Messages

16

[Max] General Discussion / Re: Why render results with different amount of memory do not differ ?

« on: 2021-07-28, 14:15:04 »

The size of memory plays a role only when you don't have enough of it. If your scene (and all other programs you're running at the same time) fits in the available memory, there should be absolutely no difference between various RAM sizes.

There are other factors which come in play, because I guess the two builds you mention are not exactly identical. For example the RAM in the 96 GB build might be running on lower frequency or be configured in a way that not all the CPU memory channels are used. And that's talking just about memory, there can be many other factors affecting computer performance, not just hardware, but also any currently running software as well.

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[Max] General Discussion / Re: Distributed rendering

« on: 2021-07-26, 09:16:36 »

- is there a setting somewhere to include, or not, the maps when sending out the job to the render nodes ?

Why do you need this? Do you have some problems when some files are transferred when they're not needed (e.g. they're available on some shared drive)?

- would it be possible to send over the calculated data from the render nodes "over the fly", and not at the end of the render in order to speed to the compilation of the render data ?

It already works this way. In the DR settings we have Synchronization interval (defaults to 60 seconds) and Max pixels to transfer at once (defaults to 3 millions). DR slave sends its in-progress data whenever either of these limits is reached. If the master receives data from a slave only at the end of the rendering, this means that the slave rendered for less than 60 seconds and also rendered fewer than 3M pixels, before the master ended the render.

18

[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Corona Renderer 7 for 3ds Max - Daily Builds Discussion

« on: 2021-07-12, 17:15:53 »

Don't worry, it doesn't mean that we're scrapping this. During v8 planning, we just decided that it isn't really a trello-grade feature :)

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[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Corona Renderer 7 for 3ds Max - Daily Builds Discussion

« on: 2021-06-09, 16:34:32 »

Ryuu, can you confirm that haze/areial perspective will behave similarly to the previously posted video from V-Ray, i.e. it will affect colours of the distance objects and not only just a sky itself?

Yes, haze affects everything in the scene, not just the background.

As for aerial perspective - would it be possible to not affect the HDRI itself? Just the geometry in the scene.

At this point there is no option to exclude the background and we're not planning to add that in v7.

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[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Corona Renderer 7 for 3ds Max - Daily Builds Discussion

« on: 2021-06-09, 16:08:37 »

There has also been a note/question about the haze in the new sky model that has kinda been lost in the previous discussion.

This is something that is already implemented in the model, but unfortunately we have found some bugs in the implementation, just before we released the updated model in the daily builds. So for the time being we have hidden this feature from the UI, with plan to add it back in later builds when it's fixed. This is also the reason why it was ticked as done on trello and then unticked again.

21

[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Discussions about people's expectations, Corona developement, life and other things

« on: 2021-06-07, 11:56:28 »

Hello everyone, sorry that we had to delay the new tone mapping until Corona Renderer 8. Unfortunately, we have grossly underestimated the amount of groundwork we would need for this task. The biggest things, for example:

• Making the tone mapping pipeline configurable basically means completely redoing the way we handle tone mapping in Corona. Unfortunately, it is tightly bound to lots of code in both Corona itself and our 3ds Max plugin, which needed lots of changes and tweaking.
• At the same time, we're currently in the middle of switching to a new UI framework. On one hand, this will have lots of benefits in the future because with the current framework, we sometimes need to spend a huge amount of time to work around some bugs or unimplemented features. On the other hand, there is always a learning curve when you start using some new tool, and unfortunately, we have underestimated how much that will impact our work on this task.

Several times we were at the stage where it looked like we would need just 2-3 more weeks to finish this task, only to hit some road block which delayed us for another week or two, if we wanted to do things properly instead of just quickly hacking some workaround that would just bite us in the ass further down the line. Unfortunately, we're still in a similar stage, and so we were faced with a tough decision where all the options would lead to a disappointment:

• We could just delay the V7 release for a few weeks, put the team in an extended crunch mode and rush the code to make it into the V7 release. This way, however we wouldn't have enough time for polishing both the UI and functionality based on your feedback. We would also be asking to have to do a V7 hotfix just for fixing the bugs introduced during this rush.
• We could delay this for V8, releasing it in the first few V8 daily builds, and then have the whole V8 release cycle for polishing and implementing even more new tone mapping operators based on your feedback.

Going with the first option would probably be good only as an excuse for ticking off the "done" checkbox on Trello while not really having any benefit for you. For that reason, we have decided to delay this feature for V8. We're planning a bigger post with further explanation & some video/pictures showing the current state of the new pipeline.

Just one note about the amount and importance of new features - please keep in mind that some things that might seem small and really unimportant to you may be essential for someone else, and it may have been something that was preventing them from using some feature in Corona (or using Corona at all). This discussion is a good example of that, where some of you are understandably disappointed that we had to delay the new tone mapping for V8, while others don't mind or even think that this feature is not needed at all. There have been many more bugfixes, optimizations and features done in V7 than what is shown in the Trello board and we'll be updating the board later today with some other bigger items.

