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[Max] General Discussion / New Rebusfarm limit on passes (non-distributed renders)

« on: 2019-11-05, 19:12:19 »

Just a notice for people using Corona with Rebusfarm:
(This is not official. I'm just a customer who has realised this by trial and error, followed by contacting Rebusfarm support today)

As of an update to the Rebusfarm plugin today, there is a limit on the maximum number of passes you can specify when rendering non-distributed*. Maximum is now set at 400 passes.

This seems to be by design as part of the update. I've asked for a bit more information from Rebusfarm support and am waiting to hear back.
I don't currently know if it's possible for customers currently in the middle of a project to roll back to an earlier version of the plugin without the limitation so they can finish their work with consistency. This is one of the questions I've asked about.

*I don't think this limit is imposed on distributed renders - scene checking with distributed render does not throw up the same error that occurs when trying to exceed 400 passes non-distributed. That's all I know.

I don't know if this would be of concern to anyone here in terms of them providing the most viable service?
I'm currently preparing a flythrough animation of a complicated interior I've tested to the point that I feel 600 passes are necessary. Maybe that's too unusual to cater for. I'm awaiting to hear of a reason for the change anyway.

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Hardware / Dual CPU motherboard - Any alternative to ASUS?

« on: 2016-01-07, 22:00:01 »

I was wondering if there were any decent alternatives to ASUS motherboards if you're looking at a dual Xeon workstation. Has anyone built anything with an alternative?
Seems a bit thin on the ground for options that I can find.

The reason for asking is that I've recently built a workstation using an Asus z10pe-d8 ws motherboard. It seemed like a good specification and also the only viable option at the time. Anyway, it turns out one of the DIMM slots is faulty (it's the board, not the RAM, I've tested). Along with some faulty temperature sensors on the board itself, which bothers me less so than not having all DIMM slots available.
I've got a working machine for now with 7 memory modules so I'll probably just go with it for the time being but at some point in the future I'd like to get everything working on a new motherboard so it's all functional. I'd prefer not to give any more business to ASUS in the process but I can't seem to find anything else.

As a side note, I'm not just complaining about ASUS after this one fault. I've only ever built 2 workstations and bought a defective ASUS motherboard for the first one as well (refused to boot and, after process of elimination, moved everything to a Gigabyte motherboard where it worked perfectly. RMA'd the ASUS board only to get the same faulty board returned to me 6 weeks later, rattling around in it's box, without explanation). Nothing statistically relevant to anyone other than me but I just seem to have a bad record personally with ASUS so far. It's put me off.

There's a Gigabyte board that seems like it might be okay:
Gigabyte Dual Intel Haswell Extreme MD60-SC0 Server Motherboard - Maybe I'm looking at this wrong but it appears at a glance that a long graphics card might interfere with the cooler on the CPU behind it.
There seem to be quite a few Gigabyte 'b2b' dual CPU boards as well, but none for the v3 xeon cpu's.

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[Max] Resolved Feature Requests / Hold displaced geometry in memory

« on: 2015-12-04, 00:18:22 »

I think it would be useful to have an option to hold displaced geometry in memory after a render if possible - say, something like a checkbox in the Corona Displacement Mod to enable.
For running repetitive tests on displaced objects I find the calculation time for the displacement can really build up.

If the object were held in memory it would also be great if it could be imported into the scene as a mesh. Again as an option. A bit like with a proxy. It would be nice to evaluate exactly what the displacement is up to now and again.

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Hardware / Passmark scores for Dual Xeon systems

« on: 2015-09-29, 18:48:11 »

The scores for Dual Xeon systems seem a bit disappointing on the Passmark chart (here: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/multi_cpu.html).

I'm guessing maybe because the score isn't based purely on multithreaded tasks the benefits aren't as evident as they might be.
Does anyone know of a better resource for comparison please? (One that would be more appropriate to render performance).
Oh, just thinking as I write this, I suppose I could take a look at the times various systems were getting on that benchmark Corona scene.
Still, a chart somewhere would be nice if such a thing exists.

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[Max] I need help! / Using anisotropy in World Space

« on: 2015-03-10, 13:35:46 »

I had read previously that anisotropic reflections work only in World Space for the time being in Corona but I'd imagined that this would solely govern the orientation of the effect and that the actual reflection would still spread along the real surface of the object. I'm not sure if I'm judging this wrong from observation but from the tests attached it appears as though anisotropic reflections don't adhere to an object's surface. On the undulating curtain surface reflections spread in the horizontal direction are becoming completely lost. Anisotropy is also strongly affecting the appearance of material glossiness and reflectivity amount.

The same problem doesn't seem as apparent on the sphere primitive. Is it simply that the geometry of the sphere is kinder to the shortcomings of World Space anisotropy than that of the curtain behind?
Basically is there anything I can do to make anisotropy work on objects such as the curtain or should I give up on this until Object Space anisotropy is possible in Corona?

All the examples have the same material apart from the anisotropy values, which are: 0, -0.1, -1, 1
(Sorry, I've labelled the file name of 2nd attachment wrong. It is -0.1)

Thanks