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 ... 392 393 [394] 395
5896
Might be useful for testing, you can take a look at what adaptivity does using the CInfo_SamplingFocus render element, brighter areas show where more processing is being done. Have to have enough passes for it to show up (e.g. for default of Adaptivity recalc of 5, would need to run for at least 5 passes to see anything in that render element).

5897
[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Texture baking prototype
« on: 2016-05-13, 17:56:31 »
Yep, looks like both issues - the padding, and the default file path - seem to be working fine from some quick tests in RC6. Excellent!

5898
Hardware / Re: Upgrade or buy new pc?
« on: 2016-05-13, 15:43:49 »
That's the route I went - that said, I did do a fair bit of animation so the mini-farm was good for that, but with Distributed Rendering it should be good for stills too (or you can just use Backburner to pass off a still to a machine and leave it working away, too). No additional licenses required with a small farm like that, either.

I'm based in the US, I had a look on NewEgg at first, but ended up contacting a couple of companies direct (price was a bit better) - quite a few out there, The Server Store (https://www.theserverstore.com/) was who I ended up going with but lots to choose from, such as Server Monkey (http://www.servermonkey.com/) etc, a search for "refurbished xeon server" or similar should turn up a wide collection!

5899
Hardware / Re: Upgrade or buy new pc?
« on: 2016-05-13, 15:02:11 »
I took a different approach when I decided my 3930K could use upgrading last year - I bought a couple of used dual Xeon boxes. The 3930K (OC'ed to 4.2 from the stock 3.2) gets 3m 28s on the Corona 1.3 benchmark, the twin Xeon E5-2660 gets 1m 53s (was around $1,000 for that machine), the twin Xeon X5650 gets 2m 29s (was around $500 for that machine, making it more cost effective). None of them have monitors, all controlled through remote desktop, and did go for smaller HD and memory configurations for those. Having separate machines came with benefits too that one machine alone wouldn't. Prices were as of last year, haven't looked recently.

Just throwing that into the mix in case it is a useful alternative thought!

5900
[Max] General Discussion / Re: Corona 1.4 major new features
« on: 2016-05-05, 22:27:24 »
Adaptivity balances the calculations across the image, to focus more processing on tricky areas, normally places like shadows, to reduce those times that you find yourself with a clean image in the "easy" areas but still needing more render passes as you wait for one problem area to clean up. The option is tucked away as normally no reason to turn that off - but you can give it a go for testing (the new A/B comparison in the VFB history, plus render regions, is a great way to quickly compare differences in different settings).

5901
[Max] General Discussion / Re: Corona 1.4 major new features
« on: 2016-05-05, 21:13:55 »
Hi Franck!

It is enabled by default. If you do want to find the settings for it, it can be found by checking the "Enable devel/debug mode" in the Performance tab, and it's listed under "Adaptivity and denoising" toward the bottom of the options that are exposed.

Hope this helps!
   Tom

5902
General CG Discussion / CG Architect contest
« on: 2016-05-05, 15:40:40 »
On a more traditional note compared to the ILM contest, anyone entering the cgarchitect contest? (note, we are not affiliated in any way with this contest, I am just sharing for those who may be interested). Again, always interested to hear how any Coronauts do in contests!

http://3dawards.cgarchitect.com/

Thanks!
   Tom

5903
General CG Discussion / Anyone want their work seen by ILM?
« on: 2016-05-05, 15:37:23 »
Artstation has a new Concept Art based contest starting soon (note, we are not affiliated in any way with this contest, I am just sharing for those who may be interested). Looks like it will be a challenging one! I do love to see Corona entries into contests, so if anyone does take part, let me know!

https://www.artstation.com/contests/ilm/challenges/8

5904
[C4D] General Discussion / Re: Corona-Materials.de is online
« on: 2016-05-03, 22:39:26 »
Nice work!

5905
Anyone entering the Project Soane contest?

Grab yourself a model of Sir John Soane’s Bank of England, and create your interpretation and render to enter this contest (note, we are not affiliated in any way with the contest, just a share so people know it is there!)

