Messages

1

[Max] I need help! / Re: Chaos corona livense not found

« on: 2025-03-10, 17:59:03 »

Anyone else having the same licensing issues today with AnimaALL? Opened a ticket already but curious if coincidence or not. Anima's licensing is dreadful at the best of times but not being able to use it at all right now is a wonderful Morning surprise on top of Corona going down as well.

2

[Max] I need help! / Re: Chaos corona livense not found

« on: 2025-03-10, 13:59:01 »

Working here as well now, but a lot of time lost...

3

[Max] I need help! / Re: Long rendering time

« on: 2025-02-26, 17:08:15 »

First, make sure the exterior windows have simple (thin) glass - this is a common user error that can significantly increase render times.

I don't think it's the best advice to say people should model things in such a fake way. Double glazing is also a thing, and makes a very visible difference when rendered correctly. Not to mention it's not practical advice depending on whether you might receive a certain level of detail in a model from a client, for example. There will be other more obvious ways to optimise the scene before doing something like that, it's just not necessary or desirable IMO.

4

[Max] Bug Reporting / Re: Corona 12H1 Scaling issue

« on: 2025-02-24, 16:59:13 »

1.0 as a default with a dropdown/button in IR for different scaling factors would be awesome. Ideally it would be in docked IR window too (along with previously-requested ability to look at other render elements in docked IR window too). Imagine an overlay toolbar which is invisible until you hover over the docked IR window, then it appears with a set of buttons, dropdowns etc. for all these things.

5

[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Chaos Corona 13 for 3ds Max - Daily Builds Discussion

« on: 2025-02-24, 16:20:35 »

Agree. Not sure why something that's clearly well outside of Corona's photorealism modus operandi is taking priority over something (interface slowness) that affects quite literally every single Corona user in every single use session, no matter what you're doing with it. It's nice that Toon stuff is happening, but the priorities here are... strange. It currently sounds like it's not even a priority in 14 either but more of a starting point there for release more likely in 15? And toon stuff won't be any kind of innovation either, when it's in. It'll be catching up with other NPR engines from many years ago, so I don't really put it into an "innovative new tools" mindset. Doesn't make sense to me, sorry!

6

Hardware / Re: old threadrippers and win11 upgrade?

« on: 2025-02-17, 16:32:27 »

We have a bunch of 3990x and they're all compatible out of the box with win11 if we wanted, but you might just need to enable the bios' TPM and/or update the motherboard BIOS version for this to be visible.

7

[Max] I need help! / Re: 4k Cache - What's the latest? (2023/4 Update)

« on: 2025-01-24, 16:41:24 »

Not sure where development is on this, but came across a situation this week where bright light coming in through thin curtains was causing very strong blotches of light, around 30cm in radius, using 4KCache. Switching to UHDCache fixed it immediately. Whacking up the quality/lowering granularity for the 4KCache helped but never removed the issue.

8

[Max] I need help! / Re: Modeling liquid volume for caustics

« on: 2024-12-05, 15:55:42 »

When modeling the volume of a liquid for caustics, is it still necessary to make the volume's geometry go beyond its container walls?

For the surface of the liquid, will the solver recognize either a bump map or displacement map for the surface irregularities?

First question: we always do this, and it looks correct, so yes, overshoot. But it's not necessarily essential.

Second question: either will work - displacement is of course more realistic, and will look correct at the edges where the water meets other surfaces, but bump is a good quick way of getting more or less the same result without worrying about the displ map screwing things up on the edges e.g. wave height becoming a challenge. Just not as realistic to look at. Depends on use case really.

The above are assuming you're using phoenixoceantex (which is great), but you don't have to.

You have a highly appropriate username for these questions!

9

[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Chaos Corona 13 for 3ds Max - Daily Builds Discussion

« on: 2024-12-03, 11:07:28 »

I believe it is the camera tone mapping overrides which need a restart to get updated for IR, just like camera object visibility.
You can try doing batch rendering of few cameras which have different tone mapping. They should all come out with expected tone mapping overrides.

