1.6 Daily builds changelog

[Ondra]

Daily builds are available in the usual place: https://coronarenderer.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/5000570015-daily-builds



So far just removing some dead code ;)

[Ondra]

lets start!

Bugfixes

• Fixed .conf error popups on startup when running Corona under windows user with unicode name
• Fixed: settings scatter density to 0 did not actually remove all instances
• Fixed: interactive not updating when changing fstop: https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php/topic,13428.0.html
• Renderstamp now fully supports unicode

Improvements

• Added option to keep the CoronaLight white for direct visibility even when using highly directional emission distribution
• Glare speedup by 33% (esp. with low glare blur)
• Update to embree 2.12: generally faster performance (2-3%) and lowered memory consumption (esp. when using motion blur)
• Autosave now creates folders automatically when set to use nonexisting folder, instead of failing
• Updated interactive doc: http://corona-renderer.com/doc
• Removed lighten, darken operations from mix tex (identical to min, max - updated min, max description)
• Maxscript: added method getRenderType, removed isRendering: https://corona-renderer.com/wiki/maxscript

UI

• Scatter dialog sizing improved
• Fixed system settings dialog layout
• Added clarifying warning to Output texmap - that affected by color mapping is not compatible with changing postprocessing during render
• .conf parsing error message now shows location of the problematic file
• out of memory error message improved
• Added clarifying message when mtl editor preview is disabled in interactive

[Ondra]

the big one is here! hopefully everything works ;)


Major new features

• Added fuzzy render regions in corona VFB - click and drag region while holding ctrl
• Mix Tex now works with bump mapping in all modes, properly blending individual map bump results
• LUTs no longer clamp overbright values, instead they extrapolate
• Added curve color mapping controls
• Added stereo perspective camera
• Added Corona triplanar (blended box) texture

Bug fixes

• Fixed bug: on some machines corona kept reactivating and crashing when opening material editor
• Fixed LUT parsing broken in some locales in previous daily build
• Fixed a rare crash in render history
• Fixed crash when closing 3ds Max on some computers
• Fixed crash when NANs were produced in a scene using LUTs
• Fixed lightmix channel not working with A/B history
• Fixed NANs under specific conditions https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php/topic,13812.0.html
• Fixed NANs under different specific conditions https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php/topic,13815
• Fixed UHD cache precision being set wrong in settings, resulting in images with splotches
• Fixed clicking on tools button in VFB and then again did not return the VFB to exact previous size
• Fixed crash when using bloom&glare on 1*1 px render
• Fixed: scatter not updating with animated texmap: https://corona-renderer.com/bugs/view.php?id=2202 https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?topic=13496
• Fixed crash when RoundedEdges map was plugged into opacity slot
• Fixed: bloom & glare not updating in docked interactive VFB https://corona-renderer.com/bugs/view.php?id=2336
• Fixed: bloom & glare temporarily displayed on non-matching image when moving camera in IR: https://corona-renderer.com/bugs/view.php?id=2210
• Fixed: bloom & glare on/off checkbox state not loaded when using save&load in VFB postprocess tab https://corona-renderer.com/bugs/view.php?id=2298
• Fixed render regions in VFB not updating in some rare cases
• Fixed: images saved black when rendering regions and saving to image format with transparency https://corona-renderer.com/bugs/view.php?id=2234
• Fixed: Bloom & glare effects with VR/stereo camera no longer incorrectly bleed between left eye and right eye image

Speed improvements

• LUT parsing speedup: 3-5 times faster
• Around 20% faster bloom & glare computations using 16-bit floats on computers supporting F16C instruction set extension (Intel Ivy Bridge and later). This should have no effect on the visual quality, but can be disabled in devel/experimental rollout in case of any problems.
• Significantly improved sampling of HDR environment maps with significant contrast (for example with baked-in sun). Renders with HDRI should now have up to half the noise for same rendertime.

