Hi all,

I have a quesion about watercolor effect:

I know there is NPR (Non-Photorealistc Rendering), which can create some pretty impressive sketch and watercolor effects. It does take quite a lot of experimenting to get right and quite a lot of patience to render. Since NPR has not been updated for multi-core rendering, it does take painfully long to render and even before that - to compute the strokes. Added to the trial-and-error tedium of setting it up, it does become a bit of a pain and time-sink.

(Unless I am doing it wrong and there should be much less of a trial-and-error process for the setup! If so, please tell me, because I'd love to get better at it!)

So, I am here looking for alternatives. My thinking is that there might be a combination of lighting rig + shaders, which might yeld and interesting watercolor result. At this stage it'a hunch as I don't quite know how to go about setting it up.

Hence, the questions:

a) Have you ever stumbled upon a lighting rig/accident, which made the render look "painted" or strangely blotchy as opposed to realistic?

b) Poser shader trees have some elements called "color clipping" and other procedural setting, which appear to allow for watercolor-like and other media-immulating shaders (there is a pack of them sold at RDNA, although I don't have a Poser version in which I could actually test them to see how they work). Is there anything that could wotk similarly in Carrara.

c) Carrara has alternative Lighting Models, and even more Lighting Models come with Shaders Plus from DCG. Could any of these models be used to help creat a more painted/traditional media effects?

d) Any other suggestions would also be very welcome!

 

Now for the other odd questions:

1. If I want to set up a scene in Carrara, and then create some form of render (HDRI?) to be able to use that render as a backgtound/spherical-map-environemt for other scenes (to save render time), how you I need to set up my camera and lights/render settings?

2. If I have a vector, I'd like to be able to import as a path into the vertex modeler, how would I go about it and is it at all possible? Are there special formats/vector properties that need to be observed for a vector to be usable in this way? And where in Carrara would I fing the import/loading options for it?

Thank you! And sorry for the questions being all over the place.