Messages

31

[Max] Corona Goodies - User Contributions / Re: Corona Randomizer

« on: 2023-11-20, 22:01:16 »

I was thinking maybe I should create the checkboxes and a button for a preset save/load. This way you can load your favourite setups and then just re-use them.

That would be awesome.

+1

No, not really, 3ds Max 2024 allows to save user defaults for most controls, so that's not an issue anymore. I think it will be better if you keep the script simple.

Can you please explain in more detail, I can’t fully understand

32

[Max] Corona Goodies - User Contributions / Re: Corona Randomizer

« on: 2023-11-20, 03:09:25 »

Ok updated to include both Mapping Randomizer and Triplanar. Let me know if you encounter bugs/issues.

This is absolutely amazing and will save me a ton of time.
Thank you very much for your time and for making the script freely available.

Will it be okay if I make a post about it in my Telegram channel indicating your authorship and attach the script itself so that more people can use it?

PS the only thing I would love to have  a checkbox, when clicked it would create a  map with parameters:
U | X   -1   1
V | Y   -1   1
W | Z   0   360
randomize each tile - on

and if the checkbox was not pressed, a regular map with default parameters would be created, as it is now.

33

[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Chaos Corona 11 for 3ds Max - Daily Builds Discussion

« on: 2023-11-14, 17:37:20 »

Hi Dev Team. Thanks for the new cool features like addition tools, I love them in added new tollbar but could you please remove them from quad menu.
If I remove it on quad, it always appears again and again
Thanks

+1

BTW, speaking of Corona power tools, they are quite nice to have, but i would like to see some tools that are actually related to Corona, like tool that would insert mapping randomizer or triplanar nodes to selected material. Lately i'm adding mapping randomizer to most of my materials and it start to feel quite tedious task after some time, especially since introduction of multiple inputs.

Here! This is exactly what I've been talking about recently. all these tools are super useful but when you are doing a large project and all 40-50 materials must have Corona triplanar and CoronaMappingRandomizer for each channel it becomes very cumbersome and inconvenient. I would really like these uv-related features to be either built into the corona bitmap with the possibility of batch editing, or there would simply be a separate script/tool where you can add all this to the existing, already configured material for each channel through multiple outputs.

34

[Max] Feature Requests / Re: The most wanted feature?

« on: 2023-11-06, 06:47:56 »

I remember that someone seem to have already asked in this thread, but I can’t find if the request was logged

https://quixel.com/blog/2020/1/22/blending-megascans-assets-in-ue4?utm_campaign=Tutorials&utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=social&utm_content=Goddess%20Temple%20in%20UE4:%20Lighting%20%26%20Blending

It would be very nice to get a blend-shader, I’m now doing more and more exteriors and fitting individual assets into the environment can be very time-consuming.



Now, we can do this by using CoronaDistance, but if you want to do so - you need to create a Layered mtl each time for each object, that you want to organically fit into the environment. If a more complex material is applied to the ground, which already contains Layered mtls, the shader tree turns into a mess. Plus we can't get proper normal blending, CoronaRoundEdges Map doesn't work well in this case.

It would be convenient if, right in the “advanced options” section, each material had a checkbox that would enable mixing with environmental materials, without the need to change the material tree and add objects manually to CoronaDistance.

- this section could have a numeric distance/radius parameter;
- a map slot similar to the "Distance scale" slot in the Corona Distance map (there we could insert a height map from an object that we embed in the environment or some noise map);
- a checkbox for mixing normals, which will either use a separate radius or take it from the main distance parameter.
- texture coordinates can be projected directly from the parent (ground) object.

P.S. This will undoubtedly complicate the structure of CoronaPhysicalMtl, especially for the newcomers.
And in general I am not a supporter of the approach of a universal all-in-one shader for all use cases. So I would prefer to have an additional map (or a reworked corona distance map with the second "mode") that would contain all these parameters and would connect to a special map slot in corona physical mtl, if necessary.

