Author Topic: Corona 1.4 render setup UI overhaul  (Read 7720 times)

2016-03-03, 12:04:21
Reply #15

lacilaci

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why not just make a radio button switch for denoiser off, firefly only, full.... like with exposure (simple vs photographic) forget checkboxes and dropdowns... unless there are more options planned but still..

Because radios take a lot of space, and visually clutter the most. You don't need to see all the options at one given point in time.

Really? You would place it all inline from left to right and a value parameter box at the end... single line all options exposed easy to memorize the position of buttons no need to read or open a menu... A menu dropdown you always have to read to know what is the current setup...
« Last Edit: 2016-03-03, 12:17:17 by lacilaci »

2016-03-03, 12:19:47
Reply #16

Frood

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In the end, it's the userbase who use the renderer on daily basis :)

I´m sure almost every daily basis user would like to have even more controls than advanced UIs could ever deliver :) The downside is that you lose that new users "where are all the controls"-face when looking at corona for the first time (and I´ve enjoyed a few of them :). Even if it´s only for a day before activating the "i want it all" checkbox.

This first impression is/was so important because it generates a (founded) feeling that it´s simply just f* working! (something everyone using products from the you-know-who-company misses from time to time).

It creates the effect that even the most clueless beginners feel like they're missing out on "better controls".

Yes but this is ok when one has got the first impression and has been working/testing for a while with the simple UI, isn´t it? As for the "best settings": Until now the very elegant anwer was: "the default settings" which is true for most situations. And if it´s another case, that user isn´t any more a beginner :) I don´t want to defend standard/advanced UI at all costs, i just feel it could serve in two directions.

It´s goal conflict: Simple interface: more new users (and thus $), voracious power users, extended interface: satisfied userbase, possibly confused new users. I only presume that of course. A poll would be interesting if the current userbase would benefit a simple UI to gain more/quicker control (but I think I can take a guess).


Good Luck and thanks for reading


P.S.: Could we have generally a dedicated thread/sections for UI discussions/mockups? This Daily builds thread is just a mess...


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2016-03-03, 12:50:01
Reply #17

Juraj

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I´m sure almost every daily basis user

voracious power users


Where did you extrapolate this info from ? The original idea behind Corona was simplicity, so why would all those "power-users" want something else from it ?

More clutter was never an answer in this thread and yet suddenly it starts to pop-up again.
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2016-03-03, 15:01:45
Reply #18

Frood

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Where did you extrapolate this info from ?

Feature request and forum post in general, but this is presumably as I wrote.  And "voracious power users" was a ironic term - just in case. You want something else (actually "more", not else) because sooner or later you reach the the limits/drawbacks of simplicity (adding elements or exposing parameters to UI does not necessarily mean to complicate or "clutter" things anyway).

Good Luck


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2016-03-03, 15:28:30
Reply #19

lacilaci

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Where did you extrapolate this info from ?

adding elements or exposing parameters to UI does not necessarily mean to complicate or "clutter" things anyway.

Good Luck

Really? You don't think this would suddenly lead to "expert" tips for best settings and a lot of confusion and user errors?

I'd prefer if renderer would be present only in a form of single "render" button... Now of course there are situations a "renderer" cannot determine so there are some controls in place.. and they should be not simple as in simplified, but easy to use with as little possibility to create confusion and user error as it is possible.

2016-03-03, 17:09:15
Reply #20

Juraj

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Where did you extrapolate this info from ?

Feature request and forum post in general, but this is presumably as I wrote.  And "voracious power users" was a ironic term - just in case. You want something else (actually "more", not else) because sooner or later you reach the the limits/drawbacks of simplicity (adding elements or exposing parameters to UI does not necessarily mean to complicate or "clutter" things anyway).

Good Luck

Request often come from victims of Stockholm syndrome.

Vray recently kept removing and removing. Their only one year old feature (Minimal Shading Rate), which made scattered samples into single parameter, is already worthless as well, because they implemented fully automatical sampling. 2-step simplification happened here, while the software grew in robustness.
It's about 95perc. perfect, so nothing absolute. But does those 5perc. case warrant fiddling ? For small minority of user, yes, perhaps. But it mostly warrants another automatization improvement.

