An angry c4d user

[Merlin]

Hi, I've been a freelance graphiste since 2007 and use cinema 4d since version 7 seems to me.

After using Arnold for 1 year I stopped because there were bugs and downturns, I was losing a lot of time.

So I decided to test Corona with the free version first and then buy (rent) the license that became paying the same price as 3ds max.

I was pretty happy with the free version despite the bugs, but the problem is that the paid version is not better and I think what is even worse.

There is a long list of problems and slowdowns or new tools that do not work!!!!
It's outrageous, I opened a discussion on Facebook that tells me to report on the Forum, but there are so many problems that I would spend my time doing this.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/328706397278931/?multi_permalinks=1298024237013804&notif_id=1558948689401182&notif_t=feedback_reaction_generic][url]https://www.facebook.com/groups/328706397278931/?multi_permalinks=1298024237013804&notif_id=1558948689401182&notif_t=feedback_reaction_generic[/url]

Your rendering engine is not bad, but it is not good …
It’s not optimized for C4D and especially you do not test it. You think that you always have the customers who have to do it, but we're not Beta tester anymore, but customers who pay for the whole month and we re entitled to have a product that works properly…

Would you be happy to rent a car with three wheels and not hold the road?  NO.

Before developing new gadgets like "caustics is good, but there are other priorities not to mention basic functions that are missing, for example the ability to put a HDRI texture on the lights and many other useful functions.

But above all, to make the IPR properly operate that slow down the machine considerably. I thought I had a productive tool to focus on creativity, but it's the opposite that s happening, Corona's anti-productive and I pass my time to crack nerves.

Currently I test redshift and I can tell you that you have a concern to you. I know it's a GPU and it's more responsive, but not to mention it's really optimized and stable. I can't wait for it to be integrated into C4D and I think you'll lose a lot of customers if you don't change policy and your priorities.

Sorry for my bad English, I use a translator.

Cordialement

Marc Dubois, An angry user…

[Nejc Kilar]

May I kindly ask you to clarify what you mean with IR slowdowns? :)

[Merlin]

Not the IR But that's the whole workflow slowdown.
Every time I change a tune in a material, I push a cursor, and the Magic Wheel of the Mac starts to turn long enough and sometimes it bugs … even when the Ipr is not active … It's very painful

[leo3d]

Use Mac for Corona joke

[Merlin]

why? is better on pc?

[Shawn Astrom]

Hey Merlin. I would encourage you to check out the latest beta versions and see if they fix any of the issues you are having. Remember Corona is a state of the art render engine and the C4D development is coming along great.

- Shawn

[Merlin]

Hey astrofalcon,
what do mean by  latest beta versions, I have the last daily build But it's just like a beta paycheck version and it's worse that before and the news doesn't work, and about the downturn is not new...
I'm starting to think Corona is a gadget, but not a professional tool to work quickly and correctly as with other driving motors more serious. There's not just me who s the trouble I think, but nobody's gonna run around and everybody thinks it s normal.

I've sent an e - mail to the development directorate I hope they will answer me...

Version: 4.0 daily May  3 2019 (core 4 (DailyBuild May  3 2019))
Cinema version: R19.068 CINEMA 4D Studio

[dzintas]

All of your gripes just seems to come from your preconceptions of how corona should work, and not how it is working.

It's hard to comment when you don't mention most of your problems. And few things you mention are tweakable.

Ability to use HDRI textures on lights. You can use corona light material for that and map it on whatever geometry you like.
https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?topic=18542.0

Interactive rendering performance can be improved by enabling "force path tracing" option in performance tab or by adjusting UHD catche precision value.
You also should try adjusting number of cpu threads used by interactive render and switching off Ai denoiser.

[Merlin]

hey dzintas, Maybe you find it normal to pay for a version that works less well than the free version?

If you read my post carefully everything is detailed and there is also a link to the discussion that I opened on Facebook, with explanations and also other dissatisfied users.

For the lights I know this technique, I tried it but it is more complicated and then we lose the possibility of adjustment in post FX.
And it's not recommending to use a light material to illuminate a scene because it generates noise

[Designerman77]

Hi Merlin,

try the latest Corona 4 Beta.

It works better than core 3.
Here is the download link:

(https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1--L2vBzH3sFxSfdglqlHoxF9NCS2W2xU):

Despite a few things which I also massively criticized about Core 3, the latest Core 4 Beta works quite well.
Ans the Corona team really puts huge effort in quickly improving the bugs, us users find.

