Export as .scn

[nightnurse]

It would be great, if it would be possible to export your corona scene as .scn.

The reason I'm asking for this is, that we are using Thinkbox Deadline for our render farm in the office, because we are using different rendering&3D softwares. (3dsm&corona, c4d&corona, rhino&maxwell)
Deadline does not support C4D Team Render anymore. The command line renderer is not ideal because it does not work for distributed rendering.

If we could export our corona scene the same way as from 3dsm, we could render that via a Corona DR job the same way we can do in 3DSM.

Best,
Christoph

[houska]

Hello Christoph!

First of all - why doesn't TeamRender work for you? Is there something we could do to make it work?

As for the commandline render, you could somehow split the image into pieces by modifying the camera using a custom script and then combine the pieces together. I also wonder if rendering multiple times and then combining the results using a weighted average would work for you?

Regarding the DR - that's currently a 3DSMax-only solution, because C4D has a powerful and useful TeamRender, which we are able to use already. There are plans for a Corona-only solution using our homebrew DR, but we haven't even started working on this.

There is a possibility to export the scene into a .scn file, but it's very limited and the maps won't export due to missing implementation. The whole export to .scn feature is currently only available through the Development/Experimental tab in render settings.

Regards,
Cestmir

[nightnurse]

Hi Cestmir

Thanks a lot for your reply.
I'd love to use team render. Unfortunately we are running different software solutions in our office, so we are using the render management software called Deadline to manage the different render jobs on our Renderfarm. Otherwise we would have to maintain either different (split) renderfarms or different solutions parallel on the same nodes, that also causes problems, because they have to share the resources (RAM mainly).
Deadline used to run team render jobs a few versions ago, but Maxon blocked that due to licensing reasons, so they had to remove that feature.

For now we are using command line to render the jobs, if we have enough time.
We've tried the command line option with tiles and that worked somehow, but is far away from being a rock stable solution. Also command line gives absolutely no feedback on how far the job is (see my other feature request). This works as a temporary work-around, but I'd love to have a good solution sometime in the future, that's why I asked for a .scn export, because that sounded like a possibility.

With the 3DSM files, we currently have to option to either render them as 3dsm&coronaDR jobs in deadline, or export the .scn and render them as Corona DR job without the need for 3DSM. It would be great, if we had the same option for cinema.

Best,
Christoph

[houska]

Hi Christoph and thanks for the additional information that you provided!

The issue with .scn export will always be missing shaders in Corona standalone. What that means is that we'll be able to export Corona native shaders and you will then be able to use them in Corona Standalone. However, the original C4D shaders will not be exportable to standalone. At most, we might be able to map them to some existing shaders of ours, but where there are no Corona alternatives, we won't be able to do anything.

Thanks for writing anyway. At least we now know one of the usecases for the .scn export and this might push it higher on our priority list.

[Eddoron]

Hi Christoph and thanks for the additional information that you provided!

The issue with .scn export will always be missing shaders in Corona standalone. What that means is that we'll be able to export Corona native shaders and you will then be able to use them in Corona Standalone. However, the original C4D shaders will not be exportable to standalone. At most, we might be able to map them to some existing shaders of ours, but where there are no Corona alternatives, we won't be able to do anything.

Thanks for writing anyway. At least we now know one of the usecases for the .scn export and this might push it higher on our priority list.

Most renderers bake the procedurals when exporting the scene to Y. Would that be an option? Also, for the fancy, shaders like 3D fall-off, would it be possible or make sense to use vertex colors?

[houska]

Most renderers bake the procedurals when exporting the scene to Y. Would that be an option? Also, for the fancy, shaders like 3D fall-off, would it be possible or make sense to use vertex colors?

Yes, in this case, baking would be an option. But we don't have any vertex colors as such in Corona Core. We could use custom data for that, but that would be pushing it... Thanks for the suggestions anyway!

[nightnurse]

Hi Houska

Thanks a lot for sharing those insights, makes much more sense to me now, why that's not easily possible.
I posted one other feature request for a similar reason:
https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?topic=21365.0

would it be possible to do that in the near future? that would already help a lot!

Best,
Christoph

[walterfog]

Here in office we are in the same situation.. we could not use team render but we use deadline to manage our renderfarm... we need to submit our work by deadline and i don’t know why it is not possible make it work with Corona