After fighting a lost battle with Poser's lights in a dimly lit scene, I decided it was time to try rendering in Carrara 5 Pro instead. I thought there might be some interest in the results. After I set up an illustration for Sue's Katana ('nother thread), I opened C5P to check out the alternatives. First I loaded the Jessie in what is called "native format." Jessie came in Ok, but the sword lost all it's parameter settings. And on closer examination, Jessie had an eyelash problem (no transparency). The lights didn't look "right" (it's hard to think of Poser lights as "right"...), and the camera didn't import, so I had to set up the camera position again. I wrestled with Shaders for ten minutes trying to get the eyelash transparency to work. No luck. I'm sure the problem was my grasp of C5P shaders, but there you are. I closed the file and opened it again with the Transposer importer. Oh my. Everything was exactly where it should be (except, again, the camera, which went missing), morphed and lit and transparent. There are two odd compatibility issues. The lights don't work the same way, so I had to adjust them (down about 80%) to get the effect I had in the original. And the cameras interpret focal length a bit differently, so that the picture I got from a 50mm camera in P6 was a bit fish-eyed compared to the 50mm image in C5P. The real surprise was to come. The scene took roughly five seconds to render. That's "seconds." And area renders were virtually instantaneous. That's "no seconds." It took P6 five minutes to render the same scene on the same computer. In my opinion, the C5P image is better than the P6 one, speed aside. The only problems are the reflection maps on the blade, which I'm not satisfied with in either image, and the differences between the light and camera settings. Clearly, there has to be some tweaking in C5. But the lights are more feature-rich, and the 60-fold speed difference is pretty compelling. I don't think I'll be doing production renders in P6 any more. Which means I can stop taking the blood pressure medication.... Now to try that scene I wasted two days trying to light in Poser.

Ok, I've made four attempts to upload the comparison image, with the same results. It "uploads," then it won't display. Never mind, eh? I'd delete the thread, but I hate threads with the first post deleted. M

DO NOT DELETE! I created several poser --> carrara posts recently, asking people to do just such a time and quality comparison, nobody did it. Your tale of the transfer is important. What size and format are you final images? I think there is a 200K limit here in Rendo for images. Also, I'd be glad to host the images and put them in this thread with HTML. ::::: Opera :::::

I'd be interested to see those comps. Looks like Cararra uses the coveted hardware acceleration. Multi threading too? Have you got dual cores? I've read that it offers sss also. That should slow things down,,, ,, ,

I think they're still finalizing the switchover. Speed is up at least. I think you should try the "native" lights in C5pro. No need to bring bad baggage with you. ;)) Interesting that you picked up some specular in post6 but lost the eye reflect. Shadow intensity shot up, too.

Dogs on the roof but that was frustrating. I'll run some more tests tomorrow to see what C5Pro can do with the file, sticking with Transposer. The native import has too many problems with the file to be worth the trouble. Eventually I'll figure out how to repair busted transparency and reflection import problems, but I'll never find a fix for the fact that it ignores morph dials on props. Transposer is part of the Pro package, or a $99 add-on for regular C5. Makes no sense to buy non-Pro if you use Poser. Apologies for the Caravaggio lighting, by the way. That's what I was trying to get. I'll do some renders tomorrow with more light and maybe post P6 comparisons. Frankly, at this point I'm not much interested in what P6 CAN do; I'm still frosted over what it can't. I spent one hour building a scene and then two DAYS trying to get the dim light to work, waiting overnight for one render, and unable to even see an approximation of what the render was going to look like in previews or area renders. I started out planning to use IBL with three point lights, and by the time I was done, I was back to four spots and ##$#@ the IBL. When I finally seemed to have everything set, I did an overnight render and when I got up the next morning I found that my skin textures had been replaced with some sort of semi-topographical pseudo-moire pattern that looked like the oil stains under my crankcase. Thank you Poser; just what I wanted. I opened the file in C5P and did a quick test render. It looks a great deal like what I wanted. And the render took less than a minute. A word of warning: If you are the lazy sort (like me) and leave 29 empty frames in your static pz3s, Carrara will assume it's a (very boring) animation, multiply the frames by 3 or so, and then when you hit Ctrl-R you will see it begin the extraordinarily rapid process of building 90+ frames of your "animation." Those are NOT render passes, and 90 times a small number is not a small number any more. Reset the render options to only generate one frame. M

C5 animation of grass growing...lol Thanks for the tips.

