Messages

61

[C4D] General Discussion / Re: ///// 3dtools.info v2.0 & DNA|Materials for Corona /////

« on: 2023-05-13, 00:15:11 »

Just got these. Did not expect much since usually these asset packs are not all that great.

But these are in fact. Just tested the shingles. CR materials seem to be set up really well even though not too complicated. See a quick one minute render screenshot.
Happy I got these. Thanks.

62

[C4D] General Discussion / Re: 3.25 Gb file renders without crashing Mac OS/Studio

« on: 2023-04-15, 00:45:38 »

@BigAl3D
In my case C4D deletes duplicate materials after I convert materials to PBM. At least my Maxtree materials.
@Stefan-L
Thanks for the tips.
@Konichowaa
thanks for these tips as well. I notice that in Archviz a lot of different skills are needed to handle large amounts of data. I think CR can add some features here as well to switch on and of certain bottle necks. I keep wondering how all this works with Unreal, Lumion and the like since they don't seem to have this hassle to keep things fast. The quality is much less but they are getting there sooner or later.

63

[C4D] General Discussion / Re: 3.25 Gb file renders without crashing Mac OS/Studio

« on: 2023-04-12, 11:55:19 »

Tx Tom and BigAl3D for the tips.

I would love to have an "iterative" render button that renders images before the final one. I find working with deadlines in a busy office not ideal for the hassle to deal with regrouping materials and geometry to minimise render time for iterative images. I think most time is spend calculating displacement. Imagine terrains, pavements, masonry etc all need displacement at a very fine level. Wish the VFB had a button to switch of displacement temporarily.

What I do now is to have several files open to render parts of the model for lighting, instances, renders without vegetation etc. If all is set within one file things can get really slow. The C4D asset browser can also seriously slow down the workflow. The asset browser duplicates each material for each asset placed. So Maxtree vegetation placed with the asset browser can cause hundreds of materials extra compared to place the same assets by copy pasting the assets between files. The asset browser can not deal with layered Corona render materials. It's a bit of a pity that the asset browser in C4D is not as useful as it could be.

64

[C4D] General Discussion / Re: 3.25 Gb file renders without crashing Mac OS/Studio

« on: 2023-04-07, 00:46:53 »

Files this big will never really be fast in viewport. Sketchup and Vectorworks are far worse. No idea how 3DSmax is though.
I will check your suggestion on GI from file. This project took about 15 hours modelling vegetation and texturing the buildings, iterative rendering and so on. Getting the libraries from Maxtree took about 2 hours, they really have a slow website... Updating the textures from Maxtree also took some time. I would say that if Maxtree libraries had been easier to obtain, the time to first pixel had been fast and the viewport in C4D was a lot faster this image could be made in a few hours. I charge for these images somewhere between 3 to 400€. It's not my main job and do about  one or two images per month.  This pays for the apps and libraries I use for my own architectural practise.

The image has a purpose but it's not great image on itself. Indeed the hedge could be better and there is a halo around the vegetation near the sky. I can't really get that right since the alpha channel is not that good. I added the sky in PS. I sharpened in Corona and in Lightroom and indeed a bit too much. Adding more hours to this job would improve the image but they liked as it is so left it there.
tx for your comments, greatly appreciated !

65

[C4D] General Discussion / 3.25 Gb file renders without crashing Mac OS/Studio

« on: 2023-04-06, 14:29:04 »

Hi,
just to keep the enthusiasm for CR. I rendered a file yesterday with lots of Maxtree assets up to 3.25 Gb and my Mac Studio 128Gb rendered it all without crashing once even during all the iterations before the final render.
I used the edge trimmer for the grass which works very well since C4D allows you to select the texture opacities and set them on edge trimming all at once.

C4D became  slow though, I could only handle the file in wireframe view . Scene preparing by CR also takes a while, a few minutes.  I wonder if other render engines for GPU rendering would allow for much faster iterations and save time to first pixel. The render times for the final high res renderings are less meaningful to me. Since overall most of my time is spend on modelling, vegetation placement and render interations on low res.

66

[C4D] General Discussion / C4D 23.2.0

« on: 2023-04-01, 23:39:02 »

Just installed the newest C4D 23.2.0
Corona seems to be ok on it.
Be careful though. C4D installed by erasing my previous version including all plugins. Had to reinstall those. Mac OS btw.
Maybe there is a way to prevent this.

