difficult to set material colours and Corona Pattern seems broken

[frv]

I am a bit in a hurry and can't provide files and examples.

But I still have lots of difficulties to set a material colours with the sliders. Setting goes everywhere randomly.
I tried Corona Pattern with a gravel mesh but on anything else than a plane that is undistorted or scaled the patterns do not behave properly. I get flat gravel on each part of a plane that I scaled. I do mnot remember it was so difficult to set a pattern. Now after hours of trying I gave up. It simply does not work. Back to displacement. Pity, I liked the patterns.

General comment. It seems to me that Corona render is getting more and more difficult to use and to navigate around the many little and bigger bugs. Is it because I am using the daily builds ? Some new features can only be used after hours of trial and error.

OSX 13.2.1
Mac Studio Ultra 20 core 128Gb ram 2Tb hd
C4C 2023.1.0

[frv]

Just another bug. Chaos scatter shows in viewport what does not render.
See attachment. No flowers in the garden even though Scatter renders them as wireframe in the viewport.
And in the viewport the flowers are only scattered around the edges of the surfaces. I never had this before.

[frv]

well, the last problem was caused by reversed normals wrongly corrected by the rotation setting normal vs. Y
Can happen when you copy a Chaos scatter from another file.... :-)

[frv]

Just got my renders out. Time for a minute to respond to myself.
The problems with the Corona Patterns trying to have a gravel road were mostly caused by normals not being up. C4D has a known bug that when you reverse normals on some types of geometry C4D crashes. Not a Chaos problem. Another thing with the Patterns is that the UV settings can be very sensitive. A bit to hight or low and you the result is rubbish.

The color sliders for the materials are getting to be a big problem.When you slide or type in a value for Color, Hue and lightness  randomly change. The material preview goes black with even the slightest change in color. I hope this is just a daily build issue. But its so bad with this release that things have become unworkable.
Mac OS
Mac Studio Ultra 128Gb

[Beanzvision]

Hi there, sorry to hear you were having some issues with Corona pattern. Are you able to share some images of these issues or perhaps submit a support ticket so we can investigate it further?

[frv]

Tx.
I think the pattern object might be too complex (80 Mb 2mx2m pebbles by Arroway)
But I got this working surprisingly well before. When I tried it with the latest daily build C4D became unresponsive. I might overlook something. It's a complex feature though with setting hard to grasp if in the middle of a project with a deadline. I went back to displacement, looks less but saves me so much time in research on how it works.

[frv]

I got it to work but not properly.
The pattern only shows at render of course.

When I leave the Corona Pattern visible in the viewport C4D becomes very slow, almost unresponsive. Not a huge problem since I can easily filter it in the viewport.

Another problem is with the base object. Once edited the pattern becomes distorted. I can set a simple C4D plane but as soon as I use edited geometry for my base object I get distorted pattern as you can see in the attachment

[frv]

And this one. Its a bit exaggerated but I often have stretched surfaces and so on in landscaping and I get these kind of distortions when using Corona Pattern

[Beanzvision]

If the base object has been modified, you may need to unwrap the UV's again and adjust them. I'm no expert in this area btw. In this example I unwrapped the UV's and set it as cubic projection. This might help resolve your ''stretching'' issue. :)

[frv]

Tx, the high polygon count of the gravel mesh probably is too much for this feature. I get a lot of random results. So back to displacement for gravel. But I only noticed this problem with the latest build and haven done gravel before without much of a hassle.

It's really hard to to get this feature right since its all very slow to preview. C4D freezes up a lot when the gravel mesh is subject to the pattern. All in all I think it's great feature but for really simple meshes to be patterned.

I will experiment again sometime with a simple mesh.

[frv]

Tried the unwrap and that worked. I also tried to remesh the plane on which the pattern is set but strangely enough that did not work at all.

Can you do an unwrap automatically ? I would say that geometry is constantly edited and the unwrapping is essential. I have spend hours of remeshing and trials to get this right. Happy its now solved. The gravel is not really too complex. It's does freeze C4D but you can switch of the Corona Pattern until you need to render.

btw The Arroway gravel meshes and textures are amazing. Especially if you have gravel in close up. The smooth gravel meshes are a bit better since they have better geometry than the crushed gravels.

[frv]

Did a few more test. Interesting to set a displacer for the gravel. All works well but when I copy the gravel and rotate it it becomes a mess (see second attachment).

So there are definitely bugs with this feature. Would be better I think if the pattern could also be set in a more straightforward manner than using UV's, especially for gravel.

[Beanzvision]

Unfortunately, I'm no expert in UV unwrapping. There was an automatic feature which was introduced in S22. Hopefully that may help you.

[frv]

Tx again for the help.
The gravel is incredibly realistic when used with Corona Pattern. So I am tempted to use it as much as possible. But it's also very unstable and can cost many hours of trial and error when used in a project. Wish this feature had better or more straightforward setting.