Richardson: The lights are actually an import option but yes, given how much I had to change them from P6 kludge to working C5, I won't bother to import them again. In fact, I will probably not bother to set them up in P6 either, and just use infinites for posing. Not sure why I lost the eye gleam. The figure is default Jessie with default materials; I only tinkered with the katana materials, since they were not ready "out of the box." Susan_Carter's free R'osity katana, by the way, which is a great freebie with some materials, texture maps, and two dozen morphs that make it very diverse. I haven't done enough with C5 Shaders yet to feel that I understand them, but I set up the reflection on the blade, and I'm not really satisfied with it. On the other hand, I never got quite what I wanted there in P6 either. The interesting thing about the improved shadow intensity is that I actually dropped the light intensity in C5, because the image was too bright with its interpretation of P6 light settings. Maybe the shadow map settings etc are not imported. I don't think I changed the defaults in P6. Just turned one set off in both apps. For me an interesting element is the very observable difference between the actual focal lengths of the respective cameras. Both are "50mm", and they are at roughly the same distance, though not exactly the same polar coords, and yet there is a very noticeable fish-eye in the P6 image compared to the C5Pro. Given the weird "focal length means what we want it to mean" world of Poser (less well-known but just as bizarre as the fact that a "Poser Unit" is 8.6 feet), this doesn't surprise me. I have six cameras, and 3 or 4 more in my checkered past; and I've never had one that worked like a "Poser camera." Anyway, off to nap. I've been up since one, so I'm no longer operational. M

mickmca terrific information. Yes, IBL KILLS bright lights and highlights. My guru, face_off, advises me to use IBL only in outside lighting where high-difuse is natural. In my last indoor portrait, I abandoned IBL altogether. Meanwhile.... The comparison of P6 vs Carrara render speed you are reporting is exhilerating. I judged for myself that if I could get a doubling of render speed, all else equal, I'd go for it. If I do, and if Carrara has any sort of good animation tools, I'll probably just use Poser as my character ante-room, clothe them, texture them and hair them in P6, and just import them into Carrara and do lights, cameras, scene setup, animation and rendering there. I am mainly worried about the lack of face_off's auto shaders for skin realism. Will have to back-build that capability in Carrara. Also, I've developed skill in Poser animation, hoping the tools in Carrara are okay. Apparently, C5Pro has dynamic hair and cloth, SSS and several forms of GI, and some sort of shader tree setup, so I believe I won't be losing anything critical vis a vis realism. ::::: Opera :::::

Just visited the Eovia site, and if I understand it correctly, owners of practically any 2D or 3D software, including Poser, can get a "companion" download version of C5Pro for $399.

They also just posted a Poser6/C5P bundle at $599, whereas the straight out C5P product lists at $549.

The non-Pro versions are less.

::::: Opera :::::

Message edited on: 01/28/2006 13:30

I've been using the Carrara renderer for quite a while now with Poser. It's speed compared to Poser will spoil you quickly, especially if you do animations, although you can certainly pick settings that make for a slow render if you so choose. Most import problems are easy fixes. My only gripe has been the occasional artifact, which I think I've finally figured out how to avoid.

tunesy, have you attempted to animate anything in Carrara? What about skin realism?

Hi, opera. I've been using C4Pro and P5. Just got P6 yesterday and C5Pro won't be here till Monday, so I have no helpful input on the sss in C5Pro if that's what you're alluding to with respect to "skin realism". Frankly, skin realism isn't really what I'm after since I don't do many stills and when I do they're not usually close ups. Plus, I don't want to invest in a render farm for this time sink of a hobby ;) There is a recent thread over on the Rosity Carrara forum about C5Pro sss though, if you haven't already seen it. I've been very happy with Carrara skin with no sss, but someone who does a lot of close up stills might have more to say about it.

" tunesy, have you attempted to animate anything in Carrara? What about skin realism?" Oops. Didn't answer your question. Hehe. Sorry. Yes. Animation is almost all I do with Poser and Carrara. I've been very happy with skin in Carrara for animation purposes even with no sss.

Thanks. I think I need to download the C5P trial and try it!

