Messages

1

[Max] General Discussion / Re: Quick question - your thoughts on ArchiCAD integration

« on: 2018-08-13, 10:58:45 »

Hi all!

You may remember in our last blog post we mentioned testing integration with some CAD software - here at Total Chaos we just showed the first results of testing integrating Corona into ArchiCAD (can't share the video here, but it was very rudimentary initial testing so you aren't missing out on much ;) ).

So now we would welcome your comments and thoughts:

*Is it software you'd be interested in seeing Corona integrated into?
*What features of Corona would you like to see there?
*Do you have other CAD software that you think would be a better fit or has more need of Corona?

Everything is just early testing, so don't get excited one way or the other :)
But we would like to hear your thoughts before we do anything more than these early tests.

Thanks!

   Tom

+1 for an Archicad Integration. This would be awesome. As an Archicad User since Version 5.0 (22 now) and longtime Max/Vray/Corona user this opens up new possibilities. Would be interesting though in what manner you could integrate a proper light and material system, if that is even possible or how the integration would work in general?

As architects that also visualize we would really love to have this integration, at least for simple everyday work images without to much hassle of dealing with multiple programs. As the workflow from Archicad to Max is a bit painful and material replacement too, i also second the wish for a cool import/export/translation tool. Marc Lorenz's plugin helped for that, but it is all nowhere near the integration Archicad has for example to Rhino or Cinema 4d (it reads an writes those file formats native).

Cheers,

Chris.

2

[Max] General Discussion / Re: REBUS RenderFarm

« on: 2015-09-29, 17:30:48 »

Talk to them directly but my understanding is that you need to buy at least 1 point to "activate" your account, even if you have a bunch of points already on it through freebies etc. I had to do this. Then the watermark was removed and I could re-download the clean files.

Same with us! Shame they don´t state that policy clearly somewhere... You just really buy one or a few points with a credit card or something and then you are authorized. But the strange thing is, we did 2 or 3 jobs before with the free points, before we ran into that watermark problem with the next one - and of course back then very time critical - job.

Cheers,

Chris.

3

[Max] General Discussion / Re: A7 to 1.0

« on: 2015-03-02, 12:01:37 »

I guess we will manage with 1.0, better to look forward. Especially as we already ordered our licences. The one project which makes troubles will be over anyway in a few days, and it is not the most important one for us. Plus it makes trouble regardless which corona or max version we use, so be it. ;)

4

[Max] General Discussion / Re: Fairsaas monthtly!

« on: 2015-03-02, 09:36:46 »

the discount will be active for up to 12 consecutive months on a single subscription - so if you cancel after the 45 days and resume (meaning you will buy a new FairSaaS license) later, you will have to pay the full price this time.

Very well, thanks! I thought it would work that way... Activation on our first workstation went without a hitch a few moments back. Please continue the amazing work, we look forward to the ongoing development.

Cheers,

Christoph.

5

[Max] General Discussion / Re: Fairsaas monthtly!

« on: 2015-03-02, 09:29:41 »

Sorry for One question but is not really clear fr me!
If i buy a Fairsaas license now and pay monthtly will i pay the disscount price during
One year or After 45 days the normal Price for each month??

I wanted to ask that as well, in the following scenario... We got our licences this morning, yeah! :) So, well let´s say i cancel them (or some of them) for the holidays in summer and renew afterwards, i guess we will from then on pay the full price for the ones i kind of paused?

Edit: We are cool with everything, and love the flexible licencing. Just wanted to know. :)

Cheers,

Christoph.

6

[Max] Resolved Bugs / Re: rendering resets/restarts infinitely BUG

« on: 2015-02-28, 09:17:31 »

Right before you posted that i found out that there was a DOF active on the camera i played around with... Well so your suspicion turns out to be quite right, is there a problem with that? in fact i don´t use it anyway, we were just toying around in the interior shots with some trickery.

multipass DOF is an outdated feature from 20 years ago, that wasnt still removed because... well you know why. Corona does not support it, but when you turn it on, it will cause 3ds Max to render each frame multiple times. It is not really a bug in Corona (and does not happen only in 1.0) and it seems we cannot do anything about it :/.

So is this the cause of the problem?

