It's finally here!! Octane Render for Carrara (OR4C) by Simon Guard (AKA: Sighman) is now in PUBLIC beta. If you purchase the plugin during the Public Beta phase, you pay half price of the full version, and get a free upgrade to the full version when it is released. You can see the introductory video here: [Octane Render for Carrara](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dq77R_s6xUs&feature=youtu.be)

This public Beta release definitely does not feel like beta software. It's extremely stable and with excellent integration into Carrara. It was great to be a part of the beta team with the group of talented and professional artists that Otoy put together. Sighman (the developer) was extremely fast to respond to any issues we found, and a pleasure to work with.

This latest version is very stable and quite feature rich. Testing it has been amazing. It was an extreme honor to work with some of the great names that many of you know such as Tugpsx, 3Dage, PhilW, and Orion_UK (and of course Sighman).

Attached is an image I did literally just messing around while watching the TV. Thought I'd hit you with something plain, before throwing my usual stuff at you.

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Any discount on Octane itself, with this?  :)

Unfortunately I don't think so. It's a fairly significant investment, mainly due to the cost of purchasing Octane standalone. If it's any consolation, I haven't had a bit of buyer's remorse. This brings up another feature, you can export your entire Carrara scene for rendering directly in Octane standalone (with all lighting, shaders, etc. intact). This can be really handy if you want to use the standalone to render for some reason.

The interactive nature of Octane and the plugin while editing shaders and lighting has dramatically improved/transformed my workflow. The stability of OR4C is exremely good, soooo much better than the DS plugin it's amazing.

Here is a test render of V6 using some SSS shaders I developed on the V5 Bree texture set (I think these got included as a part of the OR4C installation). You really need to zoom in on this one to see the great details.

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Here’s another one of a Stone Mason scene with a Carrara ocean primitive and the Octane sky/sun.

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The updated introductory video can be seen here.

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Here is a simple OC4C render using V6

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Another image done with the Octane plugin. This is probably my favorite render so far. No post work other than adding the sig. You can see the full image in my gallery **[ here](http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2558952)** (**warning** - the full image contains nudity).

I don't remember exactly how long it took to render (the original was about 3000 pixels wide), but as I recall it was about 40 min. It took a bit longer due to the low lighting conditions and having 5 light sources. The  main light is Octane sun shining through two windows. I used the light sconces in the room model for additional very very low insensity mesh lights to increase the interior lighting and help the background areas resolve better/faster.

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Looks good, DustRider, I like the way you got the end of the ponytail to look like it has real strands as well, I had to look more than once.

Nice light

For anyone interested - The Demo version of Octane Render for Carrara is now available!!
You can find it here: https://render.otoy.com/downloads.php

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Here are a few more renders done with the Octane Render plugin for Carrara.

Vicky in a Studio with a ... Donut??

[
"I Want Those Keys!"

](http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2567614)
Afternoon Sunlight

Bridged

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Vicky in has studio…
If you would have shown her like that in the preceding challenge, I would have voted for you !

Quote - Vicky in has studio…
If you would have shown her like that in the preceding challenge, I would have voted for you !

 lol ... Darn, missed another vote!! Ah ... the fun of not having the ability to flag your posts at DAZ. On the upside, I get to post an audiences version at DAZ, and the clothing optional version here.

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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...

There are 3 kinds of people in the world. Those that can count, and those that can't..

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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Thank you for your explanations, Dust Rider.
I didn't look at this thread any more on DAZ forum because I didn't understand well the Octane render's advantages compared to that of Carrara.
Now that I understood well thanks to you, I realize that it's especially interesting for still images because in animation, one uses sometimes hair, also for grass etc...and if we wants to keep a homogeneity in the sequences, it isn't possible in this case.
I have two questions all the same:
1-What about particles, clouds etc.?
2- Does we have obligatorily to use the plugin for Carrara or can we do the work directly in the standalone version ?
I post this here, because they are to much specialists in the DAZ forum and I'm afraid that my questions are too basic...
Thank you again.