67

[C4D] Bug Reporting / Re: difficult to set material colours and Corona Pattern seems broken

« on: 2023-03-09, 00:59:36 »

Tx again for the help.
The gravel is incredibly realistic when used with Corona Pattern. So I am tempted to use it as much as possible. But it's also very unstable and can cost many hours of trial and error when used in a project. Wish this feature had better or more straightforward setting.

68

[C4D] Bug Reporting / Re: difficult to set material colours and Corona Pattern seems broken

« on: 2023-03-07, 16:43:09 »

Did a few more test. Interesting to set a displacer for the gravel. All works well but when I copy the gravel and rotate it it becomes a mess (see second attachment).

So there are definitely bugs with this feature. Would be better I think if the pattern could also be set in a more straightforward manner than using UV's, especially for gravel.

69

[C4D] Bug Reporting / Re: difficult to set material colours and Corona Pattern seems broken

« on: 2023-03-07, 13:04:41 »

Tried the unwrap and that worked. I also tried to remesh the plane on which the pattern is set but strangely enough that did not work at all.

Can you do an unwrap automatically ? I would say that geometry is constantly edited and the unwrapping is essential. I have spend hours of remeshing and trials to get this right. Happy its now solved. The gravel is not really too complex. It's does freeze C4D but you can switch of the Corona Pattern until you need to render.

btw The Arroway gravel meshes and textures are amazing. Especially if you have gravel in close up. The smooth gravel meshes are a bit better since they have better geometry than the crushed gravels.

70

[C4D] Bug Reporting / Re: difficult to set material colours and Corona Pattern seems broken

« on: 2023-03-07, 11:18:54 »

Tx, the high polygon count of the gravel mesh probably is too much for this feature. I get a lot of random results. So back to displacement for gravel. But I only noticed this problem with the latest build and haven done gravel before without much of a hassle.

It's really hard to to get this feature right since its all very slow to preview. C4D freezes up a lot when the gravel mesh is subject to the pattern. All in all I think it's great feature but for really simple meshes to be patterned.

I will experiment again sometime with a simple mesh.

71

[C4D] Bug Reporting / Re: difficult to set material colours and Corona Pattern seems broken

« on: 2023-03-03, 12:22:41 »

And this one. Its a bit exaggerated but I often have stretched surfaces and so on in landscaping and I get these kind of distortions when using Corona Pattern

72

[C4D] Bug Reporting / Re: difficult to set material colours and Corona Pattern seems broken

« on: 2023-03-03, 12:14:53 »

I got it to work but not properly.
The pattern only shows at render of course.

When I leave the Corona Pattern visible in the viewport C4D becomes very slow, almost unresponsive. Not a huge problem since I can easily filter it in the viewport.

Another problem is with the base object. Once edited the pattern becomes distorted. I can set a simple C4D plane but as soon as I use edited geometry for my base object I get distorted pattern as you can see in the attachment

73

[C4D] Bug Reporting / Re: difficult to set material colours and Corona Pattern seems broken

« on: 2023-03-03, 12:02:11 »

Tx.
I think the pattern object might be too complex (80 Mb 2mx2m pebbles by Arroway)
But I got this working surprisingly well before. When I tried it with the latest daily build C4D became unresponsive. I might overlook something. It's a complex feature though with setting hard to grasp if in the middle of a project with a deadline. I went back to displacement, looks less but saves me so much time in research on how it works.

74

[C4D] Bug Reporting / Re: difficult to set material colours and Corona Pattern seems broken

« on: 2023-03-02, 12:16:22 »

Just got my renders out. Time for a minute to respond to myself.
The problems with the Corona Patterns trying to have a gravel road were mostly caused by normals not being up. C4D has a known bug that when you reverse normals on some types of geometry C4D crashes. Not a Chaos problem. Another thing with the Patterns is that the UV settings can be very sensitive. A bit to hight or low and you the result is rubbish.

The color sliders for the materials are getting to be a big problem.When you slide or type in a value for Color, Hue and lightness  randomly change. The material preview goes black with even the slightest change in color. I hope this is just a daily build issue. But its so bad with this release that things have become unworkable.
Mac OS
Mac Studio Ultra 128Gb

75

[C4D] Bug Reporting / Re: difficult to set material colours and Corona Pattern seems broken

« on: 2023-03-01, 00:54:27 »

well, the last problem was caused by reversed normals wrongly corrected by the rotation setting normal vs. Y
Can happen when you copy a Chaos scatter from another file.... :-)