Carrara Crawling - what to upgrade? - Polyloop

Jaeger · 9th January 2006, 04:41

I'm a total newbie, so please feel free to say RTFM if appropriate.

I've just bought Carrara 5 Pro, with the latest patch. The first project that I'm working on is an import from Poser, and consists of two M3 and two V3 models, with simple clothing/hair, no special textures or other complexities. 100 frames of animation, with a lot of keyframes (Mimic-generated lip-synch). All obj's are in external Poser runtimes. Imported using Transposer.

It took around 10 minutes to import into Carrara, and the same to load the Carrara file now that I've done the import. Moving around the Carrara rooms takes unacceptably long, and all Carrara operations seem to be very slow (setting camera angles and so on). Rendering speeds are OK, but I've twice had memory-related errors while trying to render, and it seems to be having problems working with a DV codec (my preferred output format).

My PC is 3.8GHz with hyperthreading, 1GB RAM. Is the problem simply inadequate RAM? I'm used to Poser, which is heavy on CPU but not too bad with RAM, but am I right in concluding that this is too low for Carrara?

I don't mind going out and buying the RAM, but would appreciate any feedback on whether my interpretation of the cause of the slowness is accurate, and any tweaking suggestions, first.

medeamajic · 9th January 2006, 09:52

I am not an expert of 3-D animation. I do know that dynamic hair will slow the system down if you are trying to view it in the preview room. See if your ram is maxed out in the task manager. Is your system slow just using geometric primatives?

Jaeger · 9th January 2006, 23:47

It's slower than I would have expected even with primitives, but most of the slowness is in the Assemble and Model rooms. Rendering, including preview, is the only activity that's faster than Poser.

Patrick210 · 10th January 2006, 00:15

You definitely need more ram, the more the better. I haven't worked with only 1 gig of ram for a few years. Possibly check your display settings for OpenGL, fully textured will slow things down with lots of mapped textured.

Patrick

Pete Exxtreme · 10th January 2006, 00:16

What is your video card too ?

medeamajic · 10th January 2006, 02:56

You should be able to flip and rotate the primatives with with out being slow or slugish if you use the default shader. It may be a video card conflict but I doubt it is ram if the geometric primatives are slow and slugish. Is the RAM maxed out in the task manager? I don't think Carrara has a memory leak.

Charles · 10th January 2006, 23:56

If you used TransPoser to import Poser objects it is unfortunately normal that animation is slow. The Poser sdk is not very fast when it comes to generate the mesh of the characters...
Regarding the display, are you using OpenGL? Moving big objects around is only going to be fast in OpenGL and if you have a good graphic card that supports OpenGL.

Charles · 11th January 2006, 00:29

Regarding the memory allocation error, we have found two causes: one is a bug with terrains and shadow buffer that will be fixed in the next update. The second is the use of subsurface scattering with replicated trees which simply uses too much memory

bwtr · 11th January 2006, 04:20

Every App should have a Charles!

Jaeger · 11th January 2006, 06:42

Thanks so much for all the responses! Based on Patrick's reply, I bought and installed 4GB RAM yesterday, and it seems to have solved most of the problems. (It also made my husband very happy, as he got my existing RAM). Everything's running at acceptable speeds except animation.

My card is NVidia GeForce MM something or other - I can't remember the exact version, but will check tonight (I'm at work at the moment). It definitely supports OpenGL. I updated the drivers and did some tweaking yesterday. Preview and rendering are both acceptable speeds at the moment, but I think there should still be some room for improvement, so I'll go back and look tonight based on the replies here.

Yes, I used Transposer. Incidentally, is there a bug in this regarding fps? It asks about four times per imported object.

Animation still sucks. It takes forever to move from one frame to another, and there is no way I can see what's happening until I render. I'm trying at the moment to do all of the model animation in Poser before moving to Carrara, and just do camera movements in Carrara.

jtbullet · 11th January 2006, 18:39

You know what carrara does faster than poser?