Minor improvements

• Remove fireflies denoising mode now works for render elements
• Lowered memory requirements of denoising render elements
• Denoised render elements elements are now displayed as soon as ready, one-by-one - corona no longer waits until all denoised elements are computed
• Added new render stamp variables: corona build name (%bn), preprocessing time (%ptp), number of CPU threads (%ct)
• System-wide settings are now versioned to rule out conflicts when changing between daily builds and stable version
• CoronaBitmap bump mapping now works outside of Corona
• Added sRGB (Photoshop-matching) invert option to CoronaOutput
• Added support for 3ds Max stereo camera plugin
• Distance texture now shows warning in the render when no node is plugged in
• gi.hdCache.* parameters renamed to gi.uhdCache.*
• Updated the scatter lister script to 1.01:
  
  • Added a version number to the header of the program
  • Lister window now resizes to be high just enough for all the scatters to fit, saving space
  • Fixed crashes when instancing and referencing scatters (Lister now shows both instances)
  • Minor bug fixes and performance increases.

UI

• Added LUT controls into VFB postprocess tab
• Added taskbar progress bar to 3dsmax during rendering
• Fixed glitch in CoronaMtl UI
• Added tooltips to Corona Color Picker
• Skinned checkboxes in Corona VFB
• Changed maximum value of mtl editor quality to 50
• Opacity cutout/clip checkbox in CoronaMtl changed to be off by default
• Long dropdowns in VFB render passes select are no longer clipped by the bottom end of VFB window
• Flip green checkbox in CoronaNormal is now on by default
• Changed defaults of bloom and glare intensity to 1 (with default for “enable” checkbox remaining at false)
• Corona buttons are now drawn with different color when disabled

[Ondra]

New features

• Significantly improved refresh rate of interactive rendering when moving viewport quickly. Difference is most observable in simpler scenes
• Added support for 3dsmax “2D Pan Zoom” feature in interactive rendering (max 2014+)
• Recently used LUTs are cached in memory to allow faster switching between them.
• Added support for zooming-in in Corona VFB during interactive rendering. The renderer automatically focuses on visible area

Improvements

• Improved adaptivity and denoising results in some rare cases.
• Reverted “flip green” default change from previous dailies since there is no clear consensus on what the option should be by default
• Fixed cubemap + blowup + displacement rendering
• Fixed noise amount sometimes computed incorrectly in image: https://corona-renderer.com/bugs/view.php?id=2369
• Fixed freezes when changing tone mapping controls in VFB (introduced in previous daily)
• Fixed crash when switching between interactive and regular rendering (introduced in previous daily)
• Fixed Corona VFB history showing black images when used with region render
• Fixed denoising turning image out of render regions black https://corona-renderer.com/bugs/view.php?id=2290
• Faster drawing of image in docked VFB
• Fixed bug with taskbar progress being stuck sometimes
• Denoising is now no longer crashing when out of memory, instead error message is displayed

UI

• Added tooltips for triplanar tex
• Denoising is now properly disabled when rendering only elements
• Fixed Shift+Tab not working on some elements in Corona VFB
• Improved combobox drawing
• Fixed combobox sometimes not closing (introduced in previous daily)
• Fixed checkbox in corona VFB sometimes drawn without skin
• Corona combo box now has scrollbar if enough items are present
• TAB key in Corona postprocessing VFB tab now goes through all adjustable controls
• Made the focused checkbox border less prominent

Curves controls

• Made curves ajustment more responsive
• When zooming in/out in curves control, histogram now updates accordingly
• Improved how equalize in curves work with HDR images
• Curves controls is now closed when VFB is closed
• Curves window is no longer always on top of non-3dsmax windows

[Ondra]

•     Fixed incorrect resizing of Corona VFB on double-click (https://corona-renderer.com/bugs/view.php?id=2386)
•     Fixed rare crash when system ran out of memory during denoising
•     Unified Corona prompts and info popups (message boxes)
•     Fixed bug causing CoronaSun being a bit smaller when textured
•     Bloom & Glare now properly handles the left-right seam in 360deg renderings and tries to approximate the deformation near poles
•     Fixed crash when denoising was enabled during rendering (https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php/topic,14416.msg92233.htm)
•     Fixed DR producing incorrect alpha values (https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php/topic,13401.msg91735.html#msg91735)

[Ondra]

Fixed denoising not working

New DR - experimental

• Improved UI DR server + DR tab in VFB
• Slaves report their current status to master
• Showing memory usage of slaves
• Customizable names of slaves
• 3dsmax on slaves is spawned immediately after DR server starts
• Slaves now automatically gather missing assets from master and cache them locally
• Adaptivity + DR now works
• DR slaves now respect VFB regions, region layout on slaves is updated every time they send the results to master
• Better response of DR: sends results faster
• Improved anti-aliasing in DR when every slave renders only a few passes
  

