Sparrowhawke3D introduced a new plug-in called Cumulus S3D
Cumulus S3D is a volumetric cloud shape plugin that creates up to 9 puffy animatable clouds in rows. The clouds grow and fade over time and puffs circulate within the clouds.
With many settings and options the clouds can be arranged in neat rows or be randomly spread. Towers can rise and fall above the base of the cloud which can be flat, rounded or undulating.
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.
I will be releasing all the DCG plug-ins I have rights to as open source. I am still working through the open source license and hosting decision, but as a first step, there is a beta for the no purchase or serial number required version of the plug-ins.”
The fluid simulation plugin for Carrara, FLUIDOS 1.4, is released now for both Windows 32&64bit and Mac since v1.4.
A free christmas present by Alvin Bémar at ShareCG: https://www.sharecg.com/v/90155/view/9/Plug-in/Fluidos.
Includes a detailed and updated manual, several test scenes and support for some AMD or NVIDIA graphics cards for acceleration.
Version 1.00 was released 2017-12-24.
Version 1.01 was released 2017-12-26, update if you got FLUIDOS early due to a bug.
Version 1.1 was released 2018-01-24 with the following change log: -Now, the depth in hierarchy is unlimited. Anything can be parented inside the Fluid Domain at any level. -Fluid Domain can be scaled using Overall (or its equivalent in Scale tool). -FluidS now can resize the diffuse particles (the default is 1.0) -A Range force slider allows to “thicken” the extent of the surface forces to one or two cells away the solid (default is one). -The user could now turn off OpenCL. -It was implemented three more GridFluidSim3d diffuse particles features: maximum lifetime, wavecrest emission rate, turbulence emission rate. The default values are the current ones in Fluidos 1.01 -The manual is updated. -Some bugs fixed.
Version 1.2 was released 2018-04-27 with the following change log: -Viscous fluids simulation available.
-Some advanced features are now available.
-FluidS modifier is faster.
-The triangle diffuse particles geometry is fixed.
-Triangle particles can be oriented to camera now.
-A memory leak in FluidS was fixed.
-And some other bugs was fixed.
-The updated manual explain details. I add two scenes in the files. In addition, there is a template for texture maps in shaders for the diffuse particles triangles.
-The version is for Windows 64 and 32 bits too.
Version 1.3 was released 2018-07-21 with the following change log:
-Faster and less memory needed for objects only partially inside the Fluid Domain
-Added an adjust factor for high precision viscosity simulations.
-The smoothing is better in the interfaces liquid-solid when there are curved obstacles (smooth the “stairs”).
-Expanded the limits of particle emission rates sliders and Smoothing iterations.
-Reduced the limits of Particle jitter factor to avoid crashes,
-Reorganized the Fluid Domain parameters tab.
-Added functionality for animated solids (they can push fluid now).
-Added functionality for spatially variable viscosity Bugs fixed:
-Flow force didn’t work in many scenes.
-Point force didn’t work properly as square inverse (this was a subtle bug).
-If an obstacle with a surface force was initially outside the domain, the plugin stops with an error when the obstacle reaches the domain.
-Every second frame, the body forces (gravity) were applied two times.
-If the chosen preferred device was CPU and the simulation was stopped and resumed, the device automatically was changed to GPU.
-Diffuse particles simulation sometimes could crash the plugin.
-CFL condition number didn’t work properly
Version 1.4 was released 2019-01-08 with the following change log:
New Features:
Anything is source: any object can be a source (or a sink).
Cuboid source and Anything is source can be spatially discontinous.
The OpenCL simulations are around 30 % faster.
The simulations can use presets.
Line forces.
Spatially variable viscosity now with viscosity controls.
New options for objects parented to Fluidos Domain (viscosity control and ignored).
Support also for MacOS 64 bits.
Fixed these bugs:
Some graphics cards were incompatible with the plugin.
Diffuse particles quantity sometimes decreases during simulation and, then, suddenly increases to limit in one frame.
Positive surface forces were insensible to intensity.
Simulations with moving obstacles enabled, sometimes are unstable (disproportionate turbulence, explosions, etc.)
Philemo has been busy with creating useful plugins for Carrara lately. This time it is the NoPokethrough plugin for Carrara, that had a free alpha version some time ago, but has now timed out while we wait for an official release at a Carrara content store. So what is it exactly? Philemo explains:
It’s a modifier you can apply on any figure or prop that removes poke through. It also creates morphs so that you don’t have to do the computation every time you do something. Morphs are keyframed and you can add different ones for different situations (a poke through created by a particular posture).
Latest status update by Philemo from 2016 November:
I’ve added a lot of features since and I’m slowly debugging it (while refraining to add more features 🙂 ). Once done, I have to compile and test for OSX and I’ll be ready to release a beta version.
So how does it work?
Add “No PokeThrough general utility” modifier to the actor or model of the cloth. You can have as much as you need (one initial, another one for cloth on cloth situation, other dedicated to a particular posture that isn’t solved by the initial one).
Target : Object to check against. Often, it’s the figure wearing the cloth, but not necessarily. Can be other clothes (cloth on cloth poke through), a prop or whatever you can intersect with. It’s better be the instance (model or actor, not the figure or a group, unlike the example). I can’t figure out why, but the intersection works better. Distance from body : minimum distance to body. Default to 0.1 inch (2.54mm) Dynamic : If ticked, collision solving is done whenever necessary. As it can take from 0.1 seconds, up to 2 or 3 depending on complexity, use it sparsily before creating a morph (because whenever necessary maybe quite often :-)) Morph name. Name that will be used for storing morph into the model. Will be corrected if necessary for unicity. “Create” button : create the morph “Update” button : update the morph offsets (resolve collision again) Morph value : coefficient of the morph (as in parameter tab). “Delete” button : delete the morph
This video by Philemo both explains how to use the NoPokethrough plugin for Carrara and also shows a second step-by-step method that results in better morphs:
