Chaos Corona Forum

General Category => Gallery => Work in Progress/Tests => Topic started by: romullus on 2014-01-13, 20:50:56

Title: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-01-13, 20:50:56
I saw the other guy on forum posted beautiful renders with vcm: http://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php/topic,2450.0.html and wanted to try it myself, but run into problem of excessive fireflies. Fortunately with the help of other coronauts, here in forum, i managed to find a solution. It seems that vcm don't like bluriness in reflection and refraction slots. Especially in refraction. Put some map in that slot, other than white and you'll get a horde of fireflies.
Anyway here's my attempt:

(http://cdn1.share.slickpic.com/u/Romullus/Album201406170122/org/tbfcdF_web/web.jpg)
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-01-14, 00:29:08
Quick and simple scene, that i made just for fun of it:
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: astudio on 2014-01-14, 11:14:12
And what do you change for VCN setup? :)
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-01-14, 12:12:57
Nothing at all - render settings were default.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Dolphinoff on 2014-01-14, 13:16:45
Excellent result, congratulations!
thanks for the explanation :)
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-01-16, 00:01:11
Another wip from me. Car model is by Stelu Harsan.

Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-01-16, 20:37:43
This was my first attempt at corona rendering.  I was very amazed how fast i was able to learn basics of corona. Especially after mental ray :]
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: kahein on 2014-01-17, 12:31:07
This was my first attempt at corona rendering.  I was very amazed how fast i was able to learn basics of corona. Especially after mental ray :]
great
i like it
maybe the foreground concrete need better displacement
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: yagi on 2014-01-20, 18:22:30
wow! your first attempt is too good to be true!... weldone
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: frebel on 2014-01-28, 01:12:06
Nice improvements on the images, I liked the car in the studio, you can give some hint on settings in the shader car paint, looks good.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-01-28, 11:39:31
Sure, but material itself is very simple.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: frebel on 2014-01-28, 14:48:48
Thanks for share, i'm comparing all solutions that i found in forum for carpaint shader and testing
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-01-28, 23:33:03
One more image of concept car. I tweaked carpaint a tad and added some eye candy.
I like how much contrast i can get straight out of renderer. With Corona, i can throw photoshop through the window :]
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-01-30, 11:45:40
Some chap asked me to share floor material of my latest rendering. So here it is. Studio setup and material itself:
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-02-11, 00:48:01
Testing procedural galvanized steel material. I might eventualy replace procedural map with bitmap, if manage to find decent quality one.
Very early wip.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Ondra on 2014-02-11, 00:57:46
nice bucket rendering :D
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: johan belmans on 2014-02-11, 10:33:43
nice bucket rendering :D

:-)
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-02-11, 16:28:25
nice bucket rendering :D

:-)
+1 :]

Second attempt. This time with the help of bercon maps. To be honest, i hoped to achieve better results with these awesome procedurals, but beeing long time mental ray user, i have no experience with bercons whatsoever :[
Next step will be bitmaps, i guess.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: maru on 2014-02-11, 16:50:47
In my opinion, previous one was more realistic.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Utroll on 2014-02-11, 17:12:42
Cellular Round Variations
Worley Voronoi F1, Euclidean Distance Metric w. Solid
and Worley Voronoi F2-F1 Solid Fill, Manhattan and Chebychev Distance Metrics
http://www.neilblevins.com/cg_education/procedural_noise/procedural_noise.html

With two layers and distortion.... you'll be good to go I guess
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-02-12, 13:23:58
Wow, that is some incredible useful resource. I remember, i saw it ages ago, but i forgoten it completely since. Thank you very much, Utroll! It's a real pity that "solid" feature was removed from bercon maps v3 and i cannot replicate those results :[
Meanwhile, i'm continuing with my galvanized material. This time i used texture instead of procedural map. It's a little better than previous attempts, in my opinion, but not good enough. Besides, i'd really like to get a good material with procedurals only.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Utroll on 2014-02-12, 14:01:51
My bad, I've noticed before night that I could not reproduce the result neither because of changed features... actually I could do pretty much everything I wanted quite quickly with berconmaps earlier releases, but new versions are pretty useless, they just makes some cloudy magma or stars.. I tried for one hour without convincing results (that I finally obtain from cells map in chip mode, 5 layers though).

Anyway you're skilled enough to figure out your best way :)
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-02-12, 15:52:24
... actually I could do pretty much everything I wanted quite quickly with berconmaps earlier releases, but new versions are pretty useless, they just makes some cloudy magma or stars..

Funny, i felt the same. Like something changed in bercon noise since i used it last time (many many years ago), and changed not to the better.
Anyway i get back to cellular and after a while i managed to get pretty decent results by combining couple of layers of it, like you suggested. I feel pretty happy with it, so, case closed, i think :]

Thank you once again, for your valuable input, Utroll!
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-02-13, 11:04:31
I did quick animation with this bucket, just to see how material works in animation. Have to say, i'm pleased with results. Corona is such addictive thing.

Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Ondra on 2014-02-13, 11:51:37
you have to use http://, not https://
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-02-13, 11:58:00
Thank you!
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-02-17, 19:41:43
Today i've tried to play with multiscatter for the very first time. Don't know if i'm doing something wrong, but A5 acts very strangely with multiscatter (1.2.0.12) - sometimes it works flawlessly, sometimes it refuses to work at all. I guess i have to wait for A6.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Ondra on 2014-02-17, 19:52:04
Today i've tried to play with multiscatter for the very first time. Don't know if i'm doing something wrong, but A5 acts very strangely with multiscatter (1.2.0.12) - sometimes it works flawlessly, sometimes it refuses to work at all. I guess i have to wait for A6.

Just install daily builds and see if it is ok
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-02-17, 19:59:17
I'd like to, but whole daily builds installation / activation procedure sounds rather too complicated to me.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Ondra on 2014-02-17, 20:11:21
it is actually quite simple, but its your decision ;). Anyways, if you are having any problems, trying it with daily builds would help also me
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-02-17, 20:20:39
it is actually quite simple, but its your decision ;). Anyways, if you are having any problems, trying it with daily builds would help also me
Now, this definitely put some pressure on me, because i'm feeling guilty by using such marvelous software for free and not giving anything in return :]
I'll try it, thank you.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: johan belmans on 2014-02-17, 22:47:28
@Keymaster

is it possible to install the daily builds next to A5 (on one/same PC)
If so, is it still possible to use Backburner and will backburner choose for A5 whenever a job is assigned to that PC?
(Hope it is clear what I mean)

Why?
Cause I use A5 for my commercial projects, but I am willing to test the daily builds.

cheers

Johan
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Ondra on 2014-02-17, 23:46:03
it can be done via switching 3dsmax plugin folder path. I have no experience though
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: racoonart on 2014-02-18, 00:17:53
I have a separate external folder containing different builds with all plugin and dll files (A5, dailies, important steps etc). One of these subfolders is referenced in all the plugin inis over the network (or more precisely: they all include another ini which targets the plugin folder, easier to maintain that way). The important thing is to include the path where the dlls lie into the path environment variable on every machine - without that max will fail loading and complain about missing dlls.
So this way I don't need to have the files in my max folder and can just rename the build's folders which then load different files on each max start.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Juraj on 2014-02-18, 00:33:04
I have a separate external folder containing different builds with all plugin and dll files (A5, dailies, important steps etc). One of these subfolders is referenced in all the plugin inis over the network (or more precisely: they all include another ini which targets the plugin folder, easier to maintain that way). The important thing is to include the path where the dlls lie into the path environment variable on every machine - without that max will fail loading and complain about missing dlls.
So this way I don't need to have the files in my max folder and can just rename the build's folders which then load different files on each max start.

I wish I was smart as this man :- ) I would simplify my brute approach to everything so much. But I am primitive, so I'll guess I'll just need to get a hold on of some tech guy instead.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: johan belmans on 2014-02-18, 08:58:37
I have a separate external folder containing different builds with all plugin and dll files (A5, dailies, important steps etc). One of these subfolders is referenced in all the plugin inis over the network (or more precisely: they all include another ini which targets the plugin folder, easier to maintain that way). The important thing is to include the path where the dlls lie into the path environment variable on every machine - without that max will fail loading and complain about missing dlls.
So this way I don't need to have the files in my max folder and can just rename the build's folders which then load different files on each max start.

I wish I was smart as this man :- ) I would simplify my brute approach to everything so much. But I am primitive, so I'll guess I'll just need to get a hold on of some tech guy instead.

OK, I have to admit I feel the same way as Juraj.
But thanks Deadclown I will give it a try.

cheers

Johan
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Alex Abarca on 2014-02-19, 06:12:25
That's pretty sick. you see the reflection on the handle in this bucket.

http://factorydirectcraft.com/pimages/20050702174551-514643/9_galvanized_metal_wash_tub.jpg

It reflects all of the handle. On the one you did it skips, it could be that it needs a layer or reflection, no?

But it looks sick, so does the animation. great work
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-02-20, 13:29:39
The "problem" is, that galvanized steel comes in such huge variety of looks, depending on type of manufacturing, ageing and so on. It's impossible to replicate all those looks in one material.

Ok, here's my next wip. Formica rufa. I did this render mainly because i wanted to compare corona with mr in terms of speed. Oh boy, mental ray so embarrassed himself it's even not funny.

Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-02-21, 11:59:58
Since i cannot get access to dailies, i have to stick to A5. Still, so much fun. I rendered very quick and dirty animation over night, just to see how ant rig, i did recently, works in motion. Not bad in my opinion, but still very much to do. Updates will follow, i guess.

Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: maru on 2014-02-21, 12:13:46
This is awesome!
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: johan belmans on 2014-02-21, 12:16:45
Looks like the ant is suffering from Parkinson ;-)

Good job well done!!
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Ludvik Koutny on 2014-02-21, 13:15:32
That ant is sooo adorable :)
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Utroll on 2014-02-21, 16:00:04
very quick and dirty animation

Oh well.. if you say so :)
It's very good. I mean I don't have nose sticking to screen but at first play I wasn't feeling like watching some quick dirty CG.
WellDone !!
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Alex Abarca on 2014-02-21, 20:10:19
Hi Romullus, nice animation.

How many frames?
Avg rendertime per frame?
How Many passes?
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-02-21, 20:45:16
Thanks everyone for your comments. Currently i'm working on walk cycle, so parkinson symptoms should be gone, next time you'll see it :]

It's very good. I mean I don't have nose sticking to screen but at first play I wasn't feeling like watching some quick dirty CG.
WellDone !!
All credits to Corona for that, my part was quite small :]

How many frames?
Avg rendertime per frame?
How Many passes?
What i especially like about progressive rendering, it's posibility to control rendertime very precisely. I knew how many frames my animation is and when i want Corona to finish render it.  So i divided available seconds by frame count and inputed what i got into Corona's time limit field and in the morning i had my animation finished. Wicked!
It was 2 minutes per frame, but it's irrelevant.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-02-25, 23:09:56
Quote from: Keymaster
Fixed bug with slow non-rigid motion blur

Excellent, i have a scene where motion blur, when turned on, slowing render down more than 5000 times! While A5 shows only 1.3 times slowdown. Waiting impatiently to try that scene on newest build.

Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-02-26, 20:37:05
I tried 2014-02-26 build - non-rigid motion blur is still very slow. I should wait for the next build, i guess.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-02-26, 23:17:37
It seems my ant has some friends :]
I'm not satisfied with this animation at all, but have no desire to work on it anymore, either. I ran into various problems when working on this scene. Problems from max's side as well as from corona's. So, i decided, that'll be my final.

Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Alex Abarca on 2014-02-27, 06:39:47
Did you do some kind of AI on it?
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-02-27, 11:15:28
Well, kind of... ants movement was simulated with crowd solver in 3ds max.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Ondra on 2014-02-27, 20:23:35
I tried 2014-02-26 build - non-rigid motion blur is still very slow. I should wait for the next build, i guess.
How much? Can yo provide me a sample scene where the problem happens?
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-03-06, 11:14:16
Did some quick render test with improved deformational mb. I still can't believe how amazingly fast this renderer is. Keymaster, you are unbelievable!

Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-03-11, 00:18:14
Another wip. Model is not mine.
Shoul be continued...
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Polymax on 2014-03-11, 00:20:06
Another wip. Model is not mine.
Shoul be continued...
test scatter?
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-03-11, 00:21:47
No, it's simple array. I don't think i need scatter for this.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-04-01, 01:02:17
I decided to do little break from modeling and to render a bit. Model is not finished yet. Picture is straight out of corona.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-04-03, 00:47:50
Car is still in wip stage, but getting there... slowly :]
Corona's sky and sun only.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Alex Abarca on 2014-04-08, 06:32:31
I love that car, when I was kid, this was the first car I wanted to have when I grew up. I first saw in a U2 video.

Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-04-08, 10:59:42
No no, you are confusing zaz 965 with trabant. Those two cars are very different. One is soviet knock-off of fiat 600, other is produced in eastern Germany. One is rr layout car, other - ff layout. One has backward opening doors, other - forward opening. One has all steel body, other is made out of fiberglass mostly. These have almost nothing in common as you can see :]

Anyway, here's some more progress, i've made:

Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: klipanos on 2014-04-08, 12:14:59
nice!!!!
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-04-11, 15:47:15
The new spherical cam is awesome! My only wish, there was fisheye lens as well. I hope it'll happens someday, though.
Oh, did i tell how i like the way corona handles bump mapping? Compare it to mental ray, it's just unbelievably amazing!!!
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-04-11, 17:00:20
Some more progress on zaz:

Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: fellazb on 2014-04-11, 21:10:39
Oh, did i tell how i like the way corona handles bump mapping? Compare it to mental ray, it's just unbelievably amazing!!!

Yes yes, it's awesome compared to MR! Now adding bump really makes some sense :) The best thing about bump in Corona is that it also behaves very natural in areas with indirect lighting. In MR the bump just sorta vanished on those areas. I haven't tried any normal mapping yet, but having this quality with regular b\w images is indeed amazing.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Alex Abarca on 2014-04-11, 23:03:39
Its looking good, noticed you added the mirror, top cage and the triangle window.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-04-12, 01:44:53
Thanks, i've added quite a lot more. Not everything can be seen in this shot, though. Also, started texturing, but it's too difficult task for me.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Alex Abarca on 2014-04-12, 08:24:53
Yeah, I took note on the tire too. It looks good.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: robo on 2014-04-16, 03:23:02
Some chap asked me to share floor material of my latest rendering. So here it is. Studio setup and material itself:

You used emissive planes here, right? With normal Corona mat. set using the emissive option or did you use the CoronaLight mat?
How long/how many passes did it take before acceptable noise levels were reached?
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: klipanos on 2014-04-16, 09:15:25
Niceeee!!!!!!
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-04-16, 20:54:41
Some chap asked me to share floor material of my latest rendering. So here it is. Studio setup and material itself:

You used emissive planes here, right? With normal Corona mat. set using the emissive option or did you use the CoronaLight mat?
How long/how many passes did it take before acceptable noise levels were reached?
It was rendered with A5, so coronaLight material wasn't available. IIRC it was hdr maps assigned to corona mtl's emmisive slot.
Noise to signal ratio reached acceptable level after 20-30min, but i kept rendering a little longer to get even cleaner image. An hour or so.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: robo on 2014-04-17, 03:00:16
It was rendered with A5, so coronaLight material wasn't available. IIRC it was hdr maps assigned to corona mtl's emmisive slot.
Noise to signal ratio reached acceptable level after 20-30min, but i kept rendering a little longer to get even cleaner image. An hour or so.

Ah thanks!, one thing though; You said you applied the HDRI to the emissive slot, but of which material?
The top part of the seamless background?
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-04-17, 10:45:07
No, it was applied to those "light" planes, that provided lighting for scene.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Alex Abarca on 2014-04-18, 09:28:04
Wow, so you put an hdr on your emmision. Never tried that, nice effect.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-04-18, 21:58:11
Yeah, but in A6 one should use CoronaLightMtl instead.

Ok, back to my zaz. I really should continue with modeling, but i just can't stop playing with rendering. Corona is just too addictive. Dayum!
Next shot is for pure fun. Since Keymaster fixed custom bokeh map bug, i wanted to test it. For this i used procedural CA map by tiagodmed and gorgeous acer tree models, kindly provided by hrisek. Thank you guys!

Picture is straight out of renderer. I still can't believe, how good Corona is!
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Alex Abarca on 2014-04-19, 00:51:09
this one looks good,  are you going to add the tire splash guard?

I was going get you on tire air valve, but sure enough you have on there. :D
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Ludvik Koutny on 2014-04-19, 16:15:04
Just to be sure, i'd try to compare speed of simple bitmap bokeh image VS procedural one. I would expect some performance hit when resolving that procedural network for each ray shot, vs just calling cached bitmap. I may be very well wrong, but i would test it, just to be sure ;)
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-04-19, 16:38:07
this one looks good,  are you going to add the tire splash guard?

I was going get you on tire air valve, but sure enough you have on there. :D
I didn't thought about tire splash guard. Will definitely add it. The model could only benefit from this. Thanks!

Just to be sure, i'd try to compare speed of simple bitmap bokeh image VS procedural one. I would expect some performance hit when resolving that procedural network for each ray shot, vs just calling cached bitmap. I may be very well wrong, but i would test it, just to be sure ;)
I didn't specific comparison, but from what i noticed, procedural bokeh lowered r/s number by very insignificant amount, if at all. Anyway it was just test. I don't think i'll use that feature in future because of lack of flexibility. Although, CA effect came out very lifelike, i must admit.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: hemrie on 2014-05-04, 00:04:38
Good job with the car paint.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-05-25, 20:15:36
I was testing brilliant script ATree3D from Avizstudio. Can't believe it's free! So i throw some presets, done by forum member hrisek, tweaked them a little to better suit my likings, scattered with MultiScatter. Then added grass, generated with Grass Generator, which is another great free script by forum member (sadly, i can't recall his nick). Hit F9 and presto, i have beautiful image in no time with minimum effort. It's easy to be cg hobbyist these days :]
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Ondra on 2014-05-25, 20:31:22
hahaha, I remember 8 years ago some "oldschool" people complaining about how easy is it to create CG images, and giving me shit for using GI which they considered "cheating" :D
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Utroll on 2014-06-04, 09:56:27
I was testing brilliant script ATree3D from Avizstudio. Can't believe it's free! So i throw some presets, done by forum member hrisek, tweaked them a little to better suit my likings, scattered with MultiScatter. Then added grass, generated with Grass Generator, which is another great free script by forum member (sadly, i can't recall his nick). Hit F9 and presto, i have beautiful image in no time with minimum effort. It's easy to be cg hobbyist these days :]

Ah man you made my day, I'm wondering since weeks if Atree is rather good or rather a plug-and-wtf!-quick-deplug plugin. Never had the force to try it for myself :D (Although aTiles paid version seems unsexy but powerfull enough to replace floorgenerator+mightycraptiled+ or whatsoever)
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-06-29, 16:39:20
I have plans to make decent leaves textures collection over summer. There's some early tests.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Utroll on 2014-07-09, 20:38:12
~super~ decent !
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: maru on 2014-07-09, 21:01:14
first one - average...
second one - epic!
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-07-14, 22:18:23
Thanks, i'm trying to improve my photography setup constantly - who would thought that foliage texture photography can be such hard task.

Anyways, here's my latest doodle. Textures and material of ivy still in wip stage.
Ivy generator is hard to master. I wonder, maybe there's better tool for ivys somwhere? Should i look to growFX demo?
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: HLeandre on 2014-07-15, 11:32:58
Really nice work romullus.
Could you tell us more about your lighting (hdri in environment slot, vray light dome or corona sun, )  ? What about your camera setting ? Vray cam or standar cam ?
Thanks
Léandre
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-07-15, 15:26:46
Thanks, i don't have vray and even if i had, i wouldn't use it's tools with corona.
My setup
lighting: CoronaSky with increased turbidity in enviroment and CoronaSun with slightly lesser intensity and bigger size to emulate slightly cloudy conditions.
camera: focal length - 45mm, f-stop - 1,8 for dof
render settings: pt+hd, GI/AA balance set to 32 and LSM - 1, everything else leaved at defaults.
There was one giant portal over scene, not sure if it was helping or did harm only :]
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: londonvisuals on 2014-07-15, 18:43:21
Wow, the ivy looks awesome oO, you could incorporate a bit of hue variation to the leaves to make it even better.
Awesome still.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: HLeandre on 2014-07-16, 09:22:53
Thank you for your reply romullus.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: klipanos on 2014-07-19, 10:11:06
Just beautifull!!! The leaves are very difficult to make them look real, you did just fine!!!!!
Welldone!!
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-07-21, 21:03:37
Thanks, bigest secret in making believable leaves, is good textures, i think. And i'm trying my best to get them as good as i can.

Yet another wip. Scene downloaded from IDST render (http://www.idst-render.com/scenes.html). I changed quite a few things from original model to better suit my likings.

edit: trees are made by Krzysztof Czerwiński (https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?action=profile;u=9347)
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: CiroC on 2014-07-21, 23:12:35
Are you using any kind of translucency for the leaves?
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-07-21, 23:50:09
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: CiroC on 2014-07-22, 15:04:26
Do you use a single texture map or falloff map with a bright and dark textures? Thanks
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-07-22, 15:08:47
Single texture.
I wonder what would be benefit of falloff map? Can you show some example?
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: CiroC on 2014-07-22, 16:34:45
Single texture.
I wonder what would be benefit of falloff map? Can you show some example?

I saw this in the Lamp shader (CML's website), but I will give a try with my scene and share it here.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-07-26, 16:33:04
Yet another procedural material. This time i didn't managed to go fully procedural, though. There's very simple bitmap gradient, used as normal map, but for some strange reason i can't recreate it reliably as procedural map.

Still wip.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: maru on 2014-07-26, 17:42:38
Some gradient rams should do the trick. DON'T GIVE UP! :D
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-07-26, 20:29:30
I didn't. Managed to recreate it with composite, gradient ramp and CoronaSolidTex woodoo. Not 100% identical, but i like output even more than bitmap gives.

More experiments on the way! :]
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-07-27, 14:13:39
Struggling to create oil in-between cable strands. To manage refractive/transparent materials in blend, is very frustrating and very expensive too :/

Material is fully procedural still, although i have to use bercon noise, because native noise is just too regular.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Juraj on 2014-07-30, 20:54:27
Quite fantastic :- ) Would love to know how to create these, no patience, and too dumb.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-07-31, 00:44:59
Sure, i'll make tutorial about it, when i'll have more free time. But basically it's not that different from mental ray version, for which i made tutorial couple years ago:


I don't want to share material itself, just because, usually people learn much better, when they have to make things by themselves :]
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-07-31, 19:56:43
How much is to much polys for single tree? I took ATree3d script and some quick preset from 3dtreexchange.net. Tweaked and test rendered it, then tweaked more, then rendered again and so on and so on... until i ended up with whooping 14M poly tree. I'm realizing, that it's overkill, because proxy file alone is weighting almost 500MB. Now i have to find a way to optimize it without crunching to much details :/

Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Nekrobul on 2014-07-31, 20:04:12
How much is to much polys for single tree? I took ATree3d script and some quick preset from 3dtreexchange.net. Tweaked and test rendered it, then tweaked more, then rendered again and so on and so on... until i ended up with whooping 14M poly tree. I'm realizing, that it's overkill, because proxy file alone is weighting almost 500MB. Now i have to find a way to optimize it without crunching to much details :/

Geometrical leafs?
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: CiroC on 2014-07-31, 20:04:42
How much is to much polys for single tree? I took ATree3d script and some quick preset from 3dtreexchange.net. Tweaked and test rendered it, then tweaked more, then rendered again and so on and so on... until i ended up with whooping 14M poly tree. I'm realizing, that it's overkill, because proxy file alone is weighting almost 500MB. Now i have to find a way to optimize it without crunching to much details :/

I definitely need to take some time and learn how to use it. Do you find difficult reproduce tree species? For example, if you want a Quercus it is difficult to create this tree?
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-07-31, 20:22:20
Geometrical leafs?
Yes. Single leave has 37 tris. Initially it was even more heavy, but i had to take measures, as soon as i generated 30M tree :]

I definitely need to take some time and learn how to use it. Do you find difficult reproduce tree species? For example, if you want a Quercus it is difficult to create this tree?
It's my first day, when i decided to dwelve deeper into this plugin. I can't create exact tree that i want, yet. But script itself is quite powerful and flexible, although quite unstable. You should see what hrisek (https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?action=profile;u=9347) is able to do with it. Just amazing.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: racoonart on 2014-07-31, 20:30:24
If you want to do a lot of plant modelling I'd recommend trying GrowFX, I do everything with it and I love it. Imho it's totally worth the money ;)
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-07-31, 20:38:11
I'd love to, but i can't afford it, unfortunately. I'll probably try demo sometime.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Adanmq on 2014-07-31, 22:06:43
I´m using GrowFx also. Usually if i try to make the most realistic tree the polycount sometimes go over 25mill for a simple 12mts Betula tree, but the scene becomes a nightmare. I think for most of the cases, 1-2mill per tree sould be ok for medium/far range. You can use more complex ones for closeups.

Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Juraj on 2014-07-31, 22:15:31
I think it's not overkill. If you aim at single-mesh tree, 20milion for broad-leaf tree where you use atleast 9-12 polies for leaf + opacity map for detail (always both) is just fine.
The few better trees I got hold on, where those (4-5) from Bertrand which he made with GrowFx, they were around 3-to-4 milion poly, had around 4-6 polies (+ opacity) and it shown...they were rather crude even in medium distance.

I then once tried to go for more realistic maple, of around 20meter height, with GrowFx, and ended at about 80mil. polies, + displaced trunk. Still, wasn't so perfect I wished..very far from.

I really liked the idea Alex Roman writes in his book, he made instance not of whole single mesh tree, but parts of it (few branches), which were extremely detailed. If he did it as single mesh, I believe those trees would have been quite humungous,
but as instanced branches it was managable, and of course, those are one of the best trees out there.

(but then again, Alessandro Prodan did extremely convincing ones with faaar fewer polies with Maya, I don't know how did it so well...)

I btw totally hate GrowFx, it's so far from what Tree generator 'should' look like (realistic algorithmic L-system generation and "eye-balling" with curves), every single tree I have seen looks totally wrong when it comes to nature mimicking and realism.
But it's the only plugin which can generate high quality single mesh body (for future sculpting/displacing). It's one-eyed captain among poor blind competitors. Maybe one day....
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-07-31, 23:53:40
Wow, obviously my quality standarts are much lower than yours :]

Anyway, decided to rework this tree from scratch and reached more manageable polycount. Version without leaves, to me looks good already. I will try to play with leaves later.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: CiroC on 2014-08-01, 00:17:46
Any opinion regarding Speedtree cinema?
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Nekrobul on 2014-08-01, 00:26:38
Geometrical leafs?
Yes. Single leave has 37 tris. Initially it was even more heavy, but i had to take measures, as soon as i generated 30M tree :]

I definitely need to take some time and learn how to use it. Do you find difficult reproduce tree species? For example, if you want a Quercus it is difficult to create this tree?
It's my first day, when i decided to dwelve deeper into this plugin. I can't create exact tree that i want, yet. But script itself is quite powerful and flexible, although quite unstable. You should see what hrisek (https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?action=profile;u=9347) is able to do with it. Just amazing.

I wish i culd have time to experementate with geometrical vegetation too)) i am already getting sik from fixing evermotions trees opacity maps wich are usualy oversised and not properly balanced in photoshop to have complete black and white.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: CiroC on 2014-08-01, 08:59:55
Not to mention that the famous volume 58 is totally wrong regarding leafs, trees sizes and bark's colour.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Stan_But on 2014-08-01, 10:01:44
The cable is cool, Romullus
Thanks for tutor  (;
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-08-02, 14:10:16
Curious, is this a bug or a feature? :]

Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: maru on 2014-08-02, 15:12:07
How did you do this? It's really cool! :D
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-08-02, 15:24:44
Big secret. It's round corners, just don't tell anyone :]
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: maru on 2014-08-02, 15:40:15
So I guess it's a feature. But I wonder if it also behaves like this in other renderers.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-08-02, 17:01:39
Just checked with mental ray - nothing unusual.
Meanwhile in Coronaland:
Ok, i admit, i'm stressing it, but still...
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Stan_But on 2014-08-02, 18:35:35
interesting)
groovy effect)
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-08-10, 14:54:39
Corona SSS, rocks!
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: maru on 2014-08-10, 21:26:54
Corona fanboy? ;)
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Stan_But on 2014-08-10, 22:15:01
I think he must keep the small Magic Pony in his hand :D
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-08-13, 20:08:39
Some random doodle:
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: maru on 2014-08-13, 20:37:30
This is sooo sexy!
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-09-12, 11:28:34
I'm giving away some texture, i made recently. It's not tiling very well, but still, some may find it useful. Feel free to use it in personal and commercial projects, but do not resell.

These are pumpkin seeds.

Link to 2K res PNG's (https://www.dropbox.com/s/5mesaaxpilaf46x/MS_2K.7z?dl=0).

Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-10-14, 00:31:34
Tried to achieve wet look. I think a few hanging water drops would be very helpful for that, but can't figure out how to approach this without too much work.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Juraj on 2014-10-14, 01:19:49
Looks very good. Is it a full tree ?
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: snakebox on 2014-10-14, 02:04:33
Tried to achieve wet look. I think a few hanging water drops would be very helpful for that, but can't figure out how to approach this without too much work.

Wet look is certainly close! Maybe just pick a handful of leafs randomly all over the tree and detach them, for then to just scatter some water drops on them?  If you try to do it tree wide I think you will get a headache, but I also don't think you need the entire tree to be dripping for the effect to really pop. Also some lens drops would sell it easy:

for Nuke, http://www.nukepedia.com/gizmos/particles/rainmaker  for example.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-10-14, 09:55:53
Juraj_Talcik >> yes, it is. It's one of those great models from Krzysztof Czerwinski which is giving away for free: http://trzyde.blogspot.com/2014/06/freebies-new-3d-models-of-acer-tree.html I just changed textures.

snakebox >> thanks for advice, i'll give it a try when i'll find time.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: dia on 2014-10-14, 14:17:29
Looks really nice indeed.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: hrisek on 2014-10-14, 15:51:32
Juraj_Talcik >> yes, it is. It's one of those great models from Krzysztof Czerwinski which is giving away for free: http://trzyde.blogspot.com/2014/06/freebies-new-3d-models-of-acer-tree.html I just changed textures.

snakebox >> thanks for advice, i'll give it a try when i'll find time.
dear romullus - i'm so happy that you have done so great work with my 3d tree! Your leaf textures and corona shader are amazing! It's nice to see that my blog is used by someone:)
Greetings!
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: borisquezadaa on 2014-10-14, 16:01:39
How about make some drops with smoothed half spheres and paint it over using the great Soulburn scripts ObjectPainterUI?...
(http://coolwallpaperz.info/user-content/uploads/wall/o/38/abstract-water-drops-prev-diamond-like-on-leaves-next-104706.jpg)
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-10-17, 13:07:22
hrisek >> i'm constantly checking your blog - it's full of useful things. Your generosity worth great respect!

borisquezada >> that's really good idea. I'll definitely give it a try. Thanks!

Meanwhile, i'm playing with interactive rendering. I couldn't imagine it'll prove to be sooo useful thing. Painting vertex colours and in real time see final result, is such incredible experience!
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Ludvik Koutny on 2014-10-17, 13:22:19
I'd use smaller viewport for interactive though. You can always zoom in to what you need to see, but using quarter viewport instead of half one will give you double rendering speed, translating into double feedback speed ;)
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: snakebox on 2014-10-17, 14:03:20
hrisek >> i'm constantly checking your blog - it's full of useful things. Your generosity worth great respect!

borisquezada >> that's really good idea. I'll definitely give it a try. Thanks!

Meanwhile, i'm playing with interactive rendering. I couldn't imagine it'll prove to be sooo useful thing. Painting vertex colours and in real time see final result, is such incredible experience!

is vertex paint by any chance a free plugin/script? :P
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: racoonart on 2014-10-17, 14:05:14
I can activate it for you in YOUR max for only 9.99 euros per month :D  *hint*
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-10-17, 14:59:05
I'd use smaller viewport for interactive though. You can always zoom in to what you need to see, but using quarter viewport instead of half one will give you double rendering speed, translating into double feedback speed ;)
Sure, but with such simple scene, it renders quick enough and i rather have bigger preview size than cleaner image.

snakebox >> you better save those money for Corona ;] http://help.autodesk.com/view/3DSMAX/2015/ENU/?guid=GUID-EADD121F-482F-4387-8D6C-0548533E4F56
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: borisquezadaa on 2014-10-17, 15:28:19
You can add a vertexpaint modifier to any  geometry in 3dsmax and hand paint in viewport. Just rigth click in object properties and thick Vertex Channel Display.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Ondra on 2014-10-17, 16:56:47
hrisek >> i'm constantly checking your blog - it's full of useful things. Your generosity worth great respect!

borisquezada >> that's really good idea. I'll definitely give it a try. Thanks!

Meanwhile, i'm playing with interactive rendering. I couldn't imagine it'll prove to be sooo useful thing. Painting vertex colours and in real time see final result, is such incredible experience!

That looks like a really cool use-case for the interactive rendering. Would you be willing to do a short (1-2 minutes) video showing the workflow that we could use in the future to demonstrate the interactive rendering capabilities?
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-10-17, 17:02:36
No problem.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-10-24, 13:05:25
Was playing with growFX demo - what a cool plugin! A bit hard to learn, though. Anyway, created this strange thing, now it's time to learn how to create some trees, before time limit runs out :]


Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: deneb26 on 2014-10-28, 22:47:21
Yayiiikss...what's that creature? looks quite disgusting ;-)
How did you do that in growFX? Haven't tested it myself yet, altough I have a license since 2 years...sigh...

Ale
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2014-10-29, 00:24:33
Not the cutest one, i have to agree :]

Actually it's very simple - it's just vew "branches" with metamesh animated with growFX wind. Hair is done with max's native H&F.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2015-02-13, 17:25:26
Finally 32 bit displacement is working in Corona!
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2015-03-05, 13:24:54
Tried to create snow material, but not very successfully. What i found however, that if let render only a few passes, remaining noise and fireflies can make snow to look more convincing.

Will try to play with snow material more, but if anyone has some valuable tips, my ears are open.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Bigguns on 2015-03-09, 21:43:12
I would try with volumetric SSS, should work well.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2015-03-19, 16:26:48
I would try with volumetric SSS, should work well.
Actually there is some sss in that material, but maybe not enough.

---------

Portals in Corona remains mistery for me. I rarely use it, but when i do, i get very mixed results. Sometimes it clearly helps, sometimes quite opposite. Like in this scene, portals gives more noise in same time compare to no portals. I placed it quite accurate, but there's left some small openings without portals. BTW, is it bad that my portals are instanced? maybe it's better to attach into single mesh?

Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: maru on 2015-03-19, 17:44:26
They should make things faster in this case. Can you show how you placed them?
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2015-03-19, 20:29:00
Glad that you asked for it - i found that some portals were severely shifted. Placed them where it should be and difference in noise became noticeably smaller, but still not in favor to portals.

Attached screen of portals placement. View from outside.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Ondra on 2015-03-19, 23:42:41
Portals work best with:
+ small openings
+ small number of windows
+ simple scene
+ constant/LDR environments

Portals work bad with:
- complex scenes (many rooms with windows)
- sharp HDR maps (HDR maps with sharp illumination peaks - those that cast shadows)
- large/multiple windows

Sun is not influenced by portals.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: oncire on 2015-03-20, 02:27:16
Portals work best with:
+ small openings
+ small number of windows
+ simple scene
+ constant/LDR environments

Portals work bad with:
- complex scenes (many rooms with windows)
- sharp HDR maps (HDR maps with sharp illumination peaks - those that cast shadows)
- large/multiple windows



Sun is not influenced by portals.

great tip ondra.. will follow this tips in my next project
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2015-03-20, 09:20:04
Invaluable info indeed. Thank you so much!
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: maru on 2015-03-20, 12:28:30
I did a small test but the difference isn't so noticeable as in your post. My scene is probably much different than yours, but maybe there is some other issue in it?
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2015-03-20, 12:56:47
As i said, some portals were shifted. Probably this lead to additional noise. After i fixed portals position, difference in noise became similar to your examples. I guess it means that everything is fine here :] Anyway, i delted those portals after Keymatser's explanation.

And of course, thanks for helping!
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Stan_But on 2015-03-20, 16:13:17
I notice portals need in testing in each different scene
Sometimes even with huge windows renders looks better with portals than without them
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: maru on 2015-03-20, 16:17:18
I notice portals need in testing in each different scene
Sometimes even with huge windows renders looks better with portals than without them
I'm not sure what you mean but renders shouldn't look different with or without portals, just refine faster/slower.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Stan_But on 2015-03-20, 16:38:03
I notice portals need in testing in each different scene
Sometimes even with huge windows renders looks better with portals than without them
I'm not sure what you mean but renders shouldn't look different with or without portals, just refine faster/slower.

I mean exactly getting noise free image faster/slower
Sometimes portals looks cleaner even with huge windows. For example I faced with it in scene where windows were 50% of ceiling and one whole wall
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Ondra on 2015-03-20, 20:39:05
I'm not sure what you mean but renders shouldn't look different with or without portals, just refine faster/slower.

this is strictly true only when rendering in unbiased mode. When MSI is used, the overall intensity could be affected, but it should not be huge difference, and should be only difference in overal brightness, no splotches/artifacts.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2015-03-23, 19:17:02
Just some quick doodles with Corona volume material:
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2015-04-17, 12:07:35
Decided to revisit my galvanized steel material. I managed to significantlly simplify material tree (from 8 procedural maps down to 3) yet leaving same visual appearance.

This is brand new shiny steel mat. Next will be aged/oxidized one.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Caue Rodrigues on 2015-04-18, 05:32:02
amazing Romulus!
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Alex Abarca on 2015-04-23, 17:57:13
is the sick!
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2015-06-04, 21:10:25
Tried to create braided steel hose material. Not satisfied with results, but i kinda stuck so i leave it as it is for now.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Ando on 2015-06-18, 09:09:32
Your galvanized steel material is awesome! Can't wait to see the aged next..
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Nekrobul on 2015-06-18, 09:54:45
Tried to create braided steel hose material. Not satisfied with results, but i kinda stuck so i leave it as it is for now.

The thing i noticed is that there is a larger distance between fibres.

Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2015-06-23, 23:56:37
Your galvanized steel material is awesome! Can't wait to see the aged next..
Well, i created aged one long time ago, but it don't look very impressive. Nothing to show.

Nekrobul, you're absolutely right. Will try to redo my textures. Doubt that it will improve my material much, though :]

Meantime i'm trying to create semi believable knight armor material. Found a beautiful knight model and started to construct material. Unfortunately, i had to put this model on halt until bug with CoronaMultiMap will be fixed. Hopefuly it won't take to long ;]
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: fLuppster on 2015-06-24, 00:10:09
The bump looks fantastic!
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: deC9r on 2015-06-24, 04:35:19
the armor shader  is great!
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2015-06-24, 12:11:09
Thank you. Here's quick test in enviroment. Had to bump up contrast significantly, because enviroment itself wasn't very contrasty.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: maru on 2015-06-24, 12:27:18
For some reason the material looks much better on the close up. The dirt in corners is more visible. Maybe it should just render a bit longer?
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2015-06-27, 16:07:06
Maybe that's because it's in different enviroment. Metals can be very picky to "quality" of enviroment. Anyway, it's still work in progress. Will try to make that material to work better in different enviroments.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2015-07-27, 18:14:32
Raindrops texture test.
Texture was made in 3ds max with multiscatter. Raindrops are simple spheres, wet tracks are done procedurally with few 3ds max maps. Usage is very simple: create glass material and apply normals map texture to bump slot.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/130720054@N03/19869944440/sizes/o/

Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Nik on 2015-07-27, 23:45:01
Cool result.
Can you please generate a bigger size? I mean not just resolution, but size of texture. I think 4x or 6x enlarge would be nice :) and 6000px for example
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2015-07-28, 00:17:20
I could, but i'd rather record a tutorial, so everyone can make it for themselfs :]
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: bryanwrx on 2015-07-28, 00:18:54
Raindrops texture test.
Texture was made in 3ds max with multiscatter. Raindrops are simple spheres, wet tracks are done procedurally with few 3ds max maps. Usage is very simple: create glass material and apply normals map texture to bump slot.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/130720054@N03/19869944440/sizes/o/

I also did an quick rain on window with simple particle flow :)
feature=gp-n-y&google_comment_id=z12yj13irzf3zrmks224w11x1ymitvd1s
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: maru on 2015-07-28, 10:40:07
Reminds me of this super easy tutorial:
http://viscorbel.com/condensation-shader-vray/
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2015-08-17, 21:22:36
Here's small trick with CoronaScatter. Lets say you want to distribute with CScatter some number of instances on certain area as evenly as possible. Usually results are not that good - in some places instances forms clusters, in other places there are large gaps left. That's not exactly what we want. Luckily, there is simple solution now. Set scatter count to relatively large number so instances would cover all area without bigger gaps, now enable strictness and adjust its percentage to desired level. You may fire quick render a few times and watch a instances count under stats tab if you want exact number. Viewport stats also can help :]
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2015-09-28, 15:28:25
Played a bit with max's procedural maps and did make some brushed steel pattern. Glossiness and bump are mapped with warp texture plugin (not included in matlib), but similar results can be achieved with bercoin noise or even native gradient ramp.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: GestaltDesign on 2015-09-28, 21:34:04
Ha, very clever!!! Wish there were more posts like this, it's very inspiring!
Thanks for the share!
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Tanakov on 2015-10-07, 15:24:18
Decided to revisit my galvanized steel material. I managed to significantlly simplify material tree (from 8 procedural maps down to 3) yet leaving same visual appearance.

This is brand new shiny steel mat. Next will be aged/oxidized one.

Can you share the making off? My brother is going to render a lot of galvanazed stuff and this material looks dope.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2015-10-07, 16:25:01
Sorry, don't have a time for a making of right now, but i can share material if you want.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2015-10-11, 18:48:51
Just found that CoronaScatter has hidden camera culling feature :] It's not suitable for animations unfortunatelly, but works like a charm for stills. There's only few missing features left and i could kiss good bye MultiScatter forever :]
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Ondra on 2015-10-11, 19:40:27
what is your usual instance count before/after camera culling? We are thinking about making CScatter faster....
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2015-10-11, 19:55:53
It depends on camera frustum contact area i guess. Can't test today.

We are thinking about making CScatter faster....

That is always nice to hear. Eagerly waiting for any improvements to this great little tool.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2015-10-12, 11:21:27
Here's some proof that camera culling has positive effect on performance :] There wouldn't be any advantage if collision avoidance wouldn't be on, of course.

It would be awesome to have real camera culling that would work with animation too, but for now i'm happy with what we have.

Edit: seems like forum's attachment system don't want to work with large animated gifs. Attaching it via external hosting.

(http://imageshack.com/a/img909/4694/HXwF0r.gif)

Edit 2: here's how it's made: https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php/topic,9728.msg62865.html#msg62865
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2015-10-27, 10:46:42
I've been plaing with motion blur and noticed some strange artefact (?). Curious is this just optical phenomena or some glitch/limitation of rendered MB. Propeller is spinning at mere 400 rpm and MB transform segments are set to 128, so i don't think it's Corona's fault, but maybe i should render it with MR for comparison.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Ondra on 2015-10-27, 10:48:57
I can totally imagine this being the correct solution, there are discontinuities on the static model (where the spiral is occluded by the propeller)
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2015-10-27, 15:52:27
Ok, so initially i didn't believe you and decided to tested it with MR :] It gave exactly same result, so i sat down and tried to analyze what's happening and after a while i understood that you were right - it is correct solution indeed. However it still looks kinda strange :]
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: maru on 2015-10-27, 18:40:57
Mindfuck, but I guess the pattern gets rotated "more" or "less" than what we would expect when it is behind the other part.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2015-10-27, 19:04:49
Actually it's very simple. Camera never can see what's behind blade (green line), no matter how fast propeller is spining. What we see it's only what's at the blade's edges, but because of MB there's an illusion that we can see though it.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2015-11-02, 22:35:40
Procedural expanded polystyrene material. Nothing fancy.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2015-11-12, 17:10:15
I finally figured out how to make bercon tiles to work as bump map. Now i can make procedural bisazza tiles inside max, yay! :]
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: maru on 2015-11-12, 17:14:32
I omg'd :D
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Juraj on 2015-11-12, 18:06:20
Generating a normal map of them on the fly :- ) ? Smart. I would never have patience for anything procedural but it's quite cool.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2015-11-12, 22:45:41
I love to play with procedurals. Unfortunately max is quite limited in that regard, i think i gonna try substance designer one day.

Meanwhile one more material - this time, no procedurals were used.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Nekrobul on 2015-11-13, 12:26:34
Stones miss some crispy reflections and bump for detail.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2015-11-16, 15:45:09
I agree with you Nekrobul, will try to fix that later.

Meanwhile i was testing new turbo ivy and i must say that working with it is now much easier, because results are almost instant. So i decided to regrow old sponza scene. Plus add some fog to spice things up :]
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Juraj on 2015-11-16, 16:44:53
Is that post-process or Volume fog inside Corona ?
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Bormax on 2015-11-16, 16:45:21
Very nice picture!
I saw video on youtube about turbo ivy, but I couldn't get it - the site guruware.at doesn't work. Could you tell where did you get this plugin from? Right now I'm working on a project where I have to fill 170m lenth wall with ivy, that turbo mode would help me alot with this
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2015-11-16, 17:06:51
Is that post-process or Volume fog inside Corona ?

Everything rendered in 3d. Post is minimal, just slight tonemapping in arionFX.

Bormax, i noticed that guruware often has problems with bandwith. I'm not sure if it's ok to put link to download plugin publicly, even if it's free. I'll contact you via P.M.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Bormax on 2015-11-16, 18:07:11
Bormax, i noticed that guruware often has problems with bandwith. I'm not sure if it's ok to put link to download plugin publicly, even if it's free. I'll contact you via P.M.
Thank you romullus!
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Nekrobul on 2015-11-20, 20:23:01
OMG, i just realised i used your model you uploaded on 3d sky in a animation for a short film X_X
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2015-11-20, 20:52:49
Cool, at least some of my models are put to good use :]
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Nekrobul on 2015-11-20, 21:07:53
It's even been to canes festival ;)
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2015-11-20, 21:16:33
Now it's my turn to say OMG! :] Will we see that animation?
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Nekrobul on 2015-11-20, 21:19:05
Unforcinatly not ( even we have not seen final result. but i could look for render outputs. ))
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2015-11-25, 15:20:00
Fully procedural faux maze in 3ds max. Inspired by this blog entry: http://www.migenius.com/articles/procedurally-retro-with-mdl

Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: maru on 2015-11-25, 15:22:51
how.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2015-11-25, 15:29:43
Very simple, actually :]
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: maru on 2015-11-25, 16:00:00
cool, and it's displaced?
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2015-11-25, 17:10:28
Yes, with displace modifier and prooptimizer on top of that. I tried Corona's micro displacement, but it's just impossible to get decent results with reasonable amount of polygons. Besides with Corona's displacement i would loose ability to color maze walls in different clolours.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2015-11-28, 23:47:35
Just saw this interesting approach on ink rendering at sketchfab and wanted to see if it's replicable in Corona. Turns out it perfectly is! Corona toon render :]
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: PROH on 2015-11-29, 02:05:38
Very interesting. Would you mind share how to do this?
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2015-11-29, 08:38:45
Sure, i will make mini tutorial later. Unfortunatelly it's not very practical solution - more for a fun factor.

edit: and it's done: https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php/topic,9728.msg66682.html#msg66682
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2015-12-02, 14:36:43
I dug out an old file with ants and found that those poor little creatures had trapped into neverending loop.

Rendered over night, for 200 passes per frame. Unfortunatelly some frames came still too noisy. I intentionally unchecked lock sampling pattern in hope that i can denoise in post, but either noise areas are too small or my knowledge of working with neat video plugin is not good enough, denoised result turned out pretty awefull. Finally i decided to wait for Corona build with adaptivity and rerender all sequence again. Anyway here's dirty preview. Made for fun.

Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: maru on 2015-12-02, 16:25:32
Awesome! Your ant videos always remind me of
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2015-12-02, 17:14:16
Nice clip. Can't say same about music, though. :]

BTW, i put those ants on sketchfab also: https://skfb.ly/IRu7
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: dubcat on 2015-12-02, 17:21:16
BTW, i put those ants on sketchfab also: https://skfb.ly/IRu7

Awesome! I can't stop watching :(
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Nekrobul on 2015-12-02, 19:09:36
You should make a coub with your animation and rammstein on background XD
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2015-12-02, 19:38:08
No Rammstein, please.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: maru on 2015-12-02, 20:29:06
Ok, do it with Shakira.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2015-12-02, 21:27:58
You guys listen what you want, i'll stick with my music :]
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2015-12-23, 12:30:06
Some playing with materials.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: pokoy on 2015-12-23, 13:07:48
The dust layer looks great!
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2015-12-27, 22:40:20
Another material session, this time felt.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Juraj on 2015-12-28, 00:20:57
that's brutal :- ) Care you show more of it ?

I do a lot of felt fabrics of furniture maker but with approach that does not look best at close-up. This looks marvellous.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: maru on 2015-12-28, 10:33:59
My guess would be "simply" hair geometry scattered over the surface but I am also curious about any tricks used.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Nekrobul on 2015-12-28, 10:47:54
Looks mindblowing. How you achived it? X_X
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: johan belmans on 2015-12-28, 11:13:35
Yes, well done!
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2015-12-28, 11:20:25
Thanks guys, not so much tricks here :] First i searched for a felt texture, found a really good one at wildtextures (http://www.wildtextures.com/?s=felt). Then fed this texture to Knald and made normal map from it. Also made height and AO textures as well. CrazyBump, NDO, B2M or other similar program can be used here. Even Photoshop. Material itself is very simple and it looks pretty good, especially at front facing angles. At glancing angles it's very flat and CGish though. Displacement can help a great deal here, but still not very convincing, especially in close ups. So i swapped displacement with simple spline modeled fibres, scattered all over model with CoronaScatter and view instantly became much more realistic. Fibres material is extremely simple - CoronaMultiMap in instances mode in diffuse map and transluceny from 0,3 to 0,8 depending on what look you want to achieve. Less translucency shows fibres colour better, more translucency helps to better blend in fibres with felt material and looks very nice in contrary light. As an added benefit, fibres can help to mask shadow terminator problem, from which this material suffers quite badly, due to fine and strong normal map. Additionally i added falloff map to scatter's density slot, to steer more fibres in areas where they needed most. Unfortunatelly CoronaScatter refuses to respect color map curve adjustments, so it's hard to fine tune distributin. AO doesn't work here too, in case someone wants to try it :]
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: maru on 2015-12-28, 11:30:07
I wonder if flat "sprites" with opacity-mapped fiber textures would work here. :)
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2015-12-28, 11:38:51
I can't see why it wouldn't. If you don't affraid opacity OFC :] Hair&Fur could do a trick as well.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2016-02-28, 16:46:29
Rerendered my ants anmation with adaptivity and denoise. Not only the picture became much cleaner, but aslo it saved  about 30% of render time. Although i'm fairly confident that i could try to reduce render time even further if needed. Must say, i'm impressed. Even more than i thought i would be :]

Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Nekrobul on 2016-02-28, 17:46:03
Wow.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: rozpustelnik on 2016-02-29, 08:22:33
@romullus
Can You provide some more tests on denoising/adaptivity? Some "real-world" scenarios ie. exterior shot with foliage and dof, interior shot with complicated GI and reflective materials...
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2016-02-29, 10:48:57
I will do... probably. But i think build with adaptivity should go public very soon, so everyone can do tests by themselves.

Meanwhile i did some more comparison shots of my little fellows, because i find that particular scene benefits from adaptivity very much. Without DOF and MB this scene samples very fast, but as soon as those effects kicks in, some areas requires very high amount of samples, for noise to be at acceptable level. And adaptivity fights that problem very efficiently. This is by no mean a scientific test, i just fired a render, waited for noisiest part of an image to became acceptably clean and stopped rendering. Settings were such: GIvsAA - 4, LSM - 2, adaptivity - 0, denoising - 1.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Nekrobul on 2016-02-29, 10:58:07
I will do... probably. But i think build with adaptivity should go public very soon, so everyone can do tests by themselves.

Meanwhile i did some more comparison shots of my little fellows, because i find that particular scene benefits from adaptivity very much. Without DOF and MB this scene samples very fast, but as soon as those effects kicks in, some areas requires very high amount of samples, for noise to be at acceptable level. And adaptivity fights that problem very efficiently. This is by no mean a scientific test, i just fired a render, waited for noisiest part of an image to became acceptably clean and stopped rendering. Settings were such: GIvsAA - 4, LSM - 2, adaptivity - 0, denoising - 1.

There are couple of strange things going on. Maybe it is because the number of pses is very different? Could you make one more test with same amount of pases lets say 20-40?
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2016-02-29, 11:11:23
It wouldn't be very fair comparison, because with adaptivity you cannot to directly compare passes with passes anymore.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Nekrobul on 2016-02-29, 11:26:14
Then may be same time for let's say a minute?
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2016-02-29, 11:38:26
Ok, i did both comparisons, with fixed amount of passes (40) and time (1 min).
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Nekrobul on 2016-02-29, 11:57:45
That wats i am talking about!

Actualy now i can see wat an insane speedup it is acording to the last image. X_X It seems that noise in Dof wont be problem anymore.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: rozpustelnik on 2016-02-29, 12:10:01
The adaptivity by itself does a pretty good job here. I assume that rays casted into black background in first couple of passes are somehow assigned to sample more important parts of the image later. I wonder how well it will behave in interior shots...
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: lacilaci on 2016-02-29, 12:14:01
Can't wait to try.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: alexyork on 2016-02-29, 12:35:28
This is great..... can't wait to try this in production!
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: maru on 2016-02-29, 13:32:24
Sorry for spamming in your thread Romullus, but there is no official adaptivity thread yet (I am sure once it's out it will EXPLODE with tests and examples), so:
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: alexyork on 2016-02-29, 13:38:44
Great results...!

Quick question, more related to the denoising feature really - can Corona output a version with and without denoising at the same time? I think it would be ideal if we could blend between them for final renders in post, as some areas become warped during denoising.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Juraj on 2016-02-29, 14:09:34
Great results...!

Quick question, more related to the denoising feature really - can Corona output a version with and without denoising at the same time? I think it would be ideal if we could blend between them for final renders in post, as some areas become warped during denoising.

Heh I asked exactly about this to Ondra when we talked recently, basically controls for aggressivness of filter, and blending of filtered and non-filtered in framebuffer. He said it's doable, but said it didn't yield positive results from his tests. But that's no definite no :- )

How I planned to use this, was to do this manually, output both filtered and un-filtered results, and mask them with mat-ID  pass for mats with little high-frequency details, like flat painted surfaces. There is no detail that I can loose in white ceiling, but I always have shit-ton of noise there.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: alexyork on 2016-02-29, 14:21:13
Great results...!

Quick question, more related to the denoising feature really - can Corona output a version with and without denoising at the same time? I think it would be ideal if we could blend between them for final renders in post, as some areas become warped during denoising.

Heh I asked exactly about this to Ondra when we talked recently, basically controls for aggressivness of filter, and blending of filtered and non-filtered in framebuffer. He said it's doable, but said it didn't yield positive results from his tests. But that's no definite no :- )

How I planned to use this, was to do this manually, output both filtered and un-filtered results, and mask them with mat-ID  pass for mats with little high-frequency details, like flat painted surfaces. There is no detail that I can loose in white ceiling, but I always have shit-ton of noise there.

Cool. I mean for us it's probably not that important at all to have the blending controls within Corona. I would just like to be able to paint between the normal and denoised versions in photoshop/AE etc like we do now - if a render is a little noisy we'll denoise it in LR then matte between the two in PS manually. Having a sophisticated method for masking might be beneficial too. For now it would be great if there was a simple checkbox "Save Denoised Version Separately" or similar, so we get two files to work with each time.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2016-02-29, 15:32:00
While i find adaptivity absolutely awesome, i have mixed feelings about denoising. On one hand, in animations like posted earlier, it could be godsend, OTOH i doubt that i will use it often on stills. I'm not a big fan of clinically clean images in a first place, besides i don't quite like those jpeg compression like artifacts after Corona's denoising. While those usually can be seen only in high zoom, it still leaves "dirty" image impression for me.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: lacilaci on 2016-02-29, 15:36:40
While i find adaptivity absolutely awesome, i have mixed feelings about denoising. On one hand, in animations like posted earlier, it could be godsend, OTOH i doubt that i will use it often on stills. I'm not a big fan of clinically clean images in a first place, besides i don't quite like those jpeg compression like artifacts after Corona's denoising. While those usually can be seen only in high zoom, it still leaves "dirty" image impression for me.

I think it could be awesome for high res product shots... When the image is almost clean, but needs to be completely clean... Especially when featuring glass..
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: alexyork on 2016-02-29, 15:39:22
While i find adaptivity absolutely awesome, i have mixed feelings about denoising. On one hand, in animations like posted earlier, it could be godsend, OTOH i doubt that i will use it often on stills. I'm not a big fan of clinically clean images in a first place, besides i don't quite like those jpeg compression like artifacts after Corona's denoising. While those usually can be seen only in high zoom, it still leaves "dirty" image impression for me.

I agree. But I think if we can simply paint mask between normal and denoised we could control this. The "dirty", "wobbly" areas are visible in some areas of that animation but not in others, so as long as you can easily control this it should still be super useful. I can see myself using it to remove speckles in certain areas, smoothing out noisy large glossy surfaces, spotlight reflections in floors etc.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: agentdark45 on 2016-02-29, 15:47:19
Great results...!

Quick question, more related to the denoising feature really - can Corona output a version with and without denoising at the same time? I think it would be ideal if we could blend between them for final renders in post, as some areas become warped during denoising.

Heh I asked exactly about this to Ondra when we talked recently, basically controls for aggressivness of filter, and blending of filtered and non-filtered in framebuffer. He said it's doable, but said it didn't yield positive results from his tests. But that's no definite no :- )

How I planned to use this, was to do this manually, output both filtered and un-filtered results, and mask them with mat-ID  pass for mats with little high-frequency details, like flat painted surfaces. There is no detail that I can loose in white ceiling, but I always have shit-ton of noise there.

Cool. I mean for us it's probably not that important at all to have the blending controls within Corona. I would just like to be able to paint between the normal and denoised versions in photoshop/AE etc like we do now - if a render is a little noisy we'll denoise it in LR then matte between the two in PS manually. Having a sophisticated method for masking might be beneficial too. For now it would be great if there was a simple checkbox "Save Denoised Version Separately" or similar, so we get two files to work with each time.

I fully support this idea, would make batch rendering a breeze too.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2016-02-29, 15:59:49
Just a reminder, someone should fill request in appropriate board, if you want that feature to appear in Corona. I doubt that devs will surf through my wips topic ;]
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Ondra on 2016-02-29, 16:19:40
but there is no official adaptivity thread yet

Can you make it? A thread for adaptivity on/off images?
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Ondra on 2016-02-29, 16:35:36
Heh I asked exactly about this to Ondra when we talked recently, basically controls for aggressivness of filter, and blending of filtered and non-filtered in framebuffer. He said it's doable, but said it didn't yield positive results from his tests. But that's no definite no :- )

How I planned to use this, was to do this manually, output both filtered and un-filtered results, and mask them with mat-ID  pass for mats with little high-frequency details, like flat painted surfaces. There is no detail that I can loose in white ceiling, but I always have shit-ton of noise there.

The problem there was that the correct way to make the denoising effect less prominent is not to blend pixels that are 100% denoised and pixels that are 0% denoised, but to decrease the amount of blurring during denoising.

In principle it is the same problem as if you want to create perlin noise (like 3dsmax noise node) - you cannot do it by blending pixel noise (like TV static) and constant color. But I dont know, maybe in the end it will look OK-ish ;)
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2016-02-29, 16:40:04
I may rethink my attitude towards denoising :] 1 minute render test.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: lacilaci on 2016-02-29, 16:51:07
I may rethink my attitude towards denoising :] 1 minute render test.

it's making me impatient :D
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2016-02-29, 17:02:01
I know your feelings. God, how i hate those damn teasers...
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: FrostKiwi on 2016-02-29, 22:48:26
Are these from daily builds or internal?
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2016-03-01, 09:01:51
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: mitviz on 2016-03-01, 09:24:34
please lord let the denoiser come soon i pray:)
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2016-03-05, 23:32:11
Tried to achieve 3d printed look. Not very successful, though.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Juraj on 2016-03-06, 00:46:39
Actually looks pretty good :- ) Is that in shader ? or the model as well.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2016-03-06, 09:25:25
I'm not sure if i understood you correctly Juraj, if it's about displacement, then yes, it's from the shader. Tried different variants for it and settled on gradient ramp with a little bit of noise. Model itself is smooth.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: pokoy on 2016-03-06, 13:44:05
Tried to achieve 3d printed look. Not very successful, though.

Looks great. Having done similar tests in the past I know it's not easy to get the print layers to look good on the entire model, they might look great on the sides but the top needs mostly needs way more work and the hardest part is to introduce imperfections. Good result here!
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2016-05-30, 22:28:11
Yet another material exercise. Tried to replicate faux bronze and aged bronze with patina. Not verry happy with results, but not gonna try to improve - i spent already too much time on this.

Model is from: http://threedscans.com/
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: cecofuli on 2016-05-31, 00:25:17
Aged bronze is super!
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: DarcTheo on 2016-06-29, 14:16:35
loving the bronze, nice one.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: agentdark45 on 2016-06-29, 14:24:04
Holy crap, those bronze materials are insane! Are they all procedural? How are you UV mapping those scanned models?

Would you be willing to upload the materials to http://coronamaterials.com/ ?
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2016-06-29, 17:28:54
Sadly, those materials won't work without models, because it heavily relies on numerous baked maps.

But i can upload models with materials, because those models are obtained as public domain. Give me a few days, before i can find some time to do that.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: maru on 2016-06-29, 18:05:07
AFAIK the providers of those models were interested in collecting works done with these, so you could contact them too. A small "made in Corona Renderer" note would be appreciated also. ;)
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Marcellus Ludovicus on 2016-06-29, 19:18:41
From which site did the models come?
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2016-06-29, 19:39:33
Look here: https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php/topic,11832.0.html
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2016-07-01, 11:34:33
Here's promised model with bronze materials: https://www.dropbox.com/s/7hu5dahmnxfldda/FrankWilleme%20model%20and%20Corona%20bronze%20material%20Share.zip?dl=0

Please note, that unlike original scans, i do not share it as public domain. More info on licensing is inside archive file.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: agentdark45 on 2016-07-01, 12:48:33
Thanks for sharing romullus. Good to see how the shader is constructed! Is there an easy way to adapt this for general models? Or is manual detailing necessary?
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2016-07-01, 12:58:38
Those maps were baked from high poly, detailed mesh, there's no way to get needed details from low poly, i'm affraid. Besides as much as i like Corona's AO, it's impossible to get information with it, that curvature or cavity maps gives. Initially i tried to do as much work procedurally as i could, but soon gave up, because results was simply not convincing enough :[
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2016-07-16, 21:37:56
Can stop toying with new post processing tools in Corona. Tried to compare glare and bloom with ArionFX and i think that Corona's implementation still can't match its quality. Especially that can be seen around bright light sources - ArionFX nicely transitions bright white light to coloured glare, while Corona always gives ugly sharp transition. On the positive side, i like Corona's update speed - much faster than aFX, ant the fact that you can see those effects while working with IR is absolutely amazing.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Juraj on 2016-07-17, 13:23:11
Good test, and not so good result. I found the same, the current glare is capable of producing flare, but not true glare. Even for very high glare power, the highlights stay rough with no transition.

Here is result from VFB+. The glare is very complicated to setup there for true realistic behaviour, because power and size is unrelated. It's also not real-time, but computed like the one from ArionFx, although not as good as Arion. But it's kind of middle ground, and you can see it produces strong glare before massive star appears.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: arrival on 2016-07-17, 16:22:44
Hi  Juraj..hope u can help me,because i've download the trial version from vfb+ to have a look at this.
i dropped the dlx file to plugins folder,hit render in corona,but...no vfb+

how can i activate this ?

Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Juraj on 2016-07-17, 16:37:29
You have to either select 'Native 3dsMax VFB' in Render setting System tam, VFB rollout.
 
Or, you can like me sometimes, use Corona VFB (for denoising), and after the render is finished, click on 'RenderFrame Windows' (Teapot in Square on the upper bar) and it will be there.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2016-07-17, 17:12:34
Here is result from VFB+. The glare is very complicated to setup there for true realistic behaviour, because power and size is unrelated. It's also not real-time, but computed like the one from ArionFx, although not as good as Arion. But it's kind of middle ground, and you can see it produces strong glare before massive star appears.

Indeed, glare from VFB+ looks much better, but if it isn't real time, then i'll stick withArionFX for the moment :]
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Juraj on 2016-07-17, 17:20:15
It's almost real-time if you stay under 2560px resolution :- )
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2016-07-17, 17:43:41
90% of my renderings are under that resolution :]
I tried VFB+ demo couple years ago and i didn't find it very attractive at that time, maybe i should give it another try.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Nekrobul on 2016-07-18, 10:06:57
90% of my renderings are under that resolution :]
I tried VFB+ demo couple years ago and i didn't find it very attractive at that time, maybe i should give it another try.

You definetly should try it now, but afterall i prefered arion.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: FrostKiwi on 2016-07-18, 10:14:53
Is there a sponza atrium scene converted to corona somewhere floating around or is it your own creation?
My favorite test scene, can you share the it? Would love to test setups with this instead of the corona benchmark scene^^
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2016-07-18, 10:30:22
It is Sponza model from Crytek: http://www.crytek.com/cryengine/cryengine3/downloads You can download max file and use converter to turn it to Corona scene. I wouldn't want to share my scene in its current state, at least not yet.

Meanwhile some more work on this scene. Decided to change floor this time - added after the rain look to it.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Rotem on 2016-07-18, 12:23:36
Here is result from VFB+. The glare is very complicated to setup there for true realistic behaviour, because power and size is unrelated. It's also not real-time, but computed like the one from ArionFx, although not as good as Arion. But it's kind of middle ground, and you can see it produces strong glare before massive star appears.

Indeed, glare from VFB+ looks much better, but if it isn't real time, then i'll stick withArionFX for the moment :]

Does ArionFX run on the GPU? I can't imagine it being that much faster with a CPU based solution.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2016-07-18, 12:35:21
I don't know if it runs on GPU, but it isn't fast at all. Quite contrary, bloom and glare features are painfully slow, but the quality ArionFX delivers, is totally worth it.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Rotem on 2016-07-18, 12:40:08
I see, I read your comment as implying that the Arion solution is real-time.
I haven't tried Arion, but making an educated guess I would attribute most differences in quality to better glare kernels.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2016-07-18, 12:49:25
I don't say that your implementation is inferior to Arion's, i simply don't knw that. I tried VFB+ demo couple years ago and i think i didn't touched glare and bloom features at all.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Rotem on 2016-07-18, 12:51:36
You didn't, glare was only recently added :)
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: mitviz on 2016-07-25, 00:05:39
very nice work:)
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2016-08-15, 23:17:40
Corona distance map rocks! Now, if only Ondra would change hes mind about triplanar map and then introduce advanced bump map... that would be beyond all awesomness :]
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: dubcat on 2016-08-16, 00:08:37
nice, need to test this tomorrow! Looks like the ground is infested with Sha.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2016-08-16, 10:13:21
What is Sha? :]
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: tomislavn on 2016-08-16, 12:26:35
What is Sha? :]

You should start playing World of Warcraft :D
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2016-08-16, 12:42:35
I definitely shouldn't :]
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Ludvik Koutny on 2016-08-16, 17:20:23
But you should do some tests with the new glare. It works amazingly well ;)
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2016-08-16, 17:35:38
Do you mean there was some changes to glare-bloom in latest build?
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Ludvik Koutny on 2016-08-16, 18:23:18
Aside from rescaling parameters, not... There was some change maybe about a month ago... and from my quick tests, it looks great ever since. It's just fun to play with, but I don't have much time lately. You on the other had, have a WIP thread... ;)
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2016-08-23, 00:03:42
Following discussion in daily builds topic. Never again to badly floating things in CG water :]
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: TomG on 2016-08-23, 14:05:30
Looking good! I can see a movie in this one - "Increasingly abandoned as technology advances, three standard CGI objects set off in search of a new life...."
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Juraj on 2016-08-23, 18:27:45
The symmetrical flare looks rather fake. We could use mask for more natural shape.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2016-08-23, 19:58:33
Not sure i understood you correctly. Do you mean radial symmetry? Apart from the fact that every other streak should be slightly smaller and of slightly different shape when flare forms from odd numbered blades, i don't see nothing too wrong with our flare. But maybe you have something else in your mind?
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Juraj on 2016-08-23, 20:12:28
Well, everything about it is symmetric and even.

I expect soft flare ( +/- F4 in wide angle lens ) to look like this:
(https://cdn.photographylife.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Sun-vs-Plant.jpg)

And sharp flare ( F11+ in wide angle lens ) to look like this (both are very high-end lens)

(http://thecareyadventures.com/DPS/14-24/Peter-West-Carey-Utah2012-1022-6929.jpg)

We need shape mask support ( .hdr ) for that.

Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2016-08-23, 21:16:54
Well, we already have mask - DOF shape custom. Ideally its shape should govern glare. Unfortunatelly those two aren't tied in any way in Corona... :[

Also i'd like to see lens flare too. As well as other optical abberations. maybe someday :]
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Juraj on 2016-08-23, 21:30:03
Well, we already have mask - DOF shape custom. Ideally its shape should govern glare. Unfortunatelly those two aren't tied in any way in Corona... :[

Also i'd like to see lens flare too. As well as other optical abberations. maybe someday :]

What is the relationship of DOF (you mean BOKEH ? ) mask and glare ? Now I am confused.

You can get the example I posted above with VrayLens effects (or VFB+) is using glare mask. It doesn't affect bokeh shape.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2016-08-23, 21:47:40
AFAIK starburst shape depends on aperture shape and aperture in Corona is called DOF mask. The more rounded aperture shape, the less prominent is glare streaks and vice versa. Obviously in Corona aperture blades are considered perfectly poligonal, so we have that very symetrical somewhat less real looking glare. Although in real life sun flare is getting very symetrical and regular when aperture is closed to maximum and thus its shape becomes polygonal.

(https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-726zdcSLacI/VlUGZLEd3EI/AAAAAAAAOUk/NrMq5js3lJo/s1600/StarburstText.jpg)
(http://my3boybarians.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/darcysgraphic.gif)
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Juraj on 2016-08-23, 21:55:13
Aperture does affect the size/shape (hence I wrote the f-stops ), but lot other shape factors are due to lensing (diffraction, irregularities, obstacles, etc..). Different lenses provide wildly different glare streaks on same aperture shape (which is quite identical across modern high-end DSLRs, hence why people put in custom shape cutouts for "artistic" effect in real-life).

It does not substitute glare mask, which is simple solution to complicated lens simulation.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2016-08-27, 00:16:42
Just a bunch assets from free megascan samples thrown together.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: antanas on 2016-08-27, 15:16:24
Well that's what I keep telling all my cg artist friends I've got for at least 4-5 years - photogrammetry Rules and it is a 3d modelling's future, well for some things at least and at least a decent part of that future, and now when megascans finally "hit the shelves" and they finally begin to realize that, it feels so good to be right for a change ))
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2016-09-30, 23:22:42
Recently did some sci fi gates for client and decided to render it for myself. Render straight out of VFB. Who needs photoshop when Corona does everything you need.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: maru on 2016-10-01, 18:23:57
Render straight out of VFB.
Ok I am officially starting counting these sentences. :D
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2016-10-01, 19:15:20
I think after 1.5 release you will have to count instances where usage of PP software is mentioned - it will be easier that way :]
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2016-11-05, 20:50:29
I was bored today and decided to play with my old model. Very simple setup, one light and enviroment, almost no PP, just raw Corona power.

Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Dionysios.TS on 2016-11-05, 20:59:37
Cool tire material! :)
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: johezetop on 2016-11-05, 21:28:54
Very simple setup, one light and enviroment.

hi,
where i can get this oil tanks hdr?
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2016-11-05, 21:51:34
This HDRI is freebie from smcars.net forum.

@Dionysios.TS, thanks, but it's just texture, material itself is basic :]
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Dionysios.TS on 2016-11-05, 21:53:35
This HDRI is freebie from smcars.net forum.

@Dionysios.TS, thanks, but it's just texture, material itself is basic :]

Yes I noticed that but is cool anyway! :)
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Dionysios.TS on 2016-11-06, 00:09:12
Metal shader seems nice too, what did you used btw? Complex Fresnel?

Thanks!
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2016-11-06, 10:01:41
No, no Complex Fresnel here. I tend to avoid to use plugins that can't be collapsed into editable poly :] For that reason i got rid of almost all material plugins, even bercon maps.

Metal material is very basic (as about 99% materials on this car). I just lowered IOR to 12 to get a bit darker metal an that's it.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Dionysios.TS on 2016-11-06, 21:42:19
No, no Complex Fresnel here. I tend to avoid to use plugins that can't be collapsed into editable poly :] For that reason i got rid of almost all material plugins, even bercon maps.

Metal material is very basic (as about 99% materials on this car). I just lowered IOR to 12 to get a bit darker metal an that's it.

Wow, simple but effective! Thanks again for sharing.

Dionysios -
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: lacilaci on 2016-11-06, 21:51:40
I was bored today and decided to play with my old model. Very simple setup, one light and enviroment, almost no PP, just raw Corona power.

It's actually pretty lovely... Only a low-res backplate is ruining the mood.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2016-11-06, 23:02:53
I know, i have all my HDRIs saved in 3 resolutions: original, medium and small. I always pick medium rez one for scene building and testing and i almost always forget to swap it with higher rez when rendering finals :] Shame on me.

@Dionysios.TS, no problem, i like to share knowledge :] Actually, this metal material looks pretty meh in bright light conditions, but since i intentionally lowered enviromental light intensity, metal became much richer, more contrasty and started to look better.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2016-11-24, 22:05:08
Look Ma, no UVs! No object in this render has UV coordinates. I freaking love triplanar, never got chance to try it with other renderer - even more excitement for me :] Would love to play with it more, but unfortunatelly this build is too unstable - every other try to render ends with crash. Looking forward for more stable build.

As usual, straight out of VFB:
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2016-11-24, 23:16:57
One more test. With the help of triplanar we finally have scatterer that can sample colour from distribution object... somehow. It's not perfect, but better than nothing. Pretty cool :]

If only Max would have blur node, this trick could work even better.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2016-11-25, 19:14:59
Despite continuous crashing, i keep working on this locomotive. Still fully procedural.

BTW would love to hear some suggestions on how to prevent AO from bleeding through thin meshes. Reducing distance radius is not an option, as it kills effect in other places.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: maru on 2016-12-15, 14:51:23
Awesomeness! Any chance for some BTS porn? Material editor screenshots? Wires?
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2016-12-15, 15:07:05
Did you mean BDSM pron? Sure, i should find something in my collection... oh, wait, maybe you actually want behind the scene material. Well, i probably could gather some screen or two, but not today - i'm desparately busy for couple days. I'll try to remember to not forget about it :]
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: maru on 2016-12-15, 15:13:00
Yes, I meant behind-the-scenes (no pun intended), sorry for not being specific when it comes to genres.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2017-03-05, 23:30:42
Fun with caustics.

(https://image.ibb.co/h5jZaa/output_Es_XXPQ.gif)
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: PROH on 2017-03-06, 00:40:14
Nice :) What's the secret?
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2017-03-06, 14:17:23
Caustics generator and self illumination. Horrible fake, but still better than no caustics at all. And renders blazingly fast :]
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: jjaz82 on 2017-03-08, 10:46:30
Fake but very smart, compliments romullus
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2017-05-28, 11:56:32
My newest model. Volocopter VC200 by e-volo. OCTADECACOPTER, baby! :]

As usual no external post at all, everything's straight out of Corona VFB. I used one of dubcat's LUT, which worked brilliantly. Render times were from little more than 1 minute to little less than 1 hour, depending on picture space filling and usage of DOF. Background is simple HDRI in Corona's dome mode. I had a proper backplates for that HDRI, but didn't want to bother with them.

(https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4222/34513471700_44aa1a11e3_o_d.png)

(https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4268/34089770373_66888ab3c6_o_d.png)

(https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4228/34768647621_a0e07e740c_o_d.png)

(https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4195/34513476680_a52aa1f06b_o_d.png)

(https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4249/34513476380_dda3d66cd6_o_d.png)

(https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4269/34768647971_5ceef943af_o_d.png)

(https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4274/34089769983_749d3c0b38_o_d.png)

(https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4201/34057549014_aa925de27e_o_d.png)

(https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4225/34513477160_2d415b6b6d_o_d.png)

(https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4199/34768648211_fb0ffde624_o_d.png)

(https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4200/34513470420_d5d03034e0_o_d.png)

(https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4276/34513470050_eddac315be_o_d.png)
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: krassnoludek on 2017-05-28, 16:35:14
dude, you are seriously kicking ass
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: lacilaci on 2017-05-28, 18:42:22
Really cool stuff... The interior/seating area looks a bit uncomfortable though. Having a nice interior and comfortable seats would boost this whole appearance to a new level imho. Still, great work and renders.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2017-05-28, 18:56:59
Thank you both.

I agree that seats looks (and probably are) uncomfortable. That's most likely due to the fact, that this unit is just a prototype. When i was about to finish modelling, i found that e-volo released new production ready unit, which has closed cockpit and more comfortable seats, oh well... Nevertheless, stylistically i like this one more.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: yagi on 2017-06-03, 00:18:16
amazing renders....quick question. How do you use coronas DOME MODE??? when should we also consider using it preferably and is it a better option than using regular hdri in environment slot ?
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: TomG on 2017-06-03, 02:45:23
YouTube tutorial on Dome Mapping -
- hope this helps!
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: yagi on 2017-06-03, 18:24:58
Thanks TOM
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: klipanos on 2017-07-07, 19:09:44
The VOLOCOPTER looks amazing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Well done!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Christa Noel on 2017-07-08, 03:14:54
a bit late but that's a very nice work as usual. And you used Dubcat LUT, my favourite (thanks Dubcat) :)
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2017-07-09, 15:35:51
The VOLOCOPTER looks amazing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Well done!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well, thank you!!!!!!!! I'm glad that you liked it :]

a bit late but that's a very nice work as usual. And you used Dubcat LUT, my favourite (thanks Dubcat) :)

Photographic 1 and 2 are the only ones that i use and i use them quite a lot. I think it's safe to say that they are my favorites too :]
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2018-01-07, 12:14:39
Couple pics of retro keyboard that i modelled recently.

(https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=2466.0;attach=77188;image)

(https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=2466.0;attach=77190;image)
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Ondra on 2018-01-08, 11:22:11
offtopic: you should update your signature ;)
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: NicolasC on 2018-01-08, 11:42:49
Lovely keyboard !! very nice :)
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2018-01-08, 11:57:53
Lovely keyboard !! very nice :)

Yeah, i would love to have one, but the price...

offtopic: you should update your signature ;)

Oh come on, the report was closed just 5 minutes ago and i was waiting for the fix like forever :] Anyway, thank you for the fix! The only thing that left now, is to figure it out how to use compositing mode properly :]
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: tomislavn on 2018-01-08, 12:36:53
Yeah, i would love to have one, but the price...

Price is around 100-110€ on Amazon :O That's not much at all for a mechanical keyboard with those cool retro looks :)

EDIT: Actually the leather one is more like 180-200 though :D just noticed!
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2018-02-16, 23:11:05
I did some tests with advanced bokeh settings, tried to find optimal values. I think that for most realistic results i will try to stick with 0 - 0,7 range for center bias and -1 - 1 for vignetting. It looks like at more extreme vignetting values, image corners starts to resist to blurring - something i never noticed in real photographs. With center bias set at 0,8 and more, bokeh starts to resemble image taken with mirror lens and negative values just gradually brings everything back in focus.

Attaching set of images with vignetting set to 1 and 1,5. At 1,5 cat's eye effect is more prominent, but image corners looks really bad.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: maru on 2018-02-19, 18:02:45
I also noticed that the corners are quickly becoming too sharp and too dark. I am not sure if this is something that happens in real life, especially the darkening, but maybe there are some ways to prevent it?
In the images I found online the "cat eye" is often very pronounced, but at the same time the corners are bright.
http://toolsandtoys.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Olympus-40-150mm-Pro-Lens-Review-57.jpg
https://phillipreeve.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Sony_FE_vs_GM-01149.jpg
https://www.mu-43.com/gallery/data/500/marina-flower-small.jpg
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Ondra on 2018-03-05, 08:21:13
I also noticed that the corners are quickly becoming too sharp and too dark. I am not sure if this is something that happens in real life, especially the darkening, but maybe there are some ways to prevent it?
In the images I found online the "cat eye" is often very pronounced, but at the same time the corners are bright.
http://toolsandtoys.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Olympus-40-150mm-Pro-Lens-Review-57.jpg
https://phillipreeve.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Sony_FE_vs_GM-01149.jpg
https://www.mu-43.com/gallery/data/500/marina-flower-small.jpg

The darkening is physically based, as the basic fenomenon that creates the cat eye effect is occlusion of the lens aperture. My best guess is that the photos are corrected in postproduction (AFAIK removing vignetting is one of the easiest and most prevalent corrections... or at least it was when I was playing with it ;)). It would be interesting if anyone is able to produce such effect with real camera to confirm this
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2018-03-05, 10:31:17
Novadays most cameras does vignetting and some other abberation corrections internally, so if picture was shot to jpeg, most of its vignetting is already removed by a camera. There's plenty of profesional lens reviews on the internet and it clearly shows that most fast wide lenses (basically those who "suffers" from cat's eye effect the most), has plenty of vignetting. I think Corona does everything right here :]
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2018-09-21, 20:37:37
My next wip, Iranian truck. Model is from grabcad, i just added some minor details, fully unwrapped and started texturing it, Texturing is at the very early stage, basically just a bunch of materials dropped onto the model in the Substance Painter. Enviroment is a scene i made a year or so ago, mostly out of a free models gathered in the internet. New AI denoiser was used, mainly because the scene already barely fits into my 16 GB RAM :]

(https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=2466.0;attach=90963;image)

Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Juraj on 2018-09-21, 20:44:51
So the whole car is unwrapped ? Where do you generate your curvature map ? I will need to do something similar very soon and I think it might be less hassle then going procedural in corona.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2018-09-21, 20:56:35
Yes, whole car is unwrapped. Curvature, along with other maps, was baked in the Substance Painter. The process is very easy and straightforward, just load your mesh, choose resolution and press bake. I've heard that Marmoset Toolbag 3 has even better baker now.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Juraj on 2018-09-21, 20:58:22
How do you export the mesh ? Per material groups ?
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2018-09-21, 21:18:57
Yes, i had separate objects for each material, although you can merge everything into single object and use material IDs. I think it would be the same as having the separate objects.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Juraj on 2018-09-21, 21:23:33
Thanks, last question and I'll wish you happy weekend :- ). What Subdivision is best to export for the curvature & painting ? First one that appears smooth or the final one intended for rendering ? ( I presume such one could be very heavy for painting )
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2018-09-21, 21:36:33
To be honest, i don't know, i never tried to paint on a very high poly mesh. Not sure how well the Painter handles high number of polygons. My guess is, that there shouldn't be big issues. The truck was already subdivided when i got it, but the mesh isn't very dense - whole truck is about 150K and there's no issues whatsoever, even with my underpowered hardware.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Benny on 2018-09-23, 08:05:30
Jeez man, mind blown. Something about the light and material on that car is just wonderful.

A making of video would be equally wonderful. ;> 
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2018-09-23, 12:07:23
Thanks Benny, i'm planning to work more on truck's textures, maybe on the enviroment as well. As for the making of, i never did anything like that and i think that this scene probably would be worst candidate to start :] But if you have some questions, you may fire them away and i'll try to answer as best as i can.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Benny on 2018-09-23, 19:25:44
Well to begin with the lighting around the area around the grille and down to the wet dirt looks incredible. Are you somehow obstructing a large size light combined with an hydro to get that softness? That chrome material gives it almost a toy car effect that really stands out as well. What resolution did you render this?
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2018-09-23, 23:15:21
Lighting is very simple - just Corona sky&sun and moderately sized Corona light close to the camera, pointed to truck's front - you can see its reflection close to the front wheel arch. I also lifted shadows in lightroom and boosted midtones just a touch, i wish Corona VFB would have some tools to help with shadows and midtones.

Regarding resolution, i uploaded original size - this is the maximum my pc can handle for this scene :]
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: maru on 2018-09-24, 13:56:44
That scene is actually a very good candidate for v2 vs v3 tests (e.g. the new autobump).
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2018-09-24, 14:36:03
Actually i just did some quick autobump test and results are pretty puzling. I'm going to post my findings in daily builds topic.
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: romullus on 2018-09-25, 13:55:19
That scene is actually a very good candidate for v2 vs v3 tests (e.g. the new autobump).

Just tested autobump on this scene. The difference is quite subtle, but it's an improvement for sure. Build-09-20 image is a bit noisier, just because i render it shorter.
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2018-12-02, 14:56:39
Started to revisit my material library in Connecter. Here's how it's looking now.

(https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=2466.0;attach=94538;image)
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: Juraj on 2018-12-02, 15:52:55
How are you satisfied with the workflow ? Materials are the last thing I didn't migrate yet from Siger, but maybe because I couldn't be bothered to set the workflow up.

What mapping is that btw ? Spherified box ?
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2018-12-02, 16:37:28
Yes, sperified box with planar mapping. I think it works pretty well in most cases.

As for my workflow, to be honest, i'm not really satisfied with it. It's very time consuming and tedious. Not sure if it's because i'm slow in general or because Connecter still has much room for improvement. Some its undocumented features can be hard to comprehend without much testing or sometimes pure luck. Also all this thing is quite new to me, so i make many mistakes and have to redo things several times (little perfectionist inside me, don't know words "good enough"). But little by little i'm moving forward and once i'll finish... heck, i'll probably never finish :]
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: Benny on 2018-12-03, 00:01:39
Nice!

I'm also trying to organize my materials better, but got a bit put off by the awkward preview rendering setup. Since the Connecter people live by selling models I can understand that they aren't that interested in putting a lot of efforts in improving the material part. Still, it would be great to have all resources under one interface. Also like that this isn't a plugin for Max but can be worked in independently.

So looking at your folders, you have a 3ds Max and a models-scenes, what is the difference between these? I also notice that you have a Textures folder but not a Materials, where do you logically place these?

You should totally sell this library!
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: Ink Visual on 2018-12-03, 02:01:51
Hi Romullus,
Can you perhaps quickly describe how do you create material previews in Connecter?
Like Juraj, materials library is the only thing that I didn't fully move to Connecter yet. Mainly because of weak documentation on this topic, I think I only tried to batch create previews once or twice, I failed and never went back to it again. So seeing your workflow on this topic would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2018-12-03, 11:54:49
I'm also trying to organize my materials better, but got a bit put off by the awkward preview rendering setup. Since the Connecter people live by selling models I can understand that they aren't that interested in putting a lot of efforts in improving the material part. Still, it would be great to have all resources under one interface. Also like that this isn't a plugin for Max but can be worked in independently.

I think that material thumbnail rendering system is on par with their 3D assets thumbnail rendering system, but it's poorly documented and that what makes it hard to start using it. I might make short HOW TO later, when i'll more familiarise with the workflow. As for not being 3ds Max plugin, for 3d assets that's great, but i'm not sure how important it is for materials. I don't know if Connecter  supports anything else except mat files. Maybe C4D materials? And hopefully they will support Corona universal material once it will hit daylight.

So looking at your folders, you have a 3ds Max and a models-scenes, what is the difference between these? I also notice that you have a Textures folder but not a Materials, where do you logically place these?

Folder structure is relevant only to me, it may not make sense for anybody else. 3ds Max is the name of the folder where i keep all my projects, all the rest, are asset folders. Material files are saved in the corresponding texture folders.

You should totally sell this library!

Nah, 99% textures aren't authored by me, but rather gathered from all around in internet, no selling is possible.

Can you perhaps quickly describe how do you create material previews in Connecter?

Yes, i probably will do something like that in the future.
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2018-12-13, 10:41:00
For some reason3ds max asset tracking window on my pc, goes offscreen with a frequency of 1-2 times a week. Since there's no easy way to recover it in windows 10 (at least i don't know any), i get very frustrating every time that happens. Luckily after some googling, i found an excellent sollution. I just need to drag any .max or .mat file from Connecter to 3ds max viewport and from contextual menu choose about/config...>3ds max: asset tracking... and voila, that bastard window jumps in front of your eyes!

Source of the idea: https://ikonoform.com/3ds-max-asset-tracker-wont-open/
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2019-01-08, 16:23:29
My latest model rendered with Corona.

(https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=2466.0;attach=96138;image)
(https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=2466.0;attach=96140;image)
(https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=2466.0;attach=96142;image)
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: rozpustelnik on 2019-01-08, 16:53:03
This looks terrific! Great attention to detail and nicely shown slight use marks.
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: bluebox on 2019-01-08, 20:10:55
Looks great. Is the dirt unwrapped or Corona AO ?
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2019-01-08, 20:46:52
Thank you both. Model is fully unwrapped and textures are authored in Substance Painter, no special Corona features are involved :]
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: bluebox on 2019-01-08, 21:33:51
Wow. Havent noticed in the renders that the model is so low poly. Really good job. How would you describe substance learning curve ? Easy to get the hang of it ?
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2019-01-08, 23:17:49
Havent noticed in the renders that the model is so low poly.

Xexe, it's the aim of low-poly modelling :]

How would you describe substance learning curve ? Easy to get the hang of it ?

I would say it's super easy. You can get basics in one evening after watching few tutorials - i recommend to start from watching Allegorithmics official youtube channel - they have top notch content there. Of course, it will take many hours and much practise to master the painter, like with any other tool, but it's definitely worth it.
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: bluebox on 2019-01-09, 15:54:29
Thanks Romullus. Will have to give it a try!
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: Jpjapers on 2019-01-09, 20:25:19
Would be really really interested to see a video from an end user that has migrated their library to connecter and any issues/bumps in the road you experienced.
I Want to put the time into the organisation but at the moment I dont understand the best practices/workflow due to the lack of documentation.
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2019-01-09, 21:35:14
For me there was no migration at all, because before Connecter i didn't have any library. All my assets where lying in few folders, losely separated by categories. To find something, was nearly impossible, so i was always using the same few assets in all my works. With the help of Connecter, i discovered so many models or textures, i wasn't even aware that i have them. Most of them were deleted immediately, because they were horribly outdated :]

Lack of proper documentation is a bit of issue, but basics are pretty easy to grasp and with time you will discover more advanced features. Also Connecter team is very friendly and open to discussion, you can find them on trello or on facebook.
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: Jpjapers on 2019-01-10, 10:58:21
For me there was no migration at all, because before Connecter i didn't have any library. All my assets where lying in few folders, losely separated by categories. To find something, was nearly impossible, so i was always using the same few assets in all my works. With the help of Connecter, i discovered so many models or textures, i wasn't even aware that i have them. Most of them were deleted immediately, because they were horribly outdated :]

Lack of proper documentation is a bit of issue, but basics are pretty easy to grasp and with time you will discover more advanced features. Also Connecter team is very friendly and open to discussion, you can find them on trello or on facebook.

So did you let connecter scan your folders then reorganise within connecter? or did you organise your models in file explorer first and then have connecter pick that structure up?
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2019-01-10, 11:56:27
No, for me folder structure is irreleveant. Of course, you can use it if you want to, but the real power of Connecter comes from tags. Think about it - you can put your asset in one folder only, but you can assign as many tags to it as you want. If you can't be bothered to assign tags to each of your model, you can still use Connecter basing on your folder structure, but i see very little benefits from Connecter in such case.
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2019-01-14, 16:30:06
Little trick how to make double sided displacement.
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: Ink Visual on 2019-01-14, 17:59:08
O wow, that's great Romullus. So what is the secret then cos I don't think I fully understand it.
Is it the water level? I'm sure I tried that before (as I remember it was working like that in Vray) and it didn't give me the desired effect.
Or the normal modifier on top is the key thing?
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: Fluss on 2019-01-14, 18:46:58
@cexec He uploaded the scene if you want to see how it is made ;), right under the example image. Thanks for sharing romullus, always usefull
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: Ink Visual on 2019-01-14, 18:55:46
Thanks Fluss, I did open it but I still don't fully understand how it works though, thus the question. Unless I know the concept right and it just wasn't working in Corona 2.0 but working now in version 3.
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2019-01-14, 19:17:23
Should you open layer explorer, you'd find that there's actually two planes with their normals pointing to opposite directions. That's the trick :]
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: Ink Visual on 2019-01-15, 10:25:55
Oh, here you go! I knew I'm missing something, thanks a lot Romullus!
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: maru on 2019-01-18, 13:47:21
We don't need the geopattern now. Sorted.
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: Fluss on 2019-01-18, 14:23:34
We don't need the geopattern now. Sorted.

Geopattern is definitely more convenient ,Ram efficient and the result are better. sorted
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: Jpjapers on 2019-01-18, 15:57:58
And can handle geometry rather than displacement which is still a mess in some cases IMHO
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2019-01-18, 16:33:56
I wonder if that geopattern is widely used in typical projects? I mean, sure, we saw some spectacular examples of its usage by enthusiasts, but appart from that, is it been used by average joes? I guess it's not as easy to use as displacement, which has huge amount of readily available high quality maps. For geopattern there's not much options - either use same of the few available patterns in each project, or make unique parts on your own, which might be laborious and time consuming. I'm not saying that displacement is enough for our needs and there's no need for new tools, but i wonder if geopattern might be one of those features which is asked actively, yet might end up like rarely used toy.
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: Fluss on 2019-01-18, 18:46:16
Mostly for cloth and any repeating geometry pattern. I see guys using it quite regularly on their facebook page. What's more, when you don't have the displacement map you need, it's quicker to use geometry rather than create a displacement map. And most likely, it's about details shot or High-res renders. Displacement stretches the mapped textures and looks ugly. To me, it's not a displacement alternative, both are great and used for different purpose.
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2019-01-18, 19:33:25
Agree, i don't see it as displacement substitute either.
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: Jpjapers on 2019-01-18, 20:23:51
From what ive seen it works amazingly for things like fabric, anything like building cladding on complex surfaces and potentially foliage.
Displacement has its uses but i think if geopattern was more widely used across production renderers then it would have many more options.
Plus it seems to be a bettr option for those without absolute top spec machines. I Also think things like carpet and fabrics look so much better with geopattern as opposed to displacement and hair/fur
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2019-05-18, 19:20:42
Chunk approves Corona fisheye

(https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=2466.0;attach=104648;image)

Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2019-05-20, 12:32:52
I have very lovely fisheye lens, but i tend to leave it home, because i know, once i'll mount it on my camera, it will stay there for the remainder of the day and all my photos will be "ruined". It looks like the same is happening with my renderings - for better or for worse, i just can't stop using fisheye camera :]

(https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=2466.0;attach=104777;image)
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: rozpustelnik on 2019-05-20, 13:54:55
Both images look great. The pool looks awesome.
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2019-05-20, 14:20:25
Thank you! All pools looks awesome with caustics :]
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: Fluss on 2019-05-20, 14:39:17
Those are really cool romullus! Man that pool looks insane with caustics indeed!
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: Tanakov on 2019-05-22, 10:55:16
I have very lovely fisheye lens, but i tend to leave it home, because i know, once i'll mount it on my camera, it will stay there for the remainder of the day and all my photos will be "ruined". It looks like the same is happening with my renderings - for better or for worse, i just can't stop using fisheye camera :]

(https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=2466.0;attach=104777;image)

Whats the recipe for that kind of facial hair?
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: pokoy on 2019-05-22, 11:00:42
Just love the fisheye stuff, I'd take it as the new Corona installer splash ;)
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2019-05-22, 11:02:35
Whats the recipe for that kind of facial hair?

