Topics

46

Off-Topic / Hall of shame: nVidia

« on: 2014-07-23, 08:54:20 »

Hi,

recently i participated in the discussion about new nVidia GPU based GI solution, and while most of the mental ray fanboys including staff claimed the solution is brute force, it turned out it does some interpolation and i caught it red handed. Once i did, and presented several page of verifiable data, it resulted in me being banned and all my posts being edited by admin to imply something different, and data proving GPU GI indeed does interpolation were deleted.

http://forum.nvidia-arc.com/showthread.php?12992-Maya-2015-and-mental-ray-GI-GPU-prototype

Here is the link to the thread, so have fun (even when most of the relevant data is already deleted), and remember to stay away from the nVidia and their dirty lies.

BTW: It was clear that CPU only Corona easily beats new GPU GI rendering on both CPU and GPU :D

47

Gallery / Mercedes Benz S63 Coupe

« on: 2014-07-03, 00:38:29 »

Hi,

since Alpha 7 comes with new ShadowCatcher, i decided to make a few nice pictures to promote it.

So i bought a nice Mercedes model from Turbosquid user Squir ( http://www.turbosquid.com/Search/Artists/squir ) and nice HDRI with set of backplates from http://hdrmaps.com/ .

Then i threw together a few basic materials, and decided to take shadowcather for a spin. Here are my results:

48

[Max] Tutorials & Guides / ShadowCatcher VideoTutorial

« on: 2014-06-01, 20:37:59 »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ykDboG8u60

Here's part 1, other parts will follow shortly...

I apologize for the audio quality and clumsiness at the end. I will need new microphone and some tutorial-making practice :)

I haven't embeded it so that you can go watch it on YouTube in fullscreen :)

49

News / 3ds Max 2014 SP4 released

« on: 2014-02-26, 16:19:24 »

Hi,

i would like to let you know that Autodesk released SP4 for Max 2014. I recommended you all to install SP3 to get rid of bug that caused extremely slow texture reading and therefore starting of rendering. But Autodesk managed to break real time rotation of environment map in viewport. In SP4, this should be resolved, so you can finally have version where textures load properly and you can rotate enviro in realtime. :)

Go get it here: http://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/3ds-max/downloads/caas/downloads/content/autodesk-3ds-max-2014-service-pack-4.html

50

[Max] General Discussion / 3ds Max 2014 SP3

« on: 2013-09-27, 12:36:41 »

Hi,

service pack 3 for Max 2014 has been released. Along with other bugs, it fixed the extremely slow texture loading bug that was introduced in Max 2014, and causes either material editor loading to take ages, or rendering to start up very slowly in Max 2014.

So i recommend installing this latest SP to every 3ds Max 2014 user here:

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/item?siteID=123112&id=22328132&linkID=9241178

Also big thanks goes to Kelly Michels from Autodesk who made sure this issue got resolved.

51

[Max] General Discussion / Bucket rendering testing needed

« on: 2013-08-21, 10:28:20 »

Hi,

for those of you who have access to daily builds, functionality of bucket rendering has been partially fixed, and it is now very easy to use.

Basically:

Subdiv AA sets the base AA quality.

Adaptive threshold sets how significant difference in the pixel value needs to be for adaptive refinement to occur.

Adaptive steps set the amount of adaptive steps each of which will refine the bucket further.

So if you set subdiv AA to 4, adaptive steps to 4 and adaptive threshold to 0.02, then:

- initial adaptive step will be rendered constantly using 4 subdivs per pixel
- next adaptive step will sample any pixels with difference larger than 0.02 with additional 4 subdivs set in subdiv AA
- and two more adaptive steps will proceed looking for any pixels with difference larger than 0.02, and keep refining them using 4 more AA subdivs

This should be pretty easy to control. Bucket rendering is no more affected by any of the progressive rendering limits, and will stop once all of the adaptive steps finish.

Now i would like to ask you to test bucket rendering, and see if it performs better in some of the scenes. As bucket rendering has some basic adaptivity implemented, it could be beneficial for example in scenes with strong DoF :)

Thanks in advance :)

52

General CG Discussion / Vote for return of Tom Hudson as 3ds Max developer

« on: 2013-08-09, 16:05:39 »

For all of you who at least little bit like 3ds Max, please help to get 3ds Max back into active development by voting for Tom Hudson. Development of 3ds Max in past years has been quite disappointing, and if you want to finally see those historic persistent bugs fixed and some truly innovative feautes added, then the very least you can do is to give your vote.

If you do not have an Autodesk account, it just takes you a minute to create one.

If you do, then please vote to help both yourselves and other users, as well as the future of 3ds Max.

If you do have an AD account, but do not have any votes left, then consider removing votes from some of the other ideas that have less chance of success.

Thank you very much in advance.

You can vote here: http://3dsmaxfeedback.autodesk.com/forums/80695-general-feature-requests/suggestions/4249552-tom-hudson-for-3dsmax-development-leadership

For more information about this, please take a look here: http://www.maxunderground.com/archives/19385_autodesk_siggraph_event_news___including_future_of_naiad.html

53

News / Good neeeews everyone!

« on: 2013-07-28, 11:25:29 »

Lolmaster is back from vacation :)

54

[Max] General Discussion / Grate workz!!! Congratz!!!!

« on: 2013-07-05, 12:33:18 »

Hi,

recently, with release of Alpha 5, our forum activity raised a lot and with it also amount of posts, especially in gallery. While i definitely see that as a positive thing, I would prefer if a value of posts on this forum came out of their quality, not quantity. I understand many of you often post comments or congratulations in gallery just to encourage authors to use corona further and to show us as a warm and welcoming community, but i am really starting to be afraid we will become another Evermotion forum.

