Messages

1

Work in Progress/Tests / Re: health Center WIP

« on: 2014-11-19, 07:13:10 »

typically people would use hdri as an environment map to get natural (interesting) reflections in your windows.

Otherwise, martians like me, would add some interior to make the scene more interesting and do the reflections in Photoshop. :p

Otherwise, yes, since Corona works very well with HDRI, you should take advantage of that. Unfortunately, my main pipeline is still MR and MR in 3DS Max is not the best at handling HDRI.

Another thing, you should add some more environment, some more trees, etc. To make it more dramatic, change the time of the day to something that would be more plausible to the golden hour of photography, where you would get long shadows and warm colors. Then I'd add lights inside the building (which Corona handles beautifully just by adding a few lights here and there).

Also, add some reflections to the asphalt and if you are going to do the scene at the golden hour, light up trees and bushes and the key elements of your building.

Anyhow, hope that helps.

2

[Max] General Discussion / Re: Question regarding Processors

« on: 2014-11-17, 22:06:21 »

Hi Juraj,

Yes, a scene I was working on, not really personal, work oriented. I was xrefing 9 other scenes, had 957 lights on, and I had to DR 3 other machines. On the DR dialog, the two slaves with Intel processors were getting between 8 to 10 passes while the AMD machine would do no more than 1 pass. Since it was a very heavy scene, there would be several updates a minute and one could easily see how many passes and the difference between both type of machines.

I was using Corona 7.1. I was using the original 7.1 and no Daily Builds, just the original Alpha put on the forum by Ondra.

3

[Max] General Discussion / Re: Question regarding Processors

« on: 2014-11-17, 03:18:44 »

So I have been testing these two slaves (AMD) against the other two I have (Intel) and the AMD are half the speed in MR and about 1/8th to 1/10th in Corona. After some research, the AMD chips seem to not hyperthread whereas the Intel ones do, hence the speed increase. Hope this helps anyone when making a decision in buying a future CPU machine.

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[Max] Resolved Bugs / Re: Distributed Render with XRef Scene

« on: 2014-11-07, 08:45:04 »

Same here. I had 9 Xrefs, 4 million polys on base scene and 950 lights, it worked better than any other 1mil poly scene I have ever done with MR. ;)

5

[Max] General Discussion / Re: Question regarding Processors

« on: 2014-11-02, 19:17:12 »

10x slower makes it sound like there's some kind of performance bug. I was expecting the top-end AMDs to be more like... I dunno, maybe half the performance of the top-end Intels. Not 1/10th.

Yeah, well, it also depends on the scene, but the one I was working on was more than half, definitely, and at times it seemed like 1/10th, specially when on the DR window it said that my other two intel slaves were doing 40 passes in the time that my AMD slave was doing 4. So give it a safe margin of 5 or even 6 passes to the AMD and we are still talking a lot of difference. Perhaps it is a performance bug, but all cores were up to 100% on the AMD and everything seemed to be working fine (I checked that all before I concluded the difference on the two machines).

6

[Max] General Discussion / Re: Question regarding Processors

« on: 2014-11-01, 21:52:20 »

Yeah, I guess the thing to do is to dump my two HP slaves that I bought for 2K each and get Intel based... :(
Irregardless, I'm sure Ondra can handle the hard pressing matters first and then tackle the AMD issue. Truth is, MR is also slower in AMD but not to so remarkable as in Corona, where the difference was almost 10 times slower which then may put some people off from using Corona if all they have is AMD chips on their computers, it may, just say, limit the market. If my workstation is AMD based and I try Corona and it is not way faster than VRay I may stay with VRay, rather than buy a new workstation with Intel just to test if Corona works better on the new station. Anyhow, this is not an issue that is important to me, but I thought it may be good for Ondra to know so that he can deal with it as he sees fit.

7

[Max] Resolved Bugs / Re: corona lights noise

« on: 2014-10-29, 21:24:18 »

There is currently a limitation that light sampling gets inefficient after about 240 lights are placed in the scene. It will be improved in the future versions. There is probably no bug in the scene - it looks normal, just takes longer to render (which is hard to judge since there are no details provided)

Hi Ondra, I get that a bit right now. I'm using A7.1 and I have 900 lights... Is there an update to handle this? Thanks for your fast response.

