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Topics - Jpjapers

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1
[Max] Feature Requests / USD Support from Chaos?
« on: 2024-01-19, 16:20:26 »
Now Chaos has signed up to the OpenUSD Alliance will we be seeing integration from the corona side?
Im hoping that we can see some support from the corona side because currently we are in a walled garden.
Material X support as well as integration with USD would allow greater compatibility when working in multidisciplinary teams.


I note that Vray already has export compatiblity with these features;
  • V-Ray shaders (materials and textures)
  • Animation of shader parameters
  • V-Ray lights
  • Animation of VRayLight parameters
  • V-Ray Displacement
  • VRayInstancer
  • VRayProxy
  • V-Ray Physical Camera
  • User-Defined object attributes with textures such as VRayUserScalar and VRayUserColor
  • Native MaterialX materials through maxUSD

I understand that things are different than they used to be with regards to PR and what the team can say but the canned response of 'check the trello if its not there then keep your eyes peeled' really isnt helpful. It feels like with Vray the users wouldnt need to ask if the feature is coming because its an industry standard piece of software, of course its coming. With Corona though i feel i can never be sure if the software is going to keep up with the industry requirements of its user base.

2
Ive increased the viewport texture resolution for a file im working on but regardless of the resolution decals dont seem to improve. I dont know if this is to do with the way max compresses large bitmaps or the way decals are implemented but its slightly annoying.

3
[Max] I need help! / Tracking down the cause of a slowdown
« on: 2023-05-04, 16:34:51 »
Hi all,

I have a huge scene im working on and after merging an object from another file, rendering has slowed to a crawl with five minute parsing times 5 minute UHD cache times and rays/s under 200k.
I cant figure out what is causing the issue as the object im merging in, is fine when rendering in its original file and has no immediately obvious issues.

I was wondering if anyone had any tips and tricks they use for tracking down the causes of slow renders whether it be rogue objects or complex shaders.
If any of the devs have tips on what they do when assesing out scenes that would be really useful to know too!

4
I have a scene with probably between 100 and 200 light sources and they all need some volumetric effects to show beams (I cant use the Volume light effect for reasons).
Its a bit of a nightmare scenario for a renderer im sure but after a 12hr render on a 3950X at 1440p the volume fog is still insanely noisy and full of fireflies.
Denoising helps a little but only if cranked up to 100%.

Are there any system adjustments i can make to corona to improve the rendering in this situation? I have 128GB RAM so thats not an issue.
Are there any scene optimisations i can make?

5
[Max] Feature Requests / Projection map slot in Corona Light
« on: 2023-04-06, 14:42:34 »
Corona Lights would benefit from the ability to apply (edit: and focus!) a projection map.
Ive found myself doing alot of stage lighting work recently and needing to simulate things like gobos.
Currently i cant see a way to achieve a gobo with a corona light. It can be faked with standard and photometric. But neither of them provide a full solution.

I can use photometric lights, however the intensity settings are completely incorrect when using corona shadows in a photometric light (i had to crank the photometric light to 450,000 lumens to match the 3000 lumens of the corona light with the same IES).
They also require an IES profile to appear in volumetric materials and passes.

Whilst i understand that a projection map is a 'fake'. If the only way to achieve the desired result of a gobo filter, is to use a photometric light, with corona shadows and a projection map.
Then you also have to eyeball the light intensity, surely corona can provide a better solution than that natively because at that point its compounding three or four fakes to achieve a shaped volumetric ray which could be achieved in corona by allowing users to adjust focus of the texture you can currently apply to corona lights.

It would need to work in conjunction with the IES profile for it to be fully featured.

I have attached a quick render demonstrating why none of the currently available methods we have are fully featured and arent suitable for achieving physically based gobo effects with IES and volumetrics. Something that is fairly important in the stage lighting space.

6
It would be great if there was a maxscript method to access each lightmix layer and its value/tint/state
This would make certain automations for common tasks in lighting design really quick and easy instead of needing to load and save conf files.
Another benefit would be that the value spinners and colour tint could be mapped to hardware controls such as MIDI sliders for physical slider adjustment of intensity and knob adjustment of HSL.



7
I have two lights. On the left is the corona light. on the right is a photometric light.
Both are using the same IES. Both are set to the same lumens and same colour temperature.

Why is the photometric light so much dimmer?
I need to be able to create a gobo projection effect so if theres a way i can do this with corona lights in absence of an actual projection slot on the corona light, that would be great.

Max 2022 - Corona 9.


8
Not a super-critical bug as i imagine not many people actually would notice but i see that in Corona 9 that when changing light units with IR running, the behaviour of the corona light doesnt change to match the new unit until you restart IR.

Hard to communicate what i mean by behaviour exactly but Obviously if i pick lumens as my unit, the Lux of the surface the light is covering reduces, the larger the light gets whereas W/sr.m^2 maintains the same lux level on surface regardless of light size. This is how it should be. However, until IR is restarted, the light does not change the way it outputs the light.