You don't simply reach a limit, it just might be progressively harder keep things simple. Yet it happens in Corona constantly, and succesfully. UltraHDCache is more advanced, yet fully automatical. Before we had threads full of people asking for what settings to use thee.

Corona should not switch philosophy midway because it runs into small issues.

Rawalanche's suggestion to test adaptivity so single best parameter can be adopted, is much better than exposing the parameter, which would just lead to another headache of adjusting it per scene.

I honestly don't even touch GI/LSM anymore, even with more DOF and Motion blur, I don't see big difference to warrant fiddling with it. In time when my image is ready, they all converged almost identically with no benefit whatsover.



Artistic/Creative clutter (Framebuffer), that's another thing which is positive :- ) But not exposing more internalities. The first UI concept (by Raw) presented on previous page is fine imho.


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2016-03-03, 18:22:14
Reply #21

Frood

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Really? You don't think this would suddenly lead to "expert" tips for best settings and a lot of confusion and user errors?

Yes, maybe, so what? You will never be able to avoid this. And as long as you can explain what´s happening and you are able to point at the default settings button I don´t see why this should be much of a problem. Of course some users will put the cat in the microwave to make it dry as allways. If you look at my post(s) you´ll realize that I sign the rest of your answer.

Good Luck!


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2016-03-03, 18:35:48
Reply #22

Frood

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Corona should not switch philosophy midway because it runs into small issues.

I never proclaimed a paradigm shift away from simplicity and never will. Advanced vs. simple UI was just a discussion proposal because I see some conflicts.

[...] parameter, which would just lead to another headache of adjusting it per scene.

No headache if you leave it at default.

I honestly don't even touch GI/LSM anymore, even with more DOF and Motion blur, I don't see big difference to warrant fiddling with it. In time when my image is ready, they all converged almost identically with no benefit whatsover.

That surprises me in fact because until now it makes a significant difference for me depending on the scene. But it may lose relevance with adaptivity, let´s see.

Artistic/Creative clutter (Framebuffer), that's another thing which is positive :- ) But not exposing more internalities. The first UI concept (by Raw) presented on previous page is fine imho.

See, if internalities are not relevant - of course it makes no sense to expose them. I don´t know what you are refering to, but if it´s about for example adaptivityInterval: It´s some arbitrary number, maybe evaluated from test scenes. I don´t know how much cpu impact it´s calculation has, the system does not know how long "1 pass" will last and so on. But there is certainly a reason why it´s not calculated every pass (maybe it should be computed time dependend, not pass dependend?) This would be a example for simple vs. advanced UI while myself is pleased with a string option to control it as long as the possibility to do so exists.

Good Luck!


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2016-03-03, 23:42:01
Reply #23

Ondra

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Some time ago we promised that we will make Corona UI simpler, not more complicated. Right now we are almost certain that the max ray depth parameter will be removed in 1.4 as it is never necessary to change its value. Light samples multiplier might get removed as well because we are improving sampling of many lights. Additionally, I would like to remove GI/AA ratio in 1.5, when we introduce next level of adaptivity which sets this parameter automatically depending on scene. Max passes limit might get removed as well as the noise threshold option is more conventient. We also already removed internal resolution multiplier (will be replaced with some post-process option).
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2016-03-04, 00:02:03
Reply #24

racoonart

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Right now we are almost certain that the max ray depth parameter will be removed in 1.4 as it is never necessary to change its value.
Well... actually I used it quite a bit today ;) I've been rendering cloud panoramas using sss and reducing the max ray depth provided a big speedup in rendertimes without sacrificing too much quality. The "single bounce" option wasn't enough, 25 way too much, around 5 was perfect.
"Removing something will always break someone's workflow" :P
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2016-03-04, 01:49:15
Reply #25

antanas

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Right now we are almost certain that the max ray depth parameter will be removed in 1.4 as it is never necessary to change its value.
Well... actually I used it quite a bit today ;) I've been rendering cloud panoramas using sss and reducing the max ray depth provided a big speedup in rendertimes without sacrificing too much quality. The "single bounce" option wasn't enough, 25 way too much, around 5 was perfect.
"Removing something will always break someone's workflow" :P

