I love Carrara, and anything that is for Carrara I am for... I have heard of things like this before, but for the most part they were for programs I didnt have or use or plan to acquire, so I pretty much turned away from all the talk. So I am truly ignorant when it comes to stuff like "this", and if you t a l k  s l o w, one day, maybe not in the near future, but one day nonetheless, its possible that my brain has a chance that it might consider the information and absorb it. And definitely not to come off as lame, but i don't "see" it.... Don't get me wrong, those renders are awesome, but I want to understand that "this" is something beyond and other than lighting and texturing... So now that there is something like this for Carrara, could you please explain it to me. Start from the beginning, and when you get to the end, stop...

Hmmm .... Now this is a tall order, I don't know that I would be the most qualified to answer some of your questions, but I'll give it a go (feel free to drop into the Octane thread in the Carrara forum over at DAZ, there are a few more Octane users that frequent there than here). Actually, Octane, just like any renderer, is all about lighting and texturing (or how light and shaders/geometry interact). But, unlike Carrara's internal renderer which is a biased render engine, Octane is an unbiased renderer (except for the Direct Lighting Kernal that uses a bit of ambient occlusion). So Carrara uses various statistical methods to sample lighting and improve render speed (hence the term biased - for the statistical bias introduced/used), where unbiased render engines like Octane use very little statistical sampling to achieve the final result. Typically, in general, the more bias that is introduced in the rendering process, the faster the resulting image will be rendered, but also the more blurred the final image will be and the less accurate the lighting result will be. Typically biased render engines (like Carrara) also give the users more options to control the rendering process and quality than unbiased renderers. Carrara can be pushed to get results that are very very close to unbiased render engines, but the renders will take a long time. For more info on biased/unbiased here are a couple of decent links:

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

http://3d.about.com/od/A-Guide-To-3D-Software/tp/Rendering-Terminology-Explained.htm

OK, so Octane is unbiased - what's the big deal? Well, unbiased render engines are notorious for being very slow, because they require a lot of additional computations compared to biased renderers. That's where the use of the GPU for rendering becomes extremely important. Modern GPU's (Video Cards) have enormous computing power often called stream processors or cores. These little processors are designed to do the mathematical computations extremely fast and efficiently to calculate the display of high resolution 3D images at acceptable frame rates to allow gamers to play their favorite games. In essence, the intense competition in the Gaming Industry has created what is basically the equivalence of a small render farm on the GPU. For example, the video card I'm using with Octane (a laptop) has 336 Cuda Cores, or 336 processors that can be used for rendering. So I am able to get faster render times on my laptop using an unbiased render engine (Octane) compared to a render of nearly equivalent quality done in Carrara.

But, the advantages for me don't stop with render speed/quality. The interactive nature of using the Octane plugin represents a huge boost in overall productivity for me. I get near real time feedback when I adjust lighting or shaders. For me this is a huge plus and makes the whole process of tweaking shaders and lighting to get exactly what I want (or as close as my skills will allow) very interactive, enjoyable, and fast compared to how I do it with just Carrara (tweak, test render, repeat until things are "good enough"). When editing materials on a given object, I have the Octane Render Viewport open (rendering - showing each change I make automatically) while I edit the shaders in the Material Room, and I can stay there (in the material room) until I get them the way I want them! No more going from material room, to render room to test render, back to material room, adjust, go to render room and test render, etc.

Of course the down side (there always has to be a down side) is that you need an Nvidia video card to use Octane, and right now scene complexity is limited by the.amount of VRAM on your card (and of course speed is limited by the number of Cuda cores on your card). There are a few other things too, such as Carrara hair is not supported (it is not exposed in the SDK), and a few other Carrara features either don't work with Octane, or aren't as good/efficient. But overall I am very happy with the plugin. It doesn't replace Carrara's internal renderer for everything, but I seldom use the internal renderer now.

Well, I probably didn't start at the beginning, and I doubt that I made it to the end, but I'll stop anyway, and wait for additional questions. Posting your questions at DAZ may get better results, since more users of the plugin frequent there (and there are a LOT more examples posted there - by other people).

Here is the link to the Octane Render thread at DAZ - http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewthread/45564/

Here is a link to my most recent render (would post it here, but the image sizes for the forum here are smaller, and the detail/clarity of the textures on the full sized render is quite impressive): http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewthread/43528/P286/

Hope at least something I wrote helps and made sense.

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