Topics

31

[Max] Resolved Feature Requests / Tiny one - CoronaLight Gizmo not to be rotated

« on: 2017-12-04, 12:15:49 »

For some strange reason all corona lights' gizmos are rotated slightly to the right with a weird 8-sided star shape when you draw them (try it with a simple disk light), this makes using the gizmo lines to quickly align the light to stuff in the scene impossible. It would be super useful if one of the lines was pointing straight up, down, left and right, in a cross shape, with intermediaries too, for this reason.

Cheers.

PS. Also, please, please, fix the gizmo scene unit scale issue. If working metres or whatever they really should automatically scale down appropriately. They're totally massive otherwise and every single time we need to shrink down to 0.01 or 0.001 even. Thanks :)

32

[Max] Feature Requests / Viewport IR - Render Elements Dropdown

« on: 2017-11-06, 12:53:06 »

It would be great to have a dropdown menu in the top right corner of an IR viewport allowing you to switch between render elements, such as masks etc. Only currently possible in a floating IR window.

Cheers,

33

[Max] Feature Requests / Corona Material Library - Some Requests

« on: 2017-11-06, 11:01:58 »

Hi chaps,

We're not on 1.7 yet, but one of the things we're most looking forward to using is your CML, as we think it can easily replace our current setup. Are there any plans to implement the following?:

- centralised maps location with support for UNC paths/mapped network drives etc.

- centralised library so multiple users can access it simultaneously and if it changes somewhere everyone can see those changes (on re-load of library)

- ability for multiple users to add/remove/change library content

- ability to lock the library to read-only mode, and unlock when someone needs to add/remove/amend something, to help protect from library corruption or overwrites etc. or for admin management

- support for real-world scale or custom scale on import

- easy duplication so you can make alternative versions

- keywording with search box

Cheers,

34

Gallery / Recent Spaces - Cameron Design House - Parts I and II

« on: 2017-09-26, 16:08:16 »

Hi all,

We are thrilled to publish a large and unique body of work for Cameron Design House - a London-based luminaire design and manufacturing studio. We were given more or less free-reign to design and adapt all of these spaces for these beautiful lights to be displayed and we hope you'll enjoy this first set, with more to be published over the coming months.

PART I
http://www.recentspaces.com/cameron-design-house-part-one

PART II
http://www.recentspaces.com/cameron-design-house-part-two

And a few preview images:

Many many more here: http://www.recentspaces.com/cameron-design-house-part-one

Cheers and see you in Venice in a week!

35

[Max] Resolved Bugs / 8-bit Gradient Bitmaps result in noisy/lumpy renders

« on: 2017-09-06, 11:33:05 »

Found this today - if you have a simple black>white gradient map saved as an 8-bit file (PNG, TIFF, whatever) and load it into a bump slot, the result in the render will be super bumpy/lumpy at a small scale. If you produce this same map in 16-bit, this goes away and you get a perfectly smooth result, as you'd expect. Looks like Corona isn't happy sampling from an 8-bit gradient, basically.

36

[Max] I need help! / Quick one - Corona Regions + DR - Supposed to be working?

« on: 2017-08-31, 12:22:45 »

I'm almost sure I read somewhere back with 1.6 release that in 1.6 DR is supposed to work within Corona Regions i.e. respect them and not render the whole image. Is this not the case in 1.6? Because it doesn't seem to be working here on this scene I'm rendering right now. The DR nodes are spitting out large strips of data back to the VFB that are running across the whole image.

We're on 1.6 Hf 1 here.

Cheers,

37

[Max] Feature Requests / Corona Render Elements with custom filetype per element.

« on: 2017-07-24, 11:09:11 »

Hi folks,

In a lot of our projects we have many cameras in a single max scene. For us the most efficient method is to use no File Save output file, but instead use max's own Batch Render, add all the cameras and give them all a unique file output, which is usually an exr.

We then have all the usual Render Elements, for example masks etc. For these, we name the element but leave their output empty, so that they automatically pick up the main output render's filename for example view_01_camera_01.exr > view_01_camera_01_mask_walls.exr.

Using this method we don't need to go to any effort at all with updating filenames for rendering, and we simply drop the latest batch of renders into a subfolder once done, so they don't get overwritten. Generally this is a really good workflow.

But the only issue here is that there is currently no way to force those render elements to render to a filetype other than whatever the main render is, in this case exr. This results in loads of massive mask renders, which would be perfectly fine as JPGs.

This might be a max "thing" that can't be addressed, but is there a possibility to have custom filetypes for Corona Render Elements? This would solve this problem.

Cheers,

38

[Max] Resolved Bugs / Tone Mapping breaking EXR re-exposure again?