I would like to ask you all to help improve standards of this forum by putting a little more time into your post, and also not to post just for sake of keeping forum activity up. It would be great, if every post carried something constructive, as it would really add to the value of this forum and make majority of information stored here relevant.

Almost none of the 3D pictures are 100% perfect, and it helps a lot more if you point out what is the weakest aspect of the image or what you personally dislike, so the authors can work on it next time and improve themselves. Or if you just really like the image, then you can describe what is so catching about the image, so author can build on top of that to push it even further.

This is by no means order or a new forum rule, it is just my personal request to you all, and as we are an adult and intelligent community, i am sure most of you will understand what i mean. I would just like to avoid this forum being flooded by the kind of comments i used to name this thread ;)

There are also other sections like general discussion and offtopic, where you can create new discussion about pretty much anything and you are encouraged to do so. If you want to keep forum activity up, that is the way to do it. Some interesting discussions about CG industry, software, hardware, or just funny cat videos or bike riding may come out of this. And even those will still have a lot more value than simple non-constructive congratulations and praising.

Thanks in advance ;)

PS: It would be a good idea to spread this thread around the forum by for example linking it in a reply whenever you feel like the discussion is going down to the Evermotion forum level :)

55

Gallery / Lobkowicz Beer TV ad

« on: 2013-06-18, 20:29:31 »

Hi,

this is a short TV ad that we did at ProgressiveFX studio for a czech beer brand.

I took care of shading, lighting and rendering while my friend Martin Frodl did all the modeling.

Rendertime was about 30 minutes/frame on i7 2600k which our renderfarm is mostly built of. 30 minutes was enough to get very clean image with rendered 3D motion blur.

The bike cockpit does not look very good, but we had very short time budget to finish the project and client had no comments regarding the bike appearance.

It is also worth mentioning that the beer at the end of video is a photo. Rendered sequence ends where it starts to blend with black background ;)

 

Unfortunatelly i do not have access to PFX vimeo account and video embedding is disabled, so for the time being it will be just as a link until i get someone to change embedding permissions ;)

56

News / Minor Forum look changes

« on: 2013-06-09, 17:45:26 »

Hi,

we have done some small tweaks to forum look. It might not update automatically for everyone, so it is suggested you do a hard refresh a few times for web elements re-load properly.

Just hold down Ctrl and hit F5 key a few times ;)

57

Gallery / On the way home...

« on: 2013-05-12, 10:04:16 »

Since Corona now supports a multiscatter, there is no excuse for not making something nice :) Took about at hour to get clean at 1920x1080... :)

58

[Max] General Discussion / 3dcenter.ru Corona thread

« on: 2013-02-21, 12:06:50 »

Hello,

when analyzing where visitors of our forum mostly come from, we have noticed that many of them come from a Russian site 3dcenter.ru. Thanks to this information, we have found a thread about Corona on the site. Unfortunately nor me nor Ondra know Russian language so we have read the thread using Google translator, which gave us only very crude and foggy translation.

From that crude translation, i understood that some of the Corona problems have been discussed, and i or Ondra may be able to provide answer for some of those problems. So, here are the answers for some of the problems i understood were discussed.

• You should always use single sided planes in windows for window glass, and apply glass material set to twosided mode. Real glass will slow down rendering a bit, even if you disable shadow casting for it.
• You should use HD cache as secondary GI for most of the interior scenes.
• For curtain material to pass sunlight through, you should not use opacity, but refraction level parameter, with refraction mode set to twosided, and optionally, refraction color to be mapped with opacity map. This is at the moment more efficient solution than mapping opacity. You don't necessarily need to map refraction level if you do not want to, for basic effect of light shining through the curtain, just set refraction mode of curtain material to twosided, and raise refraction level to pass more light through the curtain. Mapping the refraction color will occlude sun based on the map you put in.
  This information might not be true for people with nightly builds, as opacity slowness should be fixed there. Some tests of mapped refraction with twosided mode vs opacity would be appreciated. :)
• For scenes with strong depth of field, it is recommended to lower PT samples value to 2-8 to change ratio of GI vs AA sampling. Less PT samples mean more samples are devoted to AA, which is also responsible for clearing DoF effect. So you will get more samples in your AA and less in GI, which may lead to better balance and better rendertimes.
• There is often a noise in surfaces with sharp, but very weak/faint reflection. That is caused due to the insufficient adaptivity and therefore objects in reflection having insufficient sampling priority. This is a known issue and will be fixed in next alpha release. For those of you who have nightly builds, you can go to Devel/Debug settings and try to use Per-pixel M+C sampler, which should solve this problem at the slight expense of performance.

So i would like to ask people who are both Corona and 3dcenter.ru members to pass these information to guys from 3dcenter.ru, and inform them that they are always welcome on our forum too. :)

59

Work in Progress/Tests / Harkonnen Harvester ReImagined

« on: 2013-02-07, 23:07:13 »

Hi,

a while ago i promised some videotutorials. This is the reason i have not done any of them yet. I am still working on my personal project of re-imagined Harkonnen harvester.

There are still some materials missing, especially on the smaller parts, and there will be also full CG desert environment around the whole thing, so it's going to take a bit more work. But once this is done, i will get back to making some tutorials :)

60

News / Displacement testing needed

« on: 2013-02-07, 15:48:55 »

Hi...

for those of you who have access to nightly builds, I would like to ask you to test displacement in 2013-02-04 build, as it should be vastly improved. If you find that there is not enough detail in foreground, do not be worried to increase Max subdiv per poly value to something very high.

Just do not try to combine very high max subdiv value with very low projected size and dense mesh, if you do not want to end up with a crash due to the running out of memory ;)