Operaguy (I know, I'm asleep. Oh well): C5P has a very robust shader system with hundreds of built-ins. In fact, I'm using a preset Platinum to fix the shader on the blade. It's very different from P6's material room, but it seems to import "whatever it can figure out," so you may not lose your shaders if you apply them before going to C5. Don't take my 60x as gospel. It's based on anecdotal evidence: watching one file render. But fast as in 5-10 times looks pretty much normal. And the best thing is, once the area render primes itself (longer wait on first use in scene), it is almost instantaneous. My machine is pretty high end, but only for the under $1000 sort. 2 Gigs of RAM, 200 Gigs of HD available, a Sempron 2800 I think, if that makes sense. It was the top "standard" CPU available when I bought the machine six months ago. I just loaded the "render overnight" file that started all this, set the DPI to 600, and got a gorgeous render in about 30 seconds. Let's consider the speed issue pretty much settled, eh? At 72DPI that image was taking 15-30 minutes to render in P6. At 600, I don't know how long it took, because I would set it going and it would still be getting organized when I left for work or went to bed. And when it was "done", it would be screwed up in some way that the 72DPI production render wasn't -- to my mind, a sure sign of a memory issue, and that's bad news when I just bought a gahunken computer to use for Poser stuff. I'm sure my "instant renders" in C5P are driven by the machine's being top-of-the-line. My tech guy told me it was so fast, he installed win2000 on it in ten minutes. The lights are all wrong (getting back to my original picture), and the dynamic cloth is hanging like some sort of artsy fartsy Bloomingdale's display, but that's because I only loaded the first frame. Now I'm gonna open the file in P6, get my dynamics, remove all the frames but #30, and take that over. We'll see. If that works, I'll post the result. Easier said than done, of course. I can't find a way to remove the 29 frames that generated the dynamics. Looks like the "fixed" a "bug" in P5. The way I remembered it, you could create a dynamic, then drag or copy the last frame to the beginning of the set, delete the other 29 frames, and you'd have a finished item. If ever, no more. Tunesy: Did not mean to suggest that the animation render was slow. It's comparably fast. But if you sit through ninety frame renders thinking you watching some sort of progressive render of a static file, you will think the static render is 90x slower than it is ... which would STILL be pretty dang fast. The animation renders were going by so fast, I thought exactly that, until I realized that 10 "progressions" hadn't changed anything. Then I looked, and sure enough, Carrara had taken my word for it that it was an animation. Ahem. I'm going to go ahead and post this. Poser has spent fifteen minutes draping 12 frames of a 40-frame series. I have three pieces of clothing dumped on the floor, so the dynamics are pretty intensive, but like T. said, you get spoiled fast. One minute per frame? Whuph. M

...one last thing about Carrara I'd like to point out: the 'fun factor'; that intangible that at the end of the day means so much for us hobbyists. Carrara has been a reliably fun and stable app to work with since version 3 and, to me, it fits like a glove with Poser.

mickmca, thanks for reporting. NOW GO TO SLEEP! Lol. Yeah, I think it's just a matter of finding a different way to shade the skin, absent my trusty face_off tools. I watched the only "human character" video on the Eovia website gallery, "Girl with Guns" (LOL, i wonder if that's the Carrara equivelent to NVIATWAS?) Anyway, plenty of realism there and good walk animation, though of course that could be BVH or even Poser walk designer. I noticed that the shader plugin package recently released has a "dirty up the corners and chip the paint" module, as well as a toon shader. Very cool. And, yes, fun factor counts with me. My tools have to be pleasurable. Lifestyle choice! Tunsey...how would you compare Carrara's animation tools (dope sheet, graphs, etc.) with poser's? I'm very happy for this thread. ::::: Opera :::::

"Tunsey...how would you compare Carrara's animation tools (dope sheet, graphs, etc.) with poser's?" Up to now I've used Poser's animation tool set exclusively for character animation and Carrara for rendering because that was the only work flow choice available with C4Pro/Poser. When P5Pro gets here on monday I'm looking forward to seeing how the workflow of animating Poser figures within Carrara goes. I won't be disappointed if it becomes apparent that doing character animation within Poser turns out to be more efficient than doing it within Carrara. That's a good question though. I'm surprised I haven't seen a single thread on that topic. The reason I'm not really concerned about it is because sometimes we forget that Poser has a pretty good animation tool set. No one will ever confuse it with Animation Master, but it's pretty good ;) It won't bother me at all to continue to animate within Poser and import to Carrara to render. Ooo, but maybe the work flow within Carrara will be better )) Hehe. I dunno yet )

yes, I am a fan of Poser animation as well. So, if animating in Poser is better, so be it. It's just that, during animation, suddenly you want to do a quick lo-res render here and there, etc. Better if you are already in renderland. But, if the transfer to Carrara really is smooth, then....okay. ::::: Opera :::::