As a professional industrial designer with 14 years of experience, I can confirm you, that Corona is a highly professional render engine ... and neither a toy, nor a "joke, like you think.
It has a very natural looking light calculation - not so cold and technical like in many other render products, of which you mentioned some.


Regarding the IR... on my older Mac for mid 2011 the IR was also hanging in heavy scenes.
But this you will experience on every weak(er) machine.
As I see, your machine is from 2010. Don't expect too much from it...

Be aware that in a "normal" interior scene like a kitchen or so, you can already have a huge number of polys.
People don't invest just for fun 3 - 5 k in new and performant computers nowadays.

Me, for example, work on an iMac Pro - and Corona runs super fast on it. Even heavy interior scenes don't slow down the viewport - at all.


Regards.

[Designerman77]

Use Mac for Corona joke

Leo... Corona "a joke on Mac" ?

You clearly never used a Mac, I guess.

At my former work, and not only there, I experienced exactly the opposite!

Corona running smooth on an 7 year old iMac.
While the brand-new, powerful Win-PC was fighting to even move the same scene in the viewports.
Also other softs were slow... like Adobe Illustrator and PowerPoint.

Same thing even withe a Windows-typical Program: Rhinoceros !
Less speedy on the new PC, while super smooth on the old Mac...
Even on the emulated Windows, running on a Mac over Bootcamp - the WIN-softs like Rhino were much smoother.

Modern PC with monster Cores like the 32-core Ryzen may have brute force for renders - that's really great.

BUT driver problems and components that have not been tested in specific constellations often cause a "faster" Win-PC to be slower than an old Mac.

That's my experience after 15 years... again and again.

[Merlin]

Hi Designerman77,
Thanks for these interesting feedback and coming from someone working on Mac OSX.
Regarding the daily build I already had version 4 but of the month of may, so I will install the last hoping what works better.
What is unfortunate is that we are not informed of the updates, even on the Group of Facebook, finally brief...

Regarding my machine it is perhaps "old" but there is still 3.33 GHz 6-core Intel Xeon, 32 Go 1333 MHz DDR3, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB 6143 Mo
I think it's better than the imac, am I wrong?

Thanks to you

[Merlin]

Designerman77,
I'm glad to hear your experience on Mac, because I feel like he has a few users to make 3d on mac osx because of the lack of compatibility with the Nvidia cards, but I also think it only concerns the Cpu rendering, no ?

[Designerman77]

Salut Merlin,

don't worry, you will not have to switch from Mac to Win-PC... :)))

At the moment, due to the crazy core numbers that are available for Win-systems, there is a kind of "euphoria" for Win-PCs when it´s about 3D-work... including slogans like "Macs are a joke for 3D"...
a claim wich, of course, is total nonsense.

But however... modern 3D-work demands powerful computers, no matter if WIN or OSX. There is no way around it.

And such things like IR will run smoothly on a decent computer... I guarantee you.
As mentioned, I use the IR even on relatively heavy scenes - in C4D on an iMac Po 8 core. It´s super fast and responsive.

You ask if your machine "is better than an iMac". Better than which iMac... ? :)
Better than an iMac from 2010... yes... maybe 50 % faster. But the actual iMacs or iMac Pros are 4-5 times faster than your machine... maybe even more.
If you can invest in such a machine... your happiness will be endless... I guarantee you. :))))

And regarding Corona... I don't know how long you've been using it.

Take a bit of time to experiment with it. As you see on the web... one can make really outstanding, super realistic and beautiful renders with it.


Wishing you much success and a bit of patience. But I also understand when people are angry about not working tech. I also react like that... sometimes. :)

[Merlin]

Okay, I think you're right and I was starting to wonder where the problems came from and if I was the only one...
I use Corona for 6 months or a can more I do not know anymore, I started with version 3 free.

Before I was using Arnold which is also very good but it crashed every 5mn, really...

J’ai followed your advice and only test for 5mn the last daily build and it seemed more fluid where I had downtime before, but to check over the long term.
How do you know about the updates daily build?
On Trello, there are only official versions, I think.

[TomG]

Hi!

