Topics

1

[Archive] Chaos Corona for Maya / Important. Please read - development halted

« on: 2016-02-04, 20:02:43 »

Hi friends.

Unfortunatly I will not be able to continue the development of mayaToCorona. Even if this is a great renderer and a cool project, the plugin reached a level where I am unable to continue with my humble skills and available time. Alone fixing any bugs takes too much time.

So I will leave this project. Thanks for this great experience. It was great to be part of this.

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[Archive] Chaos Corona for Maya / Swatches Rendering

« on: 2015-11-30, 16:53:20 »

Hi,
I received an bug with the hypershade/AEditor swatches where maya crashes as soon as a swatch will be rendered, what means immediatly if you have the AttributeEditor open and create a CoronaSurface shader. Does anyone have a similiar problem?

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[Archive] Chaos Corona for Maya / mayaToCorona 0.47

« on: 2015-11-19, 20:04:29 »

Only two small updates:

- reimplemented dump and resume renderings. You can now activate it from render globals and push a button to save/load framebuffer for resume
- changed the roundCorner connection from messate to point. Before the attribute was grayed out for what reason ever and it was not possible to simply connect a roundCorners. Not you should be able to connect a roundCorners via drag'n drop.

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[Archive] Chaos Corona for Maya / mayaToCorona 0.46

« on: 2015-11-13, 18:10:55 »

Hi,

this version has the follwing improvements:

- added vector displacement
- improved layered shading, at least with non OSL file textures
- simplified the round corner connections
- improved bump mapping with non OSL textures
- implemented IPR adding and removing nodes and shaders

The OSL texturing seems to yet to work correctly with layered shading, I'll try to fix it in one of the next releases.
Round Corners can now created a little bit easier:
You simply create a round corners map and assign it to the CoronaSurface shader. If you do it via (Ctrl-)drag'n drop in hypershade, you can use the default connection. Or you connect it to attribute called "Round Corners Map".

Again I created a small video to show the IPR uipdates:

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[Archive] Chaos Corona for Maya / mayaToCorona 0.45

« on: 2015-10-29, 20:26:13 »

Another one:

release 0.45
- fixed problem with clicking start ipr render before the old one was done
- added interactive shader updates
- added interactive object transforms

Here's a small video showing the updates:

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[Archive] Chaos Corona for Maya / mayaToCorona 0.44

« on: 2015-10-24, 15:10:13 »

Hi,
a small update.

- first ipr implementation for camera and lights
- displacement should work now

I recorded a small movie to show the IPR:

IPR works only with cameras and with lights at the moment. Other features will follow. I hope you do not have too much crashes. If so please tell me as exactly as possible when it appeared so that I can try to reproduce it.

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[Archive] Chaos Corona for Maya / mayaToCorona 0.43

« on: 2015-10-15, 19:23:30 »

Hi,

In this release the photographic exposure bug is fixed.

- the file texture node and the area light node now has an attribute called "No OSL". If you turn on this switch, plain Corona textures are used, what means you cannot use any procedural texture only a file node with it's placement node is recognized.

To be clear:
If you turn on this switch, then if a file texture is directly connected to an attribute, this file node and it's placement node is used for texture mapping. But it is used without OSL and OIIO, only with Coronas own texture system. Please tell me how it works.

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[Archive] Chaos Corona for Maya / mayaToCorona 0.42

« on: 2015-10-13, 22:08:13 »

Okay, here we have a new version.

a lot has changed in this version. We now use the newest API. All the changes result in some incompatibilities with older scenes.
For that reason there are no example scenes for this version, I will have to setup new ones. For the same reason there are no docs any more.
The pdf is really outdated. Plese refer to https://corona-renderer.com/doc/ most of the info is valid for 3dsmax and as well for mayaToCorona.
A few elements are not yet readded. e.g. the saving and resumig rendering does not work at the moment. It will work again in the next release.
The corona framebuffer is disabled as well in this version until I find the time to implement it correctly.
We have no version for Maya2014. I was unable to compile it correctly with the newest API.


Here is a (I fear incomplete ) list what has changed.
- reworked the CoronaSurface UI
- fixed render stamp visibility
- added light directionality
- added mesh/area light double sided option
- fixed some physical sky problems
- added area light render attributes
- added texturing for area lights
- redesigned render globals UI
- added wire/AO/Sky shader
- reimplemented coronaMap for image files like IBL with colorBalance and placement
- implemented the new Maya2016 Hypershade material viewer

Some workflows have changed:
- Corona sky is now a map instead of a hard coded setting in the render globals. If you want to use a sky shader, simply create a sky
- round corners is now a seperate node wich should be connected to the bump attribute of the corona shader. This has to be done via connection editor, the normal connection via bump will create a 2d bump node by default.
- if you want to mix round corners and normal bump, then you can connect the outNormal of a 2dBump node to the normalCamera input of the roundCorners node. This should work, but it only works this way not vice versa.
- we have a wire and ambient occlusion shader, but these cannot be freely combined with maya shading nodes, they will only work if they are directly connected to a corona surface.

I expect that you will encounter some more bugs in this release because of the amount of changes.
Please test as hard as you can and report any problem you have.

Layered shading does not yet work correctly, I try to fix it for the next version. Please test the Maya2016 Hypershade material viewer, I had some issues with not updating materials correctly here, please check if you encounter the same issue.