I recently acquired C5 Pro ($350 if you buy C3 for $50, then upgrade to C5Pro for $300) to try and escape Poser's various bad habits. Particulary crashing renders due to memory management problems. The 'toon I just posted on the "tits and dicks" thread was one of them that gave me fits. I had to delete both HyperReal textures, kill ray tracing, and black out the window so I could delete everything inside of Cafe II before I could get that render to go through. From what I've seen of Carrara so far, I'd say that Poser is going to be relegated to "ante-room" status as soon as I can become more proficient with C5. C5 is also more of a "do everything" app. Model, animate, render, etc.... Very nice package for a very reasonable price.

If you are using a superior program like Carrara there is no point in setting up lights in Poser. Just do all your lighting in Carrara.

Yes, Carrara's lighting set up is far easier than Poser's. Very straightforward, much less swearing.

Almost got "For my mother, who wanted me to be a Episcopal priest" done (the scene that got me into this). I've spent about three hours setting up the lights and camera after transferring the PZ3 with both missing. Once I got close to what I wanted, I decided to go for broke and demand a 10" 600DPI render. Eighteen minutes. Poser 6 was taking hours to do a 1" 600DPI render, and ruining it. I'm sold. By the way, a lovely feature is the "Progress" tab on the Render panel. Not only does it tell you, accurately! how long the render will take, it reports a half dozen statistics about the process, such as total size of the templates (500 megs in this case) and total facets scanned. As for the lights: They are quite different, but anything that is really (rather than unfound or renamed) is more than made up for with extras. For example, you can tell a light to not strike certain objects in its path. My human figure is lit by a distant Bulb light of one color, and NOT hit by the distant Bulb in the same location that illuminates the back wall in a different color. Ambience is a scene setting, as it should be, rather than specific to each object. (And if you want Poser "ambience," you can use the Anything Glows light, which turns the object into a light emitter.) Sunlight is handled with a skydome approach (like Bryce or Vue), which presents a problem when working with indoor scenes: The sun shines through the roof unless you add one.... For "Mom," I faked the sunlight with a spot because of this problem and because for some reason the window in the DnM wall I'm using will let you see a backdrop behind it, but will not allow light to pass through it, either in P or C. I can get what I want more accurately by replacing the spot with a Distant Light in a "can" with reversed normals. For now, the spot is good enough. Ok, the test is done. So now I have an 80Meg Tiff that is closer to what I've been trying to do than I've been in two weeks. Still not ready for prime time, but here's a 600x700 72DPI version (14 seconds). I still need to tinker with the lights illuminating the wall, bring them up a tiny bit more.

Sounds like you need to calibrate at least one of your monitors, mick. It's fast and easy to do. Here's a link, but there are many others out there: http://www.jasc.com/support/kb/articles/monitor.asp

calibrate at least one Thanks for the link. I've never calibrated the LCD, come to think of it, but I have printed to an inkjet, so I think it's pretty close to "real life." I think the Sony is just old (as in ten years), but someone chewed me out a few years ago for posting an image that was hopelessly dark, and it looked just fine on the Sony. I'm going to put my big dog 21" CRT on the internet machine (I have to reinforce the desk: why I've waited) and see what I get. If the JASC calibrator will work offline, I'll try it on the LCD. Is there detail in the wall? I can't see any on the Sony. M

I ran the gamma tools on both monitors. The LCD is virtually 100% on target, as I would have guessed from its printer performance, and the Sony is not only off but incapable of achieving a contrast level that gives me more than half of the black blocks. So, time to heft the Hitachi and pray for the desk. At least I'm fairly sure the picture looks lighter than I wanted it to, in spite of the fact that I can't see a thing in it. And I can go back to trusting the LCD for brightness and contrast. I know they have serious limitations for color accuracy and the illusion of continuous color; that's why I use both monitors. And I've assumed for the last few years that the Sony was no good for contrast and brightness, but it's deteriorated since the last time I thought about it. M M

Your image does not look overlit.

