Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.


Messages - TomG

Pages: 1 2 [3] 4 5 ... 395
31
A curious kind of question. It's not one of those things that can be "attempted" - you either do it, or don't, and it would be in its entirety not done a bit at a time. The cause of it in a sense is known, we know why it happens in the general principles of the algorithms Corona is built upon, so we know what it would take to fix it (in broad terms) and we know how complex and long that would be.

So this question is rather like knowing that something arises due to the foundation of a building, and so knowing that to fix it would involve closing the building and tearing a lot of the building down and then having to build it differently, and then asking "Has any attempt been made to fix it?". No - because we'd have to close the building, tear a lot of it down, and rebuild it differently. This is not just a problem in an isolated part of the code, where you can try a rewrite or workaround or two, but is down on the foundations that everything else is then built upon.

32
Still no change, sorry. It would require some fundamental reworking of some things in Corona, which of course you already have heard, and with the potential for that to break so many other things, it hasn't found a place in the scheduling so far.

33
[Max] General Discussion / Re: Interactive Render Problems
« on: 2025-01-15, 15:58:47 »
For crashes, please always attach a minidump, as detailed in https://support.chaos.com/hc/en-us/articles/4649117083409-How-to-report-issues-3ds-Max . Sometimes an example scene where it happens can be helpful. You can send those via ticket if you have any concerns about posting them on the public forum (https://support.chaos.com/requests/new ). You might be able to catch it during the freeze to force a dump as described in the page, if Max is otherwise just closing with no error message or minidump. Thanks!

34
[C4D] Daily Builds / Re: 100% cpu in IPR usage in daily?
« on: 2025-01-15, 15:56:35 »
Oh, not a stupid question, as it may still happen with the official release - but is worth running it juuuuuust to be sure :) Eliminates some small possibilities on the cause if we know for sure. Anyway, no question is ever a stupid question (except the unasked one, as then it never gets answered!). Keep on with the feedback and questions, please!

35
[Max] I need help! / Re: Corona Render Nodes with Backburner
« on: 2025-01-15, 15:52:22 »
After working with the team via ticket, should extra licenses be needed, remember that there are the Render Node licenses which are less expensive than full licenses. They allow a machine to render only (that is, no-one can "sit and use Corona in 3ds Max / C4D" using those licenses). https://www.chaos.com/corona#pricing look for the "Add more render power" link there in case you don't spot it ;)

36
[Max] General Discussion / Re: Embrace GPU rendering
« on: 2025-01-14, 20:51:10 »
TY for the feedback, and you are correct in why CPUs are better at this stuff when it comes to realism and accuracy. GPUs excel at "performing the same calculation loads of times, once per pixel" as it can then divide that up among all the cores on the GPU, and those cores don't need to talk to each other very much - the thing is, as light bounces around a scene, the calculations have to branch, meaning lots of different calculations have to be done, not just "the same thing loads of times". In the end, CPUs are architecturally built (physically) to handle just that sort of situation where each core may be doing something very different from the others and may need to exchange data and synch efficiently on doing that so there is little wasted idle time as logic branches, while GPUs are built (physically) in a way that is not so good at that.

So CPU rendering will be around for a long time to come, and we aim to keep Corona right up there as a top choice for realism in archviz on CPU :)

37
If I remember right, CoronaDistance uses ray tracing to find the nearest point on the surface of an object it is taking the distance from - so you are asking Corona to raytrace to determine how far a given surface point on the landscape is from every surface point of every tree, or something like that in terms of calculations. That is a lot of calculations :)

Not sure what difference it would make, but you might want to have one distance map per tree, that way it's only calculating distance to that tree and not all trees (you could then add these together and pass the result to scatter to place the small plants). Another option, perhaps along with the first, would be to split the landscape into separate parts, so that each part is only calculating distance to a particular tree/particular trees.

EDIT - the above would really require the trees baked to geometry. Though you could use the second approach and divide up the landscape and each part has its own Scatter, that might reduce the load on the Distance map too as it won't have to consider tracing to every point of every tree in the scene for every point on the landscape.


