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Originally Posted by LoneGunman  Agreed (well, Bryce is slower,  ). I got lot of laughs from Carrara "experts" on this issue...
Majority of people for some reason find it satisfactory. Speed is obviously more important than a quality...
On the other hand, that is why Carrara is in the lower class of rendering solutions, which is obviously reflected in it's price...Nothing against Carrara here, just a personal opinion.  |
Hmm, well I've only ever tried Bryce and Poser as alternative renderers and I have found Cararra's to be more satisfying. I had heard elsewhere that Carrara was fast and accepted that since I had little else to compare it too. (Shrug) Works for me generally for what I am doing and at my price point though I believe you that there are other render engines out there that are faster and higher quality.
I agree with the default settings for GI renders in Carrara being quick and noisy, which works for stills generally but not for animations. I have experimented with the GI render settings and found that the biggest difference in the noise factor comes from one setting, "Lighting Quality". I can get very good GI animation renders without visible noise at the Best setting but it is a 4-8 fold increase in render times to do it. The other settings, even photon count and photon map accuracy do not make as big a difference once you are past a threshold level (50K photons slows you down but doesn't make the image any better than 5k photons usually). When testing my render settings, I set Lighting Quality to Excellent or Best and then crank down the other settings to speed up the render until the quality gets unacceptable.
Is there anything missing in Carrara's renderer besides normal mapping (although I think there is a plugin for this) that we should ask the devs to add? I'm going to stick with Carrara as my main app because I know it well, but I'm always looking for improvements.