Topics

31

[C4D] Resolved Bugs / IPR in viewport like the latest octane

« on: 2018-05-04, 13:54:34 »

Octane looks to have introduced full interactivity in the c4d viewport - so you can directly select and move and adjust objects in a rendered view which is cool. If this could be stably introduced in corona this could really help overcome the current limitations of viewport OGL representation which is currently very slow and limited.

Cheers

32

[Max] General Discussion / What would you class as a high number for rays per sample?

« on: 2018-04-25, 14:45:07 »

The tool tip essentially says the higher the number the more complex the scene. But is there an acceptable range that we should be in for a 'standard' but detailed scene over which we should be considering trouble shooting our setup? Also is there a way to show the biggest problem areas in a scene visually like a sampling pass?

Thanks

33

[C4D] General Discussion / Large ram usage change during render?

« on: 2018-03-29, 10:13:28 »

Im rendering out quite a big scene (Beta 1) which hits 70GB RAM usage during the initial few passes. But when I check back on it it's only using about 40GB with the CPU still at 95%. Its denoising now and the RAM has peaked up a bit to 50GB and back down to 37GB but nowhere near the 70GB. There is 128GB on the machine so its not disk swapping. Is this to do with adaptivity? Great that it comes down but annoying it has to break the 60GB mark to start with so I can render on one of our 64GB nodes.

Having said that I have had this work in my favour before when I was rendering a scene which started off disk swapping and really slow on a 64GB node but I left it overnight anyway and in the morning the scene had actually rendered OK.

34

[C4D] Resolved Feature Requests / Progressive render and change detection in TeamRender

« on: 2018-03-27, 10:20:05 »

Im just listening to the latest CGGarage podcast about Vray cloud https://www.chaosgroup.com/cg-garage and it sounds amazing. But it makes me realise just how far away from this sort of thing we are on a local level with TR!

They are describing how after initial upload it just detects changes in the scene - like IR does and that you can also use progressive rendering which means you can check your scene after a few passes to see if everything is OK. Basically its like final frame rendering with IR features. I imagine its the same for rendering flythrough frames where 99% of the scene doesnt change. I dont know if on a local level, Vray Swarm is quite there yet but I'm sure this tech will roll out across all vray platforms soon. And they support all the common plugins.

I dont know what is coming with Team Render but I cant help but think it is a limited system and reliant on Maxon.

Our current option is the 'scanline' style packets of build up where a pre-set number of passes is reached and there is no denoising available. This means we might not be able to spot any mistakes until 3/4s of the way up the image and we have to render for longer as we dont have denoise (but I know this feature will come). It can also take ages to package up and send out over the network and if you are wanting an animation it has to regenerate the whole scene each frame which can easily take 5-8 mins before it starts rendering so its really prohibitive to use. We've just bought a 10GBe network (yet to set up) so I'm hoping that is going to help but it will still require the whole scene to be set out and fired up each time.

I have never used the max version of corona - is progressive rendering available there on distributed?

I know there is a strong argument for Team Render and compatibility but I really wish there was an equivalent of Vray standalone / swarm and I would happily work within a set number of provided corona shaders that covered the major features like randomisation and a handful of key noise shaders. Ultimately I would love a universal material format so we could use materials created in .max for bought assets.

Sadly it all feels like a long way off. Even when we get the feature complete TR version with denoising and noise thresh its still not an ideal solution for using on a daily basis mainly due to scanline style preview and time taken on making changes / restarting the render which can take an age on a big scene. Is there any tech you can collaborate on with ChaosGroup now you are all one?

Thanks

35

[C4D] General Discussion / Lightmix not denoising?

« on: 2018-03-21, 20:36:10 »

Im using beta 1 and of recent releases denoising has worked fine for me with lightmix but in this particular scene / file its just not denoising my lightmix pass. I have 7 lightmix selections and each one has denoise ticked. Corona does denoise them at the end of rendering (I have it set on 0.4) but my lightmix layer looks as grainy as it was before denoise. If I go through my lightmix layers I can see they have denoised but the main lightmix pass which I would use as my base in photoshop is still grainy.

Has anyone got any ideas as to what I'm missing? Unfortunately I cant share the file and its massive!

