Topics

46

[Max] Resolved Feature Requests / Improve CoronaLayeredMtl

« on: 2016-05-24, 19:10:34 »

Since 1.5 is about smaller improvements to existing features maybe the design if the LayeredMtl could be reconsidered to make it a bit more convenient for lookdev of complex materials.

1. Currently, the amount spinner is only active when there's no mask in a Layered Mtl - why not always? It probably makes sense if you want to use it for decals exclusively but it's highly inconvenient for adding layers like scratches, dirt etc. Making it work right in the material's main UI would help a lot as it won't force the user to mess around with additional output nodes for each mask, speeding up the workflow a lot.
Also, it forces you to remove either the material or the map in order to switch a material off temporarily - see point 2 below. It would be way easier if you could set the amount to zero.

2. I know this has been discussed a lot back then before the material was introduced, please add a checkbox to each Material layer to allow the user to quickly switch it on or off. If we want to disable a layer, we have to either remove the material or the map or replace the map with a black color. I know one important point was the it would clutter the UI but if it's still a concern, you could solve it by using a 2 lines layout for each layer, checkbox and material slot on the top, followed by the amount spinner and the mask slot. I think this would even help to make the UI a bit friendlier to the eye.

3. I would love to see an option for an additional bump slot that would be applied to all materials used within the LayeredMtl in a screen blend fashion or, if this is not possible, replace them. This would be super useful since currently you need to add the same bump map to each of the materials if you want to make it look like one surface... useful for scratches or general deformations of more complex material setups.

I would love to use the LayeredMtl more but it's really clunky to work with as it is now, especially the amount spinner becoming inactive when using masks.

47

[Max] Resolved Bugs / 1.4 - CTexmap element doesn't update in IR mode

« on: 2016-05-24, 17:47:35 »

As the title says. CTexmap element will respect viewport/orbit changes but will not respect changes to the map or background color in IR mode.

48

[Max] I need help! / Adaptivity - questions

« on: 2016-05-20, 18:12:35 »

Adaptivity works really in an unexpected way for my production scenes or maybe I'm just not getting it. The render time estimation keeps growing no matter what and I end up with rendertimes of 25+ hours where the same setup without adaptivity renders a clean image in 3 hours, that is for the same number of passes which I admit will be too much with adaptivity enabled. Looking at the SamplingFocus doesn't help since I don't know how to 'read' it.

I need to understand adaptivity better and have some questions:

- With adaptivity on, is estimated remaining time shown still valid? Should it behave like it does without adaptivity, start with an estimation and then decrease linearly until the render is finished?

- How to read SamplingFocus pass? What does a dark grey mean, what does white mean? Is the pass expected to show black areas?
For example, my backplate (CoronaLightMtl with no emission, not visible to anything except direct rays) displays a value of RGB 50-60. Shouldn't it be completely black or is this the neutral value? The ground plane has a similar material for the direct rays and instead of just being rendered 'as is' like the backplate it shows a lot of white and different grey speckles as if i needs to sample a lot.

- Should the SamplingFocus pass change with render progress? If the beauty pass is noise free, should the pass fade to black/grey/white or whatever color means to be neutral?

I'm not trying to say it's useless - quite the contrary - it really helps to get cleaner images in the same time, but I realize that I need to understand it before being able to get the best out of it.
(P.S. I know about the noise limit, I just would like to learn the answers to the question above)

49

[Max] I need help! / Do I need to adjust GI/AA balance when rendering elements only?

« on: 2016-03-07, 13:06:05 »

I have a shot with stronger DOF, for the beauty render I needed to increase the GI/AA balance a bit. Since rendering elements only won't need any GI I'm not sure if I have to set the value to something lower (so DOF resolves faster) or if the balance doesn't play any role since GI rays are skipped anyways?

50

[Max] Resolved Feature Requests / Include/Exclude Lists behavior improvement suggestions

« on: 2015-10-09, 22:44:23 »

Working with Include/Exclude lists can be super slow with large scenes. There were some improvement (like the '+' button) but it's not proving useful the way it's implemented, at least not for Render Elements. Here are some suggestions:

- The '+' button, when activated, waits for the user to pick an object. This is unfortunately useless when you want to add 100 objects at the same time. It should be the other way around: first you select the objects, then press the button and it adds the selection to the list.
- Add a '-' button to remove current selection from the list. Button behavior should be the same as above, select > press button > objects get removed from the list.
- Add an 'X' button to clear the list. Currently there's no way to clear with a single action without opening the List, selecting all objects and removing them, this should really be improved.
- Please add an indication (either a color on the 'List...' button or as a tooltip) so it's clear whether the list is empty or not. Currently you have to open the List to check.

51

[Max] Resolved Feature Requests / Additional Emission Pass with more control over what gets included

« on: 2015-09-11, 22:07:40 »

I could make good use of the emission pass but it currently includes everything that emits light and lacks control over what to include. Since the CESSENTIAL pass is meant for recreating the beauty pass you probably don't want to change that, but there should be an additional emission pass with more advanced controls, specifically:

- option to exclude background/override background color
- option to exclude CoronaLightMtls
- option to exclude Materials with Self-Illumination
- option to exclude Lights
- option to include/exclude Lights by name

This way one could add several emission passes and have different options for postproduction (fine-grained control of levels, glows, blurs etc.).

