Thinking of switching to VRay

[3dboomerang]

I'd never thought I'd say this, but I'm probably going to HAVE TO switch to VRay. I was a Mental Ray user and was amazed by those first versions of Corona. I mean, god damn that stuff was fresh.

Now however, I have to say I'm disappointed with the development as to the de-bugging and priorities of the general path. Please: This is NOT a rant, I'm basicly forced to move to VRay because of technical limitations in our projects.

I would LOVE some input of the dev team on this issue:
https://forum.itoosoft.com/forest-pro-(*)/fpp-corona-animated-proxies-and-scene-parsingprep-time/
https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?topic=26213.0

Our latest scenes over the past year were around 60Gb RAM of usage. This is due to using Forest Pack Pro, the parsing times explode and RAM usage is killing our RAM to the limit.

So much so that now our latest project just won't render, it hits the 64Gb mark on scene parsing, and preparing geo + rendering first pass is to much, it crashes, not enough RAM, paging size is also maxed out.

I go to the FPP forums pissed, I rant there saying this is such a pain in the ass plugin. Their reply:
The difference between Corona and VRay proxies, is that Corona proxies are handled different. They are stored as a FULL MESH in the memory, and the VRay proxies have a thing called "GetRenderMesh", which I don't understand, but it's supposed to be fast.

My worry is now that we have to move to VRay if this engine supports Forest Pack Pro better in parsing times and memory usage.

They (FPP-dev team) claims to have already contacted the Corona dev team multiple times about the issue, but nothing is happening.

So my question is why? I do not want to go Vray, I'd like to use Corona, but this just puts us in an impossible position.

Can a dev-team member state whether or not this is factual and if we are going to get better processing of proxies in FPP objects, or NOT. I'm sure you can say that much, so I can make an informed decision around this. I'm not going to keep waiting around for some progress on this part of Corona if the new features that're coming out atm in the new versions, is not even something we use.

Again: Not a rant, but asking firmly: Is this being adressed, or NOT. Is this improved in the next version, or NOT?

Warm regards;

Ethan

[aaouviz]

One thing I'd like to throw out there before you make a move is to try out reducing your bitmap sizes.

I was working on a scene that was using every bit of my 128gb RAM. It was sluggish, of course.

I discovered 'Pixamoon Bitmaps Tracking/Resizing' plugin and it saved my life. It's now essential to my workflow, has removed many headaches from my 3DS max use and now wish I employed it years earlier. Best $18 I've spent!

Highly recommend... to at least mitigate one of the issues you've described here.

Good luck mate

[3dboomerang]

If this would push the 64Gb RAM back to +/- 60Gb we're saved. We're using alot of 4K 8K tiff scanned textures from textures.com so yes I would assume this would help.

Trying it out, tyvm -

[3dboomerang]

One thing I'd like to throw out there before you make a move is to try out reducing your bitmap sizes.

I was working on a scene that was using every bit of my 128gb RAM. It was sluggish, of course.

I discovered 'Pixamoon Bitmaps Tracking/Resizing' plugin and it saved my life. It's now essential to my workflow, has removed many headaches from my 3DS max use and now wish I employed it years earlier. Best $18 I've spent!

Highly recommend... to at least mitigate one of the issues you've described here.

Good luck mate

Thank you, that script is worth well over 18$, it's pushed back RAM with a mindboggling 10Gb RAM. I owe you sir.

[romullus]

If you're allowed to use daily builds, then it's worth to try out of core texture rendering https://trello.com/c/yrXB2mZg/232-wip-out-of-core-rendering-for-textures According to the feature description, it should provide massive memory savings.

I'm not a fan of texture resizing, instead i always check new textures for surplus channels and bit depth - unlike resizing, it doesn't degrade texture quality, but in many cases it can give substantial memory savings.

[maru]

Thank you for bringing this to our attention. I will find out what internal tasks we have logged for this and what our current plans are and will do my best to log here as much information as possible.

Sorry for this silly question, but I would just like to understand the situation better:
Using Chaos Scatter instead of Forest Pack is not a viable solution for you in this case? Could you explain why? Is it mainly because of the amount of manual work that would be needed?

[maru]

Update: We do have some related internal tasks logged, and an ongoing discussion with iToo. Please understand that our resources are limited (limited number of developers working on a large list of bugfixes/feature requests) so making decisions on prioritization isn't easy. We *hope* that we will finally have the time to fix this along with some other iToo-related issues in Corona 10. It is currently on top of our *tentative* priority list. At this moment I can only suggest the usual - please track our roadmap:
https://trello.com/c/j5AVQ4oX/197-important-road-map-information-please-read
Once we will be closer to working on this, we will definitely include it on the public list.