PS: your render with the Stonemason towers is very impressive !

Thank you for your explanations, Dust Rider.
I didn't look at this thread any more on DAZ forum because I didn't understand well the Octane render's advantages compared to that of Carrara.
Now that I understood well thanks to you, I realize that it's especially interesting for still images because in animation, one uses sometimes hair, also for grass etc...and if we wants to keep a homogeneity in the sequences, it isn't possible in this case.
I have two questions all the same:
1-What about particles, clouds etc.?
2- Does we have obligatorily to use the plugin for Carrara or can we do the work directly in the standalone version ?
I post this here, because they are to much specialists in the DAZ forum and I'm afraid that my questions are too basic...
Thank you again.

PS: your render with the Stonemason towers is very impressive !

Here is a quote from Sighman (the plugin developer) about particles "The plugin only supports emitting Objects. All others types, including Metaballs, are not supported." But, metaballs that are not part of a particle system are supported/rendered by Octane. Carrara clouds are not supported at this point, but Octane does have a volumetric system capable of making "clouds" (in enclosed geometry/volumes). Here is an image with clouds done by one of the people at Otoy (but I don't know how he did it) http://render.otoy.com/newsblog/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/CloudForest121.jpg The attached image is one I did just as a quick test with a Carrara cloud model available at sharecg (http://www.sharecg.com/v/41244/browse/5/3D-Model/Cumulonimbus-cloud). Here is another render I did learning how to set up volumetrics in Octane for lighting effects (Specular material type with SSS): http://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/42774

Octane has a great procedural texture system, though I think it may be missing a few things that are available in Carrara (I haven't really done any sort of true comparison). Conversion of Carrara procedural shaders is not supported at this point.

Carrara animations work well via the plugin  (other than Dynamic hair of course, but Octane does have a hair system), and Octane now has motion blur for animation as well. This demo reel has quite a few examples of animations done by Orion_uk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GeGGs_QU-I

You can fine the release demo reel that covers a lot of the features here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GeGGs_QU-I

Unfortunately neither of these demo reels really show the highly interactive nature of the plugin (i.e. near real time feed back when editing materials, lights, object placement, etc.) which for me is a huge plus!!

You have the option of doing all of your work in Carrara and the plugin, or you can use the plugin to export your project to the Octane standalone native formats (.ocs or .orbx) with all of your materials, etc. intact. You can also export from Carrara to .obj and import that into Octane standalone, but it is A LOT more work than exporting from the plugin to native Octane formats.

Your questions definitely aren't too basic, and are about things that I'm sure a lot of people have questions about. Hope all this helps - and makes sense. It's really hard to proof read the new posts with the changes to the forum. Feel free to ask any other questions you might have.

Oh ... thanks for the compliment on the Stonemason image. I did it when we started working/testing with the Octane 2.0 version of the plugin. With 2.0 the limitations on the number of textures slots available went away, so I went crazy for a few days just testing things that pushed (or went beyond) the texture limits with Octane 1.5. All of the materials were edited to make them look better, and I used a Carrara Ocean primitive for the water. As I recall, the render took between 10-15 min. (after all the shader work which was probably about a half hour). About a week later I picked up Fenric's Shader Doctor plugin for Carrara - a must have when using Stonemason scenes!! 

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Thanks for these links and details.

Is it a demo version somewhere ?

Hi dustrider,

Wow! Your octane renders are incredible! The image of the workshop, the "plain" one (lol) absolutely takes my breath away. All the rest are rather stunning as well.

Suki

Thanks for these links and details.

Is it a demo version somewhere ?

You can find the demo version here: https://render.otoy.com/downloads.phpI think you will need to download and install both Octane Standalone and the Carrara plugin. As I recall, you need to install and authorize the standalone first, then the plugin. For the Carrara plugin, just click on "Carrara" at the bottom of the plugins listed on the left hand side of the page and it will show the download button/link. 