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[Archive] Chaos Corona for Maya / mayaToCorona 0.41

« on: 2015-05-17, 17:29:16 »

Small updates:

release 0.41
- fixed a problem with esc key which caused a premature stop of the next rendering.
- fixed set shading override if no shader is connected
- added bump map attribute to corona surface shader #142
- reimplemented batch rendering
- added highly experimental CoronaVFB

You can turn on the CoronaVFB in render globals under features, but it is really experimental and most features do not work yet. So it may be unstable with the CoronaVFB.
Batch rendering works again. Commandline rendering is not tested and is supposed not to work yet. This will be fixed in the next release.

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[Archive] Chaos Corona for Maya / mayaToCorona 0.40

« on: 2015-05-02, 20:26:18 »

release 0.40
- fixed broken swatches rendering (due to data reusage)
- make swatches preview black in rendering to avoid confusion
- added Corona menu
- implemented objects set material overrides
- removed camera update callback
- implemented global volume material
- fixed wrong scaling in round corners
- added a first implementation of layered shaders
- drag and drop textures onto a corona material should now work better

We now have a global material override for selected objects via object sets. Global volume is implemented. I hope it is a little bit more stable with swatches rendering.

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[Archive] Chaos Corona for Maya / mayaToCorona 0.39

« on: 2015-04-19, 14:43:18 »

Another small update:

- fixed wrong evaluation of sun if bg is not physical sky
- modified license check from the main thread (at plugin load time)
- make renderstamp usable (even interactively during rendering)
- using photographic exposure from renderglobals instead of camera
- UI updates
- added a Maya 2016 plugin, only with basic testing

Physical sun is now evaluated only if physical sky is turned on and if the checkbox "use sun" is turned on.
The license check is a bit modified. It now checks the license at plugin load time, I hope this works better.
You can now use photographic exposure directly from the renderglobals, no need to select and modify the camera any more.
Implemented GI in UI a bit better.

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[Archive] Chaos Corona for Maya / mayaToCorona 0.38

« on: 2015-04-18, 20:42:16 »

Here is a quick update which hopefully fixes the annying swatch render problems.
The release should:

- much less crashes during swatch rendering
- updating incomplete swatches after rendring is finished

The maketx file workflow has been streamlined. That means that if for any image exists an image created with maketx and has an extension of ".exr.tx" in the same directory,
this file will be used instead the original file. This should lead to a faster texture lookup.

To convert all images in the scene you can execute this script in a python tab in the script editor:

Code: [Select]

import makeTx as mk
mk.optimizeFileTextureNodes()

I will make the whole process more convenient in future releases, but for testing this should work.
Please check this release if the bugs with an emptry render window and crashes with shaders, missing hypershade icons are still present.

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[Archive] Chaos Corona for Maya / mayaToCorona 0.37

« on: 2015-04-13, 12:04:27 »

release 0.37
- switched to new Corona API with new license procedure
- fixed a crash if motion blur is turned off and a object has motionblur turned off as well
- fixed the case where one shader is assigned per face (what handles maya differntly than one shader for one object)
- fixed a crash which occured after changing the image resolution after a rendering. #183
- fixed rendering template objects. #184
- fixed wrong IPR execution
- reimplemented reusing previous defined shader data (helpful for scenes with a lot of objects)
- improved texture handling
- implemented corona intern shader swatch preview
- restructured module file

In the output window there should now appear logging informations.
The shader preview now is created with the Corona internal shader preview and should be better.
Texture handling. OpenImageIO/OSL is quite slow with larger texture files. It is recommended to use tiled and mipmapped files created with maketx.exe instead of the original ones.
There is no automatic conversion done yet, but I'll create a script to simplify the workflow. Meanwhile if you want to try it, you can convert the files with:

maketx.exe -v -oiio -o outputFileName.exr originalFilename.ext

e.g.

mayaToCorona/bin/maketx.exe -v -oiio -o myConvertedImage.exr someConcreteTexture.tif

The output file extension has to be .exr. That's important. Then you can load the images in maya and replace the original ones.
In a future version, I'll streamline the workflow so that you can simply turn on the file optimisation in the renderglobals and let the plugin do the rest.

As usual, please report any problems as exact as possible.

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[Archive] Chaos Corona for Maya / mayaToCorona 0.36

« on: 2015-03-29, 16:45:39 »

Hi, there is a new release of mayaToCorona:

release 0.36
- fixes near/far clipping #173
- fixed displacement mapping water level.
- fixed a subdiv per face shading crash. #91 (reopened/reclosed)
- fixed bump mapping (I hope). #153
- refactured large parts of the framework
- implemented udims #174
- fixed broken lighting with per face shading #176
- interactive color mapping #179
- fixed a motionblur regression

15

[Archive] Chaos Corona for Maya / mayaToCorona 0.35

« on: 2015-01-18, 14:40:24 »

Hi,

there is a new release with a few new features. I modified the UI behaviour a bit so the common globals should behave hopefully better with other renderer plugins like vray and arnold. This release introduces light linking. Light linking does not yet work with corona geometry lights which are mostly shader based what is a general problem. But I try to find a way.
Render regions should work better now, even if there is an outline which I cannot get rid of at the moment. Pressing esc during translation process will now result in a correct intterupt, but only after the translation is complete, I'll try to improve this.

release 0.35
- fixed sun size crash with limits. #152
- negative bump map value was not recognized. #153
- switched common globals ui to new system. #155
- shader nodes are not deleted any more if inputs are deleted. #159
- added near/far clipping to camera.
- fixed camera roll.
- fixed single channel textures in OSL. #156
- added camera view projections. #165
- fixed particle instancer bug. #154
- implemented light linking. #167
- fixed render region with test resolution change crash #162
- implemented imageFilePrefix #166
- improved region rendering
- pressing esc during translation process works better