Messages

61

[Max] I need help! / Re: HDRI reflection strength

« on: 2019-02-26, 20:33:57 »

Can anyone with a bit of technical knowledge explain why some HDRI's are way too strong in reflections and some are way to dull.

For example, I often find getting the lighting/exposure right with PGSkies results in super bright reflections, but yesterday I was experimenting with the Poliigon HDRI's and found the opposite.  Once lighting and exposure looked correct, the reflections were incredibly dull?

Everything is physically based. Some HDRIs have a strong highlight, but weak surrounding in comparison (eg. direct sun light). If you expose for the sun, the surrounding get's very dark in comparison and seems to reflect weaker, because you turned exposure way down.

To combat this you can use HDR Compression on the image before piping it into the environment, thus the sun get's less bright and the surrounding instead appears more clearly.
This dynamic changes from image to image, as each image has a different... dare I say it... dynamic range.
Also be very careful when importing HDRs with how the Gamma is layed out. Usually you have to import with gamma 1.0, but I have seen HDRs exported with a gamma curve and when you import them in 3dsMax with gamma 1.0 they appear utterly dark everywhere where it isn't a bright spot.

If that doesn't clear it, post some screenshots of the offending scene, so we can nail down exactly what is happening.

62

[Max] General Discussion / Re: VrayuHDRI map rotation

« on: 2019-02-25, 05:49:40 »

Wow, truly bizarre!
going of my gut is toggling new/old light solver and trying corona bitmap instead of VrayHDRI, but I'm totally clueless beyond that.

In a couple of hours it will be Monday morning in Europe, so the corona guys and mods will awaken from their deep Sunday slumber. Surely someone will look into it.

Also, really nice looking scene, super sexy soft shadows. This is definitely already photo realistic.

63

Gallery / Re: The City of Sayil / 10th Century Mayan city reconstruction

« on: 2019-02-25, 03:00:18 »

My latest personal one. hope you like it

Personal one?
Personal?
That is breathtakingly awesome! Absolutely perfect execution.
Good lord the resolution and the detail. The 3000x1340 res is underscored as low. As if to mock us :P You own a personal renderfarm?

The landscape is Avatar level detailed and alive. Screenshot from Avatar attached, you are definitely matching the quality of one of the most expensive movies ever produced.
The Fog, the lighting, everything plays perfectly together. Is the smoke done in post or in renderer? Because it interacts perfectly with the shadows and so on.

Is it an actual personal project, as in no team was involved?

This reminds me of Age of Empires a bit. Something like one might dream future games will look like.
Another Corona artist posted an image of a building modeled in the Dune universe. Which is what I imagine Dune 2000 would look like in 2050.
This is exactly what I imagine Age of empires 2 with it's Maya expansion "The conquerors" will look in 2050.

64

Porting and API / Re: Corona for Rhinoceros :)?

« on: 2019-02-25, 02:44:46 »

sorry, no plans to start at the moment...

start at the moment...

moment...

If there are no plans, then put out a statement that there actually is no intention to look into it.
Logic being: If there is indeed enough interest in the rhino community someone might develop a script to export to corona standalone. If it's left half communicated, it crushes the chance that someone might actually try this daunting task, because maybe the actual devs will do it.

You made the great post explaining why there won't be a blender integration, same for rhino would bring clarity.

65

[Max] General Discussion / Re: VrayuHDRI map rotation

« on: 2019-02-25, 02:39:15 »

through a VrayHDRI map

Corona Bitmap supports both HDRI and Environment rotation natively, just in case you didn't know.

roughly 1.5deg over 120 frames at 24fps

That's literally nothing.
0.01° per frame or 0.3° per second. You should barely be able to see a change. Can you post a gif of how the stuttering occurs?

Maybe you accidentally put in a multiple of a circle's rotation, making it seem it's that slow, although in reality it passes a full circle's rotation plus a bit, which now that I think about it can totally cause a shadow flicker every other frame, because the periods don't line up.
3dsMax's Auto keyframe is finicky and caused similar behavior to me before.

66

Gallery / Re: Greenery

« on: 2019-02-25, 02:28:22 »

After Effects using volumax

I thought I was tripping. Behind the couch there was a veeeeery slight parallax effect going on. I was going to ask about it, but that explains it.

67

[Max] I need help! / Re: Lighting and fog help

« on: 2019-02-25, 02:25:34 »

i can't seem to get the fog to react with the lighting

Can you post a screenshot of what you mean by that?
Just based on those words it's difficult to ascertain what you want and whether it's a problem coming from the setup or an actual technical problem of the light not interacting.

Setting up a scene with intense Fog-glow or light shafts quickly makes you realize how style differs from realism. Corona, being physically accurate, doesn't do light shafts or the "fog glow" until you start pushing the fog into extreme settings. This goes for every other physically based renderer. In real life light shafts and fog glow rarely occur and if, then over very large distances. So very extreme fog settings are needed, if you want it to be physically accurate.

The corona team made tutorials specifically addressing stylized fog.
Here in a 5 Part series going into detail for light shafts:

A recent one here for an artistic effect, going a bit into glowing fog:

And the original tutorial, quickly summarizing how the volume material works and how to push it to get the stylized light interacting look.

If those resources don't cover it and you got an actual technical challenge, pls explain in more detail with screenshots or a small scene upload.

68

[Max] Feature Requests / Re: physical projector

« on: 2019-02-23, 19:37:13 »

picture or video projection, with the same settings we can find in real life ?

This was discussed in this thread.

