This is Part 2 of the Carrara-izing Blender article series. This time we will look into different possibilities for moving from Carrara to Blender and also common work methods between them, to make it easier to use them both. The first part was originally written by JoeMamma2000 in the DAZ3D forum and can be found here.
Common Render engines – Octane
One major common aspect of both Carrara and Blender, is the Octane plug-in by Otoy for both rendering and shaders (materials).
Octane is available in both a stand-alone version, but also has integrated plug-ins for both Blender and Carrara, making it easier to work in both apps.
While the integrated plug-in has a different user interface due to its heavy integration in Blender or Carrara, there are several common areas like materials, lighting, cameras and so on, that can be used the same way since the render engine is the same.
Octane comes with a high price tag and a big feature set, but you can start with the free demo version to check if you meet the hardware requirements.
Currently it needs an NVIDIA GPU, get a demo version here.
Common Render engines – Luxrender and LuxCore
Another common render engine and material database, is the free Luxrender application that includes a free Blender plugin, but need a low cost commercial plugin for Carrara, Luxus for Carrara at DAZ3D.com.
An advantage with Luxrender is that it has full support for CPU rendering (no specific GPU limits or limited VRAM) at the cost of longer render times, but it also is possible to render via GPU.
The upcoming Luxrender 2.0 has been delayed, but a project re-boot is started and work is ongoing to improve.
There is a beta version of the Carrara plugin LuxusCore, with the Luxrender 2.0 engine integrated, more info here.
The Blender manual for LuxCore is here.
Export from Carrara to Blender Cycles, script by mCasual
Started in 2015 october and last updated in 2017 November, the mcjBlendBotForCarrara script has been around for a long time.
The scripts speeds up the export from Carrara to Blender and the Cycles render engine (now supports both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs).
Get the download from here and also save the PDF files of the web site, since it includes several must-have tips to get it to work: https://sites.google.com/site/mcasualsdazscripts2/mcjblendbotspecial
Bforartists vs Blender
A complete stand-alone version of Blender with a more user-friendly interface, called Bforartists is available from here: https://www.bforartists.de/
Have not tried it myself yet, but it is a free download like Blender, so go ahead and try it yourself.
Some info from the Bforartists FAQ: Q: Why should i use Bforartists and not Blender? You should use Bforartists when you are not comfortable with Blender, but are with Bforartists. I have seen generations of new 3D artists fail at the Blender UI, but being fine with other 3D packages then. Q: What is the difference between Blender and Bforartists? First let me point out where it is equal. There is no difference in the features. The main difference lies in the UI and usability.
Blender’s usability philosophy is centered around hotkeys and speed.
Bforartists usability philosophy is centered around the graphical menu. With an intuitive and easy to learn workflow. Made from an artist for artists.
“As you probably have all noticed, I’m not really active in this space anymore. After DAZ dropped me along with the other Carrara vendors, I tried to leave my old store up, but between WordPress and PayPal updates, it just doesn’t work anymore.
That
link is case sensitive, so type it in exactly like I have it there.
Thank you for your support and encouragement over the years when I was
developing these, it was a period of my life that I will cherish always.
SECOND of all, I am willing to make the entire library of my Carrara 8 source code available to anyone who wishes to take up the mantle. This includes both my privately published plug-ins as well as the ones formerly sold at DAZ (and a few that were never released). …”
Alberto write: “FLUIDOS II is a fluids simulation plugin for Carrara 8 and 8.5.
FLUIDOS II incorporates high-performance OpenVDB tools for meshing, filtering, level sets, and pressure projection. Besides the superior quality liquid simulation, now it includes other fluids types: Smoke and Volumetric fire.
FLUIDOS II is faster, more powerful and versatile than its predecessor.
The plugin is a volumetric primitive that can be used to create deep and turbid waters. Light is attenuated through the volume so like in real lakes and oceans the deeper you get the less the light penetrates and objects in the volume get darker and darker. Colours also attentuate differently depending on the depth and distance through the water.
If you have done an underwater scene before you may have used the Scene Atmosphere or Fog to get close to such an effect. This plugin allows you to avoid doing that – which is particularly useful for a scene that requires views both in and out of the water. If you change the atmosphere then anything above the water will look wrong. This short video (which I did early on in the project) shows the effect.
When a body of water is viewed from above the surface the existing Carrara shader absorption settings will work to make things get darker as they approach the Attenuation distance but once you get down into the water the shader is of no help. I explain this in more detail inmy Laboratory.
The plugin can work with multiple surface objects to create the right interactions between the surface of the water and the volume. It checks if the ray is above or below the surface so the volume effect only happens below it. It can also work with exclusion zones to create an aquarium or submersible vehicle and inclusion zones to create a fish tank.
The visibility and other settings can be adjusted to make the water murkier with details explained in the user manual. I couldn’t figure out how to add light beams but caustics work well on objects in the volume.
Philemo released another Carrara plugin at the end of April in 2019, the HD Morph plugin for Carrara, that supports high resolutions characters import into Carrara or even making your own HD content inside Carrara. Here is an early test render from Bunyip of Marvin the alien for G8M: https://www.daz3d.com/mervin-the-alien-hd-for-genesis-8-male
The Carrara files should be copied as usual to the Carrara Extensions folder, a bit new for Carrara users, is the Daz Studio scaling script that must be copied to the Daz Studio folder, to solve issues with some characters, here is a screnenshot showing the folders:
Dartanbeck more detailed step by step guide clearifies some of the steps, using the Gianni 6 HD character as an example:
“And just to clarify, in Step 4 and Step 5 of the tutorial, he is first (step 4) importing the exported (from DS) HD morphed figure as an OBJ with his import notes applied, and then in step 5, he’s loading in the figure that we would otherwise use the morph on into the same scene, with the obj from step 4.” An example: If we’re going to use a Gianni 6 HD morph,
Step 1 – in Daz Studio we’d load in Gianni 6 HD character preset
Step 2 – since this is a Character Preset, this step should already be done (but check his notes just to see what it means)
Carrara has 2 kinds of lighting, direct and indirect.
