Messages

1

[Max] Daily Builds / Re: New VFB Skin and functionality

« on: 2024-08-06, 15:46:09 »

I still ask once again to make a separate button for IR, the fact that in the drop-down list this option is the second, and the first item duplicates the neighboring button makes my designer background nervous every time I see this :D I do not believe that we must wait for the release of version 13 to fix this, thanks!

+1 for this. I imagine the vast majority of time people spend in the VFB is using IR to check renders and work on shaders. Having the button as a drop down is a small annoying thing that could be rectified easily. I dont know how many times ive accidentally hit render on a heavy scene and have to then wait for the render dialog to stop and close before i can keep working.

2

[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Chaos Corona 13 for 3ds Max - Daily Builds Discussion

« on: 2024-08-06, 15:33:05 »

Please please pretty please could we finally get a toon outline shader? Or even just expand coronawire to include a profiles mode (like sketchup profiles) without needing to outline every face?

At work currently to produce elevations with just the profiles outlined and not every polygon we are relying on a free third party exporter to export to sketchup and then produce them in there. If corona had the ability to render outlines it would have saved me genuinely weeks of work in the last two months.

It has been requested since 2014 for the exact same purpose and theres a TON of support for it every time someone posts about it. I dont think ive seen many people asking for ink and paint style shading. Just this outlines feature.

I imagine youll say you cant make any commitments to features etc etc and to post it in the feature requests etc which is fine. But toon outlines have been requested since the beta days and are consistently requested still and are one of the most backed and popular requests every time its mentioned. So if you could consider this for v13 it would make lots of your core user base very happy.

3

[Max] Resolved Bugs / Re: No value more than 100, and no denoise in VFB 2 ?

« on: 2024-07-29, 15:07:50 »

If you need a value of over 100 in lightmix something is wrong in your scene and you should make the adjustments to lights in your scene rather than in lightmix. It will result in less noise and fireflies in the image. If i recall an old thread anything above 5 in a lightmix layer and youre better off making the adjustment in scene due to how rays and sampling work in Corona. I may have the number wrong but its definitely not 100.

4

[Max] General Discussion / Re: Gamepad mapped camera control - is it possible?

« on: 2024-05-30, 11:40:41 »

I can recommend a spacemouse from 3dconnexion. Takes a bit of time getting used to, but I find navigation in the viewport and setting up compositions soooo much better with it. I only wish you could track the camera movement with it for animations, but doesn't quite work.

You can record joystick controls using the motion capture tools:

Youd need to rig it to a camera but if i recall, having not used this feature in about a decade, its not that difficult to work with.

5

[Max] General Discussion / Re: Does a higher resolution image require more passes?

« on: 2024-05-20, 17:02:59 »

The total noise amount is averaged, but adaptive sampling means Corona puts more processing power into areas that are noisy.

Are there any settings we can tweak to adjust the adaptive sampler? Im finding that even after 500 passes some shadows are still noticeably noisy pre-denoiser whereas the rest of the image is crisp and clear.

6

[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Chaos Corona 12 for 3ds Max - Daily Builds Discussion

« on: 2024-05-20, 13:10:48 »

sounds exciting....

@devs - can i ask something, one thing that has bothered me for years and i dont know the mechanics of what goes on behind the scenes in terms of code.  But the heavier a scene gets, the more longer it takes for parsing/IR to work.  Sometimes, on repeated IR activation's, it takes over 20 seconds or so on heavier scenes.  Now, i assume its taking longer obviously due to geometry/poly count + the increase in textures etc.... if this is the case, wouldnt it be possible to pre-load these (cache) them in so that it starts quicker?  & any NEW geometry/texture additions should be calculated from scratch and loaded into cache? again, i have no idea about code and its way out of my depth but i was just wondering if it was at all possible.

Because the thing is this.  I moved to Corona many moons ago due to its ease of use.  It got rid of the technical aspect that vray had in terms of scene setup/settings.  It just works.  However, with heavier scenes, i feel as though there is a bottleneck in terms of optimisation.  Scenes get heavy and slow, IR works poorly and we are left to our own devices to figure out how to optimise.  Scenes tend to feel 'dirty' if that at all makes any sense.  Apart from what i mentioned above and ive said this before, it would be awesome to also, in the short term, provide a dignostic tool to help us understand where teh bottle necks are.  WHY the IR is taking long - is it a 320MB TIF file?  is it loading multiple proxies or a 300,000,0000 polygon item that has turbosmooth set to show only during render (which has a iteration of 5) - a diagnostic tool is somehting that i feel can be achieved relatively easy as its jsut data, data that is currently understood by Corona - we just need it transposed to meaningful and clear text to us, the users....

anyway, hope this all makes sense.

Just lots of stuff needing doing before a daily comes out, big blocks of code that can't be released in stages; and then in combination with the last week or so being full of statutory holidays meaning things move to next week or so. On the plus side, should then mean a lot in that next update, including the first appearance of "export to Vantage" functionality.

The new error log shows you the heaviest scene items as well as the heaviest textures but possibly only if you run low on RAM. Having this as a diagnostic feature on its own would be good but i totally agree that as clients request higher res images, and we are required to put more and more detail in both geometry and textures to support the resolution we need better ways of optimising scenes. Revit models in particular seem to take an absolute age to begin rendering and ive got no idea why.

