-up real-time display drawing, not in pro level 3D apps as a mean of speeding-up the renderer.

 

> Quote - PLease post a printscreen from your render room settings. But Yes Indirect Light take a loto of time to render.

Here's a look at the render settings. For a small render (640x480) it takes about 13 minutes to render a single figure with hair, no background. Turning down the lighting quality to "Fast" and the accuracy to 16 pixels gives me a faster render speed, about 8 minutes. That's tolerable, at least, but worrisome for larger or more intricate renders.

Mostly, I was hoping there was someplace I could turn off certain render settings for certain objects. I'm sure I've seen this in other software, but I may be mistaken. Doesn't look like Carrara has any such option.

In general, I'm very pleased with the speed and quality I get with Sky Lighting and with Indirect Lighting. It whizzes through most parts of a given render... but it always hangs up when it gets to hair, and transparent stuff like glass with refraction. It's really just that one thing that makes it not a feasible option more often than not.

Hair and anything with transparency, reflexion, refraction, etc. are points of contention in Carrara's renderer. You are not the only one. I am having this problem all the time too.

Your render settings, from what I can see, are barely above the minimal settings. So I don't see what you could do to improve the speed.

Don't expect an answer that would speed-up your render tenfold. The problem is with Carrara's ailing renderer. It is in need of a major overhaul.

You could set the anti-aliasing to 'Good' to gain some speed, but then you will eventually get jagged lines in your render. Also setting the object accuracy to 2 pixels might help, but then your render will look amateurish at best.

 

 

Keeping everything in perspective though, I'd still say Carrara's quite a bit faster than Poser when it comes to rendering reflections and shadows. And it's easier to work with than Vue. I'm wondering what other renderers are out there that are quick and give decent results? Will probably try free Shade demo, or maybe the Luxus plugin. Overall, I'm mostly happy with Carrara, and it'll work fine for what I need from it, but still worth checking out some other options as well.

I agree that Carrara's renderer is faster than PP 2012's. I don't know whether it's faster than PP 2014 though. I don't have any comparison data.

Shade's renderer is awesome, better than Octane, if you ask me. It's also very fast. The great thing about Shade is that you can get beautiful renders out of it very quickly, with mimnimal tweaking of sahders.

The only thing I can think of to speed-up your render time is to not use skylight, but simulate it with several distant lights. Depending on how you place your distant lights, you could get anything from a dull to a very good render, so you will have to experiment.

Also don't use full indirect light, but AO only, as you seem to be doing anyway.

You could push the other options (like uncheck the interpolation, increase the photon count and the photon map accuracy). These will improve the render quality, without the speed penalty of a skylight.

 

Bucknyne - Turning off "Full raytracing" may help, but there may also be a hit you won't want in render quality. Sometmes turning on indirect lighting and setting it to ambient occlusion will improve speed because it uses more sampled lighting rather than true raytracing (but your scene will be a bit darker with ambient occlusion enabled).

In general, full ratracing takes a lot of CPU cycles regardless of the renderer used (That is why LuxRender is sooo slow). Any setting that can fake raytracing in an acceptable manner for your desired result will typically speed up your render times. Personally though, I'm pretty happy with the genral performance of Carrara's renderer, and usually just crank up the settings and let it go (I  pimarily do stills). Carrara is a lot faster for equivalant results when compared to DS and Poser 2014.

Luxus/Luxrender won't be faster, but the results are great. I've used LuxRender quite a bit, and the CPU only renders are ..... well .... slooooow compared to Carrara (I have an image in my gallery here, Castle Mage, that took 70 hrs. in Lux). But Lux can produce some stunning images!! The GPU assisted renderer in Lux is a bit faster, but still slow compared to Carrara, and it's still a bit unstable (and uses a lot of RAM). The GPU only renderer in Lux (SLG) is FAST, but quite limited with materials, and a also a bit unstable - but it is really fast when you get it to work well with your scene.

I haven't tried Shade in years - but when I did the interface was really difficult for me to grasp - but you might love it. The renderer in shade is very good, and was about the same speed as Carrara when I tried it, but that has probably changed. I doubt however that rendering speed in Shade even comes close to Octane (more on Octane next), as shade has a CPU only renderer.

