Topics

1

[Max] I need help! / Setting up DR after a fresh windows install on master and nodes

« on: 2025-04-15, 16:43:31 »

So I've just finished a clean install of windows across my pc's.  I'm now setting up DR again so it works seamlessly but have a couple of questions.

I've found some articles that detail the setup but I'm wondering how up to date they are - for example, do we still need to install Backburner as per this article https://support.chaos.com/hc/en-us/articles/4528608387217-How-to-use-Distributed-Rendering-in-Corona-for-3ds-Max

I can only find this version of Backburner https://apps.autodesk.com/3DSMAX/en/Detail/Index?id=3481100546473279788&appLang=en&os=Win64 but it doesn't say it's compatible with 2025 which is what I've just installed.  I was on 2024 before the reinstall.  The article states Backburner versions need to match Max versions ....

Also in this article https://support.chaos.com/hc/en-us/articles/4528128298257-Creating-custom-inbound-and-outbound-rules-for-the-DR-Server-application is everything still relevant and do we need to do all of this on the master and the slaves?

Of if there's a clearer more up to date guide somewhere please point me in the right direction.

2

Off-Topic / Network Drives

« on: 2025-04-11, 16:36:31 »

All of my Projects and Assets are stored on my NAS,  I'm just rebuilding my PC's at the minute and wondered if there's much difference between these two options with regards to DR?  Should either be avoided?  Are either faster with regards to saving/reading/writing/loading etc?  Or does it literally make no difference?

I'm not technical but the way i understand it, one maps to a drive letter, the other doesn't.

3

Off-Topic / Pricing VR Tours

« on: 2025-03-05, 14:22:25 »

Pretty much as the title suggests.

How are people going about pricing VR Tours.

I'm not asking for actual costs - but just your process/thinking when pricing.

Let's assume the project is simply a VR Tour to be displayed on a website only, there are no previous still images/animations for the project.  The client wants a VR Tour and nothing else.

4

[Max] I need help! / AI Upscaling doesn't carry through to VFB history

« on: 2025-01-22, 17:10:06 »

If I do some interactive rendering with the AI upscaling option checked, then try and save my VFB to history, the result in the history looks as if AI upscaling was never enabled ...

5

[Max] General Discussion / Displacement is still rubbish

« on: 2025-01-19, 14:27:01 »

Are there any plans to drastically improve displacement because frankly it's still absolutely terrible and absolutely riddled with artifacts.

The ONLY way to get displacement to behave correctly is by having a perfect quad mesh with dense uniformly sized quads, which is ridiculous in the context of modeling buildings with chamfered edges because the size of the uniform quads would need be driven by the tightness of the edges around the chamfers.  And absolutely nobody is modeling walls/buildings with perfectly uniform tiny quads.  Model basic wall, add edge loops for window openings, delete poly to create window opening, chamfer modifier for rounded corners.  That should be more than enough for modeling buildings.  But no, not if you want to use displacement.  Then you have to make sure the geometry is perfectly uniform quads.

It doesn't even work on simple flat surface, see the driveway in the artifacts screenshot below.  That's a spline for the main shape, then extruded, then edit poly with everything but the top face deleted.

The screenshots below are an override material with preserve disaplacement enabled. 1px for the displacement.  5k render.  The override shader has wires to highlight just how many artifacts there still are.

I've also done a simple version with some simply geometry, however, in this example I've made the driveway a really dense quad mesh so you can see how the displacement improves.  But I couldn't imagine refining that simple piece of geometry to a dense uniform quad mesh just to get displacement to work properly.  It's just not practical in the context of a full scene with full buildings as opposed to simplified example geometry.  The mesh in the viewport screenshot should be more than enough for a typical building.

Displacement is a mess.

6

[Max] I need help! / Normal Maps Affecting Shader Brightness

« on: 2024-12-19, 14:52:31 »

Is it normal - excuse the pun - for a normal map to alter how bright a material appears?

I've just done two tests side by side and the brightness change is clearly visible when sliding between just displacement vs displacement + normals?

I've zoomed into 1 pixel and sampled the colour and it does indeed change the values.

Displacement only looks fine.  Displacement + Normals looks duller.

What I can't figure out is whether the reduced brightness is a side effect of the extra perceived detail from the Normal map, or if it's just how Normal Maps work, or if it's not working properly.  Lack of technical knowledge as to how normal maps work isn't helping me.

I've attached the two version for comparison.