Thanks for the fast reply, we will be happy customers starting from next week, as soon as we find the time to visit the online shop. ;)

Great! We can seriously use some coffee money these days ;)

Well, you deserve it, and we will support that! :)

7

[Max] Resolved Bugs / Re: rendering resets/restarts infinitely BUG

« on: 2015-02-27, 18:02:01 »

Right before you posted that i found out that there was a DOF active on the camera i played around with... Well so your suspicion turns out to be quite right, is there a problem with that? in fact i don´t use it anyway, we were just toying around in the interior shots with some trickery.

Thanks for the fast reply, we will be happy customers starting from next week, as soon as we find the time to visit the online shop. ;)

cheers,

Chris.

8

[Max] General Discussion / Re: A7 to 1.0

« on: 2015-02-27, 17:34:10 »

how long will a7.2 work btw? and can we revert back for the moment? i have tons of hangs and quirks with the new version and an old scene that needs to be finished in the next few days...

9

[Max] Resolved Bugs / rendering resets/restarts infinitely BUG

« on: 2015-02-27, 17:24:30 »

Hi there!

We encountered a very bad bug in the new 1.0 version. We upgraded today and now when i start and stop a rendering of an old scene (we have to finish next week as it is) it infinitely restarts the render process and max nearly hangs! What can i do or try?

EDIT: By the way. Max 2015 with subscription, so the latest upgrade is installed.

Cheers,

Christoph.

10

Gallery / interior concept-images for the highest wood skyscraper in the world in vienna

« on: 2015-02-27, 15:21:48 »

Hi coronauts!

We are happy to have provided seven images for this amazing project...

http://www.minc.at/newsroom/detail/news/kerbler-gruppe-realisiert-weltweit-erstes-24-stoeckiges-holzhochhaus-in-der-seestadt-aspern-1/?tx_news_pi1

By the way, they were done in total in a 7 day timeframe, as the client came to us about 10 days before they had to print the press material. But anyway, i guess they turned out quite cool. We had to imagine the whole interior design of the 7 zones of the building on the way through the project, which all had to be depicted, together with the head of the project development company. Fun work for us!


PS: I didn´t link all the images to the forum, just three of them and the article - but they are clickable in highres over there for those interested! :)

Cheers,

Christoph.

11

Gallery / Rooftop Extension Visualization

« on: 2014-12-15, 15:24:30 »

Hi all!

These are images of one of our latest projects, a little rooftop extension and remodeling visualization. Background photography provided was quite bad but had to be used anyway, as we weren´t comissioned by the client to shoot our additional own footage and the actual hills in the background of the corner roof window are a main selling point of the design. :)

We like the minimalistic outcome with a bit of vintage/shabby style nevertheless quite much, which was the art-direction given by the architect, targeted at the actual and quite young owner of this little flat in a hip viennese district. As always it was a pleasure to work with corona, though we ran into some trouble with not matching images while trying to DR render. Looking forward to the final version in january!

Cheers,

Chris.

12

General CG Discussion / Re: A warning to all CG newbies.

« on: 2014-09-11, 16:44:56 »

Well, Juraj, we only defend something that's not true. And you have gone to great length in painting my words in a bad light.
I did not mention any names of Blogs or people. But since you have gone on your orange box about this I will be terse.

Courtesy costs nothing. If you do not respond to four email then you have chosen to do so. You have decided that it is unworthy of your time to respond.
This is your choice. But you should change your email address from: sayhello@jurajtalcik.com to something closer to the truth.

BTW. I am the opposite of what you feel I am. I go to great lengths to always put myself in other peoples shoes and write good things about there work. My only crime is that I share an interest in CG. Surely, this is worthy of some respect?
I don't think selfish is apart of my persona. I actually like people. I just dislike snobs :)

I think you should re-read your response. Your the one who comes across as selfish. You say things with such venom. I cannot believe I wrote to you.... but, I must admit... your work is brilliant :)

Well Kurai, i don´t quite get you either... I mean be honest, it´s a wonder that people even find the time to answer any mails they get from strangers. for questions, that´s what also forums are for. I might have a strange perspective as i learned 3d in a time when there was no such thing as blogs for everything, from the late 90s/early2000s on, when i was 18 and just out of school. And people used to learn it anyway if they were dedicated. i love to answer questions (should anyone have them) from time to time, but do you know what it´s like to have a functioning business as well as trying to have a bit of a good work/life balance?