(zoom, lens shift, focal, focus, distortion)

Going through that list:

• Zoom / focal length can be adjusted inside the 3dsmax spot light, it has native controls for that
• Focus: The 3dsMax spot light includes fall-off in it's parameters. As seen in the linked post's image.
  This allows you to simply blur the spot light texture input and together with the fall off creates how a defocus looks in real life. (Blurred image + unsharp boundries that tend to go more and more towards a circle shape)
• Lens-shift: I gues you mean keystone correction? That has to be done via Node editor before piping into 3dsmax spot, it doesn't have controls for that
• distortion: agian everything through material editing

Don't forget to include Corona Shadow in the Shadow paramters rollout.

Other than that you could get a super computer, turn on caustics and and put a lens in front of the spot light in 3dsMax ^^

69

Gallery / Re: Greenery

« on: 2019-02-23, 19:11:08 »

The images and scene are flawless and realistic! Really sexy.

The transitions between the light mixed images though are dirty. The images were not aligned, so when fading between night and day the video shifts and some seams are seen double.
See image attached.


The Video was not rendered as an animation, but composited afterwards. As a result there is no parallax when the "camera" zooms.
A dolly push of the camera along the room would work really great here, like normally real estate videos / ads are filmed. See gif.

Although I obviously understand, that render times would be a killer and outside the realm of "made in free time".
Also flickering candles would really add to a video.

Other than that, it is really really good!

70

[C4D] General Discussion / Re: Node editor - I'm clueless

« on: 2019-02-23, 18:35:51 »

/offtopic
As a max user, who never laid hands on C4D...
...I just noticed, the corona team implemented a whole new Material Node Editor for C4D.
That's impressive! All from inside wxWidgets as well it seems? I didn't know you could twist and turn wxWidgets into creating something of that caliber.

The design decisions are interesting.
Instead of putting the outputs in the middle of the node, like 3dsMax does it or letting users freestyle the positions unless it's on the side of the input, like nuke does it, the corona team always leaves the output knob on the first entry in the Node. I wonder why? Maybe collapsing the node doesn't shift around the output position like it does in max?

I'm currently working on implementing a Node Editor as well, though nothing related to 3D rendering, based on the C library nuklear and it's guts of a node editor. Definitely some inspiration to be found in Corona Team's work.

71

[Max] I need help! / Re: Mixing colour spaces

« on: 2019-02-20, 01:56:40 »

Awesome write-up!
Thanks, clears up a lot.

72

[Max] I need help! / Re: Mixing colour spaces

« on: 2019-02-19, 21:17:19 »

As soon as the CMYK texture is read in it is interpreted as albedo. At this point no color space exists anymore. Just like taking a raw photo allows you to assign a color profile and change white balance after the image is taken. From here on out lighting takes over, as said by sprayer.

If your lights carry pure white color, then the color of the artwork under direct light will not change.
You can test this. point a light at the artwork in 3D. Disable Primary and secondary solver and export the image.
The hues (in degrees) from the original Artwork and from the 3d render should be a 1:1 pixel by pixel match. Although the intensity changed, if that spot in the artwork was 138° Green, then that spot in the artwork will have the same 138° green.
Obviously light bouncing will change color.
You can control how much the light bounces affect the artwork using rayswitcher material, if a certain physically fake look is needed. Or with an ID matte and photoshop for that matter.

As for exporting: According to the doc, Corona uses wideRGB internally, which should allow you to export in AdobeRGB. As for how to do the jump from VFB->AdobeRGB file->Photoshop, no idea.
Hope someone else can link an article or explain, I'm curious my self.
From this point on it's all a big mystery to me. After so much pain with photoshop I gave up trying to understand how to handle color. DeadClown's Quote related: ^^

That's an easy one of me...
I don't use photoshop. At all. Period. :D
I've given up trying to achieve anything in PS that requires accurate maths / workflow. I don't even have it installed anymore :) (6 months and counting - and happier than ever). Trying to do floating point stuff in PS is like defusing a bomb in an earthquake - it will eventually blow up into your face (rather sooner than later).

73

[Max] I need help! / Re: Is it possible to have an HDR loaded into the environment map by default?

« on: 2019-02-18, 15:27:29 »

3dsMax offers the options to do this?

Yes.
You can setup a scene and save it as maxstart.max and put it into the maxstart folder, or make any folder your maxstart folder.
Explained in the doc here.

edit:

save maxstart file.

God damn the timing
Could have been a gentlemen and waited 44 seconds ;]

edit2:
btw, I recall it was you who setup and shared that awesome scene for Product shots, where it combined Shadowcatcher with Radial Gradient as background... That is my maxstart default ^^

74

General CG Discussion / Re: best mouse for 3ds MAX

« on: 2019-02-15, 09:19:51 »

It's TOO vertical.

BLASPHEMY!

75

[Max] Resolved Feature Requests / Re: New Intel CPU based denoise library for ray tracing

« on: 2019-01-31, 18:48:09 »

Are they stretching they truth a little [...] (sponza, 4th image from the top).

No. It is a cherry picked example though.
Most information comes from the passes that are not involved with shading.
See this paper's youtube video that basically started it all: At 3:42 they show how the different passes are composited. The Albedo pass caries all the texture's color information that got barely resolved in that 4th picture.
However, the lighting on the walls is very low frequency in content, so all of it smears together nicely into correct uniform lighting. Ones high frequency content comes into play (detailed bump, Wood textures, carpets) all these filters start to fault with too little render time.

Impressive without a doubt though.