8

[Max] General Discussion / Re: Very long time for parsing the scene

« on: 2014-10-29, 17:51:53 »

I have a similar problem, but in this case it is because of the amount of geometry in the scene (using proxies). Sometimes it can take up to 6 minutes or more to parse the scene.

One thing that helps me (+-) is stopping the render and for some reason when I restart the render it only takes 40 seconds or less to parse the scene.

Funny you mention it, I have the same with A7.1. I stop the scene and it frees up my memory, which for me it is good. I'm doing a whole block of buildings and 9XRefs, over 900 lights (night shot) and my memory gets all used up. I run Corona, and after I stop it, my memory usage is dropped down to 60%. I'm happy about that.

9

[Max] General Discussion / Re: Question regarding Processors

« on: 2014-10-27, 21:34:07 »

I also tested embree on an AMD rig, and it was not significantly slower. I suspect Corona is slower there because I only develop and optimize on Intel.
[/quote]

Ah! Ondra, that makes sense now. Anyhow, even on Mental Ray, I can see my AMD Slaves to be slower than the Intel ones but it was only with Corona that I could see this to be a full 100% fact.

10

Gallery / Re: Johny Mrazko WIP/finished work thread

« on: 2014-10-27, 21:10:01 »

If you did not say it was honey I would have thought it to be plastic. The material looks good, but the consistency looks... too consistent and perfect to be a semi-viscous. Edges are too perfect, etc too perfect. Other than that, yeah, I think the actual material would work for honey.

11

[Max] General Discussion / Re: Question regarding Processors

« on: 2014-10-27, 20:56:53 »

I have been doing some more renderings and while it differs on the scene, AMD chip was WAY slower than the Intel. This is obviously not a criticism on Corona, but rather when buying a computer and wanting to do CPU renderings, DON'T GET AMD!

Cheers!

12

[Max] General Discussion / Re: Question regarding Processors

« on: 2014-10-26, 00:44:38 »

All this makes sense now.

AMD: Opteron Processor 6234 2.4 GHz; 16GB RAM   64 bit system (2 processors)

Intel Xeon CPU  X5650 @ 2.67GHz (2 processors) 12GB RAM; 64 bit RAM

So basically the Intel one is 10 times faster, and I think what was explained earlier makes sense.

13

[Max] General Discussion / Question regarding Processors

« on: 2014-10-24, 07:43:09 »

Hi Ondra and the rest of the team!

Has anyone noticed a performance difference between AMD & Intel processors? I have 4 slaves two of them (the Intel) have 2.67GH and the other two slaves have an AMD with 2.4GH of speed. The rest of the slaves are built exactly the same, with the same RAM, etc. But, the Intel machines seem to render in Corona 10 times faster than the AMD machines, which are rendering literally forever!!!!! I can see it in DR, whereas the AMD machines do 4 passes while the Intel ones do 40 passes in the same amount of time.

I'll keep doing some tests, but I thought it would be good to document this if it has not been yet.

14

Work in Progress/Tests / Re: Arch. competition

« on: 2014-10-21, 04:44:53 »

I like them overall. One thing that caught my eye is the fact that the reflections of people are very precise and somewhat unrealistic and also very reflective. In other words, it seems photoshoped in, and probably they are. So I think you should just make them a bit more subtle. I don't do people in my renderings, so probably I'm not the best to give you guidance on how to do it, but definitely caught my eye.

15

Gallery / Re: Johny Mrazko WIP/finished work thread

« on: 2014-10-20, 03:13:14 »

Overall I love most of the renders. Definitely an improvement over the first ones. I noticed that on your last set of renderings, you have more contrast, darker areas in the room that give importance to the lit areas of the room, this in itself is better composition and directs my attention, as opposed to some of the previous renderings which looked washed out (sorry, I can't tell you exactly which ones because you have posted a lot of good work). But if you compare these couple of last ones to your earlier ones, I think you will see what I mean, and the direction you are taking now is definitely much improved over the beginning stuff. Good job!