[TomG]

If you're allowed to use daily builds, then it's worth to try out of core texture rendering https://trello.com/c/yrXB2mZg/232-wip-out-of-core-rendering-for-textures According to the feature description, it should provide massive memory savings.

I'm not a fan of texture resizing, instead i always check new textures for surplus channels and bit depth - unlike resizing, it doesn't degrade texture quality, but in many cases it can give substantial memory savings.

Just to clarify and manage expectations, it provides memory savings for the amount of memory used for textures in Corona Bitmaps - of course the memory used by textures is only part of the overall memory used in a scene, and depends on the scene and its balance between geometry and textures, so while it can be a large savings in memory used by textures in Corona Bitmaps, this may or may not be large in terms of overall memory required for the scene to render. You might save 50% of texture memory for Corona Bitmaps, but this might represent a 10% savings in overall memory needed by the scene, etc. And it does have to be Corona Bitmaps :)

[danio1011]

Thank you for bringing this to our attention. I will find out what internal tasks we have logged for this and what our current plans are and will do my best to log here as much information as possible.

Sorry for this silly question, but I would just like to understand the situation better:
Using Chaos Scatter instead of Forest Pack is not a viable solution for you in this case? Could you explain why? Is it mainly because of the amount of manual work that would be needed?

I too have found FP and Corona (latest DB) to be really sluggish lately.  Do I understand your question to imply that the same scatter set up in the same way, same density, etc. would be faster with Corona Scatter than iToo's FP? 

Thanks!  And wow it sure would be amazing to get FP to be faster with Corona....
Daniel

[Basshunter]

One thing I'd like to throw out there before you make a move is to try out reducing your bitmap sizes.

I was working on a scene that was using every bit of my 128gb RAM. It was sluggish, of course.

I discovered 'Pixamoon Bitmaps Tracking/Resizing' plugin and it saved my life. It's now essential to my workflow, has removed many headaches from my 3DS max use and now wish I employed it years earlier. Best $18 I've spent!

Highly recommend... to at least mitigate one of the issues you've described here.

Good luck mate

Hey aaouviz! Would you mind to giving us some tips on what your workflow is with this plugin. In understand it can resize bitmaps and then reduce the amount of ram used but a couple of questions arise:

- How do you know what the right size is in order to avoid textures to look blurry on the render?
- How do you deal with objects/textures that are far from the camera on some shots but very close in others?

[3dboomerang]

Using Chaos Scatter instead of Forest Pack is not a viable solution for you in this case? Could you explain why? Is it mainly because of the amount of manual work that would be needed?

It's a viable solution I think, but it's one of those things we'd need to focus on and use into a new project so we can start with Corona Scatter from the beginning and learn as we go along. If it supports the same sort of mingling of objects and "edge" mode cutting, sub-object and custom replacing, etc.. I mean, we'd have to see what it does. We chose Forest Pack Pro a long time ago, it's just a hump to get over.

Plus this is a project we did months ago, that is now asked to make an animation of. Happens a lot and we can't convert to Corona Scatter like that, to much vegetation to redo.

Time wise we're spending our R&D on UE5. (There was also the Q of UE5 support for the new Corona Physical Shaders when using datasmith export, cause currently also only supports CoronaLegacyMTL and the Converter doesn't let you choose Legacy anymore). So I don't know, maybe. But it's always ever the question of wanting to spend time on new plugins / software, or spend it on family once in a while ;)

Ai.... It's Saturday evening and I'm here again on the forum.. shame on me.

Grts

[aaouviz]

Thank you, that script is worth well over 18$, it's pushed back RAM with a mindboggling 10Gb RAM. I owe you sir.
[/quote]

So happy to hear this helped! Thanks for the update

[aaouviz]

One thing I'd like to throw out there before you make a move is to try out reducing your bitmap sizes.

I was working on a scene that was using every bit of my 128gb RAM. It was sluggish, of course.

I discovered 'Pixamoon Bitmaps Tracking/Resizing' plugin and it saved my life. It's now essential to my workflow, has removed many headaches from my 3DS max use and now wish I employed it years earlier. Best $18 I've spent!

Highly recommend... to at least mitigate one of the issues you've described here.

Good luck mate

Hey aaouviz! Would you mind to giving us some tips on what your workflow is with this plugin. In understand it can resize bitmaps and then reduce the amount of ram used but a couple of questions arise:

- How do you know what the right size is in order to avoid textures to look blurry on the render?
- How do you deal with objects/textures that are far from the camera on some shots but very close in others?