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Hi dustrider,

Wow! Your octane renders are incredible! The image of the workshop, the "plain" one (lol) absolutely takes my breath away. All the rest are rather stunning as well.

Suki

Thanks Suki!!! Using Octane actually makes it fun to just go through your runtime and see how different things render. Some, like the Bot Shop, render extremely well straight out of the box (with a little lighting adjustment of course). For that image I also uses a bit of volumetrics to simulate so dust in the air.

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Another fooling around with Octane render. Not a refined render at all, just a very quick test to see if I could use 3 Genesis/Genesis 2 figures in Octane with 3Gb of VRAM. Figure on the left is V6, Middle Figure is a custom Genesis figure based on V5/G4 and a bunch of other morphs, and on the right is  a custom figure based on V6 with a little G6 and a lot of additional morphs.

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I was messing around with volumetrics and came up with this one. The "light cone" effect is created by light from the Octane Sun shining through the doorway (no spotlights).

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So how do you get the eyes not to show as black? I have tried them as normal Carrara shaders, Octane water shaders, Octane glass shaders, and fully transparent, and yet the whole eye is always black, getting so pissed with it atm, I may dump the image I am doing, to just go back to doing scenes as characters are a complete pain in the arse.

Then again it could be the Carrara elite shaders messing me about

Attached are images that show the settings for both the EyeSurface and the Cornea, as well as the resulting render. Don't look at anything but the eyes - the rest needs a lot of work (note: the eyes don't have burned in reflections). For the EyeSurface I used the Lead Crystal Glass shader from the LiveDB, then made a slight adjustment to opacity. For the the cornea I just made sure opacity was gayscale color set to 0.000. The image was rendered using Path Tracing.

One important note is when using spectral materials (like the Lead Crystal Glass) you should use Path Tracing or PMC for best results. In this instance, the default Direct Lighting will result in the eyes being noticeably darker.

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In case anyone is interested, Octane version 2.21.1 introduced the support of "Out of Core" textures - which means users are no longer constrained to the amount a RAM on their video cards for large scenes/texture sets!!

From the Otoy web site:

"Out-of-core textures allow you to use more textures than would fit in the graphic memory, by keeping them in the host memory. Of course, the data needs to be sent to the GPU while rendering therefore slowing the rendering down. If you don't use out-of-core textures rendering, speed is not affected.

Out-of-core textures come also with another restriction: They must be stored in non-swappable memory which is of course limited. So when you use up all your host memory for out-of-core textures, bad things will happen, since the system can't make room for other processes. Since out-of-core memory is shared between GPUs, you can't turn on/off devices while using out-of-core textures.

You can enabled and configure the out-of-core memory system via the application preferences. For net render slaves you can specify the out-of-core memory options during the installation of the daemon."This feature is now available via the Octane plugin for Carrara. Just doing some quick tests, I've had over 5Gb of textures in system RAM, and have been able to load and render a scene with five clothed V4's and three clothed M4's, Faveral's Medieval Docks, and several props (it only took about 2Gb of system RAM and 2.7 Gb of video RAM). I do get a bit of a performance hit, though a lot of that I think is due to the extra geometry in the scene (adding geometry always slows rendering a bit). I tested just restricting the GPU VRAM to force textures into System RAM and saw no noticeable slow down, but when adding additional figures to the scene to increase the RAM usage, I got a max of about 12% drop in performance. IMHO, given the render speed of Octane, a 12% drop in performance isn't bad at all (36 seconds more for a 5 min. render, or 7 minutes longer for a 1 hour render)

This should allow very large/complex scenes to be rendered on 2-3Gb cards (or even 1Gb cards). Here is a link to a scene done with the Poser plugin on a 3Gb card that has 18 figures in it - quite impressive (further down the page the author notes that he is up to 30 figures in the scene)!! http://maskdemon.deviantart.com/art/render-Out-of-Core-Textures-system-ram-not-vram-512307016

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