I was gonna suggest changing your camera view to 16x9 because it looks like 4x3, but lux beat me to it i guess. If you change it to 16x9 ratio, then it should match the viewport better because the viewport is also 16x9 aspect ratio. Definitely use the camera view when you are preparing for a render because that's the only way to get a accurate view of the scene. Perspective is just a faster way to arrange the objects and stuff without changing the camera. Think of perspective view as looking through a director's own eyes, but then the director must always set up the scene seperately through the camera itself for shooting.

I just don't think geometry is a big problem when rendering in Blender. There are very few mesh errors that will affect the render in modern versions of Blender. More important are knowing the shader and lighting systems of the software. That's where 99% of render problems begin and end. Not with the models. Yeah, if the models are extremely outdated like Lux mentioned in archive 3d, then I can see where you might have some problems. But most of those problems will also come from the way the thing is textured and uv mapped.

Blender isn't the only software that handles ngons flawlessly now. I think just about all software do it. 3dmax, Maya, C4d all seem to handle them great. The only time ngons are a issue these days is when you subdivide for sculpting or whatever. Zbrush doesn't like them, but that's for good reason. Otherwise, there isn't a software today that doesn't handle ngons with great results. There's no reason to avoid them anymore, unless you intend to subdivide the models for sculpting or whatever reason.

wendyvainity posted at 4:37PM Sun, 13 June 2021 - #4421210

it's only 100 samples on that frame as I am rendering an animation so yes noisy, and I did enable the denoiser, unlike DAZ iray Octane will not use the CPU to load the geometry at all and it is pretty much maxing my 980Ti with that scene, this is OR4Carrara plugin not the DAZ one. The Carrara render doesn't have those noise issues as well as being faster so definitely my preferred choice for this scene.

Yes, it will definitely be faster for a number of reasons. The first is that your GPU isn't able to handle all the scene and is probably offloading a lot of it to your CPU, which will be slower than if your CPU is taking all the load to begin with. I don't know which version of Octane, but like I mentioned, newer versions will not work as well with older GPU cards because the architecture of the card is different. Lastly, we can see that the Carrara version is not nearly as complex or accurate in the shadows or realism. Octane will always try to make the most realistic lighting for the scene possible. When you have a completely enclosed scene, lit by only a bunch of emission lights, then It's going to try to bounce millions of light rays around the scene to create more ambient light. This will take TONS more processing power. Carrara is obviously not even attempting to do that. The carrara scene appears to be flat and lit much more like a first or second gen gaming engine, except for some raytracing. So I guess it depends on the look you are happy with, because they certainly look like two completely different scenes.

I feel like if you really cranked up the render settings and set up the Carrara scene to render with the same look and quality of the Octane scene, then render times would tend to even out. Then again, it would depend on your GPU for Octane. Your 980 ti would be good in earlier versions of Octane, but not so much the newer versions. You'd need a card that had much larger VRAM capacity in order to load all the textures and geometry into the GPU.

So yea, without a GPU upgrade, and without try to actually make the scenes look exactly the same in both engine, the Carrara version will always render faster.

The only thing I can see where you might need to learn other parts of the software in Blender to render things is the compositor and working with nodes. Especially now in later releases nodes are becoming a bigger part of the overall thing. If you render with Cycles, you'll need to learn some node setup in the compositor if you really wanna speed up the renders. Especially if you don't have a optix gpu. You'll have to use the Intel openAI denoiser in compositor as well as some effects that can be done there. Create lens flairs, lens effects and everything can be done with nodes there.

The model corrections can be done any modeling software, so people don't really need to know how to model in Blender to get those problems solved. The shader system is the only other sticking point for rendering in Blender. If I export something form Daz, even with the best plugin there might be shader stuff that need to be manually adjusted for the best renders. That is double true if you wanna render with eevee it seems. Most of the plugins can optimize the shaders or convert them from one shader tree to another, but eevee isn't always compatible and requires special shaders and settings to do certain effects like glass or whatever.

If you have an Optix enabled GPU, it will use the Optix denoising which should clear that noise up nicely.

Yeah, the Carrara will be faster on CPU because Octane requires GPU with Cuda. If it's a newer version of Octane, then it depends on the architecture of your GPU. I think it will only use the CPU when your GPU runs out of VRAM. If you have an older GPU, then newer versions of Octane will not perform as good. However, the results look much better in Octane than the Carrara version.