7

[Max] General Discussion / Re: Does a higher resolution image require more passes?

« on: 2024-05-20, 13:03:14 »

I wonder if perhaps a future feature request could be some sort of adaptivity region where we fan freeform draw a region around certain areas of a render that are noisy to place more importance. Or perhaps a noise region where a render will continue until a certain area reaches an acceptable noise level. It seems currently that the noise limit feature works on some sort of averaging?

8

[Max] I need help! / Re: Setting RGB baseColor values with maxscript defaulting to linear input?

« on: 2024-05-20, 13:00:41 »

This is good info thank you frood

9

[Max] General Discussion / Re: Does a higher resolution image require more passes?

« on: 2024-05-16, 12:57:25 »

Less passes to look visually good, but also less passes for same noise, but never checked any formula :- ).

But this is good thing to pay attention, so you don't end up with too little AA done. Since high-res images don't need as many passes for GI/Light, they can for example end up being around 2-3perc. noise (visually clean) with only 25 passes for example, but roughly 100 passes are needed for really clean anti-aliasing from my experience.

This is the sort of thing im trying to work on. Clients asking for higher and higher res images year on year and i need to get better at adjusting the finer render settings to suit the output rather than just leaving it to render for a nominal amount of time on my workstation because theres only so many hours in the day.

10

[Max] General Discussion / Re: Gamepad mapped camera control - is it possible?

« on: 2024-05-16, 12:55:00 »

https://github.com/cb109/maxstick

It hasnt been updated in 9 years but mnaybe this still works?

11

[Max] Feature Requests / Re: User-created physical material presets

« on: 2024-05-16, 12:22:02 »

what kind of base materials would you make apart from the one which are already present in the preset, corona material library and cosmos?

More plastics and ceramics would be good but thats not really why i think the feature could be useful. It would make consistency slightly quicker to achieve and also be a great timesaver.
 For instance im currently doing lots of work with a 'studded plastic brick company' and it would be great for storing presets that dont need maps, just specific SSS settings and colours from brand guidelines.
Its the same sort of reason id love to be able to load libraries into the corona colour map to be honest. It would just be great to have things like paint manufacturers, pantones and brand colours easily accessible within the material.

12

[Max] General Discussion / Re: Does a higher resolution image require more passes?

« on: 2024-05-15, 16:53:24 »

Actually, higher resolutions usually need less passes to visually "look as good", though I don't know how that translates into noise level. But of course it still takes longer to get there, due to the extra processing needed for all the extra pixels :)

Interesting, thanks Tom. Just doing a lot more render farm work recently and trying to wrap my head around the pricing has raised some questions. this being one of them.

13

[Max] General Discussion / Does a higher resolution image require more passes?

« on: 2024-05-15, 15:23:45 »

Does a higher res image require more passes to reach a certain noise level? Or does each pass just take longer?
For instance will and image of 1000x1000 and an image of 5000x5000 reach a 3% noise level at the same number of passes but each pass takes a longer time on the 5000x5000 image?

Ive never really thought about it before, i usually just let it run until it looks nice.

This help page is really useful but it didnt answer my question unless i missed it.

https://support.chaos.com/hc/en-us/articles/4528236666257-How-many-passes-is-enough

14

[Max] I need help! / Setting RGB baseColor values with maxscript defaulting to linear input?

« on: 2024-05-15, 01:18:37 »

Hi,

Whenever i try to change the baseColor of corona materials via maxscript, the values end up being input in linear by default. Im assuming this is because of the way max internally handles colors and the conversion between rgb 255 and rgb 0-1. How can i ensure theyre added in sRGB or how can i convert the values correctly?

for instance color 250,200,10. If i manually add it into the picker in srgb mode the colour is correct.
However when i add it via maxscript it adds it in linear mode and so the resulting srgb colour is 254,228,59

How can i fix this? Is there a formula i need to implement in my script or do i need a different approach?
I tried using the max standard color map but the same thing happens even if i set the gamma to 1.0. It has to be to do with the way maxscript handles the (color R G B) values internally.

Thanks!

EDIT: The solution was to gamma correct the sRGB colours

Heres a function

Code: [Select]


 fn adjustColorGamma _inputColor _maxVal _gammaVal _doInverse =
 (
 if _doInverse then
 (
 outputR = _maxVal * ((_inputColor.r/_maxVal)^(1.0/_gammaVal))
 outputG = _maxVal * ((_inputColor.g/_maxVal)^(1.0/_gammaVal))
 outputB = _maxVal * ((_inputColor.b/_maxVal)^(1.0/_gammaVal))
 
 (color outputR outputG outputB)
 ) else
 (
 outputR = _maxVal * ((_inputColor.r/_maxVal)^_gammaVal)
 outputG = _maxVal * ((_inputColor.g/_maxVal)^_gammaVal)
 outputB = _maxVal * ((_inputColor.b/_maxVal)^_gammaVal)
 
 (color outputR outputG outputB)
 )
 )

adjustColorGamma (color 255 255 255) 255 2.2 false

 

15

[Max] Feature Requests / User-created physical material presets

« on: 2024-05-14, 16:33:19 »

It would be fantastic if we could save and load custom presets to have in the physical material presets list for common starter materials.
The ones there are useful but having your own custom ones would be even better. Think of it as an alternative to a material library for base materials already set up how you like them.