Another option, though not available for Carrara now, but will be in the near future, is Octane Render (plugins are available for Poser and DS now). It's a GPU only renderer (Nvidia cards only) that is Really Really Really FAST. They just announced the development of a plugin for Carrara. I've been putting the Demo for Poser through it's paces for several days now and WOW - beautiful renders in minutes that would typically take hours in Carrara (or even longer in Poser of DS). The down side is you are somewhat limited by the GPU RAM and texture maps limitations, everything (geometry and textures) needs be able to fit into VRAM. Just for comparison, the image in my gallery that took 70 hours in Lux, took about four minutes in Octane - with equivalant results!

One other option for GPU rendering is Cycles in Blender. Of course this would mean exporting  your scene to OBJ, then importing it into Blender and setting up all your mats/shaders in Blender. Might not be woth the effort, but the advantage to Cycles (and the GPU rendering in Lux) is that it is OpenCL - and can use ATI or Nvidia Cards.

Hope this helps.

I don't have an Nvidia card, but I've already made a note to myself that when I get my next system, it needs to have Nvidia graphics, for a number of reasons. The fact that Octane is Nvidia-friendly just puts it over the top. I'll definitely be looking into that, thanks!

(also, your gallery rocks! The "Castle Mage" image... I'm guessing you used raytraced DoF? That's a real killer when it comes to render times! It gets good results though. Usually I'm too lazy for that and I just cheat and do DoF in post)

Quote - ...The only thing I can think of to speed-up your render time is to not use skylight, but simulate it with several distant lights. Depending on how you place your distant lights, you could get anything from a dull to a very good render, so you will have to experiment...

Yeah, that's pretty much what I've been doing, for the most part. I don't do much still work; most of my work has been webcomics and animation, so I try to get the best quality in as little time as possible. Using globals with shadow buffers and the right settings gets results that wouldn't be mistaken for Sky Lighting, but at least provides realistic ambient effects with some "pseudo" occlusion. Not a bad option.

> *Quote -**Bucknyne wrote:* > > *I don't have an Nvidia card, but I've already made a note to myself that when I get my next system, it needs to have Nvidia graphics, for a number of reasons. The fact that Octane is Nvidia-friendly just puts it over the top. I'll definitely be looking into that, thanks!* > > *(also, your gallery rocks! The "Castle Mage" image... I'm guessing you used raytraced DoF? That's a real killer when it comes to render times! It gets good results though. Usually I'm too lazy for that and I just cheat and do DoF in post)*

Thanks!! Yep, it's raytraced dof. I could have done a few things to the scene that would have reduced the render time (like removing the water that isn't visible, and extra geometry that isn't visible), but I wanted to see how well Lux could handle it all, and the water was actually providing some nice indirect lighting.

I've been pretty restricted to Nvidia cards for a few years because I use another app (not 3D) that uses Cuda. Both ATI and Nvidia have their pluses and minuses, but I've have good luck with mine over the past few years.

Attached is a quick sample of an Octane render using the Poser plugin demo. I grabed the image at about 3 min. Sorry for the water marks and small size - limitations of the demo. The same hair is pretty slow to render in Carrara, Poser, and DS, and it was at the same quality you see here in about 2 min. - it still needs to run for a couple more minutes to get the little white specs around the eyes to clear up - but it should give you an idea what Octane can do. This was a straight out of the box render - no materials editing. Oh - and this was done on a laptop.

Wow. Looks fantastic! And I recognize that hair (Wildcat Hair, I think); it's given me fits in the past rendering it in Carrara. 3 minutes for results like that is unreal!

Yep - It's Wildcat Hair, and the lighting in the scene is just an HDR image. The speed, quality, and ease of use of Octane and the plugin has really blown my mind! I should be in bed now, but I'm having too much fun tinkering with the Poser plugin.

Editing shaders is a blast. you can pick the shader by clicking on it in the rendering image in the Qctane viewport, edit a setting, and see the results of your changes in a few seconds. Needless to say that I'll be getting the Carrara plugin when it comes out. I'm going to get the DS plugin soon too, while it's in beta and half price so I can learn to use Octane before the Carrara beta comes out.

Really amazing technology if you can work within the constraints of your graphics card!