35

Gallery / Re: Hyrule Lost Woods - Full 4k CGI Fan made

« on: 2023-10-28, 02:37:26 »

All that remains is to wait until the marketing department of Chaos Czech establishes a special award with a substantial payment in euros:
“For popularizing an engine in the field of animation. Gone through suffering.”

Truly great work! Watched it several times, everything is very smooth, I was especially surprised by the almost clean bright bokeh without flickering.
Even the fact that you managed to grow so much plants with GrowFX and didn’t quit halfway through is already worthy of respect :D

The only thing that caught my eye is that it is possible to improve the particle simulation of raindrops at the very beginning, splashes are too slow and do not leave marks on the shot with stair steps and, in my opinion, and are too active and "contain too much water" on the closeup shot with the single plant

Extraordinary work, I wish you success, may this project still get at least a million views!

36

[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Chaos Corona 11 for 3ds Max - Daily Builds Discussion

« on: 2023-09-25, 12:36:33 »

For me the roughness modulation mode doesn't work with a regular 3ds Max Noise map, the None mode works as expected, but the modulation only works with regular bitmaps, is this how it's supposed to work? (see the attachment)

Yes, this is expected. Corona does not have any control over 3ds Max maps, only over textures loaded through CoronaBitmap.

in this case, I don’t understand why the filtering disable mode worked with noise if Corona has no control over it :D

PS I remember that in the original video about bump to roughess technology its effect on anisotropy was mentioned, tell me, is this not relevant in our implementation?

37

[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Chaos Corona 11 for 3ds Max - Daily Builds Discussion

« on: 2023-09-23, 15:36:04 »

For me the roughness modulation mode doesn't work with a regular 3ds Max Noise map, the None mode works as expected, but the modulation only works with regular bitmaps, is this how it's supposed to work? (see the attachment)

38

[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Cryptomatte playground!

« on: 2023-09-20, 03:52:34 »

- The way Cryptomatte is saved is currently not ideal. Maybe we could make it save as a regular render element? Optimize the process some other way?*

Yes, in my case, I usually render more complex sequences (where post-processing using cryptomatte may be needed) on render farms, and even the banal transfer of 1000 .cxr files via the Internet to my computer can be painful.

 It would be cool if we could save a separate, not so heavy rendering element of the cryptomatte and then, say, in Fusion, do a channel merge and use it as usual.

39

[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Cryptomatte playground!

« on: 2023-09-19, 08:51:53 »

Is there any way to reduce the number of information that is stored in CXR, and limit it to only elements crucial for Cryptomatte to work?
The main cxr file output often results in extremely large file size. This makes it unusubale for VFX, (I mean try to manage hundreads of frames of 10GB size each).

For most projects we only save the main pass as .CXR, and all the other render elements are saved as JPEGs (with help of Pulze SM).
Cryptomatte element can also be saved as .CXR (keeping everything else as JPEGs), but as I understand, by curent design, this doesn't matter, becaouse in order to use Cryptomatte we still have to use main .cxr pass anyways. Can that be changed, so that if cryptomatte element is set with .CXR extension, it contains all the data (and only that data) that is needed for it to work?

I'm just not sure what contributes to .CXR file size, maybe there's some other way to reduce it for cryptomatte use?

+1
 I was glad to see cryptomatte support, but due to the need to store huge CXRs for sequences, I just stopped using it

40

[Max] I need help! / Re: Max ray depth more than 100

« on: 2023-09-13, 19:04:00 »

Can you try using V-Ray Mtl for your mirrors?

great idea, but somehow it didn't work for me. I get identical results with both shaders, it all depends on the max ray depth setting in the performance tab, even if I use the V-ray shader. What in theory could I have done wrong?

If you can't use any other engine, best is to compose it (take center area and make it smaller; iterate).

