Exporting Carrara scene to render in Poser?
Christen
Posts: 240
I have some of Howie's Carrara sets, but they take forever to render if they finish at all before crashing. Is it possible to export Carrara scenes to Poser?
Comments
not Howie's sets as they use a lot of replicators that are Carrara function where there are multiple rendered only instances of master objects, they cast shadow etc via rendering but do not actually physically as mesh exist in the scene.
I render stuff I do in Poser in Carrara as Poser is too slow (only have P7 Poserpro is prob quicker).
you can reduce the render time considerably by deleting the fake GI light dome and using a few well placed bulbs for shadow with some ambient light, also change object and shadow accuracy to 4 and use a large tile size.
Have you tried to use the settings mentioned in the readme?
You can drastically reduce rendering-time, although the sets take some hours to render.
Well, look at the result. It is worth waiting for it.
Does your machine really crash or are you simply too impatient (my problem when I first tried to use Country Lane).
Demanding on system recources, but with a good amount of RAM (and patience) an average PC can handle it.
well with a single bulb I can render the tea garden at 1frame per minute!
(I do animations)
not brilliant lighting wise but for viable animation not bad.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AO5uNKLSpVk
Oh yeah... animations with those sets are a real pain in... you know where.
In fact I don't know how large the tea garden is , but this render of Country Lane took about seven hours (I'm not really sure about it) to render.
Nothing for animations unless you have access to a renderfarm.
yeah, this took about 24hours
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCjS34ov1cI
3 lot of dynamic hair on the horse did not help
(pelt, mane & tail)
and ofcourse I had to do it 1920x1080pixels too!
But it looks so fine. :)
I see no settings in the readme. Just a file list and a link to "product support" which goes to artzone :/ I have successfully gotten a few to render with the batch queue. But, even doing it that way sometimes crashes it. I can be very impatient at times, especially when it slows down everything else, but it does actually crash a lot of the time. It makes no sense to me. I can run PP2012 and Vue without crashes.
Try turning off shadows for grass etc and then render a small amount and see if it makes any difference.
(edit: for my stupidity ;).)
@Faerydae
You should have received the Country Lane readme as a PM.
Maybe Howies suggestions on reducing renderingtime will be usefull on your set, too.
Do you try to render as a movie or as single frames?
I am using this method for animations and assemble the movie in LightWorks (the Moviemaker or similiar software will do the same).
It will certainly prevent you from rendering for hours ending up in a corrupted movie.
In case the machine crashes you can resume the rendering with the crashed frame. :)
Reply sent :) I'm just rendering still images/frames, no movies.
I only bought Carrara specifically for Howie's scenes, so I never really took the time to learn the program well. Guess I'd better start :p
HI Faerydae :)
Howies scenes aren't really suitable for animation, but there are some tools and features in Carrara which can make your liife easier if that's what you want to do with them.
Carrara has a "Shadow catcher" material, which you can apply to any objects , For example: a ground surface, or a plane, .. and this shader will catch the shadows from objects in your scene such as Figures.
Carrara can load in a Scene Backdrop image, which perfectly fit's to your Camera ratio output setting, which helps if you're doing camera matching. or,.. You can use a 360degree Environment image in the Scene Background.
Using these features,. you can first, render out a still image, or sequence of images of the complex scene, then use that as a Backdrop or Background, and add your figures, props etc to the empty scene.
You can add a ground plane with a "Shadow catcher" shader applied to it , and then render that to "composite" the 3d figures, into that Background , and the shadows from the figures will look like they're in the scene.
Hope it helps :)
As many have already noted - Howie's scenes do take quite a while to render. I think you would find, even if Poser could handle one of Howie's scenes, that equivalent quality renders would be much slower in Poser.
One thing you didn't mention is your operating system and if you are using a 32 bit or 64 bit version of Carrara. Howie's scenes are very taxing on 32 bit Carrara, and even more so on 32 bit Carrara in a 32 bit OS. The link below is to an image I did with GI enabled, using Secret Lake, on a 32 bit system. I think I had the render tile size set to 16 or 32 (the default eats valuable ram resources), and I also did it using batch rendering, which uses less RAM than rendering from a loaded scene. The scene in the link below took about 26 hours on a quad core (AMD Phenom) system with 3 Mb of RAM running 32 bit Vista.
Hope this helps!
DR
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1832144
I'm using the 64 bit version on Win 7, 6 GB RAM. I had the tile size set all the way up. Maybe I should move it down?
It might help, I usually use a smaller tile size on complex scenes even with 64 bit, it will help to spread out the work over more cores on complex areas. I wouldn't expect your problem to be a RAM, though if you have a lot of other things running at the same time it might be. Using both GI and light through transparency can be very resource and processor intensive with his scenes, but the one I linked to above had both enabled with no crashing on a 32 bit system. Have you put anything else in the scene? Maybe there is some sort of problem/conflict with one of the additional models, you could try turning them off and rendering to see what happens.
Can't think of anything else it might be.
I lowered the tile size and it did seem to help a little. I got one done in about 5 1/2 - 6 hours. I didn't add any other figures or anything. Just the default carrara scene. Thanks!