Messages

1

News / Chaos Corona ArchViz Collection out now, along with other suites from Chaos!

« on: Yesterday at 21:19:58 »

Today, May 20, 2025, is a big day! We're excited to introduce our new industry-focused suite offerings tailored to meet the specific needs of professionals in Architectural Design, Architectural Visualization, and Media & Entertainment (M&E).

Each suite has been carefully put together to deliver the essential tools needed to support and enhance workflows unique to each industry. These are organized into three distinct tracks, and make it easy for users to select the right combination of tools from Chaos’ comprehensive portfolio, simplifying our product lineup by providing a targeted, cost-effective, and easy-to-manage toolset, eliminating the complexity (and expense) of purchasing individual products.

As another part of this transition, our fixed-to-one-device licenses (e.g. Corona Solo) are being retired and replaced by named licenses, which means you'll have full freedom to choose where you use your Chaos products (so, you are not locked to one machine, and can move from machine to machine - though still just one machine at a time for each license, of course).

The suite most relevant to the Corona community is the Corona ArchViz Collection, which features everything in Corona Premium plus Chaos Vantage and Anima too, at a price which is noticeably less than purchasing everything separately - just in time for Corona 13 next month which is planned to have the ability to render animations from 3ds Max or Cinema 4D through Chaos Vantage via the use of the Live Link.

To make changes to your subscription, visit my.chaos.com, or contact your preferred reseller.

Need more help?
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2

[Max] Bug Reporting / Re: Nan

« on: 2025-05-19, 13:17:04 »

Files of any size can be attached to the ticket, there isn't a limitation there.

The general way to find culprits is what you could call "bifurcation" I suppose - hide half of the scene, see if the problem continues. If yes, hide half of what was left. If no, unhide the hidden half and hide the unhidden half. And keep cutting in half until you have a manageable number of objects to check.

OFC it might not be so straightforward for a NAN, as it could be a couple of objects interacting with each other, but at least it's a (relatively) quick way to test to see.

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[Max] I need help! / Re: Any better ways to use a single HDRI sphericals map both as env and lightning?

« on: 2025-05-16, 13:58:47 »

Unfortunately, there is no standard for the way HDRIs are set up, so you'll find some work for background and lighting without needing separate adjustments, and some won't. Loading the HDRI once and then just passing it direct into one place, and through a color correct in the other, is the easiest solution, and will always be required in some situations due to this variance in how HDRIs are created and set up :)

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News / Chaos Corona 12, update 2 for 3ds Max (Hotfix 1) released

« on: 2025-05-15, 14:00:51 »

This hotfix addresses specific issues, and all Corona 12, update 2 users for 3ds Max are recommended to download it (the hotfix for Cinema 4D will follow next week). Find more details below.
Download now: My Products

Chaos Corona 12, update 2 for 3ds Max (Hotfix 1)
This release brings the following improvements and bug fixes:

User-Facing Improvements:

• Simplified the process for obtaining a trial.

Fixes:

• Fixed crash on Max start for old CPUs without AVX support.
• Fixed a bug where material drag & drop from Cosmos would not work in Max 2025 and newer.
• Fixed issue where Scan materials imported from Cosmos were blank if the user did not have Scans license.
• Fixed issue with the slow import of the Scan materials from Cosmos.
• Fixed issue where rotate and Select & Place tools would behave erratically during IR.
• Fixed issue where tiling lock was not working in Corona Bitmap.
• Fixed issue where CML imported from Cosmos used wrong gamma in OCIO mode.
• Self-illumination multiplier is now correctly handled when doing conversion from V-Ray mtl.
• Fixed a rare crash that could occur when switching to Collaboration tab.

Download now: My Products

5

[Max] Bug Reporting / Re: Collab -in VFB causing "internal error meesage"

« on: 2025-05-14, 16:00:23 »

Whether it disappears or not, we'd still need to fix the bug anyway, so that remains the first focus :)

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[Max] I need help! / Re: Distributed Render blur/distortion

« on: 2025-05-14, 15:58:59 »

Just observations to go into the bug searching

- Since it is the middle third of the image, looks like something to do with sections of the image rendered on one machine vs. another
- It looks less like blurriness and more like ghosting, it's as if three or four versions are overlaid each slightly offset
- Does changing the synch interval and/or max pixels to transfer at once make any difference? Either resolving it, or changing where it happens in the image? The end render is very large so there could be something to do with the network itself getting overwhelmed with data (what is your network speed btw?)

7

[Max] Bug Reporting / Re: Corona 12 crashes all previous Coronas

« on: 2025-05-14, 15:50:26 »

Other way round Avi, a file made in new Corona crashes old Corona :)

Thing is, Corona 12 had significant changes to the VFB, tone mapping, automatic exposure, lightmix, and more. This is why it isn't as simple as F10 to reset settings, as there are things that the old Corona just know what to do with.

