Carrara Non Photo Realistic Works
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Looking good UB, like your moon as well !!!!
Holy Cow. Bunch of cool stuff here....
I'll be exploring that in detail.
Watching this right now. I didn't think I had time, but I was able to. 24 minutes in so far. Great webinar and I'm very glad I was able to make time - without skipping any of it.
Thanks for this HW!
Taking a quick break to say:
You know, if we really wanted to do Artistic Animation - and use more of a hand-done job for each cell (frame) of the video, Howler would be great for this. It's got tools for cell animation, like onion-skinning, which is the ability to set the canvas to show the previous or following frame, and how many of them so that we can work like conventional cartoon artists work. It has a lot of real "Hands On" art features, I'm sure HW can testify. Sorry to always sound like a Dogwaffle commercial. LOL
Another quick break. Yikes, 50 minutes in... great stuff.
You know, I really wanted to try this sort of Cell Shading style but never really figured out a method that works for me. Someone just asked him if he ever uses the Sketch Designer. He said No. So it's just the simple draft and comic style render he's using.
Seeing UB's TheGirl render using Toon! 3 in Carrara is exciting. Can't wait to look at the rest of the posts I've been purposely putting off until after the webinar, and then after I get home from drumming. But it looks really nice.
When I attended the Poser 2017 Pro webinar, it was the various NPR styles that really caught my eye the most. It looked like a real means to be able to produce something like a comic book in motion style for animations. Of course, there's always "Actions" in PS, like what NASSOS and this Talos are doing, but Talos is really emphasizing how much he loves Poser for it's ability to provide this look. I think he's familiar with Daz Studio, as he's using Genesis figures exported and then brought into Poser to render.
A lot of what he loves about Poser is what I love about Carrara, which is very cool. I guess I've not really spent enough time trying to figure out how to set up a scene for NPR in Carrara to figure out how best to use it. I was looking for some tutorials on it - like the whole process - and failed to find anything. Time is not something I have in abundance, so the whole NPR thing has been an idea to sit down and learn... get nowhere near results I expect after already spending a bit of time... and then running out of time to dig deeper.
Maybe one day. I have found a fairly comfortable spot with my work, so maybe I never will go fully NPR? Hard to say.
You are probably correct. But that is also easy for you to say, as you understand exactly what it takes to get your hands dirty. You take it for granted. I remain utterly clueless how to generate even a simple oil painted-looking texture onto a figure without using a filter. If I knew how, I would be painting like crazy. Apparently, I can't even phrase my issue in a way that leads to help from others. I feel like I need a specific tutorial to get me into the ballpark of how to apply these strokes onto figures, and haven't seen a single one yet. Fortunately, there is plenty to learn in other areas, so I am not going crazy - yet.
No idea what you are talking about, but it sounds interesting.
Also, you mentioned that you liked my drill tank render more than Will's. Actually, I liked his better. He put a lot more thought into his composition, and I just kind of threw mine together. And while his textures were somewhat washed out, I think they fit the overall softness of the render. For me, the larger point was seeing so many people over in Art Studio struggling to get a decent outline for NPR work. It is easy in Carrara. While Carrara might not be a total solution, it certainly is a viable one.
Thanks a bunch, Bunyip! I was going to put in a real moon, but I wanted more of a toon look. I've always liked the classic crescent moon face. That moon, btw, is a native Carrara object.
Very impressive, everyone. I agree with UB that the native Toon III has its uses. I've generally been frustrated that I couldn't use carrara hair with it. But, with Philemo's hair to obj plugin, I plan to be doing more with it.
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Very quick throw together
Here is a quick scene with my custom Brash character with a very simple tunic draped using VWD and a toon spaceship. Brash's hair was converted to obj using Philemo's plugin. I am posting a version with the toon outline set to 1 and one with the toon outline set to 2.
Outline width set to 1, note line too thin and so nose not outlined
Here the line width is set to 2. Note that the nose outline appears.
For what it's worth, my Iray renders referenced take 1-6 minutes with Iray CPU (IE: Not using graphics card) per render. If I had to guess, probably around 8 minutes total.
(My initial process was slower because you'd need multiple saves to load and render, but now it's all one save file)
Iray can be incredibly fast if you know what you are doing, even with minimal hardware. I hope when I get this thing out the door I'll inspire a lot of users who feel intimidated by the jet plane and all those freakin dials set to HARDCORE.
Great visual impact in this illustration! Wish to achieve something like this with Carrara.
I assume you mean "Sharp edges" set to 1 or 2. There are other setting as well that help the outline to be crisper.
The Carrara hair limitation is not good, but there is so much commercial hair available that I am not feeling much constraint. I haven't tried Philemo's hair plugin yet.
I spent a bunch of time (probably too much) figuring out workarounds in the NPR render engine. Toon! 3, by comparison, has been a piece of cake. I wish that I had explored it earlier. Diomede, you have done some wonderful toon renders in Challenges. Only now do I get an idea of how you did them.
Correct - I adjusted both the object edge and sharp edge settings to 1 or 2 in the Toon III filter settings.
Yes, I spent a lot of time trying to combine (a) dynamic hair from photoreal, (b) clean edges of Toon III, and (c) brush stroke diffuse of NPR. I now realize that what I was trying to get was more easily done with a photoreal render put through art filters from Filter Forge and similar programs. Now with the GMIC filters incororated in the native renderer, I think some fun looks may even be able to be animated conveniently.
