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Messages - FrostKiwi

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31
As a random uneducated guess: Do you have the 16-bit Bloom performance option enabled by chance?

32
[Max] Bug Reporting / Nitpick station
« on: 2019-05-14, 18:43:31 »
With Mantis gone, you can't report trivial stuff with minimal priority.
This thread serves as a nitpick collector, for stuff literally no one cares about...
No dev should waste time fixing this, but the intern needs to do something after all...

  • IR Max passes setting has zero as the default value, even though the default is 50. Right-clicking Max Passes should set it to 50, not 0
  • Opacity textbox in the CoronaColorCorrect Map, LUT category, is too far right, it draws over the border of value box's left side.
  • Valuebox for Hue in CoronaColorCorrect is lower than the it's "row", making the hue text appear too high and makes the spacing uneven.
  • Text for Dropdown for Render Setup->Camera->Shape: is not vertically (too low) alligned with it's dropdown. Below shown the correct allignment.
  • Interacting with dialogs under LUT makes a small black box appear in the dropdown menu
  • Disabling LUT greys the filename field, but not it's dropdown arrow (also black box is back again)

33
it would be fantastic if the suns could not emit shadows.
I doubt they'd implement something so physically incorrect.

However, you can do this already: Use Max's standard directional light. You can match corona's sun with that and just not turn on the shadows in the properties roll out.
This should allow you to get Corona's sun but without shadows.

It won't produce a proper response with the skytexture, but you can just align a real corona sun and disable that to achive interplay with the sky texture...

34
[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Caustics playground!
« on: 2019-05-10, 14:19:36 »
sorry, it took us a bit longer than expected to test this build
You guys are the most consistently active / interactive devs I have ever witnessed. Literally nothing to say sorry for :]
Feels almost like this situation...

35
[Max] General Discussion / Re: CPU FAQ
« on: 2019-05-09, 13:35:43 »
SairesArt
Did you setup AMD config? They really have magic working fast on faster RAM also RAM slot have similar magic what half speed ram clock if you wrong place in modules slot
Yes, I'm an AMD guy since forever :]
Indeed, with how the Zen architecture ties much of it's internals to RAM speed, it does have a surprising amount of speed up with faster RAM, which is why I paid premium for 3200mhz RAM and OC'd it to 3400. And you are correct, mistaking the RAM slot order (I mean they are color coordinated, that's hard to do) does prevent multi channel functionality of RAM, definitely showing a performance hit.

My point was to counter the "if you don't have Quad channel, you have half the performance", which is untrue in the sense of measuring real world performance.
I don't have a QuadChannel system, but I urge someone to do a comparison on the Corona benchmark.
You will not have any performance difference between dual channel and quad channel on the corona benchmark.

36
[Max] General Discussion / Re: CPU FAQ
« on: 2019-05-08, 22:51:27 »
Using only 2 RAM modules will basically half it's performance.
It will half it's maximum theoretical bandwidth, nothing more.
You will be hard pressed to find any benchmark showing benefits of Quad channel vs Dual channel, that aren't synthetic.

Leaving the realm of practically and entering overclocking it can even be the other way around. Because how infinity fabric (jesus, who names these, does thanos work at AMD?) is setup, much of then CPU is tied to the RAM speed and two RAM sticks often clock higher than 4. Remember the witcher 3 promotional material for Ryzen, showing how higher clocks achieve higher fps? Shortly after came out guides showing how 2 RAM sticks clock higher and run thus faster than 4 in benchmarks, because no non-synthetic benchmark is actually bound by bandwidth specifically.

But all in all these technicalities don't matter in the grand scheme of things. Especially since Corona's mantra of simplicity and not getting caught up in technicalities brought a departure from settings ridden render setup tabs.

37
[Max] General Discussion / Re: CPU FAQ
« on: 2019-05-08, 16:42:40 »
faster ram will prepare the scene faster
No. RAM speed is not the bottleneck in scene parsing / preperation. Your CPU is the sole bottleneck during scene parsing.

Last time I asked, 3dsMax delivers the scene data to the renderer single threaded ohh you are on C4D but the point still stands, so there isn't much you can do to upgrade, besides making sure that your Harddrive where the Textures are being pulled from does not cause a slow down.

two 8Gb Ram sticks on a CPU with 4 dies
This has nothing to do with each other. As long as RAM sticks are not an uneven number, which would prevent proper use of dual channel ram, such relationships don't matter.
Even if you would use 3 sticks, which would prevent proper dual channel you probably wouldn't even notice.
So no, CPU dies (I presume you mean cores, because you propably only have a single CPU die ;]  ) does not factor into how many ram sticks you should have.

If you have scene performance problems open up a thread about it and give a little more detail about your scene ( how many objects, how many textures and maybe a screenshot ), so it can be properly adressed.

38
more powerful manipulation tools natively than Max ever did :)
It would be funny if it wasn't so painfully true :/
Just look at the see of paid plugins for the most basic of functions

39
[Max] I need help! / Re: Please help to identify the texture
« on: 2019-05-08, 14:02:37 »
I'm pretty sure it's limestone or maybe shell limestone. If you google limestone you'll get many very similar results.
I think we are deceived by two different textures in the scene.
The basin is made in marble, showing the typical marble / limestone streaks. But the walls are terazzo, as there are no such streaks, but the typical cut up pieces of quartz / Glass / whatever they put into it.
See image attached.

But at the end of the day we are pixel peeping on a render, not a photo. So nothing we say actually matters, only the wishes of the client.

40
Hardware / Re: Cpu fans ramping up when denoising
« on: 2019-05-08, 12:28:01 »
CPU utilization is at 100% during all stages of rendering.
[OTrant]
The longer I work as a programmer, the more I get to understand that ultimately none of these metrics say anything meaningful.