BTW, rather than "change to a different render engine and export", you can just save with Corona and try merging the new scene into the old version of Corona rather than loading it, because then Corona shouldn't try to read all the new things it doesn't understand (though you may still lose some settings, parameters, features, etc. in doing so).

If someone is making models to share (rather than scenes), it should be less of an issue than for sharing a whole scene, and they can carefully avoid using any new features to maximize the chance that it can be merged into an old Corona.

Beyond that, they'd then just make the judgment call - do they want to take advantage of new features in the latest version of Corona getting some results that couldn't be achieved any other way while narrowing the users who can use it, vs. do they want to maximize who can use it but give up on some new features that could make the model/scene better, and based on that choose to develop the model in an older or newer version of Corona (the multiloader makes it easy enough to be able to run Max with different Corona versions, so no need to be installing and uninstalling all the time).

The only way to "fix" it would be to stop working on Corona 13 or 14, and go back and edit code in 11, 10, 9... where would we stop too? Since development time is limited, that isn't going to happen (and indeed no software I know of does this).

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General CG Discussion / Re: Chaos anima forums are totally silent..

« on: 2025-05-13, 12:36:07 »

I've let the Anima PM know so he can pass that along to whoever should be monitoring those forums, ty for the heads up!

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[Max] I need help! / Re: Long Render Times with 4080 Super + Ryzen 9 7950X – Is This Normal?

« on: 2025-05-12, 22:56:54 »

Pop on over to the Corona Academy and watch Chapter 14 Creating the Chandelier. It has an extensive look at what happens when placing a light source inside a glass material as this can have a dramatic effect on render times, and the various ways you can speed things up using the Rayswitch etc. as was done in this situation to speed things up. https://www.chaos.com/corona-academy/ is the linky.

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[Max] Bug Reporting / Re: Corona 12 crashes all previous Coronas

« on: 2025-05-12, 22:53:08 »

I am not 100% clear what you mean - is it that a scene saved with Corona 12 will not open in Corona 11 and earlier? If so, forward compatibility like that is not guaranteed, only backward compatibility (ie you can open a scene from Corona X in Corona X+1, X+2 etc, but there is no guarantee you can open the scene from Corona X in Corona X-1, X-2 etc.)

This is because sometimes the data structures etc. change so much that earlier versions of Corona have no way of understanding them. As such, any errors when trying to open a scene saved with Corona 12 as the active renderer when Corona 11 or earlier has been set is the active renderer is not a bug, nor something we can fix (basically, the "old" version of Corona would have needed to know what was going to happen in the future with changes to Corona, and time travel is not one of our abilities ;) ).

As a note, if Corona is not the active renderer on saving the scene, then yes, the Corona data structures won't be saved (for things like tone mapping, lightmix, Corona Materials, etc. as the non-Corona engine won't understand or know about those) which means it might open in an earlier version of Corona - but all the Corona specific settings will be lost.

If you mean something different from the above though, let us know!

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[Max] I need help! / Re: How to associate materials from chaos cosmos to corona library?

« on: 2025-05-12, 19:02:38 »

You can still install the Corona Material Library manually if desired or required, see https://support.chaos.com/hc/en-us/articles/4528215807761-How-to-install-the-material-library-in-offline-mode . Hope this helps!

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[Max] I need help! / Re: Geometry Motion Blur

« on: 2025-05-12, 19:01:04 »

Nothing in the plan, it's one of those very hard ones that would take a lot of dev time (if it is possible at all). You can check if the idea is on the Ideas Portal, if so vote for it, and if not, you can add it :) https://chaoscorona.ideas.aha.io/ Thanks!

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[Max] Bug Reporting / Re: Collab -in VFB causing "internal error meesage"

« on: 2025-05-12, 18:59:41 »

Be sure to have it added on the Ideas Portal too of course, before I forget to say that :) https://chaoscorona.ideas.aha.io/

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[Max] Bug Reporting / Re: Collab -in VFB causing "internal error meesage"

« on: 2025-05-12, 15:52:07 »

Snag with that is, as more and more features appear in collaboration, people will not realize it is there if they have it turned off, as they will forget it exists :)

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[Max] Bug Reporting / Re: Collab -in VFB causing "internal error meesage"

« on: 2025-05-12, 12:10:37 »

Rather than make the tab disappear the solution would be to make sure it doesn't cause the error. I seem to remember this being reported somewhere else before, not sure if that was your post or not - easiest thing to do to make sure the fix is tracked is to submit a ticket via https://support.chaos.com/requests/new .