7

[Max] General Discussion / Corona 12 Update 1

« on: 2024-12-11, 23:49:11 »

How is everyone feeling about this latest release?  Personally I'm finding it to be a real bottleneck in my workflow.  I can't really pinpoint anything, it just feels sloooooowww.  Renders seem to take a lot longer to actually start.  They seem to take longer to render. Opening files seems to take longer.  IR is pretty much unusable for me right now it grinds my pc to a halt.  Working with 2 instances of Max open is a chore.  Opening dialogue boxes while a render or IR is running takes ages.  It's as if it's hogging absolutely ever available resource my PC has.  Everything just feels really really sluggish, much more than 12 Hotfix 1 ....

My current scene isn't that heavy, I isolated a plane to test the shader on it (a pavement), no displacement, so a simple plane and a hdri, it took IR about 3 minutes to kick into action ...

8

[Max] General Discussion / VFB in C12 Update 1

« on: 2024-12-06, 20:25:50 »

What is up with the VFB in Corona 12 Update 1

If you zoom out, then zoom back in to 100%, it takes a decent amount of time for the resolution of the actual render to catch up.  It physically zooms fine, but the render stays low res for a good few seconds before it gains it's full fidelity.  This used to be instant.  Another slowdown when we're meant to be advancing ...

9

[Max] I need help! / IR Best Practice

« on: 2024-12-04, 21:38:18 »

What is best practice when using IR in terms of CPU?  Is it best to limit it to a set amount of cores in task manager?  I ask because I've just upgraded to 12 Update 1 and interactive is absolutely grinding my PC to halt, I'm only trying to preview a set of stairs and I can barely move anything around, and when I do there's instant lag.

I just unticked 2 of my cores and it becomes snappy(er) again

10

General CG Discussion / Chaos Complaints

« on: 2024-11-22, 10:12:19 »

Where can we direct Chaos complaints/grumbles to?

I've had a notification this morning to say my license has been renewed.  No problem.

However, there's no indication as to how much I've paid/will be paying.  There was no courtesy email in the build up to say something along the lines of "your license will renew soon for £XXX".  I can't find anything in my account that shows how much I have/will paid/pay.

Previously when we renewed our license we'd get an email letting us know when our next renewal will be and how much it will be for.  But I've not had anything like that for this one?

It seems the practice now is if you have auto renewal on then we'll just take the money.  Which is fine, if I knew how much you were taking ...

11

[Max] I need help! / Turn off Gamma Warning

« on: 2024-10-04, 10:38:04 »

How can we turn off the annoying normal map gamma warning.  It makes me want to throw my PC out the window.

12

[Max] Bug Reporting / Sun and Sky Issue

« on: 2024-08-26, 00:07:30 »

This might be the way it's supposed to work, but ... if I have a Corona Sun in a daylight system with a Corona Sky in the Environment.  Everything works as expected.  If I take the time to say 9pm at night, you get the nice dusk sky BUT, if I turn the sun off at this point, the sky goes super bright?  Why is that?

Just to add, this also happens at any time of day?

13

[Max] Bug Reporting / Slow VFB

« on: 2024-08-25, 16:35:37 »

Not sure this is a bug or just an innefficient feature.  But the tone mapping stack responds really really slowly if you have a Curves operator expanded in the stack to show the histogram.

Turning on and off different operators such as Contrast and Tone Curve take forever to update in the render window, until you collapse the curve operator so the histogram isn't visible or get rid of it altogether.

14

[Max] Feature Requests / Lister 'Select' Function

« on: 2024-08-20, 10:10:12 »

Is there any way to get the 'Select' function in Corona Lister to do a quick 'deselect all' first when you press it.

If I've already got something selected in my scene, then I open lister and use the select button to select a light, it just adds it to my current selection.  Not ideal.

My use case here is the Corona sun which is attached to a daylight system.  I want to select the sun from lister so I can then go and manipulate it's date/time etc, stuff that I can't manipulate directly in lister itself.  But it kind of defeats the object if I can't manipulate something after selecting it because something else was randomly selected in the scene before opening lister

15

[Max] I need help! / Help with faking a lighting effect

« on: 2024-08-14, 23:44:24 »

As the sun starts to disappear I get this incredible lighting effect happening in my living room.

I'm wondering how to fake this because the recreating the reality would be huge overkill imo.

The reality (see second pic) - as the sun sets it reflects off this nasty cheap wavy perspex type material.  The perspex is really dirty and really warped/bendy.  Behind the perspex is a stained glass window.  The light then bounces into my living room, through my bay window, which has double glazed sash windows, and finally through the shutters and onto the living room wall.  The result is the gorgeous effect you see here.

How would you recreate the effect without modeling/shading the reality of the environment that's creating it?