36

[C4D] General Discussion / Will render farms adopt Beta1 now?

« on: 2018-01-05, 15:59:11 »

Any idea if render farms will start supporting beta1 now that stage has moved on to the RCs? Currently most are stuck way back in Alpha 6 saying they only support official builds. Can we say beta 1 in an official build now? Im sure its probably more stable than it used to be on A6.

37

[C4D] General Discussion / Please find a way to not regenerate a whole scene each frame of a flythrough.

« on: 2017-08-01, 09:53:42 »

This has long been a frustration with me. I'm currently rendering out a flythrough. Parsing and geometry takes 5 mins to generate and the frame takes 6 mins to render. Nearly 50% of the rendering time is just loading the scene where only the camera moves! Maybe I've missed a check box somewhere? But if not this is crazy. Is there a way to keep the scene in memory by scanning for the camera info in the scene file each frame and just taking that back to corona?

Perhaps the work done on the IPR can be used to track camera changes whilst keeping the scene in memory? I dont do many flythroughs but everytime I do it feels like going back 10 years. Does this also happen in Max?

Thanks

38

[C4D] Resolved Bugs / flythrough dropped sampling frames and strong GI flicker

« on: 2017-07-31, 10:40:54 »

I set a flythrough (camera move only) animation away over the weekend and it has just finished in time. Generally Im happy with the noise and look of it and finished in a reasonable time although some frames were taking 45 mins to render. But there are two major issues. (Latest beta with new sampler). I have also posted this in the I need help section as it might be user error but Im at a loss if it is.

1. I set the cut off to be by noise level (5%) for consistent results but whilst for the most part this worked well I am getting some dropped frames in terms of sampling where the render time would drop by 50% and there is a noisy frame which really jumps out. I think this can be fixable by manually trawling for each frame and re-rendering those ones - its probably about 1 in every 100 or so. No reason I can think of and the culprit frames were on different PCs and the sequence will have been on the same PC as I had to manually assign chunks of frames and not use TR.

2. Most problematic is I have very strong GI flickering on some of the surfaces - think incorrectly set up Vray of 5 years ago. I have set my GI method to animation (non flicker) with precision set to default one. All GI and other settings are default. I just changed the GI method and pressed render. I do have bloom and glare in the scene which I would like to keep in. Not sure if its related to that but I thought GI splotching wasn't even possible with corona?? Not sure how I would avoid this in the future as there are no settings to tweak for flickering as far as im aware. Also checked for double faces and thats not an issue.

Unfortunately I cant post the results but might send it in to the brains. If anyone has got any ideas on what I can change for next time that would be helpful.
Thanks

39

[Max] I need help! / disappointing strong GI flickering in animation

« on: 2017-07-31, 10:35:18 »

I set a flythrough (camera move only) animation away over the weekend and it has just finished in time. Generally Im happy with the noise and look of it and finished in a reasonable time although some frames were taking 45 mins to render. But there are two major issues.

1. I set the cut off to be by noise level (5%) for consistent results but whilst for the most part this worked well I am getting some dropped frames in terms of sampling where the render time would drop by 50% and there is a noisy frame which really jumps out. I think this can be fixable by manually trawling for each frame and re-rendering those ones - its probably about 1 in every 100 or so. No reason I can think of and the culprit frames were on different PCs and the sequence will have been on the same PC as I had to manually assign chunks of frames and not use DR as Im a C4D user (latest beta).

2. Most problematic is I have very strong GI flickering on some of the surfaces - think incorrectly set up Vray of 5 years ago. I have set my GI method to animation (non flicker) with precision set to default one. All GI and other settings are default. I just changed the GI method and pressed render. I do have bloom and glare in the scene which I would like to keep in. Not sure if its related to that but I thought GI splotching wasn't even possible with corona?? Not sure how I would avoid this in the future as there are no settings to tweak for flickering as far as im aware. This may be C4D bug so I will post this there in the bugs section but wondered if it was more of a corona wide issue - perhaps related to the new sampling method?

I have checked for double faces and that shouldnt be the issue.

Unfortunately I cant post the results but might send it in to the brains. If anyone has got any ideas on what I can change for next time that would be helpful.
Thanks

40

[C4D] General Discussion / exporting spherical pano for VR?