Ha, i wish i knew. Lots of beer perhaps :]
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2019-07-10, 16:36:50
I hate to spot this guy with yellow trousers in every other arhviz rendering, so i quickly threw material, that would let easily customize his outfit. Feel free to use it in your renderings. Usage is very simple, you just need to desaturate outfit parts in diffuse texture and plug it into provided material.

Be aware, i'm not sharing original asset, but only material to it. If you don't have this model, then there's no point in downloading my file.

(https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=2466.0;attach=108612;image)
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: JoeVallard on 2019-07-10, 19:04:57
I hate to spot this guy with yellow trousers in every other arhviz rendering, so i quickly threw material, that would let easily customize his outfit. Feel free to use it in your renderings. Usage is very simple, you just need to desaturate outfit parts in diffuse texture and plug it into provided material.

Be aware, i'm not sharing original asset, but only material to it. If you don't have this model, then there's no point in downloading my file.

(https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=2466.0;attach=108612;image)
Lots of guys in purple trousers now lol! Next step blend corona MultiMap to make different skin tones. (:
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2019-07-10, 19:54:30
Yeah, it looks that Corona multicolor has a weakness for purple colour :]
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2019-08-25, 16:58:11
I always wanted to make interference ripples... and now i did :] Next step would be reflected ripples, but i guess that's not possible with 3ds Max tools.
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: maru on 2019-08-27, 18:07:06
Neat!
In old versions of Max there was some sort of "water plane", which simulated water surface. It would give you correct ripples. But no idea about the new versions. Maybe pflow or tyflow could help here?
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2019-08-27, 19:33:46
Hmm, the only thing i can think of, is the ripple and wave modifiers and procedural wave map, but none of them could do anything like that. Pflow probably could help, but it wouldn't be easy to set up and i don't have much experience with particles. For simple water surface improvement, Corona distance and Bercon gradient are pretty handy tools.
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: pokoy on 2019-08-27, 19:50:39
Hmmm Max fluids? I made some tests recently and while they're not super production friendly the simulation seems solid, at least in this case it would be pretty straightforward.
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2019-08-27, 21:11:49
Sadly, there's no fluids in max 2016 :[
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: maru on 2019-08-30, 19:40:46
Max 2009 :D


Maybe tyFlow could be used here? It's free.
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2019-08-30, 21:14:07
Ah good old reactor. I'm affraid it's long gone from the max. It's rather bizarre situation - i can't use reactor, because max 2016 don't have it anymore and i can't use fluids or tyflow, because they not available in max 2016 either. Is 3ds max 2016 the most obscure version? o_O
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: Jpjapers on 2019-08-31, 22:45:23
reactor was great. So much easier and more reliable than massfx.
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: Juraj on 2019-09-02, 12:35:09
Ah good old reactor. I'm affraid it's long gone from the max. It's rather bizarre situation - i can't use reactor, because max 2016 don't have it anymore and i can't use fluids or tyflow, because they not available in max 2016 either. Is 3ds max 2016 the most obscure version? o_O

No, I still use it as well :- ). Every single Deadclown's rant on 17/18/19/20 issues scares me away from upgrading.
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2019-11-05, 19:14:55
Random doodle with my favorite car model.

(https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=2466.0;attach=114951;image)
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: maru on 2019-11-06, 18:04:48
That's a photo!
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2019-11-06, 19:18:10
No, that's Corona! :]
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: Fluss on 2019-11-07, 08:49:48
I love your favorite car model!
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2020-02-07, 21:19:45
I love fisheye. If i would do archviz, half of my renderings would be with fisheye camera :]

(https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=2466.0;attach=119416;image)
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: Fluss on 2020-02-08, 13:47:54
Looks really cool! Aren't droplets a bit too high?

In what field are you working btw?
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2020-02-08, 14:31:55
Thank you! I think you're right about droplets. Their height was tuned for other shot, which was framed from bigger distance and taller droplets looked better in it. I probably should've readjust the height for this shot, but... oh well. Maybe next time :]
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: Fluss on 2020-02-10, 13:20:03
hehe, I feel you, I won't blame you for that. I'd probably do the same... I really like this car!
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2020-02-10, 13:46:03
Those vintage cars, some of them are so lovely :]

I got comments that the raindrops aren't very convincing and they looks more like icing rather than water droplets. I think it's mostly due to the lack of caustics. I tried to enable caustics (in the material, not the global solver) and indeed in some places raindrops started to look much better, but in the other places they looks just completely wrong, like stain of dirt :/
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: Fluss on 2020-02-10, 14:13:03
How did you create them?

I think the shape of the raindrop is really important, especially when using caustics.
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2020-02-10, 15:28:23
Hmm, interesting point. Raindrops on the non refractive objects are created by duplicating the mesh and assigning "water" material with displacement, so yeah, due to the very small size of the droplets, their shape probably is far from perfect. I'll try to scatter some mesh droplets and see if that works better.
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2020-02-10, 20:38:51
So i did some testing with raindrops made from mesh instead of displacement. Droplets was made bigger intentionally, to better see what's going on. Even without caustics it can be seen some improvement, probably that means that displacement couldn't provide enough subdivision. When caustics are turned on (again, only in material, not in caustics solver), raindrops starts to look much better at glancing angles, but i think there's too much shadowing on the droplets on front facing angles. And oh... look at the droplets on the chrome! What the...? Looks like ink, not a water :/
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2020-02-10, 21:06:17
I figured out how to fix the chrome issue. It looks like caustics don't work on layered materials. I've changed chrome to simple Corona material and caustics have worked.
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: Andrejee on 2020-02-11, 00:52:07
That's a photo!
I agree. :D Hail!
Title: Re: romullus's wips
Post by: Jpjapers on 2020-02-11, 16:10:53
Testing procedural galvanized steel material. I might eventualy replace procedural map with bitmap, if manage to find decent quality one.
Very early wip.

Its surprising how many times ive needed procedural galv steel and how many times ive never done a thing about it.
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2020-02-11, 16:16:42
I think Corona material library has some galvanized steel materials. Doesn't it?
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: Jpjapers on 2020-02-11, 16:35:14
I think Corona material library has some galvanized steel materials. Doesn't it?

Ive never seen one in there. There arent actually any steel materials in the library.
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2020-02-11, 16:46:27
I can upload my material if you want, but it's need to be revisited first - i haven't touched it in ages.
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: Jpjapers on 2020-02-11, 17:03:15
I can upload my material if you want, but it's need to be revisited first - i haven't touched it in ages.

No rush really. Ive changed studios recently and theres alot less exterior work now but it would have been useful!
I made a terrible one aaaaages ago when i was experimenting with procedural dirt and procedural bad welding.
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2020-02-11, 17:22:20
I think from the distance it would look much better. From up close my material doesn't look good either.
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2020-02-12, 19:56:06
Raindrops always looks better on black. Too bad that black doesn't look good on this car :/

(https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=2466.0;attach=119680;image)
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: Fluss on 2020-02-12, 22:10:06
Yeah that's cool! Can I ask you why didn't you use the new caustics solver?
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: Jpjapers on 2020-02-12, 23:00:27
Is this a layered material of some sort or is it scattered geometry?
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2020-02-13, 00:24:48
Yeah that's cool! Can I ask you why didn't you use the new caustics solver?

Unfortunately caustics solver makes almost no difference in this scene (except for time penalty). I guess for such large number of small droplets, you'd need to crank photons to insane level to have any hope of caustics. Not for my pc, nope.

Is this a layered material of some sort or is it scattered geometry?

This time it's scattered geometry. Now, when i think, i could use  density and/or scale maps in Corona scatter to have more interesting scattering. I'll leave this for next time :]
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: Jpjapers on 2020-02-13, 10:17:09
I wonder if you could use a blended box map and blend between droplets and streaks for faces on the z axis.
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2020-02-13, 10:47:27
You mean Corona triplanar ;] Yes, you can do that. It would be even better if Corona would allow to map all six faces, instead of three, but nevertheless, it is perfectly possible.
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2020-10-18, 15:47:47
I finally found some time and willingness to work on polygon pushing of my car. Made almost all interior and filled good chunk of the trunk space. Some work was done on the chassis and undercarriage too, but nothing worth showing yet. There's lots and lots of work to be done on this car yet.

(https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=2466.0;attach=135730;image)
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: cjwidd on 2020-10-19, 07:05:26
background is CG?
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2020-10-19, 19:25:55
Yes, background is 3D, but it's not important in this picture. The car is the only hero here.
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: cjwidd on 2020-10-20, 08:08:01
Hahah, yes of course, and it is brilliant! I'm just curious why you did a CG background instead of a backplate, or is that just your preference?

Also, I meant to ask, did you use the UVW Randomizer at all here?

Also, also, what's your approach to tonemapping? All the shots of the car I've seen on your render thread are really photographic.
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: petrorosengren on 2020-10-20, 14:22:12
Nice work look really convincing.
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2020-10-20, 14:59:25
I'm just curious why you did a CG background instead of a backplate, or is that just your preference?

No, my preference is to use backplates, or most often the same HDRI from the enviroment, mapped onto shadow catcher. Actually, this test started with my usual setup at the beggining, but gradually i started to add 3D elements, since i didn't liked how looks the ground. As i added more geometry outside the camera, i started to notice how lighting became much more interesting, as light bounced from many surfaces, instead of being evenly casted from the sky. This was quite eye opening experience from me and i think i will explore this technique more in the future. Nevertheless, for this scene i'm going to revert back to simple plane and shadow catcher, since my old PC is painfully slow with 3D background and displacement in most materials, which is far from ideal when you want to focus on refining the car materials.

@petrorosengren, thanks!
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2022-08-04, 20:46:06
I realized that i didn't post or render any personal work for almost two years. Let's fix this.

(https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=2466.0;attach=169737;image)

My thanks to the authors of free assets that were used in this work.

train by z-lengyel
railroad segment by gav
fir trees by 3DPaz
smoke/cloud by MP2018
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: TomG on 2022-08-04, 20:56:19
Nice! Fix it some more, with even more renders! :)
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2022-08-04, 21:32:11
Thanks Tom! No doubt there will be more, now when i have some juice under the hood.
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: TomG on 2022-08-05, 13:35:38
Now that is good news, hurrah for the extra juice :) Looking forward to the next project!
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2022-09-05, 15:56:07
One of my never quite finished car models rendered in some mundane environment.

(https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=2466.0;attach=170880;image)
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2022-09-22, 20:18:51
Proof of concept, showing that it's possible to scatter groups of objects in Chaos Scatter, it's just not very convenient... yet :]
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: Juraj on 2022-09-22, 23:15:38
elaborate please :- )
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2022-09-23, 09:34:45
So the idea is that you need separate scatter for each member of the group. They need to be identical to each other in any way, except for the list of instanced models, of course. Most important things to keep in mind is that all members of the group must share the same pivot point and transformation and they need to be added to their respective scatter in the same order. Also, keep in mind that scatter features that are dependent on instances' bounding box, like collision avoidance and area exclusion will not work, unless each member of the group shares exactly the same bounding box, which is doable with some simple hacking. Another important point is that each group has to have the same number of members, otherwise everything will brake apart (again, solvable with inclusion of dummy members). I didn't try yet how easy, or hard is to wire every parameter of multiple scatters (i guess simple instancing will not work, because of requirement to have different instanced objects in each scatter). In theory, you should be able to wire several empty scatters together, save them to a file and reuse them in any scene by simple operation of merging.
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: Juraj on 2022-09-23, 10:39:16
Well that's just little bit too much of work around :- )
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2022-09-23, 10:50:53
Haha, that sounds  a tad more complicated that it actually is. I tried to wire parameters of two scatters and it was pretty easy, albeit quite tedious exercise. There are some complications with it, which i hope to solve with the help from Corona team. I'll update this topic soon if i'll have more news on that.
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2022-10-25, 22:39:04
Some R&D on procedural edge damage.
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: Ink Visual on 2022-10-26, 12:20:08
That is really cool romullus. Need to get my hands on data channel too. Seems like a super useful tool that is not being used often enough!
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2022-10-26, 19:45:58
I would love to learn how to use data channel too. This is actually my very first try at it, simply because i couldn't find how to do the effect with using only Corona tools.
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: Jpjapers on 2022-10-27, 11:20:42
I would love to learn how to use data channel too. This is actually my very first try at it, simply because i couldn't find how to do the effect with using only Corona tools.

Ive done similar stuff with the datachannel for complex glazed ceramics to get that effect where the glaze settles in concave areas but now the curvature map is a thing i dont need it really.

Could you have done it with the distance map?
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2022-10-27, 13:14:22
I didn't try distance map TBH. Curious to learn if it can be used to drive displacement. Thanks for the tip!
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: Jpjapers on 2022-10-30, 14:54:42
I didn't try distance map TBH. Curious to learn if it can be used to drive displacement. Thanks for the tip!

I have a vague memory of using it to create ripples around rocks sticking out of water. So i think it can be done!
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2022-10-30, 15:43:16
Ah yeah, i tried it already and it works! It's just the distance map is not very useful in this particular case... But overall, as a displacement driver, it's perfectly viable solution.
Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2023-02-09, 15:17:27
Updated my old ants video with better models, higher resolution and nicer tone-mapping. It's funny that despite 6 years of Corona's advancement and much more powerful pc, the new video took roughly the same amount of time per frame to render.

Title: Re: romullus wips
Post by: romullus on 2023-03-17, 22:22:18
Quick doodle with sand.

(https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=2466.0;attach=180564;image)

The castle model is by assetfactory, downloaded from Sketchfab. https://skfb.ly/ow7Q6