P.S. Sorry for this being announced just by moving the tonemapping card on Trello. I wanted to move the card today along with some explanatory post here on the forum, unfortunately, the Trello board got updated prematurely due to some miscommunication.

22

[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Corona Renderer 7 for 3ds Max - Daily Builds Discussion

« on: 2021-05-18, 17:48:23 »

after working with corona7 now for a while, i find it a bit odd, that you named the old/standard corona-material into CoronaLegacyMtl.
I constanlty run into errors with various scripts etc, that won't recognise coronaphysicalMtl which might became the new standard.

would prefer also for compatibility issues, that the old material would still be named without "legacy" ... as the differentiation is already done with the addition of "physical"...

Well, one of the reasons we chose to rename the materials was to prevent confusion :)

We renamed the old material to legacy to make it explicit in the UI that this is something that shouldn't be used in new projects and might be removed some time in the future. On the other hand the material should still be accessible from maxscript using the old CoronaMtl name. If you have some script that should work with the legacy material and doesn't work anymore, please send us the script and we'll take a look.

For similar reason we chose to name the new material CoronaPhysicalMtl instead of just reusing the CoronaMtl name to avoid any confusion with legacy scripts, tutorials, screenshots, etc. which would now refer to the new material which looks and behaves different.

23

[Max] General Discussion / Re: corona 7 where is to install

« on: 2021-05-13, 15:09:59 »

Just FYI, in last daily build (released this Monday) we added a warning that you're overwriting a scene that was previously saved in stable version with daily build. To prevent exactly this case of problems from happening.

24

Hardware / Re: Need help choosing a processor

« on: 2021-05-03, 08:31:36 »

Hi, although it's a bit outdated at this point, the Corona Benchmark results are probably still the best comparison for performance with Corona: https://corona-renderer.com/benchmark/results

https://corona-renderer.com/benchmark/results/cpu/3700X
https://corona-renderer.com/benchmark/results/cpu/10700

Just keep in mind that the first few entries are usually heavily overclocked, so you usually want to take the results from somewhere in the middle.

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[Max] Resolved Feature Requests / Re: In Lightmix (Image Editor too) ability to copy/paste light color.

« on: 2021-04-07, 17:01:24 »

You can just drag & drop the color from one slot to the other. It works even between different 3ds Max sessions and between CIE and 3ds Max (both ways). Does this solve your case?

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[Max] General Discussion / Re: Corona for 3Ds MAx 2022

« on: 2021-03-25, 10:57:17 »

Yeah, that one is not supposed to work :) v6 Hotfix 1 had support only for 2022 Beta that was current at the time of hotfix release.

We're planning to release v6 Hotfix 2 with support for Max 2022 release proper. There is no specific time frame for that, but it should be done within a week or two.

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[Max] General Discussion / Re: Corona for 3Ds MAx 2022

« on: 2021-03-25, 10:28:41 »

Hi, are you installing a v7 daily build or v6 hotfix 1?

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[Max] Feature Requests / Re: Material converter Updates?

« on: 2021-03-22, 10:12:23 »

We have update of the converter already prepared for next daily build:

• All materials will now be converted into CoronaPhysicalMtl.
• CoronaLegacyMtl will also be converted to CoronaPhysicalMtl.
• In the first iteration all non-corona materials will be converted in 2 steps, first converting to CoronaLegacyMtl and then converting that to CoronaPhysicalMtl. Will be improving that with direct conversion to CoronaPhysicalMtl in further iterations.

We hope to release this build today in best case, sometime later this week in worst case.

29

[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Corona Renderer 7 for 3ds Max - Daily Builds Discussion

« on: 2021-02-16, 11:01:17 »

Yeah, this is nice. Does the speed up apply also to opacity ?
What about tone mapping ?

Yeah, transparency/opacity, same thing :)

Sorry for missing the previous question about tone mapping. We're still progressing from the pipeline being hardcoded to being configurable from the UI. That will still take at least few weeks, again taking a bit longer than it normally would, because this is also connected to cleaning up some old UI code, etc.

The first iteration will be just the current pipeline where you can duplicate some operators or change their order. Only after this step it would make sense to start experimenting with adding new operators.

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[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Corona Renderer 7 for 3ds Max - Daily Builds Discussion

« on: 2021-02-16, 10:15:03 »

Don't worry, we're still going strong :)

We're currently in a phase where we're doing some long needed maintenance of the code, which also includes some bigger changes of the rendering core. Small sneak peak of things coming in the next daily build:

• Up to 30% speedup in scenes with transparency & media
• Up to 60% speedup of HQ denoising (~20% on average)
• Fixed self-intersection and precision issues when camera/scene is not centered on the coordinate system origin

Unfortunately for the last few weeks we're in a state where we want to release new build that week, only to find out one more bug introduced by these changes that we want/need to fix before doing that. I have high hopes for this week, but I don't want to make any promises.