Topics

46

[Max] General Discussion / limiting panorama views?

« on: 2017-06-19, 13:35:47 »

We keep getting asked about creating panorama VR views and its something we are definitely wanting to investigate further when we get just a second to look in to it more. One question I do have though is, is it easy enough to do say just 180 degrees rather than the full 360? Im thinking when its for external shots where you dont want to model the rest of the world that would traditionally be behind the camera.

Also is the Corona VR tool the best option for creating and editing these in with hotspots and then also generating outputs that can be packaged up for clients? Sorry for the noob Q.

Thanks

47

[Max] I need help! / windows 8 vs windows 10 RAM handling?

« on: 2017-06-01, 23:43:52 »

Ive been running into some issues with scenes maxing out my 64GB RAM on a windows 8 machine. When Microsoft was doing the free win 10 up date we updated all our PCs but for some reason one of them just wouldnt update so I just left it as windows 8 as it is only a render node. What is strange now that on a few scenes that node fills its RAM and either crashes or just pages and grinds to a crawl but another very similar machine with 64gb RAM and win 10 renders the scene fine with only 40GB recorded in task manager. Im using C4D so I dont know if that has anything to do with it but I was wondering if there was a setting in win 8 that could be changed to give the same RAM handling performance as win 10. Its happened on a number of scenes and with multiple attemps with the only difference being the operating system. Thanks for any pointers.

48

[C4D] Resolved Bugs / Glare not passing from VFB to Picture Viewer

« on: 2017-03-31, 11:03:07 »

This has been an issue for me since the fantastic glare and bloom feature was introduced. When working on large images I will often have the problem that the glare and bloom settings from the VFB dont get passed on to the PV if I want to save out of the PV as a 16bit PSD (I really wish the VFB could do this itself). The glare effect also comes and goes like its switching on and off in the VFB but if you catch it when its on it is possible to save out an exr of just the light mix layer that has the glare on so it can be added to the PSD file in photoshop. I just wish it was more robust in its transfer and also stopped flicking on and off which I think may well be the problem with non transfer anyway. Latest issue was today on a node that had A6.2 on. Thanks 

49

Hardware / How to tame a wide gamut display?

« on: 2017-03-19, 11:59:04 »

Some time ago we bought a 27inch dell that has a colour wide gamut with the thinking its going to be a pro monitor and great for our viz work. But its always been a struggle as we work in sRGB and dont actually require the wide gammut as 99% of our clients will be looking at our work on sRGB monitors and my thinking is if a photograph looks good enough on there then so will our renders.

So the problem is things like windows 10 photos and any web browser massively over saturates colours and there have been real issues with vray in the past with editor window previews looking different to the frame buffer. I dont think corona is as bad for this though its been a while since I have done tests. It has been calibrated in the past with a spyder pro and then more recently with an xrite pro so we are confident photoshop is correct its just viewing stuff that is outside of photoshop.

I personally use a 32inch BenQ 100% sRGB monitor now but my colleague uses the Dell still. So my question is has anyone managed to calibrate or somehow switch off the wide gamut range in a monitor? I also had a laptop with a wide gamut display and wouldnt do it again as that had the same problem with eye searing saturation. My main concern is most monitors these days are becoming wide gamut and I dont think its a good thing! I like the look of the dell canvas or even a cintiq but they are all wide gamut so potentially its just going to have the same problem.

50

[C4D] Resolved Bugs / strong normal shader artifacts

« on: 2017-02-19, 16:55:32 »

A6.2 C4D R18

Ive got some major artifacts popping up on this paving texture. It is a substance material loaded in with R18s native loader which works really well. I have also tried this with the baked out maps and its still the same so its not the substance.

Anyway if you look at the attached images you will see a stong line artifact over the paving when the normal map is activated. I have loaded the substance normal in to a corona normal shader and the effect works well apart from the lines show in PS and they line up fine so I think this a bug. Anyone else seen this before?

51

[C4D] Resolved Feature Requests / override material exclusion by material

« on: 2017-01-31, 11:12:48 »

Dont think this is currently possible but if not.. Currently we can exclude objects from the override material function but it would be really handy to have exclude material from over ride. Im thinking glass material in a white model, rather than having to select every object with glass on.

Thanks

52

[C4D] General Discussion / Node based material editing in beta 2 road map!!

« on: 2017-01-26, 17:01:53 »

Frickin ace! Just seen this, really didnt think it would happen without C4D doing it first but really glad its on there. Cant wait to try it out.