I can not get my eevee renders to look this good. I wish you share the secret here. Whihc leads me to the question, does the graphics card matter when it comes to eevee? I heard it is using only cpu for the rendering.

Happy belated New Year everyone!

Vray was originally developed as a plugin for 3dsmax, then eventually it found its way to other software and as a standalone engine but it was never really shipped with 3dsmax as a built in render engine that I know of. As far as I know, 3dsmax users always had to purchase the plugin as a plugin render engine.

You are right about Mental Ray, and also later iray were for sure shipped with 3dsmax as optional render engines built into the software at no extra charge. I don't think that is the case anymore, because now 3dsmax (and Maya too) ships with Arnold render engine built in. I think 3dsmax users have to pay extra for iray and mental ray now, just like vray.

When I last tried the 3dsmax trial, it had at least 3 different render engines built into it that you could choose from. I liked that about it. Even blender has two choices now, Eevee or Cycles built in. Eevee is a viewport render engine, but it can also be used as a very good final render option, and Cycles is the path tracing option like iray.

I definitely wouldn't want to use any models that was made with booleans unless the mesh was cleaned up after. Ngons and stuff make it real hard to do any editing on the object unless it remains procedural. Sooner or later everything we do in Blender will be procedural anyway. Its going to be 100% node based after version 3, even the modelling. I'm not sure I like that idea, but that's where it's heading. I heard some people saying Blender will soon be like Houdini... all nodes for everything. Extrusions, bevels, insets, everything will be done through nodes just like the materials are. Only sculpting and some character animation will remain hands-on, but most animation will be through nodes too. Not sure I like that idea.

MistyLaraCarrara posted at 9:22PM Wed, 23 December 2020 - #4408318

the only render engine results that blows me away is vray. demo reel is gorgeous.

the iray results i've seen are kinda mono looking. all look the same.

That has to do with the industry that each render engine is being used for. What i mean by that is Vray has been around for the last 20 years more or less. It's been adopted by huge vfx studios and really put to the test in movie and animation productions over and over again. So the people who were making sizzle reels and shorts with vray are mostly people in the vfx industry and working for visual effects companies.

Iray is fairly new to the industry and was adopted first by architectural, jewelry and product visualization companies. Mostly because of how accurate it can recreate real world lighting conditions and materials with almost no thought about the settings compared to vray. Vray started out as an architecture render engine for 3dsmax originally too, but other render engines have started to take over those industries now because of how easy they are to use. You will notice that the majority of professional renders in the Nvidia iray reels for iray are product shots, interiors and jewelry stuff while vray is now mostly vfx shots and artistic renders.

I tried once to get something on the blender market but they rejected it. I know it wasn't the greatest model but I saw things there that were similar to the quality so I thought i'd give it a shot. I might release them on blendswap or even maybe here instead. The guy on blender market who reviewed my model was pretty blunt in that he didn't like it. he said it was too simple and contained many issues with the modelling. I don't know what those might be because he never told me.

Thanks, lux. I'm curious how different this would have looked if you rendered with cycles. It looks really good, and if you didn't tell us it was eevee I would have thought maybe it was cycels.

MistyLaraCarrara posted at 12:48PM Wed, 23 December 2020 - #4408069

there is an Octane plug in for carrara, but is expensive.

Yeah, I was thinking more like a built in render option. I've seen it in other software like Maya and 3dsmax, where they will have a drop down list under "render" that allows you to choose a render engine that comes with the software. They usually have the default one, which in Carrara's case would be the current Ray Dream engine, but then they also offer iray, vray, or arnold. There's not need to purchase another standalone plugin. The option is built into the software. DS has that now too, where you can choose iray or the older engine. I think it was renderman or something like that. Plugins the way they are now in carrara are just bridges to other standalone engines. I'd have loved to see iray actually integrated into carrara.

Even the fastest CPU will never compare to a GPU. We're talking hours reduced to minutes for renders that are virtually equal quality. I don't think anyone who is rendering on a good GPU would ever go back to a CPU for any reason at this point. It's just not worth it, especially when the cost is nearly 3x what they paid for their PC with a high end GPU card.

The industry is going even deeper with GPU than ever before, so I think in the next 5 years, all rendering will be GPU based. Unless something crazy and unexpected comes up that changes the balance of speed, it's a no brainer. Even high end studios have started changing their render farms to GPU. Less time equals more profit.