Some info about next alpha?

[gootman]

Have somebody Any info about next alpha?

[olcaykayihan]

yeah we have been waiting very long time after lasy buggy alpha :(

I hope they dont decide to stop development ...

[gootman]

yeah we have been waiting very long time after lasy buggy alpha :(

I hope they dont decide to stop development ...

I hope too... It`s very important to add proxy to alpha...

Ondra, can you give such info about it?

[Rhodesy]

4.1 is a pretty solid release aside from the IR part. As for proxys am I right in thinking that render instances work as proxys at the moment but that we can go one step better by having pre-saved proxys that only have to be read into the corona engine rather having to double up with c4d having to have the original in the file and then export again to corona?

Looking forward to getting DR and hopefully 2D displacement when it comes in to the core. Really enjoying 4.1 and using it for most new projects, RAM consumption is quite hight though with displacement and high res planting so hopefully some optimisation at some stage too would be great.

[gootman]

4.1 is a pretty solid release aside from the IR part. As for proxys am I right in thinking that render instances work as proxys at the moment but that we can go one step better by having pre-saved proxys that only have to be read into the corona engine rather having to double up with c4d having to have the original in the file and then export again to corona?

Looking forward to getting DR and hopefully 2D displacement when it comes in to the core. Really enjoying 4.1 and using it for most new projects, RAM consumption is quite hight though with displacement and high res planting so hopefully some optimisation at some stage too would be great.

You right. Instances working, but when I use in scene tree with 1 million polygons and clone it - I anyway have in scene 1 million polygons.. So,  if I want to use 20 diffrent trees - I will have 20 millions polygons and with it my mashine will not cope((. So, we need system like Vray to export mesh to proxy and read it by corona from file ...

[Rhodesy]

Sure, im in the same boat when using forrester I can get some really nice results but a few species and variants chews into my 64GB.

I suspect corona still has to load in the 1million poly objects but im guessing it cuts out the need to load it into c4d as well. Also there is the benefit of keeping the main scene file down. I am using c4d xrefs for this reason but they are very unreliable and buggy, so looking forward to getting the corona proxys.

[Jaycop]

Hi, no worries, Corona for Cinema 4D development is still in progress. We are currently working on the A5 version that will fix many bugs.
You can look forward to:

• proxy
• layered material
• vector displacement
• double sided material
• maybe team renderer

[Rhodesy]

Super news that will be sweet especially if you can get DR up and running.

Will you just be trying to use Maxon team render or making a special corona one? I'm hoping you can do your own as the licensing for team render is not as generous as coronas if you have the broadcast bundle for example. Here you get 3 render nodes but they cheat a bit and class the main workstation as a node so essentially you get one less than you get with corona. Also there is no way to grow it like you can by upping the corona nodes bundle. I think Ondra confirmed a while back that all shaders that are supported by the single workstation will be able to net render, unlike vray which restricts you to just vray shaders which is annoying.

While I'm here, something I mentioned on mantis but is it possible to not show the corona AO shader in the viewport ogl? The reason for this is, if you add it to a shader as a layer all you get is a solid black object, so it's very had to see what's going. Can it be that we can activate AO but c4d ignores it in the ogl?

Also on a similar theme of black objects... When creating a metal I have just been using the reflectance channel and not activating the diffuse as I gather that's the correct way. However this also creates just black objects n the viewport - so half my scene just looks black now. Is it possible to get it so c4d uses the colour slot in the reflectance channel for ogl if diffuse is deactivated?

Many thanks for all your hard work, I absolutely love using corona, it's a breath of fresh air!

[burnin]

I would also advise to use Corona's DR and restrain from integrating with Team Render (rigid new licensing & buggy)... more on the subject here: http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=47&t=1333188

[babumbol]

+1

Team Render is unreliable. DR would be great.