52

[Max] Resolved Bugs / Background in screen mode should not resize when rendering in crop mode

« on: 2015-09-10, 14:53:45 »

When you have a bitmap being visible as render background and render the scene in crop mode the bitmap will be resized to match the crop region. This is really frustrating when you render through BB in split scan line mode as the background will be resized and you end up with a wrong render result.

53

[Max] I need help! / Inefficient sampling for distant lights

« on: 2015-09-08, 14:15:24 »

I have an animation where I need a more detailed environment with distant signal lights (think airport runway at night). The camera moves fast and turns by almost 180° so there's some well noticeable motion blur in the background almost all of the time. In real life this would produce nice light streaks from the distant signal lights (from the motion blur and the intense light sources).

Most of the lights are pretty small, around 10-20 cm only, and that's where the sampling becomes inefficient. I need to crank up passes to unreasonably high levels in order to make the streaks look continuous. Render times are 10 times what I need them to be for an acceptable sampling level in the rest of the image, only to have the lights sampled better (though still not looking smooth). If the lights are around 1 m, they produce the effect I'm after and within reasonable pass numbers, but I just can't make them this big in our scene, it'll look completely wrong.

Sometimes, depending on the distance, even without any motion blur some of the lights won't show up, the sampling just keeps missing them. This is unacceptable for an animation since I need them to show up in every frame, not every nth frame in a random manner.

Both Corona Lights and geometry with CoronaLightMtl show the same behavior, unfortunately.
Is there anything I can utilize to make the sampling more efficient, maybe using a different random sampler than the default '2 High-D + PRNG'?

54

[Max] Resolved Bugs / Crash - but only after rendering

« on: 2015-09-07, 13:01:48 »

Max 2016, SP1, Corona 1.2.1

So I have this particular scene where I can do everything with it, model, orbit around, enable/disable layers, view and edit materials etc. and it works fine.
If I render anything, even only a single object and cancel the render, Max will crash after some time (5-10 seconds) or when trying to orbit in the viewport, switch viewports etc.
It's 100% reproducible and really happens only after rendering with Corona.

I can't share the file but I am attaching the minidump, it may give you (and me) some pointers as to what exactly happens here and why...

55

[Max] I need help! / DOF bokeh always too noisy

« on: 2015-09-04, 17:49:35 »

I'm hitting a wall here with a scene where some 'wet' reflective material produce sweet looking bokehs that unfortunately never refine well enough to be considered final.

I have tried various settings, ranging from lowering GI/AA ratio to 2 with enough passes to using Bucket mode in order to refine adaptively but they'll never look really smooth. Bucket mode seems to be better but it's hard to control. Judging by the gallery images it's possible, there are some beautiful looking examples with super smooth bokehs - so what's the secret here?

If anyone has some useful tips on how to solve this, I'm all ears!

56

[Max] Resolved Bugs / Crash when replacing the global override material

« on: 2015-09-02, 14:45:18 »

Corona 1.2.1, max 2016

I had a material assigned to Global Material Override slot and attempted to replace it with a different material, it replaced fine but after a few seconds Max crashed. I'm attaching the minidump from the crash report. Tried to reproduce but no success so far...

57

[Max] Resolved Bugs / Interesting Matedit and Viewport performance behaviour - please test

« on: 2015-08-06, 13:54:35 »

A small interesting thing I just came across.

I have a camera animation in a static scene. The material editor (classic) is filled with some of the scene's materials, Corona is set as main and Matedit renderer.
I am getting interesting results on how the playback in the viewport performs based on the Matedit renderer:

- Matedit opened, Corona set as matedit renderer: playback crawls
- Matedit closed: playback is perfect

Now change the matedit renderer to Scanline.

- Matedit opened, Scanline set as matedit renderer: playback is perfect

Now change the matedit renderer back to Corona.

- Matedit opened, Corona set as matedit renderer: playback is perfect

So, I need to set the Matedit renderer to Scanline and back to Corona again to make sure viewport performance has no hit. If I don't, viewport playback will be very slow.

Any idea why?

58

[Max] Resolved Bugs / RC3 - Issues with CoronaMultiMap in instance mode

« on: 2015-07-29, 12:28:52 »

I just reported this in the Daily Builds thread but thought I'd post here, too.

I found a bug with the CoronaMultiMap (in instance mode) not being rendered consistently, again. With IR, It'll randomly change colors when accessing the material and modifying maps or material values for example. It may stay the same when rendered in normal mode, but it also may change, sometimes... Really unpredictable, I can't find a pattern here but it's quite unstable.

Let me know if you need more informations or repro steps, from what I see it should be pretty easy to reproduce.

59

[Max] Resolved Bugs / Physical Camera in 2016 and CoronaCameraMod

« on: 2015-07-23, 16:57:32 »

When using the Physical Camera together with a CoronaCamMod, the CamMod fails to override the shutter time, it will instead always render what's set in the physical camera.

60

[Max] Resolved Bugs / Geometry Motion Blur broken

« on: 2015-07-23, 16:16:25 »

Daily Build Jul 22 2015, max 2016

Geometry motion blur doesn't seem to work in this build (works with the build from 17 July).