Has that always been the case?

I don't recall such behavior...

Unfortunately yes. Tone Mapping Overrides "break" in IR when you make changes, and you're forced to restart IR each time you make a change. It's quite unfortunate and often catches you out because it doesn't warn you and you can be led to a false impression that something is wrong/not working, when in fact it is fine, when you restart IR or just render normally.

10

[Max] Bug Reporting / Re: Corona 12H1 Scaling issue

« on: 2024-11-09, 10:37:50 »

Another case where corona setting the IR scaling factor to anything other than 1.0 is a mistake, in my opinion, but I've stated my case for this many times over the years :) Comes up very frequently. I really think it makes more sense to have it at 1.0 and let the user decide if they want or need the IR speed boost of changing it to 1.5 or 2.0 or whatever they want, and avoids this issue and the issue of people wondering why their IR previews look soft/blurry. It's a pain when you install a new Corona version and this value seems to change back to default again too.

11

[Max] Corona Goodies - User Contributions / Re: Corona to GLB

« on: 2024-11-04, 15:29:10 »

great work, thanks again!

12

[Max] I need help! / Re: 4k Cache - What's the latest? (2023/4 Update)

« on: 2024-10-15, 10:50:18 »

I'm also keen to hear what the status of this is. It came up again last week with our team wondering what we should all be using by default, but I had no straight answer for them.

13

[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Chaos Corona 13 for 3ds Max - Daily Builds Discussion

« on: 2024-10-11, 17:22:28 »

Thanks Tom! Great to see examples and encouraged by the results. More of this generally, please! I'm sure the user-base really appreciates it.

Cheers,

14

[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Chaos Corona 13 for 3ds Max - Daily Builds Discussion

« on: 2024-10-11, 10:54:38 »

Oof, the new caustics improvements in today's DB are sounding tasty! Thanks devs. This is what we like to see. Hope we can test here soon.

Edit: devs, do you have any visual examples of the changes and the impact they have by any chance? Would be super cool to see your internal tests for this and how they're impacting speed + quality.

15

[Max] I need help! / Re: material editor SLOW - i think its a CORONA issue?

« on: 2024-09-13, 13:03:19 »

I remember when Autodesk announced their major "Small Annoying Things" 3dsmax campaign, where after years of angry commenting from customers they finally understood that we wanted all those small but workflow-slowing bugs, weirdnesses, or lack of vital tools to be fixed/implemented. They held various user group meetings with their department head(s) (I was at one in London) to actually get this feedback 1:1. It never quite hit the mark fully but it was a great period and had a very noticeably positive impact on 3dsmax, and I think the attitude has carried forward there ever since. Naturally, the issue nowadays over there is a massive lack of innovation within 3dsmax, so it could certainly be fairly argued it's gone too far the other way!

Anyway, it's something to think about. I've often wondered if Corona development would be better handled by making existing-feature improvements, bug fixes just like this happen to point version updates/hotfixes e.g. 12.1, 12.2 etc. and saving the new feature updates for major versions (and not necessarily every major version). In that way perhaps it would be possible to delay major new features being worked on and pivot development to addressing sometimes very serious bugs within the current major version in a hotfix - as many as needed - maybe 2, 3 or 4 x. In recent times there have been instances where potentially show-stopping bugs have had to be left for some future major version update because it's too late to shoehorn it in, causing frustration in the userbase (reasonably so...). As a studio, we have completely skipped 2 or 3 major versions of Corona (maybe 8, definitely 12) because of this situation. And if that reminds anyone of how many of us work with 3dsmax then I'm not surprised! Since 3ds max 2008 or so we have ignored every other version, because it's pretty well-known that the odd-versions are usually where the bulk of new features are introduced, and the even version is where they're bug-fixed and optimised... in a production environment that's critical stuff.... We don't and can't work with flakey software. C12 has proven a bit of a nightmare judging by many accounts on this forum, so we've skipped it. Not something we want to have to do, ever.