1. Physics
2. Terrains
3. Atmospheres
4. Modelling
5. Tree Generation
6. etc. you see my point.

Poser is great at what it does, no doubt about it. Carrara is ok at some things Poser does. Poser is no good at the things listed above. Maybe we are moving towards a more robust poser solution for carrara. In the meantime, setting up complex scenes using poser and carrara has never been better, when you factor in the current capabilities. One day someone will write a new character file format and it will be bye-bye poser for a lot of people. Curious labs should be at the forefront of creating that new standard. they must protect their niche.

About your display problems, yeah animation is slow using transposer, even on my dual 3.0ghz p4 and athlon 3800x2 with 9800xt vid cards(not the best but still good cards). Native format is much better. Now if they will simply combine the good features of transposer(dynamics, light import, accurate gi rendering of eyebrows and eyelashes) and native(morphs, speed), then we will begin to have a truly fully fleshed out solution. Right now the workarounds are adequarte, but leave me asking, please just finish it off!

Jaeger · 12th January 2006, 07:43

So what you're saying is that, if I'm combining Carrara-generated objects with Poser imports, the best approach, where possible, is to do as much animation as I can before I do the Poser import, and that I should try to use the native import rather than Transposer unless absolutely necessary?

Charles · 12th January 2006, 21:16

Basically yes. Unfortunately there is nothing we can do about the speed of TransPoser because the time is spent in the Poser SDK. The native import should be faster but you have to consider that it is not as robust as TransPoser. So i would say use the Native Importer when it works for you and TransPoser when you have no other choice (for instance if you need dynamic hair or clothes). That should speed up your workflow

Jaeger · 13th January 2006, 06:10

Thanks for the advice - it was very helpful.

9th January 2006, 04:41	#1 (permalink)
Jaeger Cube Join Date: Jan 2006 Posts: 62	Carrara Crawling - what to upgrade? I'm a total newbie, so please feel free to say RTFM if appropriate. I've just bought Carrara 5 Pro, with the latest patch. The first project that I'm working on is an import from Poser, and consists of two M3 and two V3 models, with simple clothing/hair, no special textures or other complexities. 100 frames of animation, with a lot of keyframes (Mimic-generated lip-synch). All obj's are in external Poser runtimes. Imported using Transposer. It took around 10 minutes to import into Carrara, and the same to load the Carrara file now that I've done the import. Moving around the Carrara rooms takes unacceptably long, and all Carrara operations seem to be very slow (setting camera angles and so on). Rendering speeds are OK, but I've twice had memory-related errors while trying to render, and it seems to be having problems working with a DV codec (my preferred output format). My PC is 3.8GHz with hyperthreading, 1GB RAM. Is the problem simply inadequate RAM? I'm used to Poser, which is heavy on CPU but not too bad with RAM, but am I right in concluding that this is too low for Carrara? I don't mind going out and buying the RAM, but would appreciate any feedback on whether my interpretation of the cause of the slowness is accurate, and any tweaking suggestions, first.

10th January 2006, 00:16	#5 (permalink)
Pete Exxtreme Lick it up Join Date: Jun 2005 Location: Thonon/France Posts: 4,631	What is your video card too ? __________________ Toute faute de frappe ou erreur de syntaxe sont dues a un clavier rebelle à toute forme d'autorité. LightWave 9 \| Hexagon 2 My gallery

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9th January 2006, 09:52	#2 (permalink)
medeamajic Now, I learn animation Join Date: Sep 2005 Posts: 1,028	I am not an expert of 3-D animation. I do know that dynamic hair will slow the system down if you are trying to view it in the preview room. See if your ram is maxed out in the task manager. Is your system slow just using geometric primatives?

9th January 2006, 23:47	#3 (permalink)
Jaeger Cube Join Date: Jan 2006 Posts: 62	It's slower than I would have expected even with primitives, but most of the slowness is in the Assemble and Model rooms. Rendering, including preview, is the only activity that's faster than Poser.

10th January 2006, 00:15	#4 (permalink)
Patrick210 Pixar want to hire me! Join Date: Apr 2004 Location: Florida, USA Posts: 549	You definitely need more ram, the more the better. I haven't worked with only 1 gig of ram for a few years. Possibly check your display settings for OpenGL, fully textured will slow things down with lots of mapped textured. Patrick

10th January 2006, 02:56	#6 (permalink)
medeamajic Now, I learn animation Join Date: Sep 2005 Posts: 1,028	You should be able to flip and rotate the primatives with with out being slow or slugish if you use the default shader. It may be a video card conflict but I doubt it is ram if the geometric primatives are slow and slugish. Is the RAM maxed out in the task manager? I don't think Carrara has a memory leak.