38
General CG Discussion / Re: Corona render as a beginner
« on: 2025-01-14, 14:51:07 »
The good news is that GPU RAM doesn't matter, as Corona is a CPU engine :) The question then becomes what CPU and system RAM you have - more threads is better, more RAM is better, with 16GB being a very bare minimum, 32Gb being a workable minimum, 64Gb probably still the sweetspot, but 128Gb doesn't hurt if you can afford it.

39
[C4D] Daily Builds / Re: 100% cpu in IPR usage in daily?
« on: 2025-01-14, 14:49:19 »
Why are you using an RC of Update 1, since it is out officially? Definitely be sure to be using the final official release :) You could also try the latest daily at https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?topic=43211.msg230037#msg230037 - let us know if either of those builds still give you issues, as changing the thread numbers should make a significant difference (make it so Corona only gets 1 thread, ensure that things are a lot slower, then we know the number changes are working :) ).

40
[Max] General Discussion / Re: Embrace GPU rendering
« on: 2025-01-14, 14:44:21 »
Sorry, this will never change - as mentioned previously, it would take about 2 years work and involve almost all the devs in order to get it done, as it's a fundamental change to the codebase (the way GPUs render is just totally different from how CPUs render). This would mean the core source of our business would see no improvements, features, and only limited bug fixes for that development time (CPU Corona), and this is not acceptable to us. And then GPU rendering, no matter how fast your GPU, always has certain limitations and compromises, which is exactly what people want to avoid when they choose Corona; they really do want the best in realism without shortcuts. I think there is a mistaken belief that "GPU Corona" would be "Corona but just on GPU" but this is not the case - it's the same as how V-Ray GPU does not look identical to V-Ray CPU, and is just inevitably different in some ways. So people wouldn't get what they actually want, as such a thing is not possible.

Of course, if you want GPU rendering, then you have Vantage, already one of the best ray tracers for GPU out there, and that doesn't require Corona development in other areas to come to a halt. So there is the best of both worlds there!

You will notice that the NVIDIA figures for "how amazingly fast these new GPUs are!" is based on DLSS4, which AI imagines 3 out of every 4 frames. In other words, not real frames at all. Take that out of the equation and the speed / power boost is looking more like 10 to 20%, which is fine, but is no quantum leap over previous generations. I look forward to seeing more third party reviews of performance, rather than NVIDIAs selected figures :)

41
For any and all lag issues (UI, IR, etc) please try the newly released daily build at https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?topic=43295.msg230430#msg230430 - this aims to address those issues, and we need the testing so we can confirm and get it out as an official hotfix as soon as we can :) Thanks!

42
[C4D] General Discussion / Re: Open PBR support?
« on: 2025-01-13, 12:42:58 »
Both engines have different target users, and so we evaluate the priorities separately. Not only that, but having something developed for one engine helps in different amounts when it comes to developing the same feature for another engine - in some cases, some code can be shared, in some cases (most, really) only general pointers can be shared and most of the work still needs to be entirely redone as if from scratch, because the engines have very different codebases. Hope this helps explain the question on "sharing forces" :)

43
[C4D] Daily Builds / Re: 100% cpu in IPR usage in daily?
« on: 2025-01-13, 12:40:00 »
Yep, that looks right. Do you experience lag or slowdown as mentioned earlier? (If not, then the reporting system saying the CPU is 100% in use is not a problem - only if it's having an impact on responsiveness is it an issue). What OS are you using, and which version of Corona? Do you still see 100% usage (and lag) with threads set to something like -4? And what if you use the positive number as mentioned in an earlier post (so if you have 32 threads, setting "31" in there)? Thanks in advance for the extra info!

44
[C4D] I need help! / Re: More fireflies in video render
« on: 2025-01-13, 12:35:45 »
Great news! And you are welcome, that's what the community is here for :)

45
Thank you for the additional info and minidumps!

Pages: 1 2 [3] 4 5 ... 395