Im sure very few people would ever notice this unless you had a decent grasp of the light units and what they actually measure but thought id point it out.


9
[Max] I need help! / Colour profile confusion
« on: 2023-03-08, 11:27:02 »
I Have photographed a load of swatches and used a Spyder Checkr to calibrate them in lightroom.
I then saved them as TIF files and open them in photoshop. At this point, photoshop has the ProPhoto profile assigned. Just changing it to sRGB changes the colours so i need to convert to sRGB rather than just Assign the sRGB profile.

So I convert to sRGB profile, the colours still look correct, and I picker the colour to get the hex code. When i put this hex code into a corona color map, it displays incorrectly. And i dont just mean brighter or darker, i mean that something green turns blue. But the hex code is the same.

How can i get the colour that i can see in Lightroom & PS & even illustrator, into max?

I know that theres been many long threads here about colour management and i could really use some advice. Ive been trying for days to figure this out.
I must be doing some process wrong as the colours i see on screen in Adobe products are correct to the real swatches i have. But outside of Adobe software i cant seem to get them to display correctly.



10
https://thefactioncgi.com/the-faction-free-resources/2021/3/25/-free-script-colour-libraries-for-3ds-max

I found this plugin recently and thought that it would be great to see this functionality, natively in the corona color material node.
Having preset colour libraries built-in but also being able to load your own from a CSV as this can do, is really useful for anyone working in design visualisation in general.
It would also be really useful if there was a way to enter the manufacturer specified LRV for paints etc and have the colour automatically adjust to compensate. Dubcat shared a method many years ago for this but its probably outdated now and the picker has changed somewhat.

11
Im not sure if its been fixed in a newer version but whenever i try and type any values into the 0-100 rgb sliders in the corona picker, it just resets back to either 0.0 or 0.1.
If i drag the sider to the desired value and edit it to remove trailing decimals, the same thing happens.
If i try to drag the spinners, the values jump around wildly and always reset to 0 as soon as i let go.

This only happens with the Linear 0-100 sliders and no others.

Any ideas why this is happening?

Max 2022 and Corona 8
Unable to update currently as im mid-project.

EDIT: Also noticing that during interactive, if i am playing with the rgb sliders, sometimes IR doesnt update until the number reaches a certain threshold. For instance if i want to add 5 into the red slider when its at zero. If i type 5 and press enter it stays. But if i click ok, then reopen the colour swatch its back at zero.

12
[Max] I need help! / [Question] - Lux unit in corona light
« on: 2023-02-17, 13:01:21 »
Is the lux unit in the corona light lux at a specific distance from the source?
Usually lux measurements in lighting data is measured at a specific distance. Is this the case for corona lights and if so, what is the distance?

Thanks

13
When im playing around with lookdev i often end up with really long and complex material graphs in the SME and sometimes they feature the triplanar or the uvw randomiser nodes. When i go back and try to optimise them i often wonder what to do with those nodes.

It got me thinking if theres any 'order of operations' logic that says they should be the final node in a graph or whether its fine to have multiples in one graph?
Are there any internal calculations that would affect render efficiency when the nodes are further up the graph?

Thanks

14
Ive had this a few times recently whereby ill go to copy the vfb to send someone a render during an IR working session and max completely freezes up and never drops to the error reporter.

Im using Corona 8, Max 2022 and Windows 10.
The render isnt anything huge. This time its barely over 720p.

The steps i took before the crash were

1. Start IR
2. Leave IR running for a brief period to clean up the image (IR Window is .
4. Click the copy button. (The button does highlight)
5. Freeze, the Ctrl+C button stays highlighted. The interface for all windows in that max session are frozen including all window controls, title bars and maximise/minimise/close buttons. The smiley face stops spinning. The max windows do not show as 'not responding' but the windows spinning blue circle is displayed across all windows relating to that max session.

It looks like bloom and glare was being calculated at the time of copying but so far the session has been frozen for around 60 minutes and hasn't come back.

I have a minidump but given the size i cant upload it here. I'm not sure where you are taking uploads now for these?


Thanks

15
Im certain this was reported years ago but im not sure its ever been dealt with.
When opening a CXR with CIE, The lightmix settings, whilst displayed in the UI correctly, arent displayed on the image correctly.
i.e. if the environment is disabled in the saved cxr, when opened it will display as disabled in the lighmix tab, but will display as enabled in the image.

The solution is to toggle any of the lightmix checkboxes and itll display correctly.
However a problem arises when you go to use the command line CIE to export layers to files. Theres no opportunity to toggle the lightmix settings so everything gets saved out with all of the lightmix layers enabled and at 1.0.


Not a huge problem but it would be good to see it fixed in a later version. Im sure the number of people using command line CIE is minimal.

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