1) It IS hard to find time to report problems, that is true - but also, without people giving us information on the problem (what it is, when it happens, crash logs, etc.) we may be unaware that you are experiencing the problem, and without the extra info, we may be unable to replicate it and so we would be unable to fix it. There's no easy solution to that - if we don't know you have a problem and what that problem is, we just won't know to work on it.

2) The forum is the place to report it, or by ticket, because we need some way of tracking everything. We want to be able to reply to you on a particular problem and say "We think it's fixed, can you check the latest daily build to find out?". It would be impossible to find one reply on one thread on Facebook, so we have to have some organized, standardized method to have bugs reported to us. This is also one of the main ways you might hear about a daily build, because when we have done something that we think is a fix, we can go to the ticket or forum post and reply to you and tell you to test the daily to see, and you'll get notified.

3) The other way to hear about daily builds is to check their release announcements here on the forum. https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?board=40.0. The changelog there will show if something that sounds like it would be relevant to your problem has been included. Info on the daily builds (and link to the forum section) is on our help pages at https://help.c4d.corona-renderer.com/support/solutions/articles/12000033462-corona-renderer-for-c4d-daily-builds. Daily builds are in-progress, and can be quite frequent, so we do not announce those on Facebook - we do announce major Release Candidate releases (when Corona becomes feature-locked and just bugs are being fixed prior to release).

We are sorry you are having so many problems, and we do want to help and get Corona working the way you believe it should be working - but we can only help if we hear about them through the official channels for such things. We do appreciate that it takes time to report a problem, but there isn't any other method to handle this - it might be the problem is only happening on 1 machine out of 5,000, and unless we hear from that 1 in 5,000 person (or we happen to have one of those machines), we won't even know the problem is there. It may be it only happens when a certain workflow is followed, and as extensively as we test in house, we sure can't test every possible workflow that our users may use. This is true of all software of course, it does take someone a bit of their time to report it - the difference with Corona is that we always listen to every report and do our best to fix it, within the long and complicated list of priorities that developers have to deal with in software development.

[TomG]

As to when a bug gets fixed, that is very complex. Developers have a lot of things to balance and prioritize between, and we do our best. There will be no perfect list of priorities, because every user will see the importance of a bug differently, but we do what we can. The kinds of things that have to be factored in are

- Bugs that we found ourselves, even ones that users have never experienced
- Bugs that users report to us, which may be ones we have never experienced despite our best efforts to test as many possible cases as we can
- New features that we think users will find useful, whether or not they requested them
- New features that users have requested, whether or not we thought of them too

- How many people does the bug effect? Just 1, a small subset that use a particular version of the host software, or a subset of a particular hardware configuration? Or only within a particular unique set of steps? Or lots of people?
- How often will people run into the bug? Is it a workflow that they might use once every 6 months, or 10 times a day? Is it only a small group of people who would use it 10 times a day, and other users will never need it?
- How critical is the bug? Is there a workaround which, while inconvenient, gets most or some of that functionality up and running? Does it make certain things impossible, but they'd only be needed rarely, or would they be needed 10 times a day? Is it a crash, or loss of scene?

- Is the bug in our code, or in the host software?
- Is the bug easy to fix, or complicated?
- Does the required fix stand in isolation in the code so won't interact/interfere with other parts of the code, or does it have the potential to break other things?
- If the bug is in the host software, is it even possible to fix it? Maybe the host software doesn't expose the data we need for the fix, maybe it doesn't offer the required functionality. If we can fix it, is the fix such a complex and risky solution to get around the host software limitation that it might break other things, so we simply can't take that chance?

- Be bug reporters too: our developers have to report bugs to the host software developers, as we are users too in that regard :)

And then bear in mind that this list changes every single day, as new bugs are uncovered by us or users.

(sheesh, I am glad I am not a developer! ;) )

So, we do try hard and do our best at what is an enormously complex task. If a bug remains for a long time (and some do), it's not because we don't care, or didn't listen, it's because of the ever-shifting balances of priorities that we have to manage.

Thanks!
   Tom

[TomG]

And just to note, the list of things developers have to balance is not to say "Boohoo poor us" - we all knew what we were getting into when we chose to be developers, etc. It's just to try to explain why it is that some bugs take longer than others, and say that the reason is NEVER that we don't care, or didn't listen.

[Designerman77]

Hi Merlin,

here you find every update about the daily builds.

https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?topic=23346.msg148426#new


Greetings

Ah, Tom already posted it.

[Merlin]

Thanks, Designerman77