I'm also excited by Will's (Oso3d) experiments with Studio Iray in the NPR thread in the Art Studio forum. Unlike Will, when I try to do a Studio Iray render, it takes all afternoon. Obviously, I would need to invest more time in the basic operation of Studio before I'd get anywhere with his approach.
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Object edge can be set higher, to good effect. It is not as critical to the line as sharp edge.
I hear you. I think that we are not even touching the potential of G'MIC yet.
I started playing a little with daz studio during the holiday and I must say I love the iray - mostly because it can be pushed to have the same look that carrara render has. (as opposite to what the normal 3delight or poser render does - which I always had hard time to master). It mostly relates to light and the way I normally light scene.
And yes Iray is far more finicky, for example you adjust tonemapping exposure just a tiny bit like 12.5 from 13 and you will get vastly different results, and also the spot lights or lights in general (outside HDRI) in iray behave very physical, which isn't always good. In carara light response is well balanced, big or small scenes can be lighted similarly, but in iray you put spotlight in a larger enclosed space and nothing..crank it up, still nothing, all the light rays are somehow eaten by the space - you have to crank up the lumens to really, really extreme values and it is very hard to finetune image this way. I have to dig more deep in how this supose to work because it seems insane, I am literaly pushing lights in hundreds of thousand lumens to get it going. Maybe I missed something.
Also on one of my computers I have GTX1050 with 3GB or something on that account and for simple scene the iray just flies! (for big scene it reverts to cpu if it doesn't fit to GTX memory). But you can also get keyshot-like realtime rendering right in interface with the GPU, which is hugely impressive. It needs greasy hardware though. The big thing is, it is all free.
I do love what daz did with the studio - after working with it for a week or two, it is actually more enjoyable to pose and build scene than both poser and carrara, but on that same account I am also sad, because all those little things could be easily added in carrara - but never will now. Still, daz studio can't best (yet) carrara foliage, treees and environment rendering. Oh speaking of poser, smithmicro is selling this week DAP for 50% off in their newsletter offer - it is nowhere on their site but maybe someone can dig up the newsletter link.
You can count me in the list of people hoping for Carrara improvements.
I started with Ray Dream Studio back in the 1990s and will always have a warm spot in my heart for its descendants.
I actually have used Carrara for modeling my Wyrms. While I moved on to other modelers better in many ways, there are still elements of how Carrara models that I prefer sometimes.
Woohoo - found myself an original Drill Tank !!!!
Thanks for commenting. I hope you didn't mind me posting your render. As I mentioned, I like it a lot.
Regarding IRAY, my preferences are apparently very different from yours (and Diomede and FP-b6). My observation is that artists attracted to IRAY tend to be more left-brain dominant. When I'm doing art, I'm basically living in the right hemisphere. :) For me, IRAY is a disaster. That said, I wish you luck in solving its render speed problems!
Now this is fun!
great Render, Bunyip.
+1
@Bunyip02 is on fire .... love the imagination lol
Broken Drill Tank!
nice improvisation - I am getting drill tank envy!
pleasure - yes I've watched it till the last twenty minutes so far - very informative - especially seeing what he achieves
dart saideth
agreed!
I'll have to watch that one again - if there was only same easy quick way to export a whole carrara scene to poser and back again - never has worked for me .... you'd also want the cameras to match....
Dart you already have the skills for NPR - ity's just a matter of sitting down and asking wat is the difference between photo real and NPR - and working up those differences
UB said
Let's see ..... if you were going to do an overpaint the best place to start is with something simple - like a pear. :)
In real life when you paint you start off with a big brush to lay in the image.
Then you gradually reduce the brush size as you hone in on the details.
Thos details are usually the focal point.
You never make the whole painting equally detailed or in focus or highly saturated or highly contrast (well you can if you want :) )
Do you have eg artrage?? Corel Painter? I havent used it much but Artrage seems good. Dart can tell us about Howler.
For an overpaint you can use a few methods.
method 2 is similar but you just paint into a copy of your render then erase when you screw up :)
it's my preffered method
hope this is of interest
PS i subscribe to this guy's paintings he sends an email one a day (?) - they demonstrate the beauty of suggesting rather then fully devloping something . Out of interest the psych evidence suiggest that to engage human emotions we should always suggest rather than perfectly outline something (eg the way a character ina book looks, and especially the evil creature lurking upstairs that you can only see in your imagination)
https://shiftinglight.com/archive.html
nice work, thanks for showing the differences
Hi Wil, thanks for that. I take it you are working on a studio plugin? Sounds exciting! Glad your renders are so quick !
FP_b647bf2dae said
thanks for the heads up on that FP_b647bf2dae
ha ha I need a jackhammer for mine
oh Stezza. you gotta get a job as the SMH political cartoonist - unless the Chinese get you first :)
Thanks Dart! My main goal in learning Carrara was to learn animation - and I haven't even started yet! Keep getting sidetracked with other stuff, but all of it is important and part of the overall knowledge needed to do the work. I have two projects in mind if I ever get some animation skill, and both involve NPR to some degree.
I suppose that everyone has seen the Petrov movie, right? I'm not looking to match his hand-drawn effort, but it is a great inspiration.
Hey, thank you Vyusur! It was done in Carrara with no postwork, using the Toon! 3 filter (not the NPR render engine) and a touch of the Lylejk G'MIC filter. There is literally nothing difficult about it. And that is what excited me, after spending weeks in the past battling that wee beastie called the NPR render engine. I'm thinking that a workflow is both possible and practical with this one.
UB wrote
that's wonderful, no I hadnt seen it. He had me when the dear were jumping and their ears flopped with inertia - love it so far