[Ondra]

Resuming dailies after big rewrite

New features

• Added cross and mirror ball environment modes to Corona Bitmap
• Added image sharpening/blurring to postprocessing controls
• Added linear exposure to Corona Output map
• Added object space normal and object gradient modes to CoronaDataTex
• Added tone mapping on/off checkbox to Corona VFB
• Added on/off checkboxes to lightmix groups in VFB
• Added lens distortion support (3ds Max physical camera) - both cubic and texture modes are supported
• Added frequency spinners to Corona Multimap
• Added color swatches to triplanar texture
• Added option to bake lightmix into the scene - still very experimental - does not work with instanced lights for example

Improvements/fixes

• Previous denoised image is no longer destroyed when re-rendering only a region with clear VFB off
• Fixed denoising values from last render remaining on screen during next render
• Fixed Corona EXR opening  in photoshop and took safety measures so it wont get broken in the future again
• Improved quality of rounded edges shader
• Vignetting is now no longer applied when using spherical/cylindrical/cubemap camera
• Vignetting is now applied before other tone mapping, resulting in improved more dynamic look
• Added collapsible groups to Corona fb
• Generally improved speed by using better random sampling
• Reduced flickering of the stats VFB panel
• Bloom&Glare is now always disabled on Corona DR slaves, slightly lowering memory/cpu usage
• Relative error is now shown with 2 decimal places
• Fixed incorrect characters sometimes appearing in autosave filenames, disabling them: https://corona-renderer.com/bugs/view.php?id=2433
• Improved the way expanding variables in autosave works - now it is possible to use for example D:/autosave/%f/autosave.exr to save each scene autosave into different subfolder (with subfolders created automatically)
• Vfb regions: scaled together with image instead of being removed on render start
• Vfb regions: saved in max scene
• Vfb regions:can be disabled and later re-enabled (dropdown in menu)

DR bugfixes

• fixed a bug preventing user from cancelling DR
• fixed textures not working when rendering with backburner
• fixed CPU load on slaves when no render is running
• fixed rendering of black images on slaves when VFB region is used
• fixed DR not being cancelled when render is stopped during GI precomputation
• fixed incorrect number of passes received from slaves

[Ondra]

mostly DR bugfix daily

• Lightmix is now computed in Wide RGB, same as normal rendering, to make its postproduction effect match more closely what Corona renders
• UI: Fixed Lightmix tab not showing correct controls first time rendering after opening 3dsmax
• UI: Shadowcatcher mtl: Fixed tooltip for “use matte projection mode”, hidden unused “keep aspect ratio control”
• UI: added feedback message after clicking Setup Interactive LightMix informing how many lights/elements were created
• Internal 3dsmax Corona name changed to just CoronaRenderer so every version of Corona can be invoked from maxscript using the same command
• UI: Deleted nodes no longer count towards number of included/excluded nodes on include/exclude buttons
• UI: Setup lightmix button is now greyed out while rendering
• Fixed some LUTs not loading: https://corona-renderer.com/bugs/view.php?id=2498
• UI: low memory message now prints system used memory and statistics of individual corona subsystems memory usage (currently only framebuffer)
• Corona VFB title is now system-wide modifiable property - works with all render stamp placeholders, and few more. Changed default to show camera name and frame number

DR

• Fixed Corona proxy not being rendered by DR slaves
• Fixed scrollbar in DR tab
• Pass limit now works correctly with DR
• Slaves no longer fetch assets from master if the assets are stored in shared network folder

[Ondra]

• Fixed which controls are frozen and which not when enabling/disabling tone mapping
• Fixed VFB title being reset on render end
• Flipped channel output in object space normal and object gradient modes of data tex to improve compatibility with substance designer
• Reduced black fringe around lights when using sharpening
• Fixed: lights not assigned to light select elements correctly when not using lightmix, but only light select elements [size=78%]https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php/topic,15085[/size]
• Fixed displayed element type in render to texture UI for corona bake render elements
• Fixed incorrect scaling of VFB regions when resolution changes
• Fixed crash of DR slaves on scenes containing XRefs
• Fixed VFB stats panel not showing statistics if another panel was displayed during render

[Ondra]

