Illumination from Corona lights in viewport

[Ondra]

Finally, Corona lights and sun cast proper illumination in the viewport, including shadows!

[nehale]

whoo hooo finally

[hydeman]

Great ! Do we need to install a new thing for testing this , or it will be available in the next version ?

[maru]

What a sexy, useless feature! ;)

[Tanakov]

Yay now its shining!

[johan belmans]

Excelent!!

[mikegarcia84]

Holly Shhhhhhhhhhhhhh....adows. Can't wait for this release. Any plans for ambient occlusion and releases for other programs?

[Avan]

You are master , you know ;)

[Ludvik Koutny]

You are master , you know ;)

I think he knows...  he knew already when he was coming up with his nickname ;)

[nerosama]

Omg finaly thanks alot :D

[borisquezadaa]

Ondra is kicking all kind of asses.

[mentalnils]

Def. not a useless feature. Sitting with a client with a architectural project and deciding where the shadows should fall in the viewport is essential. Have been working on a scene where the time of day changed in the different cameras. So every time I switched the camera I had to change compass direction and time of day. (So I had to switch to realistic shading, change the sun to something other than corona and switch on exposure control. Then when rendering remembering to switch everything back.)
So a feature that is very welcome.

:)

[Sam75]

Nice.

[johan belmans]

Hi Ondra

Would illumination from HDRI in Viewport be possible aswell?
Now while I am typing this, I am wondering of this is render engine related or Autodesk related.
The latter I will have to ask Neil for a solution.

regards

johan

[Ludvik Koutny]

Hi Ondra

Would illumination from HDRI in Viewport be possible aswell?
Now while I am typing this, I am wondering of this is render engine related or Autodesk related.
The latter I will have to ask Neil for a solution.

regards

johan

It's possible with MentalRay, but just because you actually need to have physical light object (skylight) in a scene to be able to use HDRI. That's of couse a nonsense. So if Corona supported viewport illumination from HDRI, it would probably mean you would have to create some light first in order to use HDRI. That would be terrible workflow we want to avoid of course :)

[maru]

I have two issues with this so far:
-please enable correct viewport shading for CoronaSun
-please disable shadow casting for portal mtl

[Javadevil]

This is great news, no longer have to switch to MR SUN and back to corona !! lovin ' it !

[Utroll]

It's possible with MentalRay, but just because you actually need to have physical light object (skylight) in a scene to be able to use HDRI. That's of couse a nonsense. So if Corona supported viewport illumination from HDRI, it would probably mean you would have to create some light first in order to use HDRI. That would be terrible workflow we want to avoid of course :)

It would be super nice to automatically analyse/find the "hotspot" of the hdri and transmit/simulate it as a light to nitrous then.
Don't know how flexible is 3dsmax on that aspect but I guess not that much.
A feedback on HDR lightning would be amazing, specially while everybody here says that having a good Hdri you don't need to add a sun :)

[Ondra]

it is actually doable... anybody remember e-light script? :D But in 3Dsmax it would require a number of separate lights.

There are also much better and faster approaches, like pre-convolved enviro maps, that when combined with ambient occlusion could create very fast and high-quality previews (somehow relevant video:

)

You can ask autodesk to implement it, some basic version of preconvolved IBL  should take about 2 days for single developer ;).

[Utroll]

You can ask autodesk to implement it, some basic version of preconvolved IBL  should take about 2 days for single developer ;).

You're talking in human time.
In autodesk relative time that means 8 years +or-

Then it should be done :)
Not talking about having a realtime feedback of the whole hdr but just the location of the brightest spot... for now there no other solution than aligning/linking a sun to image, or launching small test render and adjust... bis repetita.

[romullus]

You can ask autodesk to implement it, some basic version of preconvolved IBL  should take about 2 days for single developer ;).

You're talking in human time.
In autodesk relative time that means 8 years +or-

Then it should be done :)

My first thought was, it would take 5 years for autodesk to implement that, but your term maybe more accurate :]

[Ludvik Koutny]

I don't get what's all the buzz about? 3ds Max can already illuminate using HDRI in viewport for a few versions. You just add your map in environment, add Skylight light object into scene, set it's mode to "use Scene environment" and switch viewport mode to realistic and illuminated by scene lights. Only problem is i am not sure corona ignores Skylight. If not, it should not be hard for Ondra to simply ignore Skylight light object, so it would be used only for viewport preview.

And actually, solution Autodesk has implemented is a lot better than pre-convolved trick, because it creates actual shadows from HDRI map, instead of just some omni ambient occlusion random shadows.

Here's an example straight from the viewport:

[Utroll]

Lucky you then -_-
As far as I know I'm up to date but who knows what's struggling in core's pipe of the beast.
(I've tried to push lighting quality from x1 to x16, etc etc)

But for the sake of performance I would still privilege a simple light, eventually with temperature of the average hotspot... it's really all just about shadows positioning without rendering. I admit that some shameless station like yours makes it quite gadget though :)

How are you loading your hdr in env ? I mean which node are you using ?

[Ludvik Koutny]

Simple bitmap, set to spherical environment.

[Utroll]

Simple bitmap, set to spherical environment.

ok thanks for headup but nothing helps in my case... nor spherical nor jpg or hdri, bitmap or VrHdr, any exposure etc... nevermind.

[romullus]

Try to uncheck skylights as ambient color - it worked like magic for me :]

[Ludvik Koutny]

Yeah, works for me...  just make sure light mode is set to use scene lights, that use map checkbox in enviro window is enabled and there there is no exposure control.

If you still can't get it working, i will upload some example scene.

[Utroll]

Ahaha... after 1 more hour getting mad at it I just understood...
The most silly things ever. Really. Usually I try to avoid those very embarrassing situation. So I rebuild the HDRI to be sure it was an effective one, triple checked all gamma, drivers, clicked everywhere (that's the step before hammer repairing) etc...

I simply don't have daily but A6 :)
Reading the topic from start helped.

Thanks and sorry for your time.

[mike_kennedy]

For the HDRI preview in view I use the skylight now, seems to be good enough to locate the rotation and it is seamless with Corona because Corona seems to ignore it at render time :)

[maru]

Hey, it still looks like there are incorrect shadows from Corona sun. At least for me and one user from the facebook group.

[Dollmaker]

Using this (Realistic) almost hangs my scene which have many lights.. Impossible to navigate in viewport..  though I have 32 GB ram with 4 GB card.. Max 2013..