Direct lighting comprise all kind of lights (directional, sun, bulb, spot, anything glows, shape lights…).
Indirect lighting are ambient, sky light and indirect light.
The main difference between direct and indirect is that all the features of the lighting model (highlight, shadows, SSS, translucency) are used only with direct lighting. Indirect lighting considers all materials as mate, with no SSS, shadowless. If your materials follow this description, then no problem. Otherwise, renders using indirect lights often seem dull and whitish.
The goal is to add a true environment lighting in Carrara, as seen in all modern renderers.
To come back to this plugin, the idea is to create a dome of direct lights (here directional lights) with value extracted from an HDRI map. This is supposed to give the best of both world.
A side by side comparison of rendering a shiny object using sky light and dome light
Sky light
Dome light
How to use it
First, there must be an HDR Background set for the scene
The command to create is in menu EDIT/Philemo/HDR Light Dome.
It open a window with 5 parameters:
Brightness multiplier. It’s similar to the sky light intensity slider in the render room. It’s related to the shadow you’ll use (hard light threshold slider a bit below). The more shadow, the more brightness you need
Shadow intensity. Same as in lights.
Hard light threshold. It’s the threshold below which a light will be considered a hard light (ie cast shadow). A 5% value leave only the sun as hard light in a bright sky. A 200% value has all the lights as hard light.
Sky only : Will generate a half dome and no light from the ground.
Subdivision level : drives the number of lights generated by a power of 2. 5 is 32 lights, 6 is 64, 7 is 128, 8 is 256…
Optimal is often found with 256 lights, 200% threshold. It may be a bit long to render, more if you have transmaps, so you can lower some setting. That’s why the default is 50% threshold
Of course, when rendering, sky light option should be unselected.
Philemo: “I would like to thank @Magaremoto for the starting point of this idea. He suggested to look into Renderman to pick good ideas.
I discovered that Renderman subdivides meshes so that each facet fits in a Pixel. The first idea I had reading this was that would be great for displacement.
That done, I needed a subdivision (or tessellation) method that respected the existing render and was fast enough. Carrara using Phong shading, I decided to use Phong tessellation. This algorithm, created by Tamy Boubekeur and Marc Alexa (see https://perso.telecom-paristech.fr/boubek/papers/PhongTessellation/). This method is widely used in games to give nice contours to low poly models. As the author says, “Our technique is a geometric version of Phong normal interpolation, not applied on normals but on the vertex positions. We call this strategy Phong Tessellation. “.”
Carrara and displacement
Carrara usually does a fine job to simulate displacement with bump mapping when the surface is facing the camera and the light. This is not so good when the camera and/or the light are grazing the surface. Also, contours do not reflect the impression given by facing facets.
Carrara has displacement. It works great on geometric primitives (like sphere, plane,..). For meshes, it’s a little more … touchy. Displacing the vertices at the facet size is usually not enough. So, there is subdivision. The problem here is that the complete mesh is subdivided, regardless of it actually on the screen and visible from the camera. Heavy subdivision usually takes a lot of time.
Micro-dispalcement
The idea of this Plug-in is to subdivide heavily (up to 4 vertices per pixel), but only what is necessary. So, off-screen facets or facing away from the camera are not subdivided. Contours are perfect due to subdivision and micro displacement is now possible.
Micro displacement is using displacement in place of bump mapping. It allows to have consistency in quality between facing and grazing angles, both from the Camera and the lights, as it uses real geometry and is not trying to simulate it.
As Carrara is already very good at simulating displacement by bump mapping, for realistic values of displacement, the improvement is very subtle and should be considered before using.
For instance, for a grazing angle (upper jaw), the first image is rendered using bump mapping and the second one using micro displacement. There are differences, although you may have to look for them and I think the overall quality is better.
On this example on a facing fragment, (the forehead), the difference is not obvious at all:
Macro Displacement
Macro displacement is used to simulate geometry at run time. It usually has both displacement (or height) map and bump/normal map.
This is where the plugin takes its full power:
Usage of the plugin
Phong tessellation is a modifier that applies to meshes.
Select the modifier from the list:
There are 3 parameters in this plugin:
Enabled: Activate the plugin. Otherwise do nothing. Use it to re-generate the tessellation is camera, object or displacement has changed.
Shape factor: Strength of the Phong effect. 0 will give you flat shading, 0,5 is normal, 1 is overdone (stuffed fabric effect).
Vertex per half pixel: number of vertices generated by half screen pixel horizontally and vertically. 1 is 4 vertices per pixel, 2 is 1 per pixel, 4 is 2 per square of 2×2 pixels and so on. Use value 1 for micro displacement or macro displacement with sharp contrast, 2 or less is the displacement map is blurred. Starting from value 1, each successive value divides the number of vertices generated by value squared (2 is 4 times less, 3 is 9 times, 4 16 times and so on).
Displacement
To set displacement, use the standard displacement shader in the shader room.Before doing so, untick if necessary the “enabled” value in the modifier (otherwise it may take a very longtime).
First make sure the “enable displacement” is disabled.
Then set amplitude and offset and displacement shader as usual.
Performances
On my 5 years old laptop, tessellation generates about 1 million facets per second. Displacement is about 3 times faster.
Afterwards, Carrara needs at least as much time to digest all those facets.
Rendering is usually 2,5 times slower at maximum precision.
