Daily Builds 1.5

[pokoy]

Why not? Your falloff  setting is very agressive, that's why transition is so harsh. I always set falloff to 0 and play with intensity first and if intensity alone isn't enough, only the i start to move falloff slider. But that's just my preference. Anyway i try to stay away from vignette, as it more often than not can just ruin picture.

Please have a look at the Lens Correction filter in PS, see attached images. It will always blur the transition making the falloff look way more natural regardless of how 'extreme' your values are. Corona's vignette seems to paint a gradient and then apply contrast, that's why the gradient borders end up looking too harsh for anything else than 1. The current solution is ugly if you ask me. I bet this will come up pretty often if it stays like this.

[Juraj]

Pokoy got point, it looks odd.

Falloff is weird parameter for vignette anyway, Midpoint is much better, and never creates visually incorrect result. But yay, saturation :- )

100perc. Strength, Midpoint 50 (default) on left, 100perc. Strength, Midpoint 0 (full) on right. CameraRaw, post-crop vignette, highlight priority mode (physically accurate for images with dynamic range above 1).

[pokoy]

Good examples, also shows that a proper vignette should also respect image ratio, currently it's circular no matter what.

[Juraj]

Good examples, also shows that a proper vignette should also respect image ratio, currently it's circular no matter what.

Circularity is really good parameter, but it's one additional (and then you could say why not feather,etc..). But yes, it should at least as default respect ratio.

[TomG]

I like the bloom and glare results!

One thing I notice, it seems like the Ray Count has a significant effect on render time. The scene below was 18 seconds with none of the new effects, 19 seconds with a Ray Count of 1 (if Glare Power is above 0), 29 seconds with a Ray Count of 5, and 35 seconds with a Ray Count of 8. Increasing Glare Power didn't seem to impact render time.

Of course, it is showing the effect during the rendering, rather than only appearing on the image once the render is complete, and is also relatively slow to update the VFB image when the values are changed after render is complete (about 3 seconds to change from Ray Count 1 to Ray Count 8).

Naturally, it's all experimental at this stage, but wanted to report the findings!

[alexyork]

This is just perfect timing.... we're producing some work right now that we really wanted to get some in-render glare and bloom going and.. here it is.

Excited to try this out!

Would it be possible to control where these effects are applied by object? For example a checkbox for "only on coronasun", so you're effectively enabling glare on/around your sun? This would be great... Or perhaps this is a different type of effect entirely, more in line with lens flares...

You guys weren't kidding about hiring a full-time staff just to work on VFB stuff, eh? It sounds like it would be worthwhile! Tools like this are invaluable for us.

Cheers,

[FrostKiwi]

Bloom looking really good, but it desperately needs a threshold setting.
I want a stronger Bloom from the windows, without making the rest of the image look like alice in wonder land.

I understand the aim of maybe trying to base bloom of real brightness, but bloom is artistic in it's core and Bloom without threshold is barely usable at times.

[pokoy]

I find bloom and glare being a bit too much mostly, too. A threshold would be indeed welcome.

Another welcome addition would be if bloom and glare would be alpha aware. When rendering against a photo plate I wouldn't want it added to my background, only to the geometry.

I have more thoughts on how the rays look as they are not looking very natural now, I'll try to come up with some examples.

[Juraj]

I will add some positive feedback :- ) The controls and behavior on first look, do look identical to Octane/F-Storm, which is good thing.

Default ray look will always be bit fake, some blurring, shift and rotation needs to selected but perhaps it will never simulate the real deal without mask.

Esp. wide angled architectural lenses (from f/11 higher) feature lot of rays, with sub-rays as form of blurring. So it's 14 flares and each flare up to 4 "mini-flares" (perhaps due to astigmatism?).
The rays are also irregular in length.

Prime architectural lens (24/28):



Zoom architectural lens (much stronger flare), like Nikkor 14-24 f/2.8  (probably f/16 in this example)



I don't think there needs to be more controls, but perhaps a mask for custom shape ?

[romullus]

Nearly had heart attack when i realised that starting from build jun 27, scenes are no longer backward compatible. Thanks god for my habit to save incrementally every so often, otherwise i would be in deep trouble. Lesson learned, never mix daily builds with serious projects. Nonetheless, warning about introduced backward incompatibility, wouldn't hurt in changelog ;]

[pokoy]

Thanks for the info, didn't know either... too late for me, unfortunately :/

After some more experimenting with glare & bloom I have to say I love the hue power and shift parameters, you can get some funky effects there, nice stuff.

I didn't want to come across too negative in my last post but glare needs some more work.
The light streaks/rays look too flat, the streaks need to be more pronounced in the center and their intensity would need to decrease with distance from the hot pixels.
Also, I'd love to see a control for ray length, intensity alone gives us too little control imo.

Otherwise really pleased to see this in the VFB updating in real time nearly, also great to have filmic tonemapping and saturation in there. Very nice additions!

[romullus]

Don't know how it is implemented in Corona now (can't test DB's at the moment (arrrgh!)), but i think streaks length should (could) be directly tied to aperture like it is in real world, i.e. the bigger F number is, the more prominent light streaks should be.

[Ludvik Koutny]

Aside from camera aperture, length of glare streaks is tied to their intensity, so more intense hotspots also produce larger glare.








It would be really unfortunate if there was glare streak length that is unrelated to glare intensity. That's how it works with V-Ray lens effects, where all glares on the image have exactly same rigid size that is set in the settings. Due to that, it's just impossible to get a good/realistic looking glare from V-Ray's lens effect as long as there are multiple glare sources on the image.

[romullus]

Quickly tried glare&bloom, got render exception error message after few renders. I am able to work with scene after that message though. Interestingly that message is showing only when i stop render through VFB button. There's no error if i cancel render through rendering dialog.

Effect update speed isn't impressive. Maybe it's possible to add "Fast preview" checkbox in VFB to allow real or near real time lower quality preview?

[antanas]

 Well simply put, but imho, current bloom and glare implementation is not too beautiful nor too realistic, currently it is somewhat on par with VFB+'s implementation - it's Ok but nothing more and it would definitely be better to have something like ArionFx does

- well at least the first part of the video - and the ability to boost those hotpixels\overbright reflections  if needed like it does in the second part + the ratio\threshold like http://support.randomcontrol.com/display/XFP/HDR+bloom or in VFB+ is a must, same goes for glare http://support.randomcontrol.com/display/XFP/HDR+glare . Overall, ArionFx (and I think everyone who uses it would agree)  has the best implementation of those effects out there and I don't think there's a point of producing something less advanced or less real looking for Corona, I would be gladly willing to sacrifice current almost realtime calculation speed of those effects in favor of their quality even if they would take some time to calculate like in ArionFx.
 My point is - Corona is the best renderengine so it's bloom, glare, vignette and other effects should be best too or not be at all, so please take no offense if I put it too harshly - I just think it would be better to express my honest opinion on the matter as it would benefit my favorite render engine and thus all people involved way more than trying to beat around the bush so to say )