Messages

5506

[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Daily Builds 1.5

« on: 2016-07-12, 17:37:33 »

No crashes on cancelling denoising, perfect! And I like the denoising on the CTexmap element, also brilliant!

Any thought on the possibility of setting different denoise amounts for each element? Very useful even without that, but wondering if it is on the cards (I guess I am thinking there that if anyone denoises an AO in the CTexmap, it can often benefit from a higher denoise than might want to use in the beauty pass, not sure how useful folks would find that ability in general though?)

5507

[Max] I need help! / Re: transparent plastic bottle material

« on: 2016-07-12, 16:48:58 »

Glad to have helped in any way! I think the final bottles have come out rather nice there, and I hope your client agrees!

Ok on the AO :) It can be quite a flexible tool so it is good to keep it and the various ways it can be used in mind for future projects!

For videos, all the official ones are at
https://www.youtube.com/user/CoronaRenderer

That section will keep growing over time :)

Another recent series that was very interesting was the "Making of Cake Please" series which has four parts:

5508

[Max] I need help! / Re: transparent plastic bottle material

« on: 2016-07-12, 14:41:20 »

Not sure how you have the AO set up there - in a separate AO pass (create a CTex render element, and drop the Corona AO into the map for that) there should be no background for one thing, as well as no shadows. This image looks more like a regular beauty pass using AO in the diffuse component? If so, that  will definitely still show shadows unless you turn off shadows from the lighting, but still not a good way to render AO for later compositing as a separate layer.

Done in a CTexmap, with settings adjusted to give a very sharp definition to the AO should come out looking something like the attached. It will render at the same time as your beauty pass too.

If you are after some other effect, you could use the AO fed into some blending to, say, darken the refraction colour in those places etc. Depends what effect you are looking for from it.

Hope this helps!

5509

[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Daily Builds 1.5

« on: 2016-07-08, 21:00:21 »

Vignette seems to save differently than it looks in the VFB - got the same results saving to PNG and JPG. Do I have something set up wrong somplace, or should I log this in Mantis? Images are
- What I get when saved to JPG
- What it looks like in the VFB (screen grabbed)
- The settings in the VFB

I did try resetting everything else to default, but the vingette still looked different in the saved image vs the VFB.

Thanks!
   Tom

EDIT - created a new scene, gave it a single colour background in Max environ and nothing else, and does still look different in the VFB than when saved.

Chose to report on Mantis as does look like a bug given it happens in the empty scene, ID 2002.

5510

[Max] I need help! / Re: transparent plastic bottle material

« on: 2016-07-08, 20:47:12 »

Here's the scene in 2016 format - I replaced the third party HDRI with a simple one of my own rendered out from Terragen, replace as needed! With that, use the U and V offsets in the bitmap to rotate the image to get lighting in a good place, and some nice clouds to refract. Also, replace the bottle object with your remodified version too. Did tweak the water some just to go with this background, added in Fresnel falloff with an output curve to tweak emphasis of edges, but again that can all be done different for the artistic results you are looking for in combination with whatever background you go with etc.

Hope this helps!

5511

[Max] General Discussion / Re: Material preview scene

« on: 2016-07-08, 17:30:44 »

There is "a" simball available for free (not that one though) over at the third party http://coronamaterials.com/ in case that proves useful in the meantime :)

5512

[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Daily Builds 1.5

« on: 2016-07-08, 14:30:38 »

My bad, had put it in tickets rather than in Mantis, have added it to Mantis now! Glad I don't have many bug reports to submit, but need to get them in the right place when I do :) The ID is 2001.

5513

[Max] I need help! / Re: transparent plastic bottle material

« on: 2016-07-08, 02:08:02 »

From experimenting earlier, my feeling was that the HDRI background is what makes the difference to the water - with a very blurred background, the water becomes "blurry" too, there's no detail for it to refract in a sharp and clear way. Part of the reasoning I tried out the clouds, and it did seem to help - those can be left unblurred as they are neutral enough as a background that they don't need to be hidden, and then you have some nice crisp detail there for the water to refract. That may be all it takes for your scene now.