« on: 2017-07-28, 15:43:28 »

Might not be a c4d issue so also posted in the general CG section. I have set my corona camera to spherical but without the VR mod as I just want a traditional panorama to be viewed in a browser. I have also set the output to 4000x2000px and rendered out. I have then imported into pano2VR but it still looks quite barrel distorted. There is a field of view setting but I would have thought this would all be automatic and you would get a perfect result without distortion. Any ideas if im doing something wrong in cinema or is it a pano2vr problem? Can anyone recommend a pano creator tool that works well with c4d/corona?

Cheers

I found my problem - I had 10% offset in my c4d cam by mistake. I had just copied another cam in the scene and converted it to spherical, but the original cam had the offset in it. Doh

41

General CG Discussion / VR pano creator / field of view?

« on: 2017-07-28, 15:17:07 »

Im just trying out creating VR panogramas from corona (non stereo) and setting my ratio to 2:1 so in this case 4000 x 2000px with a spherical camera. The pano looks to render out fine. However when I bring it in to pano2VR which I've just downloaded the demo of - the view is still quite barrel distorted. A field of view can be set but I imagined this would automatically be taken care of so any distortion would be fixed and straight lines would remain straight. Any suggestions on a field of view setting that would be correct every time? or is there something else im missing? Thanks

42

[Max] General Discussion / Animation export and editing advice

« on: 2017-07-28, 11:37:53 »

Hoping people can offer some advice on this. I'm increasingly asked for flythroughs along side the still work. I have done this in the past saving out 8bit tiff sequences and putting them together with a bit of colour correction in AE - just getting a monthly subscription when I need it.

I was wondering if this was the best way for simple flythroughs? Even just flat 8bit images at 25 fps mount up to a considerable size so im not sure how people stretch to 16 or 32bit multilayered files. Must be a nightmare? Also can anyone recommend a simple but powerful editor that can add good quality text and also encode a high quality output? Whilst I can use AE I feel it can be a bit overkill but I like the colour controls.

Do people set number of passes or noise amount as there time control per frame? I also prefer the fixed noise which I know is perhaps not what most people chose. I find it less distracting over that dancing noise on under sampled frames. I was thinking maybe a denoise of 0.5 on a 1080p frame might be about right. Does anyone have any experience of testing the various levels and finding a sweet spot here? In the end does final compression make the denoising worse as you are losing even more detail or is it in a way better as it saves time and that extra detail we might get through less denoising and longer frame time is washed away with compression of the final clip anyway?

Thanks for any help on this, Cheers.

43

[Max] Feature Requests / Memory usage statistics in the VFB

« on: 2017-07-06, 11:45:04 »

Is it possible to get a more in depth summary of RAM useage in the VFB like GPU renderers do? So number of MB used for..

Geometry
Textures
Displacement
Frame Buffer

I think it will help the trouble shooting when pushing the RAM close. Even better if Corona could list the worst few offenders for each category except frame buffer. Not sure if thats possible.

Cheers

44

[C4D] General Discussion / Saving out non linear sRGB from PV?

« on: 2017-07-05, 10:21:24 »

More a C4D Q but perhaps linked to corona output in C4D. I've recently bought affinity photo and really like some of its features. Some of the work flow might need getting used to though. However the main stumbling block is its non handling of linear workspace images - i.e. what gets saved out of C4D by default. When I open up my multipass psd file that I've saved out of the C4D picture viewer in photoshop I immediately convert it to pure sRGB from linear space which saves a lot of head aches further down the line. But in Affinity it just opens up without a colour profile and is black and contrasty. I cant see any way to adjust this in affinity. The only options you have is to convert the space once its open but it just converts the dark image which is no good. Is there a way in C4D to just save out a pure sRGB version (16bit) rather than it retaining the linear colour space?

Thanks 

45

[C4D] Resolved Feature Requests / option to auto add light instances to lightmix layer

« on: 2017-06-26, 11:14:04 »

I often forget to update might light mix lists when I'm adding lights which can be annoying. I wonder is it possible to have a checkbox in each light mix layer that will auto add and instances of the original light? I get its important to keep the original way of working for the best flexibility but this would just be an optional check box.