« on: 2017-07-17, 11:32:13 »

Hi guys,

Have you changed anything in recent versions that has reversed behavior when using tone mapping controls such as contrast etc. and then you can't reduce exposure of an EXR to recover detail? I've just noticed this in a big batch of renders this morning. I remember this was the old behavior, which you then fixed somehow, but it seems it's back again? As soon as I reduce exp in Photoshop it just goes grey as if it's a regular 8-bit image instead of a half-float EXR.

Cheers,

39

[Max] Feature Requests / Corona Autosave filename/path should be local to max file, not 3ds max

« on: 2017-06-30, 10:20:53 »

It looks like currently when you set the corona autosave filename and folder within max it's saving that data to 3ds max itself rather than the max file. What this means is that when someone submits a network render job from their machine, say it's called machine01 and the corona autosave is set to machine01/autosaves/machine01_render_01.exr, what actually happens is that if that render ends up being rendered on machine05, it will actually pick up the corona autosave filename and path on that local machine05, NOT machine01, so it might well end up saving to machine05/autosaves/machine05_render_01.exr. This is very confusing indeed, because filenames and paths don't always (hardly ever, really) match the actual job/render name.

I've made that sound very complicated, probably. Crux of it is that corona autosave filename and path should save with the max file, not with max itself, so they will always be respected during network rendering, no matter which machine picks up the job.

Cheers,

40

[Max] Resolved Bugs / "Sampling mask compression failed: Region is not strictly inside the bitmap"

« on: 2017-06-20, 14:09:44 »

1.6.1.

Any ideas? The Learn More button goes to a 404 page.

As far as I can see there's no Corona region in use. There is a max region in use.

This is with DR on, with 3 nodes rendering in DR + my workstation. I can't be sure but I don't think those nodes are actually rendering the scene... I feel like they're all rendering something outside the VFB, hence the error...?

41

General CG Discussion / Max 2018 - Thoughts?

« on: 2017-06-13, 10:19:06 »

Hi all,

We are looking into potentially moving up to max 2018 soon, now that it's had its first update.

What's the general verdict? Stable? Any show-stopping issues? Any issues with legacy plugins like Berconmaps and Quadchamfer not working? I can see that FP/RC are not yet on stable builds for 2018 so we'll be holding off a while yet.

Cheers,

42

[Max] Bug Reporting / DOF broken when multiple cams with same target name

« on: 2017-05-24, 14:11:55 »

Here's an obscure one for you...

If you have two cameras in the scene with different names, but their targets have the same name (this can happen easily when you merge in the "same" camera from another file and auto-rename it - it renames the cam but not the target, thanks Autodesk...) no matter what you do the view will always render with some kind of DOF softness, even if you have Force DOF Off ticked in the camera mod.

Can't share the scene, sorry.

43

[Max] Bug Reporting / 1.6 - Fuzzy regions harsh falloff and leaving "dirty" pixels around edge

« on: 2017-05-03, 17:48:41 »

Steps:

First, disable Clear VFB between renders.

1) render something cleanly that's a decent size image
2) draw a corona region inside it
3) drag out a fuzzy region from that and render

Result is that the main corona region works fine but the fuzzy region seems to have a crazy tight "falloff" so like 85% of the fuzzy area is rendering 100% and then it very suddenly drops off to 0% over around 5 pixels in a "dirty" rectangle just running inside the fuzzy green box. So no matter what you do you're actually adding more noise to an already clean area of the image and there's no way to let Corona resolve that noise unless you render the whole area as a proper region with no fuzziness.

44

[Max] Bug Reporting / 1.6 - Render in VFB, close, render in docked IR, can't open VFB again

« on: 2017-05-03, 17:39:04 »

Steps:

1) render something in main VFB
2) close it
3) start a docked IR window and render away for a bit, then close it
4) hit Show VFB - doesn't open

What's worse, it completely kills the VFB that you had before, so when I hit Render again, it opens up but my previous render is gone (with Clear VFB disabled).

45

[Max] Bug Reporting / 1.6 VFB History being affected by Cameramod changes incorrectly

« on: 2017-05-03, 16:55:18 »

1) Render an image with cameramod set to EV=1.0 and then save this to the history
2) Set the cameramod to EV=2.0 and re-render, then save this to the history

At this point both thumbnails should look correct i.e. one is brighter than the other.

Now make one A and one B and drag the slider around. They look the same. I.e. the image saved in the history is being affected by changes to the cameramod when of course it shouldn't.

Might also happen with other parameters changed in cameramod or even directly in the VFB with no cameramod, I've not tested those.