Your CRT is probably burning out. I second the notion of calibrating. I am a CRT fan myself, and own a now-dead and long lamented 24" SONY FW900 which is without doubt the finest CRT ever. However, it burned out. You know a CRT is burned out when the contrast and brightness are all the way up, but it won't calibrate. RIP. ::::: Opera :::::

Message edited on: 01/29/2006 12:21

If you don't mind dealing with the size and weight, Sony sells 21" Trinitrons these days for a VERY reasonable price. Weight IS a factor with these particle board workstations that everyone sells. I had to put four steel plates on mine to handle the weight of a now deceased 21" MAG monitor. Stupid thing weighed about 90 lbs.

i have a 10' wide wood desk, pretty thin top accually only held up on the very ends, so lots of open space up till 2 weeks agi had 2 24" sony CRT monitors, 66 pounds per i'm amazed desk didnt crack from it :P hahaha good ol craftsmanship knocks on the desk, and watches it crash down now i have 2 dell 19" LCD, my desk loves me :) but they're brighttttt, always have to recheck final renders on my old CRT to get what i want :(

anxcon, were the two CRTs the SONY FW900? Are you done with them? What did you do with them? Are they burned out?(in)? ::::: Opera :::::

Sunday night, 8:00 PM California Ok. I downloaded the trial version of Carrara 5 Pro I read the instructions on how to import a .pz3 I imported an animation i've been working on. the scene contains: 1 James HiRes with 4 clothing models 1 James dynamic hair 1 EJ HiRes with 2 clothing models 1 Jessie dynamic hair fitted to EJ ground with tiled texture 3 cloth planes with texture 2 lights camera everything loaded over. I told it to render. It informed me that only 4 seconds of animation with trial version. fair enough. 120 frames at 720x450 rendered in 33 minutes, average of 16 seconds per frame. The Poser render with FF was taking over 220 seconds per frame. That's a raw 14x speed gain. Now, the lights are not right...I'm going to delete the poser lights and investigate GI in Carrara. THat might slow down the situation. More reports tomorrow. ::::: Opera :::::

GI will definitely slow down your renders, but I've found that the render times were still more than tolerable. And I agree with people who say that setting up your lights in Carrara are much easier and more intuitive than setting up in Poser. I personally never import lighting from my Poser scenes.

moving the slider on the timeline is DEAD SLOW, like 3.5 seconds for modified shaded, 2.5 seconds for wire, and 6 seconds for shaded. I have not figured out how to actually animate yet...no morphs came over, or else I can't find them. ::::: Opera :::::

I tried to buy Carrera 5 based on your recommendations, but when I did I got a shock. I placed my order on the Eovia site, entered my credit card info, and got this message back: "Dear customer: We are sorry to say that the developer of the software TransPoser 2.0 for Carrara 5 English - Download is exporting this software only to specific markets. Your order cannot be processed due to these constraints." So apparently, because I'm in the UK, they don't want to sell to me. You can imagine the email I just sent to Eovia. :/

I didn't mention one possibly obvious point about my tests: The amount of light has an almost arithmetic effect on rendering time. I rendered the pic in 14 seconds, then increased each light by 50% and it rendered in 21 seconds. Sorry to hear about the export restrictions. As I'm sure we all know, the safety of America depends on keeping 3D plugins out of the hands of terrorists. M

Naladae, When you clicked on the "button" to make the purchase, did you click on the US dollar button or the Euro button? The US button will take you to the US online store, and the Euro button takes you to the online store for Europe. Mabye you tried to purchase from the US store? Just a thought....

Could be! All the US stores I normally buy from happily bill me in $US though. Maybe Eovia can't do that for some reason... It was the wording mainly. It indicated that the problem was with Transposer only, and that the developer had made this decision. Who knows what that's about? Anyhow, I might have another go later on and see if getting them to bill me in Euro's helps. Not that we use Euros over here any more than we use dollars... :D

Those of you that want more info on Darrara/Poser might consider contacting wolf359. He's been using them both for a while. He's also a Lightwave and C4D user so he's able to compare it them with that.

I've been IMing and emailing Wolf, but he has not responded. I think he is busy making movies in Carrara! :: og ::