Big IR and DR bugfixes:

• Estimated remaining time to finish render is now also computed from noise level, if noise limit is set
• Distance tex now properly handles particle objects
• Low memory warning now shows more info
• Installer Unpack behavior improved: now it unpacks by default to actual folder, and opens the selected folder after unpacking
• Added Psycho random sampler
• Improved triplanar texmap filtering, fixed bump mapping working incorrectly in triplanar texmap https://corona-renderer.com/bugs/view.php?id=2457
• Fixed: slow IR update rate when using physical camera https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php/topic,12115.0.html
• IR improvement: scene is not entirely reparsed sometimes when not needed
• Fixed: IR restarting when viewport selection changes with command panel open https://corona-renderer.com/bugs/view.php?id=2163
• Fixed: IR restarting when changing editable poly subselection mode (vertex, line, poly, …) without modifying anything
• Fixed: IR restarting when just selecting vertices/polygons in editable poly (without modifying them)
• Fixed: command panel in Corona VFB still taking over scrolling when hidden
• Changed default VFB history folder limit from 512MB (too low) to 2GB
• Improved adaptive image sampling
• Fixed: VFB window closing immediately after texture baking
• Added option to denoise texture baking (RTT) render elements
• DR: Fixed master waiting endlessly for final EXR dumps
• DR: Fixed issues when assets were stored in folders with non-ascii characters

[Ondra]

Important bug fixes!

• Fixed: Distance texmap + animated objects do not update properly in animations
• Fixed: slow pixel probe in Corona VFB when using bloom & glare
• Added image individual image filters description into tooltip
• Fixed IR restarting the first time user clicked into a viewport
• FIxed instancing not working on objects with deformable motion blur

[Ondra]

quick daily with some more fixes:

• Fixed: crash when starting IR without corona being production renderer https://corona-renderer.com/bugs/view.php?id=2497
• Corona now shows warning when saving baking render element failed
• FIxed: crash when a scatter with over 2 billions polygons was plugged into DistanceTex
• Fixed: Corona bitmap and other maps not updating in viewport when scrubbing timeline https://corona-renderer.com/bugs/view.php?id=2476

[Ondra]

• Improved texture filtering for displacement and triplanar texture
• Fixed in previous dailies, but mentioning it for completeness sake: incorrect motion blur value used in IR when rendering with physical camera
• Fixed UI layout issues for system-wide setting, CoronaLightMtl
• CoronaLightMtl: fixed exclude + button not freezing with the main exclude button
• Added Gbuffer override to LightMtl (for more than 16 values)
• Changed AO default samples parameter from 16 to 12, since the new sampler samples more efficiently - same quality is achieved with less samples
• DR: “waiting for nodes” window timeout fixed - now timeout happens after 10 seconds of inactivity from all nodes
• Fixed: crash when zooming our a huge render with renderstamp in VFB
• Fixed: autosave not accepting folders with spaces in them
• Fixed: indexed color bitmaps loading incorrectly in CoronaBitmap
• Fixed: resizing of interactive Corona VFB on 4k displays
• Added gamma control to CoronaOutput map
• CoronaScatter instances with align to normal ON are no longer rotated 45 degrees on some geometries
• Fixed crash on collecting data from slaves in DR
• Reworked layered mtl UI

[Ondra]

• Added falloff to wire tex, made it work with bump mapping
• Fixed issues with point cloud display (with a little performance drop in viewport)
• Lightmix coefficients now stick with their render elements, even when deleting a layer
• Fixed lightmix Bake to scene behavior when using instanced lights
• Fixed lightmix bake to scene with photometric lights

[Ondra]

• Added initial support for Render To Texture projection modifier. Note that we need user feedback from betatesters to make it production proof
• Fixed a dot appearing in middle of image when using lens distortion https://corona-renderer.com/bugs/view.php?id=2516
• Sharpening and blurring can now be used at the same time to break pixel-perfect noise
• FIxed rare cases of Corona locking up when using bloom & glare
• Fixed master sometimes not finding slaves when searching LAN
• Slaves found through Search LAN now show user specified names instead of hostnames

"Setup Interactive LightMix" button now launches a new dialog with additional configuration

• Multiple options to group lights to LightMix layers: by groups, by instances, no grouping
• Preview of number of elements created & consumed memory
• Better warning display