53

[C4D] Resolved Feature Requests / save light mix with camera

« on: 2017-01-19, 10:47:27 »

At the moment the post process info is stored with the camera which is really useful (bloom and glare slow down bug aside). But we have to manually tweak or save and load the light mix settings every time. Can we also have the option for this to be saved with the camera. Effectively it would be nice to have the solution where we can make all the adjustments in a lower res test and then just hit render for full res with all the settings set and the final result will be the same as the lower res test image. Thanks

54

[C4D] Resolved Feature Requests / enhanced corona bitmap loader

« on: 2017-01-13, 17:51:39 »

I tend to use the C4D filter shader on most of my bitmaps for fine tuning and also making greyscale versions for reflection etc. Increasingly Im finding the limitations of the C4D filter offer and struggle to get crisp high contrast outputs. They often end up a bit muddy - especially when compared to some of the video tuts I have seen for max which keeps all the detail in the texture without clipping it. So seeing as getting a node system is a bit of a long shot is there a way to include a bunch of image filter sliders at the top of the corona bitmap loader? I think this will also give us higher quality results and faster processing which I think thats why it was introduced in the first place?

Thanks

Edit the exposure and gamma adjusters already in the corona bitmap shader already do exactly this - much better than the c4d filter shader. But it would be really nice to have a hue/sat slider in there as well so we wouldn't need to use the c4d filter any more.

55

[C4D] General Discussion / VFB Limited output options?

« on: 2016-12-20, 11:47:44 »

I'm a C4D user so I'm grateful for the option to switch between the corona VFB and the C4D picture viewer for saving as in my opinion the options for formats are much better.

I'm curious to know how people save out images in the VFB? From my experiments all I see is either saving out an exr layer by layer which seems like a waste of time or a corona exr dump which gives you every layer under the sun with the file size you might expect from that. Is it possible to save out an exr that just has the layers you have selected in the multipass? You can do this using the C4D picture viewer - although for some reason saving takes much longer even though there are fewer layers!

But failing that the only other options I can see a single layered save outs of 8 bit formats, even tiff is 8 bit only. The Jpeg save is also overly compressed which spoils the image for the sake of a few mb here and there. If I save out a jpeg from the C4D picture viewer I get a quality slider and the 100% quality jpeg has noticeably less artifacts than the corona VFB one.

My standard default has long been a 16bit multilayered PSD which I think gives the best option for dynamic range vs file size once you get 8K image size with 10-15 layers. 32 bit files are huge and you end up in that situation where ultimately you need to convert down at some stage but if you need to re-render bits and then merge in to your 16 bit PS file then it gets tricky.

Would it be possible to get a 16bit multipass PSD save option in future VFB builds?

56

[C4D] Resolved Feature Requests / Resumable rendering

« on: 2016-12-07, 13:58:57 »

I see Vray has just announced this in their 3.5 update. I remember Maxwell announced it about 10+ years ago but did they ever get it to work? I know in V1 when I bought it, it didnt work. Funny that light mixing is only coming round in other renderers now as multilight is pretty old news as a feature. I'm looking mainly at vray here, as Corona was relatively quick to implement it.

Anyway the resumable rendering feature is so appealing to me with long render times and sleepless nights praying nothing will interrupt an over night rendering under the heat of a deadline. Having the option to save out periodically as Corona renders would be a great intermediate solution (I know this will sacrifice a bit of speed) but then the full blown resumable render feature would be fantastic and also opens up the possibility of moving the render from one machine to another.

Cheers

57

[C4D] Resolved Bugs / crashes in VFB and PV but not in viewport rendering

« on: 2016-11-15, 19:16:20 »

A6.2

Does anyone know why I might suddenly be getting crashes when rendering out to PV or VFB but not when I chose to render in the viewport? The scene was rendering fine earlier in the day and I have tried switching of MP but it still crashes 100% of the time. Material override lets the scene render which suggests it might be a material but there isn't anything odd in there or a new type of material that wasn't being used before in earlier testing. The strange thing is that it renders in viewport so what is different between viewport and final render?

Thanks

58

[C4D] General Discussion / Love the new corona mat menu in A6.2

« on: 2016-11-10, 23:47:53 »

Great move, no more moving up and across menus. Really helps to give the built in feeling and save that 1 second every time we need to create a new material. Thanks

59

[C4D] Resolved Bugs / white balance effects C4D viewport

« on: 2016-11-07, 11:57:12 »

Adjusting the corona camera white balance also effects the viewport so its colours become more blue or yellow which isn't a good thing. Thanks

60

[Max] I need help! / Multipass crippling time penalty?

« on: 2016-10-28, 11:09:10 »

Im trying to debug a very slow rendering scene. Its an interior that has run for 15 hours and only reached 55 passes on a 16core xeon PC (CB 22,000). Its predicted time is 53 hours to get to 250passes. There is definitely something wrong here and I think I have tracked it down to the multipass. If I switch it off the predicted time drops to 6hrs which I would be very happy with. My initial thought was to switch off filtering for all the multipasses but that only takes it down to 46 hours predicted time which is still far too slow. I have 14 multipasses including a few light select layers, so quite a lot and I could probably drop a few if needed. RAM levels are fine.

Im using the C4D latest daily build and corona VFB but I'm assuming its the same system in the MAX version. I was wondering if anyone had any experience with this sort of extreme slow down with passes? Thanks