[Ales]

Hi,

here is a few notes to Team Render / DR support:

1. Right now, we are integrating distributed rendering with Team Render, but we also plan to implement Corona own DR (it won't be in A5 though)
2. With Team Render, there shouldn't be any limitation with shaders or features (everything that works in normal rendering should also work in TR).
3. Right now, even if we add our own DR, plugin will still be tied to C4D (many shaders are evaluated by C4D), meaning there wouldn't be any advantage in terms of C4D licensing. We have been talking about possibility to allow render nodes without C4D (i.e. use Corona standalone), but it would bring some limitations (some shaders would need to be baked etc..). Anyway, this is still in phase of discussion.

As of AO / other Corona shaders in OGL, I am working on some improvements to show something reasonable in viewport, e. g. in case of AO, it will simply show unoccluded shader (and will work even inside layer shader).

[Rhodesy]

Brilliant news on the AO front thanks Alex. Also hoping for a solution to the black metal OGL if you can.

Disappointing on the DR/Team render news though. I've never tried TR as I have always used vray, and never used vray DR in production due to having to use vray shaders which I really dont like and there are some C4D ones I will miss. There have been loads of threads on CGtalk about the pain of Team Render and that a lot of studios have stopped using it as it has failed them too many times.

Please forgive my ignorance but in my head I imagine C4D exporting the whole scene with shaders and textures into corona and then corona renders it and shows the results in the PV. Is there not a way to distribute all the info you get from C4D at the point of render warm up once corona has all the info from C4D using the corona standalone? You can close a c4d scene down whilst PV is rendering so it doesn't need to constantly pull info in from the c4d scene, one its exported its done, right? Perhaps this is possible to single image renders as there wouldnt need to be any intelligence managing different frames - its just all the same info but rendered over X number of machines?

Also in terms of material editors, does it not make sense to create a unified material editor like I gather there is in thea so you can use it for all platforms rather than having to reinvent the wheel for each new supported software? I know this would take a bit to do and there would need to be some good procedurals in there and some tile randomisation would be nice but it would be great for creating a community library for all users.

Cants wait for A5. Proxys are going to really help my workflow.

[Ales]

The problem with shaders is there is no way to know what exactly will be needed to evaluate before actual rendering, so the shaders are being continuously evaluated during rendering. The reason you can close current document without interrupting rendering is that C4D internally copies the scene, but it is still C4D representation with all its shaders. To allow DR without C4D on nodes, there are basically only three options what to do - we might

  1. reimplement/replace all shaders - this is already done with some shaders (e. g. Layer shader or Bitmap Shader), but reimplementing all shaders C4D has would take very long time and would be nearly impossible for some complex shaders.

  2. bake shaders before rendering - this would result in inaccuracies during rendering and wouldn't work at all with some specific shaders (e. g. some thirdparty shader similar to AO shader)

  3. support Corona shaders only - obviously the worst possibility...

I we decide to add support for DR without C4D on nodes, we would probably reimplement common C4D shaders where the baking wouldn't suffice and bake other shaders...

As of material editor and sharing materials between different software - this is possible when you use only Corona materials and shaders (and we will probably add support for this), the problem is when you connect any C4D materials, this is basically the same problem as with DR... you can only reimplement C4D shaders, bake them or not support them...

[Rhodesy]

Thanks for the clear answer Ales. I hadn't appreciated corona had to keep going back to c4d whilst rendering. So that leaves us with a compromise like you say but having the layer shader already fully supported is a major plus. Have you considered having a poll for the most requested shaders? For me no1 would have been the layer shader and then some of the noise shaders. I know biomekk made 100s of noise shaders in their enhance4d pack. I wonder if they could potentially be licensed and integrated easily? that could cover a lot in one stroke, but maybe not. One major third party shader I would miss is the tools4d karate tiles (random tiler) and I imagine that might be tricky to implement - unless you guys could magic one up!

But if your already on with the team render implementation that could be a good start for still renders where there is less risk of it breaking and everything is fully supported.

[berdus]

hair, fur, scatter. thanks :D