To be honest, what I normally do is reduce *all* the high-res images. The plug-in allows you to sort the list of bitmaps used by resolution, so I just do that, select the ones that are 4, 6, 8k and reduce them all being careful to make sure they're saved in the original folder with the appropriate suffix.

I then do a render and see what is obviously lacking in terms of res. It's usually only 1-2 textures, grounds/roads usually or sometimes big facade elements. We rarely need 4,6,8k textures, especially when the majority of these are used on small objects far from camera. If a bitmap is too small, it's easy to just find the original unscaled one and change it back.

To answer your second question, this doesn't really matter; if an object close to camera requires a high-res bitmap, Corona only needs to load it once, so having it instanced a second time on an object far from camera doesn't require any more computation... as far as I know.

[rowmanns]

Hi,

@aaouviz
As suggested above, in the v9 dailies we have the out of core textures. This automagically resizes the textures in the CoronaBitamps so you don't have to.

In some of our real world testing scenes we have saved more than 10gb of memory during rendering using this.

@3dboomerang
Edge mode for Chaos Scatter is in our plans. I'll do my best to let you know when it is released in the dailies :)

Thanks,

Rowan

[Basshunter]

Hi,

@aaouviz
As suggested above, in the v9 dailies we have the out of core textures. This automagically resizes the textures in the CoronaBitamps so you don't have to.

In some of our real world testing scenes we have saved more than 10gb of memory during rendering using this.

Hi Rowan,

What does this "our of core textures" exactly do? Does it reduce the size of texture depending of proximity to camera or something like this?

[TomG]

Hi,

@aaouviz
As suggested above, in the v9 dailies we have the out of core textures. This automagically resizes the textures in the CoronaBitamps so you don't have to.

In some of our real world testing scenes we have saved more than 10gb of memory during rendering using this.

Hi Rowan,

What does this "our of core textures" exactly do? Does it reduce the size of texture depending of proximity to camera or something like this?

Something like that yep - but note, only for textures loaded into Corona Bitmap (not native Bitmaps), and of course doesn't affect memory needed for geometry etc.

[Basshunter]

Something like that yep - but note, only for textures loaded into Corona Bitmap (not native Bitmaps), and of course doesn't affect memory needed for geometry etc.

Got it. Thank you, Tom.

[romullus]

It's time to kiss good bye good old Max's bitmap then :]

[Basshunter]

It's time to kiss good bye good old Max's bitmap then :]

Hmm, I've been using Corona Bitmap instead of Max native Bitmap since forever. I didn't know some of you preferred Max's one. Can I ask why?

[Juraj]

Well for one, not sure if it still applies, native never crashed when you just drag&dropped replacement during IR :- ).
I also never saw any speed or qualitative improvement, so it's just convenient with HDRi due to angle & dome mode.
It also has somewhat less features with no option to truly disable filtering.

The VrayBitmap (formerly VrayHDRi) at least introduced Elliptical (Anisotropic) Filtering for sharper result, while CoronaBitmap just retained Bilinear&Bicubic.

Last but not least. Native enables you to switch between Renderers easier, and had immediate support from Unreal export plugins. It's also kind of more future-proof in this way in general.

[arqrenderz]

Native has good support for Ifl, try to load 1000 frames using corona bitmap... also it doesn't support all formats native one does.
Also made some tests and parsing would be slightly slower than native bitmap.
Hope corona bitmap is developed further to use it without hesitation

[Basshunter]

Wow, I didn't know Corona Bitmap had all those limitations compared to native one. What's the point of using it?

[romullus]

Well, you said you are using it since forever, then i guess there is some point ;] Then also there's superior filtering algorithm, no fuss environment mapping, dome mode, correct handling of displacement maps, better RAM usage analysis and most recently - potential memory savings. Yes, it has some limitations and weaknesses, but it has some strong points too. I personally don't use it because of less convenience compared to Max bitmap and because of some other limitations, mentioned by Juraj and arqrenderz. It would be nice to see if Corona bitmap could get more love from devs, but i think it's time for me to give it a chance anyway.

[Juraj]

I believe the devs mentioned stumbling into roadblocks in 3dsMax architecture rather than not having enough love and time for it.

Corona's perfect 3ds Max integration is double-edged sword since they have to work with that there is... which I believe is lot of pain :- ).

[romullus]

Yes, you could be right, but then again, i lost count how many times Ondra said that something can't be done because of 3ds Max limitations and then sometime later he pulls a rabbit out of the hat and give us an impossible feature :]

[rowmanns]

Hi,

The forest pack issues you reported should be fixed in the latest daily https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?topic=38385.msg207389#msg207389