mapping help

[Erich]

Well of course you can author your textures in photoshop or wherever else and if you find it to be a lot easier and more flexible, then go for it. I see the situation completely opposite from you, for me procedural building of texture in 3ds Max is way more flexible and very often much faster too. If i need to adjust something, most of the time it's just a matter of moving a slider or two, or entering different numeric value instead of rebuilding texture from scratch in photoshop. And let's not forget memory savings - according to Corona report your bespoke texture takes 110 MB of RAM and my tiling texture is taking just a 770 kB (in fact i could've easily replace it with gradient ramp, so my memory footprint could have been zero). One more thing - if you would need to use this texture on different size or shape bottle, you most likely would have to rebuilt it from scratch, while with my approach, it's just a matter of adjusting some parameters and tiling, which all can be done with Corona IR running and having clear visual guidance.

I'm not forcing you to adopt my workflows, if you're more comfortable with your way of doing things, then by all means do it the way you like it and ignore my setup. After all there's many ways of doing the same thing in 3ds Max and everyone is free to chose what works for them ;]

Hi Romullus,

Thanks again for your feedback. I apologize if my previous message came across as critical of your approach.  My intention was simply to highlight that similar effects could potentially be achieved using Photoshop as well. It was more of an observation than a critique.

I completely agree that your method offers advantages.  As someone new to Corona, the technical aspects –  understanding how different tools (maps, textures, nodes, etc.) function and when to use them –  present a significant learning curve.  Unfortunately, I have found good tutorials are hard to find, and the Corona manual itself leaves much to be desired.  While the basics might suffice for architectural visualization work, Corona's learning curve steepens considerably for advanced tasks like product rendering. It's not a program you can master quickly, at least in my opinion. Corona could definitely improve onboarding for new users and include more learning resources for those engaging in areas outside of archvis.

[romullus]

No worries man, i didn't take your message as critique. I realize that my previous message probably sounded too defensive, but that wasn't my intention at all. I just wanted to explain reasons behind my setup and make it clear that my way of doing it is not the only correct method. If your method works for you better, then it means it si correct for you, but it never hurts to learn alternative workflows and have them in mind for situations where you might struggle with your usual setup.

Regarding tutorials, i don't think that Corona struggles in that regard, there are tons and tons of learning material out there, you just need to be able to distinguish more serious stuff from usual fluff. Most of what's been discussed in this topic has little to do with Corona anyway, but is more broad knowledge of 3ds Max and 3D in general. Learning material about this is widely available in all shapes and forms. Albeit it's not necessary directly connected with Corona, but it shouldn't be hard to translate the concepts between different renderers.

[Erich]

No worries man, i didn't take your message as critique. I realize that my previous message probably sounded too defensive, but that wasn't my intention at all. I just wanted to explain reasons behind my setup and make it clear that my way of doing it is not the only correct method. If your method works for you better, then it means it si correct for you, but it never hurts to learn alternative workflows and have them in mind for situations where you might struggle with your usual setup.

Hi Romullus. I don't know that I have found a technique that I could call "my own", or that I can say comfortably "works for me", as I am still learning. But thanks. :)

Regarding tutorials, i don't think that Corona struggles in that regard, there are tons and tons of learning material out there, you just need to be able to distinguish more serious stuff from usual fluff. Most of what's been discussed in this topic has little to do with Corona anyway, but is more broad knowledge of 3ds Max and 3D in general. Learning material about this is widely available in all shapes and forms. Albeit it's not necessary directly connected with Corona, but it shouldn't be hard to translate the concepts between different renderers.

In my opinion, many of the issues I have faced, both in regards to this issue and others, has been in figuring out how and when to use the various specific maps that Corona offers in a way that will give me the final results I am looking for in my product renders. I have looked far and wide for tutorials that explain using Corona render for this purpose and have yet to come up with many at all. Almost all of the Corona render tutorials I have seen are to do with Archvis. There are some basic tutorials that try to explain some of the individual materials, nodes, etc., but with no real application for product rendering. If you know of some that you can recommend, I would be very appreciative if you could let me know.

As for the manual, it does try to explain the technical details, but I have found that the explanations are more technical in nature and many of the examples provided are directed to those in Archvis. There are very few examples, if any, on how to use Corona for product rendering. But I know Corona was never really intended for that use case, even though I am sure there are people using it for product rendering.

Thanks again for all your help. It is very much appreciated. :)