Moving the lighting to catch the edges is a good idea, I did that in the sky version, made the big light vertical (tall and narrow) and moved it to the other side. I'll see about saving the file out with 2016 compatibility, though you'll need to grab the HDRI for yourself, although free I am not sure on their rules for redistributing - and you may prefer another HDRI from their site or elsewhere, lots of good ones around with some nice skies and clouds!

5514

[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Daily Builds 1.5

« on: 2016-07-07, 22:46:31 »

As a note to the above, I can cancel the Denoising if it is very early in the phase, but once it gets close to about halfway it crashes.

Also, scatter's temporal adjustment seems to be working as expected, tried it on a cloth cube just as a quick test and the objects no longer popped in and out of their locations.

5515

[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Daily Builds 1.5

« on: 2016-07-07, 22:20:53 »

if I enable Denoising for a render element and cancel the render during the Denoising phase, Max crashes. If the Denoising is not enabled for render elements, I can cancel during Denoising without a crash (Max 2016, 1.5 from July 7th). Mantis ticket created with minidump. I was using the reflection render element in this test.

Also, a thought, any chance of adding denoising to the CTexmap, for those who may want to run it on an AO pass?

Thanks!
   Tom

5516

[Max] I need help! / Re: transparent plastic bottle material

« on: 2016-07-07, 17:54:50 »

- Did the conversion steps on bottle and water
- Tweaked the water and bottle materials some (eg added a Fall Off using Fresnel to affect the Refraction colour in the plastic to try to draw out the geometry change some more, changed some of the reflectance IOR just for visual looks rather than physical accuracy, adjusted diffuse amounts some, reduced glossiness on the plastic reflection) - all of these can be tweaked some more as it ain't perfect!
- Didn't have the map for the cap, did play with the materials some there but you may want to keep your original
- Cut the water off a little bit lower in the bottle, so there is more of a gap with "just plastic" up top
- Rotated the bottle a little, as that helped bring out the features some more
- Removed the overrides as they are not needed - the same thing is now being seen as the background, reflected, and refracted, so is fine just to use the one bitmap in the Max environment

You could also try a background that is neutral but less blurred, a cloudy sky could work for instance (I used a freebie from HDRI Skies http://hdri-skies.com/) - though I'd likely play with the positioning some, I think the current positioning of the ground in the refractions makes it look a bit like an angry Joey :)

5517

[Max] I need help! / Re: transparent plastic bottle material

« on: 2016-07-07, 15:31:29 »

A quick note on Quadrify Mesh - it comes in with a default of 4%, which can result in a HUGE number of polys if the model it is being applied to has lots of polys to begin with (as imported CAD may have), which can mean Max takes an age to calculate it. For using it to remove triangulation only, often it's better to apply it to a cube, set it to 100%, then copy and paste the modifier onto the desired object, saving Max ever trying to add more polys :)

5518

[Max] I need help! / Re: transparent plastic bottle material

« on: 2016-07-07, 15:22:27 »

I did this -

- Underneath the Shell and Edit Poly I added a ProOptimizer with Weld Vertices on, set to 100% so it didn't actually simplify the mesh any other than welding vertices - often useful on imported meshes from STL and similar.
- I added Quadrify Mesh set to 100% above that, just removes triangulation where it can
- I then removed the topmost Edit Poly, collapsed everything, and converting the Editable Mesh into an Editable Poly
- Then I went to Modeling, Properties, and set Smooth 30

The last step is likely the key, setting the smoothing groups, the first few steps just cleaned things up from the import.

Attaching a close up from the Interactive Renderer just to show it is smoothed :) And a grab of the stack I set up (the last Edit Poly is turned off since I was going to collapse and turn into an editable poly anyway).

5519

Gallery / Re: My first ever picture with Corona

« on: 2016-07-06, 22:33:55 »

Hi, and welcome! That's a good looking first image, looking forward to seeing more too :)

5520

[Max] Corona Goodies - User Contributions / Re: FREE MODELS

« on: 2016-07-06, 18:57:24 »

My thinking is if they didn't care, they wouldn't say "don't redistribute" :) The fact they say that means that they do care and have laid the rules out, a small price to pay for free items! Sounds like all that is needed is to use the links to download them for yourself, so everything still remains usable with just a few extra downloads.