You have to use Autodesk software but any renderer is allowed (http://www.projectsoane.com/rules)

I see some Corona entries in there already :) When browsing the gallery, select the filter drop down and choose Corona, as for some reason when looking at the image the Render Engine is simply listed as "NVIDIA GeForce" or similar.

http://www.projectsoane.com/#home

5906
[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Texture baking prototype
« on: 2016-04-29, 18:41:01 »
Installed Apr 29 build, and ran Max 2016.

Now, in Max 2016 I have changed the default folder (apparently, I forget!), as the default path in the RTT is now pointing at a folder on my F: drive, so a completely unrelated location.

Interestingly, leaving this as the default and rendering from RTT fails to create the file. If I manually change it to another path, it works and creates the file - even if I change it to the sceneassets/images location that wasn't working before.

So it seems specifically to do with the default path only, and seems to occur in 2016 in the same way as 2017?

Hope this helps!
   Tom

5907
[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Texture baking prototype
« on: 2016-04-29, 18:11:25 »
I found that if i explicitly specify path, then Corona saves file, but if i leave default path, then it doesn't. Anyone else can confirm this?

Haven't tested in 2016 yet to compare to 2017, and not yet updated to the newest daily build before testing - but yes I see the same thing. If I even just move up one level to the sceneassets folder rather than sceneassets/images folder then it works, so it doesn't need an entirely different folder.

As a note, I did that and it worked, and keeping the scene in that state, I repainted with the base material, changed the path back to the /images folder in the RTT dialog (thinking that perhaps if it had been manually set one time, it would start working) - but it still didn't work. So could be specific to that path, whether set as a default or chosen manually.

Hope this helps!
   Tom


5908
[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Texture baking prototype
« on: 2016-04-28, 22:11:49 »
Some more info -

I followed the same process, but this time I set the path to be on my E:\ drive, left the same default filename. This time, the file *was* created.

So first thought is maybe some sort of Windows permissions thing?

But one extra puzzle.

- Reload the scene to the default state before baking with no restart of Max
- Open the RTT dialog, add the Corona beauty but leave path set to the default
- Render from RTT
- Inspect the resulting material: the bitmap node in the baked material shows the expected path in the Bitmap field (the C:\....sceneassets\images\), and this is the path that opens if I click on the field to browse for an image (and the image is indeed not there)
- But the Bitmap node is in fact loading the image from the E:\ drive, and will render and show that image, even though it is not what is in the Bitmap's path field.

Image attached, you can see from the Bitmap preview that it is showing the image, and that the path is pointing to the C:\ drive location (where there is no such file). Clicking Reload doesn't change anything, the image from the E:\ drive location continues to be displayed. If I delete the image at the E:\location, it does vanish from the Bitmap node.

Don't know if that is just a Max thing when a bitmap is not found, or some extra piece of this puzzle.

Thanks!
   Tom

5909
[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Texture baking prototype
« on: 2016-04-26, 23:50:30 »
TY! Sometimes it helps to be new at something, then you make all these strange choices and so test new things :)

5910
[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Texture baking prototype
« on: 2016-04-26, 22:26:07 »
Sure! I've kept it barebones, with everything as default as possible

- Create sphere
- Apply Standard shader with checker pattern in diffuse (Standard so I can use the same shader in Corona and MR)
- Open RTT
- Add Corona Beauty to the output elements
- I leave this at default path and name Sphere001Corona_Beauty.tga being written to the Documents\3dsMax\sceneassets\images folder
- Render from the RTT dialogue (leaving to do the autounwrap since just a simple object and test! Sometimes lazy is good!)
- Screengrab attached of the resulting baked material, with the bitmap open - path etc is correct in that, but the preview is black
- The file does not exist at that location when I open it up

- For checking the save to an existing file, I change the "leave the default filename" for the RTT step to point to an existing file
- I change the checker colour just to be sure I know if something has changed
- Render from RTT, the file correctly appears in the baked texture and is loaded, but has not changed - second screengrab attached showing the yellow checkers that are the source material, and you can see the baked bitmap still has the old colours in it, the file was not overwritten

Performing the same steps with MR does create a file if none existed, and does overwrite the file with the render if one did exist.

Let me know if any more info would be of help!

EDIT - PS ignore the checker going into the diffuse on the baked texture :) I would normally delete that, set diffuse to 0, turn on Self Illumination, to check how that compares to the originally lit object, in this case, but didn't do that here since just testing.

Pages: 1 ... 392 393 [394] 395