i learned 3d parallel to studying architecture, and then in 2010, when i was in my 10th year of studying here in vienna, and working parallel all the time in offices as well as freelancing in 3d archviz stuff (i taught myself with friends), we founded our own company. this stuff can take time and commitment, blogs and mails can ease the learing curve and time, but yeah... it takes time. so anyway, i don´t want to insult anyone especially not you or any beginner (why would one do that?), but you also have to get the perspective of the people being bombarded with questions all the time!

cheers,

chris.

13

[Max] Resolved Feature Requests / Re: Corona UI Defaults

« on: 2014-07-20, 13:48:07 »

What exactly does this do?

what it primarily is good for in my opinion is that when you start max, your material editor is populated with this 24 slots of materials, depending on the preset you choose. and i want those to be corona materials, without having to convert them via the converter script.

because this information doesn´t get stored in the "maxstart.max" i can create but in some preferences "medit.mat" file loaded by the chosen ui preference, and buried away somewhere under user/appdata/local/autodesk/blablabla... the preset does that, among other things like defaults for "by layer" or "by object" and stuff like the default type of shadows for standard lights and so on...

vray eventually had that. like much else in 3dsmax it can quite mess up your max, but better to have it than not i guess.

because at the moment even if i choose corona now to be my primary renderer (and save this in the maxstart.max) those slots gets populated with vray materials at startup (because the default chosen before on my computer was max and vray) which then produce error messages of course.

edit: and of course, i could reset that either or edit the chosen preset like i did with an updated "medit.mat" file populated with 24 clean midgrey default corona materials. so if you know where to look you get there, but it´s hmm, awkward like so much else in 3dsmax. all this legacy and new stuff thrown together plus all those user configuration things are killing me. a serious pain!

cheers,

chris.

14

[Max] Tutorials & Guides / Re: Transparency versus geometry comparison

« on: 2014-07-18, 16:49:11 »

I dont know what happens internally in 3dsmax when you use bump mapping without filtering. I just know that you cannot evaluate bump map from a point sample - you need to look into its neighbourhood, which is very similar to what filtering does.

thank you keymaster! sounds convincing, even if i am no programmer by any means. ;)

i will look into that and re-render some scenes for more comparisons. anyway, corona bump mapping works very well compared to what i was expecting from bumps coming from vray.

15

[Max] Tutorials & Guides / Re: Transparency versus geometry comparison

« on: 2014-07-18, 15:55:11 »

image filtering and texmap filtering are 2 COMPLETELY different things.

BTW: yes, bump mapping needs always some filtering to work, the algorithm is based on it.

so keymaster, for bitmaps in the bump slot one should always use filtering like pyramidal or summed area instead of none? and what about the blur values?

it was my impression with vray 2.0 that everything worked quite well with almost every map set to filter=none and blur 0,01 so we tried to apply that to corona as well. but as people like juraj stated, the matter is probably a bit more complicated.


the attached image was rendered with corona (only a little post color/contrast/glow) to illustrate a room of an old house we are planning/converting currently (architectural design not visualization mostly)

it´s not meant to be something special or a nice visualization on it´s own but just part of the planning process... anyway, the thing is, in this scene (because it had to cost no time) every single map was set to filtering=none and blur 0,01. even the bumpmaps... we rendered it in 3000px wide and with about 100 passes, turned out quite fine i think, no? i mean especially the (quite dramatic and not very well mapped) bump mapping looks like it works to me?

besides this filtering issues the scene uses every conceivable sin like color correct maps (they are supposed to be slow too?!) for single bitmaps to alter brightness and contrast for using them in different slots of the materials (diffuse, bump, reflection). plus it is lit via an HDR light outside and a few smaller visible and invisible spheres and planes inside... rendertimes for those 100 passes were not very high and i think to get the same out of the box result with vray in reasonable time we would have had a hard time.

so thanks, conclusion again, corona is awesome. just my 2 cents to the topic, not very scientific. ;)

we will experiment a bit more with this whole bitmap filtering stuff i guess, always a pleasure to read how other people do it.

best regards,

chris.