 I totally agree with that, please do not remove\hide such things, of course I will agree that 99% of the time those settings are not needed but there might be that 1% which will spoil all the fun. Maybe it's true, and time has come for some ui split for something like Default\Physical(chuckle)\Photographic\Realistic(much louder chuckle) mode (and I think it's way better to call it that or some similar way than Basic as it could cause a lot of misunderstandings and advanced mode missuses by new users, as was stated by people in the above posts) and some sort of advanced mode.  Default mode could be simplified and new-user-friendly to the extreme and honestly 80% of the time I use corona I don't touch anything besides tonemapping controls too so it would be useful for me as well. But the advanced\expert\power-user\whatever mode could have much more tweakable settings for some special cases when those tweaks can be really helpful.

 A bit off-topic, but speaking of clouds, oh how much I miss VRayEnvironmentFog's step size parameters and subdivs for those, it would be invaluable if corona could have something like that, without some per material or per modifier (which could be even more useful) control of volumetric sampling density + some sort of quick interpolation between those samples, cause, strictly imo, without that, real sized clouds are totally impractical in those large scale scenes where those modelled or even procedurally generated clouds can be of tremendous value both for stills and animations alike.

 Same goes for per object density\quality\accuracy control of displacement which could be done per material or via CoronaDisplacementMod - as for now it's quite hard if not impossible to get, let's presume, some decent displaced close-up quality ground\tree bark\stones\tiles\bricks\etc + some way more sparse\less accurate displacement on some distant mountains\hills\sea\clouds\etc in the same scene as the ram consumption and rendertimes can skyrocket and currently one does not have any control over those parameters which are quite easy to tweak and understand even in the abovementioned vray.
 Those two are just some long time wishes which I brought up just as an example of that oversimplification (see Maxwell\Fryrender\Arion\Octane renderers and where that approach got them) is not allways the best way, while flexibility + ease of use + speed certainly are )
 And yeah as some poor attempt of some sad excuse for a joke - it's 3ds max plugin we are speaking of - simplicity was never 3ds max's way and probably will never be so why bother)
« Last Edit: 2016-03-04, 02:01:14 by antanas »

2016-03-04, 03:09:11
Reply #26

Christa Noel

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Right now we are almost certain that the max ray depth parameter will be removed in 1.4 as it is never necessary to change its value.
Well... actually I used it quite a bit today ;) I've been rendering cloud panoramas using sss and reducing the max ray depth provided a big speedup in rendertimes without sacrificing too much quality. The "single bounce" option wasn't enough, 25 way too much, around 5 was perfect.
"Removing something will always break someone's workflow" :P
ondra, please don't completely remove it. I'm with deadclown for this max ray depth. I always adjust max ray depth to 10 when doing product shot. its only a simple scene with some objects and shadowcatcher plane and hdri lighting, simple but need good good details. just like deadclown said, reducing it makes rendering goes faster without affecting the quality too much.
for me, UI simplifying is always a good thing too eventhough it comes with removed some important things unless you plan to make it still reachable via maxscript or in devel/debug mode. power user need a room to keep their workflow.

2016-03-04, 08:29:34
Reply #27

Nekrobul

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Some time ago we promised that we will make Corona UI simpler, not more complicated. Right now we are almost certain that the max ray depth parameter will be removed in 1.4 as it is never necessary to change its value. Light samples multiplier might get removed as well because we are improving sampling of many lights. Additionally, I would like to remove GI/AA ratio in 1.5, when we introduce next level of adaptivity which sets this parameter automatically depending on scene. Max passes limit might get removed as well as the noise threshold option is more conventient. We also already removed internal resolution multiplier (will be replaced with some post-process option).


NONONONONO

Hide it yes but not remove it. There are some scenarios wher it need to be pushed to the maximum. 2 mirror one in front of another and camera in between and if there is alot of refraction going on for example 10 plates of glass stacked.
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2016-03-04, 08:49:42
Reply #28

pokoy

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Here's another voice against removal of this parameter, I already had 2 jobs where I needed to increase it. I'm pretty sure it'll prove useful regularly, not often, but every now and then for sure.

2016-03-04, 09:13:00
Reply #29

romullus

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As long as those controls remains accessible through string options...

I'm not Corona Team member. Everything i say, is my personal opinion only.
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