10th January 2006, 23:56	#7 (permalink)
Charles Eovia Join Date: Jul 2005 Posts: 53	If you used TransPoser to import Poser objects it is unfortunately normal that animation is slow. The Poser sdk is not very fast when it comes to generate the mesh of the characters... Regarding the display, are you using OpenGL? Moving big objects around is only going to be fast in OpenGL and if you have a good graphic card that supports OpenGL.

11th January 2006, 00:29	#8 (permalink)
Charles Eovia Join Date: Jul 2005 Posts: 53	Regarding the memory allocation error, we have found two causes: one is a bug with terrains and shadow buffer that will be fixed in the next update. The second is the use of subsurface scattering with replicated trees which simply uses too much memory

11th January 2006, 04:20	#9 (permalink)
bwtr Brian Join Date: Jul 2005 Location: South Australia Posts: 2,094	Every App should have a Charles!

11th January 2006, 06:42	#10 (permalink)
Jaeger Cube Join Date: Jan 2006 Posts: 62	Thanks so much for all the responses! Based on Patrick's reply, I bought and installed 4GB RAM yesterday, and it seems to have solved most of the problems. (It also made my husband very happy, as he got my existing RAM). Everything's running at acceptable speeds except animation. My card is NVidia GeForce MM something or other - I can't remember the exact version, but will check tonight (I'm at work at the moment). It definitely supports OpenGL. I updated the drivers and did some tweaking yesterday. Preview and rendering are both acceptable speeds at the moment, but I think there should still be some room for improvement, so I'll go back and look tonight based on the replies here. Yes, I used Transposer. Incidentally, is there a bug in this regarding fps? It asks about four times per imported object. Animation still sucks. It takes forever to move from one frame to another, and there is no way I can see what's happening until I render. I'm trying at the moment to do all of the model animation in Poser before moving to Carrara, and just do camera movements in Carrara.

11th January 2006, 18:39	#11 (permalink)
jtbullet Box modeling Join Date: Jul 2005 Posts: 237	You know what carrara does faster than poser? 1. Physics 2. Terrains 3. Atmospheres 4. Modelling 5. Tree Generation 6. etc. you see my point. Poser is great at what it does, no doubt about it. Carrara is ok at some things Poser does. Poser is no good at the things listed above. Maybe we are moving towards a more robust poser solution for carrara. In the meantime, setting up complex scenes using poser and carrara has never been better, when you factor in the current capabilities. One day someone will write a new character file format and it will be bye-bye poser for a lot of people. Curious labs should be at the forefront of creating that new standard. they must protect their niche. About your display problems, yeah animation is slow using transposer, even on my dual 3.0ghz p4 and athlon 3800x2 with 9800xt vid cards(not the best but still good cards). Native format is much better. Now if they will simply combine the good features of transposer(dynamics, light import, accurate gi rendering of eyebrows and eyelashes) and native(morphs, speed), then we will begin to have a truly fully fleshed out solution. Right now the workarounds are adequarte, but leave me asking, please just finish it off!

12th January 2006, 07:43	#12 (permalink)
Jaeger Cube Join Date: Jan 2006 Posts: 62	So what you're saying is that, if I'm combining Carrara-generated objects with Poser imports, the best approach, where possible, is to do as much animation as I can before I do the Poser import, and that I should try to use the native import rather than Transposer unless absolutely necessary?

12th January 2006, 21:16	#13 (permalink)
Charles Eovia Join Date: Jul 2005 Posts: 53	Basically yes. Unfortunately there is nothing we can do about the speed of TransPoser because the time is spent in the Poser SDK. The native import should be faster but you have to consider that it is not as robust as TransPoser. So i would say use the Native Importer when it works for you and TransPoser when you have no other choice (for instance if you need dynamic hair or clothes). That should speed up your workflow

13th January 2006, 06:10	#14 (permalink)
Jaeger Cube Join Date: Jan 2006 Posts: 62	Thanks for the advice - it was very helpful.