Note, when rendering,
ray depth depends on the size of the image - the larger the image, more depth is needed (as goes for Texel density.See attached*) 

Finally, IMHO, it'd be of great use for advanced users, if such options as ray depths, volume priorities, photons (+domain), ... were simply exposed.

What engine are the screenshots you took from?

Yes, most likely I will have to use post-processing, as I expected, this is how I always solved this problem before

41

[Max] I need help! / Re: Max ray depth more than 100

« on: 2023-09-13, 04:26:45 »

Ah k, must be capped at 100 then.

I did do a quick test, I put a spiral of 2,000 mirrors, sides/roof/etc. Not one of them turned black. Are you sure you dont have something black in the scene where its leaking through such as a black background? Can you try set your environment to 100% white and see if its the same? Just a thought, you could be entirely right since I dont have same angles you do.

It's not environment, it's exit color. You can find it in dev/experimental rollout. You can change it from black to any colour you like, but it's solid colour and might not help much in scenarios like described in this topic. I had submitted request to replace exit colour by environment many years ago, unfortunately it was rejected by the devs.

yep, I knew about exit color, it would be great to get an alpha channel instead, I hope the developers will tell us something)

42

[Max] I need help! / Re: Max ray depth more than 100

« on: 2023-09-12, 10:27:50 »

Ah k, must be capped at 100 then.

I did do a quick test, I put a spiral of 2,000 mirrors, sides/roof/etc. Not one of them turned black. Are you sure you dont have something black in the scene where its leaking through such as a black background? Can you try set your environment to 100% white and see if its the same? Just a thought, you could be entirely right since I dont have same angles you do.

Oh, in my setup you just need to put 2 big mirrors in front of each other and place the camera between them, that's it :D
With a direct angle of view at the mirror, this will create the illusion of an endless corridor of mirrors, the nuance is that in life mirrors are not ideal and "become darker" with each re-reflection + the vanishing point is closed by the observer himself (a person or a camera). But in my case, I would like to recreate a corridor converging at one point.

43

[Max] I need help! / Re: Max ray depth more than 100

« on: 2023-09-12, 09:51:43 »

I havent got a test scene with this many mirrors but you can set the max depth in maxscript like this, so try it and see if it goes beyond 100. When I set it to 300 it says 100 in the render settings but maybe it can work?:

Code: [Select]

renderers.current.shading_maxRayDepth = 300


I also thought about this at first, unfortunately it didn’t work, it seems to set the value up to 999, but the result is exactly the same as with 100, pixel to pixel

44

[Max] I need help! / Re: Max ray depth more than 100

« on: 2023-09-12, 07:23:39 »

Hi,

is it possible to share a screenshot of how it currently looks with value of 100? If you can't share here, maybe you can DM me.

no problem, before starting a project I usually do tests to assess the difficulties that I may encounter. My final configuration will be similar to this, with oppositely positioned brightened mirrors, with a small focal length for the lens and it’s unacceptable for me to leave these black rectangles, I could fix this in post-processing, but there are quite a lot of angles and this will increase the working time significantly

45

[Max] Feature Requests / Re: Add 'Additional Outputs' to Corona Distance

« on: 2023-09-12, 04:00:40 »

Hi Tom - Thanks for the response.  My main thing I'd be looking for is additional inputs\outputs for Near and Far (and maybe Inside.)

Here's my current scenario:  I'm doing a gravel path in a field.  I'm using corona distance to make the path and give it a subtle fade off to the 'roots and leaves' map I am using for the field.  But I have to do a corona distance for diffuse, bump, reflection, etc.  Just seems like it would be cool if there were a way to stack this into one node.  Maybe I'm being dumb about my method, and not sure how that would look graphically.  Perhaps my usage is odd enough it's not worth the time...

I believe that in this scenario you can use just one black and white Corona Distance map, without using maps for the Far and Near slots.
And it can be used as a mask for mixing "gravel" and "roots & leaves" materials in Corona Layered Mtl, or for mixing individual maps through Composite or Corona Mix if you want to.