Looking at Carrara 5 Pro, and I have a few questions before I spend the cash on it. 1) Can you use maps to control the amount of SSS on an object by location, or does it just apply it to the entire object homogeneously? I want to be able to control where the SSS is applied on objects by using grayscale control maps. For instance, if I have SSS on a character's ears, I want to use a control map to create deeper scatter in shallow areas, and thin it out for areas that have more cartilage. 2) How good is the 3D motion blur? Is it clean and smooth when objects are slowly, steadily accellerating? Can animated procedural textures be motion blurred, even if the object itself isn't in motion? Looking forward to any replies. Thanks!

Hello Jimbo,

At this point SSS is object wide and not controllable by texture map. (although I hope it might be in another release) It hasn't really been an issue for me though if the ears are truly modeled to be thin. Combining that with translucency has been pretty successful.

3D motion blur is good but you pay a price in render time and it does take a little pre-planning of your scene. Carrara's scheme is to calculate the frames before, after or both (user choice) and then is blended together into a single frame. You can specify quantity of frames calculated for the effect. But you need to allow motion time in your scene on both sides of the animation or single frame to acheive this effect.

The benefit to doing this is that the shadows of the moving object are also blurred plus getting a very good result for movement over objects or through transparency. Here is the impact on render time though: A 10 frame render with a 5 frame "after" blur will calculate 50 frames to get the final result of 10 blurred frames. A "forward" and "after" blur will resulte in 100 frames of calculation. So, it's an option to be used intelligently.

I usually try to split the motion blur chore between Carrara and Final Cut Pro depending on how much time I have or how long the animation will be on visible. Where blurs need to occur on the other side of glass (think a ping pong ball moving behind a water glass) Carrara is the best fit for the job. However, for some complex scenes where the moving object is in front of everything, I'll actually render a Carrara background and the moving object separatley and do the blur completely in post production.

For still images, I simply let Carrara do all the work.

Hope this wasn't too much information!

Mark

Message edited on: 12/10/2005 10:46

Attached Link: Motion Blur for Materials

That's GREAT information, Mark. Thank you for taking the time to respond in such depth. I'm a bit disappointed that maps cannot be specified to control the SSS, but I guess I can live with that. I hope it's not too much to ask, but can procedural textures in Carrara 5 be animated? I don't see any info on that in the features list. If so, can motion blur be applied to them? There aren't many programs/renderers that can effectively motion blur animated textures, especially when the object itself is not in motion, but this is a useful feature for many things. See the link above to understand what I mean. It wouldn't necessarily impact my decision on buying the software if it doesn't have this, but it would make the choice much easier if it did. :)

Yes, animated textures do blur. Sorry for not overlooking that question in your first post. In Carrara, some procedurals are animatable but not all of them. If blurring textures is one of your primary needs, there is a blur option that works in Carrara with less of a speed penalty, too. Simply selecting "Enable Motion Blur" in the scene settings, not the render settings, allows for a much faster blur solution then the render room solution described in the earlier post. Additionally, you can rotoscope video/animations as textures in Carrara so there is also the option of blurring the movement prior to importing it as a texture in Carrara in the first place. Carrara is a pretty tidy solution. :) Mark

I have found that Carrara's Motion Blur is excellent, but as Mark points out, it does hit majorly in render time. The animatable procedural (and texture maps -- movies more precisely) textures will also blur due to the process Carrara employs to create the blur. For the time-hit, though, I've found, as Mark mentions, that it's much quicker, if not quite as accurate, to do the blur in post. For animations, I move into AfterEffects and apply ReelSmart motion blur (a plug in from re:vision effects). It's quick and looks good in motion. I'm pretty sure ReelSmart is also available for FCP, Premiere Pro and other products. Hope that's helpful. Dex

Thank you both for the great info! sfdex, I've used that ReelSmart product in AE before, and it does work great! However, there's still some problems when it comes to having a scene where more than one moving object passes in front of each other. Real 3D motion blur handles this fabulously, but post motion blur, even very high quality like ReelSmart, still gets distorted or warped under such conditions. For instance, try rendering a scene with two balls rolling in opposite directions across the screen, one set slightly farther in the distance, but parallel to the other. Post motion blur will fudge up at the point where the ball in the foreground passes in front of the ball in the background. This is where true 3D motion blur comes in handy.

Oh, you're absolutely right about that. What I've done, usually, though, is render individual elements when they need to cross one another. But you're right, there's no substitute for real 3D motion blur when it's detailed like that. I've been able to fake it with ReelSmart for many applications, particularly when speed of render is important. I'm actually very pleased with the look of Carrara's motion blur (though I haven't upgraded to CS5 yet, so I'm only speaking about CS4). And it's motion blur that can sell a CG shot where it might otherwise fail. Cheers!