Without Hardware debugging you can't look inside the CPU and 100% usage is ultimately meaningless.
I wrote code that used one thread to move memory, 25% util on my 4 core laptop and it made the whole system chug like hell. TaskManager said everything is fine, my mouse cursor stuttering at sub 30fps said other wise.  There is no such straightforward thing as "Utilization of Memory performance".

RAM usage being the next barely properly reported stat, as there are many definitions on what constitutes RAM usage. When Vista came out the task manager showed how it used the RAM to cache stuff to showcase their improvements in memory management and it made people flip out, as Windows Vista constantly reported 90% RAM usage. Microsoft never did this again, now it's a hidden stat.
There is a great article called "Why I don't use Task Manager for Memory Metrics", which goes into detail about how to read a program's RAM usage.

And my current journey of figuring this stuff out is on address space vs RAM. If you don't command stuff explicitly it's all a black box when a file get's memory mapped, lands in RAM and how long it actually stays in RAM.
[/OTrant]

41
Hardware / Re: Cpu fans ramping up when denoising
« on: 2019-05-08, 11:11:37 »
I was wondering if anyone here could help me out with a fan issue I'm having.
You want a smooth Fan curve and often the BIOS settings are beyond bad for that. Fan control in the BIOS is always limited. Although according to this post you have in your MSI Bios more advanced settings, MSI provides a companion APP, the MSI Command Center, where you can set a proper fan curve, which you can download here. Personally I recommend SpeedFan for that, as it is the pinnacle of Fan control software both in it's lightweight nature and detailed control. Unfortunately younger Motherboards changed the way they do FanControl and SpeedFan, which is not in active development does not detect the fan controls, but you can give it a try. Sadly you don't get direct access to fans anymore, a regression from previous generations of Motherboards. I'm sad to have to chose between the Heavyweight Asus AI Suite and proper fan control that doesn't suck on my workstation. All these new softwares STILL can't do exponential fan curves, like SpeedFan does for so long... Locking fan control behind OEM Software is such a disaster....

As for why specifically Denoise makes heat and thus heavy noise...
As stated in the CPU FAQ Thread, Denoise created something of a perfect stresstest.
Why is my CPU temperature higher/fan louder during the denoising compared to the rendering?
The memory access pattern of the rendering code is very random - for example, each ray may hit a completely different object. This makes it very hard for the CPU to predict which parts of the memory will be accessed next, and in the end the CPU ends up waiting for data to be fetched from memory most of the time.
 
When the image is denoised, it is accessed sequentially one pixel at a time. Also the processing of each pixel takes long enough so that the CPU is able to read the next pixel from memory before it is needed. This is a best case scenario for the CPU - it does not have to wait for memory, and the execution units are (almost) fully utilized.
 
When the execution units sit idle waiting for memory, the CPU is able to optimize its energy consumption (and therefore heat generation), but when the denoising kicks in, the CPU units are kept busy all the time and so the temperature goes up.
Also it's heavy on the FPU, which is a nice heater element for the colder months.
actually the rendering itself is much more ALU/general instructions heavy than denoising, denoising is hardcore FPU stuff. I think it has more to do with the fact that there are no cache misses and branch mispredictions in denoising, since the workload is fairly simple and predictable. CPU does not have to wait for pipeline to repopulate after branch misprediction, or for data to be loaded from RAM, so the FPUs are utilized much better.

42
[Max] General Discussion / Re: Scatter development insights
« on: 2019-05-07, 11:40:25 »
Scatter relevant feature request:
Recently I'm scraping at my sanity with randomized time for animated textures.
It's almost all gone now :S
I have 12 looping image sequences (~3000 frames long), placed across 400 instances of planes. They are assigned this image sequence via Corona Multi Tex. But if many instances play the sequence in sync, it looks awful, computery and artificial. So obviously every instance should start with a random start time.

But I can't find any way to get this to work, so I copy paste the image sequence 50 times and set a random start time by hand, which works. Randomized start time per instance should be a feature, just as Image sequence / AVI support for Corona Bitmap.

My work around works, but Slate and Max hate me now. Turning on Material render locks up max, sometimes a whole minute =.=
Never mind the crashes. Can't even use PNG sequences and had to switch to .avi files, because the shear mass of image sequence look ups made the PNG library crash.

43
[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Caustics playground!
« on: 2019-05-06, 15:04:14 »
Since caustics are the noisiest part of the image once turned on, naturally you would want to set some setting to number crunch caustics more than the rest of the image.
As I understand, caustics are calculated with the every pass.

So If you have noise from caustics, you should lower AA vs GI to get more Passes done in the same render time, just like with DOF and MoBlur.
I tested it and it seems to be the case. Both images had a 10 minute limit. GIvsAA = 4 managed 76 Passes and GIvsAA = 32 managed 31 Passes. GIvsAA 4 was cleaner than 32.

So noise from caustics = lower GIvsAA.
Is my notion correct? Makes me recall that Dynamic GIvsAA on the roadmap...

44
[C4D] I need help! / Re: Transparent background ?
« on: 2019-05-06, 13:36:53 »
Cheers, sounds like a good work-around
No need for Photoshop trickery.
I put the ship on a white shiny plane in order to get the reflections, but now I can't find a way to tell corona to render this as transparent...
The Corona ShadowCatcher is exactly made for this purpose. Though I'm on 3dsMax, I'm sure it's the same for C4D.
See Image attached.
1. ShadowMatte with reflection turned on
2. Enabled Alpha Mode "For Compositing"
3. Alpha now renders reflection
4. Reflection correctly now overlays over anything

45
[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Caustics playground!
« on: 2019-05-03, 04:54:43 »
on an object with "flat" mesh
What does that mean?
The Teapot is no a single-sided polygon, it has thickness, if that's what you mean.

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