Messages

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[Max] I need help! / Re: Modeling liquid volume for caustics

« on: 2024-12-05, 15:55:42 »

When modeling the volume of a liquid for caustics, is it still necessary to make the volume's geometry go beyond its container walls?

For the surface of the liquid, will the solver recognize either a bump map or displacement map for the surface irregularities?

First question: we always do this, and it looks correct, so yes, overshoot. But it's not necessarily essential.

Second question: either will work - displacement is of course more realistic, and will look correct at the edges where the water meets other surfaces, but bump is a good quick way of getting more or less the same result without worrying about the displ map screwing things up on the edges e.g. wave height becoming a challenge. Just not as realistic to look at. Depends on use case really.

The above are assuming you're using phoenixoceantex (which is great), but you don't have to.

You have a highly appropriate username for these questions!

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[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Chaos Corona 13 for 3ds Max - Daily Builds Discussion

« on: 2024-12-03, 11:07:28 »

I believe it is the camera tone mapping overrides which need a restart to get updated for IR, just like camera object visibility.
You can try doing batch rendering of few cameras which have different tone mapping. They should all come out with expected tone mapping overrides.

Has that always been the case?

I don't recall such behavior...

Unfortunately yes. Tone Mapping Overrides "break" in IR when you make changes, and you're forced to restart IR each time you make a change. It's quite unfortunate and often catches you out because it doesn't warn you and you can be led to a false impression that something is wrong/not working, when in fact it is fine, when you restart IR or just render normally.

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[Max] Bug Reporting / Re: Corona 12H1 Scaling issue

« on: 2024-11-09, 10:37:50 »

Another case where corona setting the IR scaling factor to anything other than 1.0 is a mistake, in my opinion, but I've stated my case for this many times over the years :) Comes up very frequently. I really think it makes more sense to have it at 1.0 and let the user decide if they want or need the IR speed boost of changing it to 1.5 or 2.0 or whatever they want, and avoids this issue and the issue of people wondering why their IR previews look soft/blurry. It's a pain when you install a new Corona version and this value seems to change back to default again too.

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[Max] Corona Goodies - User Contributions / Re: Corona to GLB

« on: 2024-11-04, 15:29:10 »

great work, thanks again!

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[Max] I need help! / Re: 4k Cache - What's the latest? (2023/4 Update)

« on: 2024-10-15, 10:50:18 »

I'm also keen to hear what the status of this is. It came up again last week with our team wondering what we should all be using by default, but I had no straight answer for them.

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[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Chaos Corona 13 for 3ds Max - Daily Builds Discussion

« on: 2024-10-11, 17:22:28 »

Thanks Tom! Great to see examples and encouraged by the results. More of this generally, please! I'm sure the user-base really appreciates it.

Cheers,

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[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Chaos Corona 13 for 3ds Max - Daily Builds Discussion

« on: 2024-10-11, 10:54:38 »

Oof, the new caustics improvements in today's DB are sounding tasty! Thanks devs. This is what we like to see. Hope we can test here soon.

Edit: devs, do you have any visual examples of the changes and the impact they have by any chance? Would be super cool to see your internal tests for this and how they're impacting speed + quality.

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[Max] I need help! / Re: material editor SLOW - i think its a CORONA issue?

« on: 2024-09-13, 13:03:19 »

I remember when Autodesk announced their major "Small Annoying Things" 3dsmax campaign, where after years of angry commenting from customers they finally understood that we wanted all those small but workflow-slowing bugs, weirdnesses, or lack of vital tools to be fixed/implemented. They held various user group meetings with their department head(s) (I was at one in London) to actually get this feedback 1:1. It never quite hit the mark fully but it was a great period and had a very noticeably positive impact on 3dsmax, and I think the attitude has carried forward there ever since. Naturally, the issue nowadays over there is a massive lack of innovation within 3dsmax, so it could certainly be fairly argued it's gone too far the other way!

Anyway, it's something to think about. I've often wondered if Corona development would be better handled by making existing-feature improvements, bug fixes just like this happen to point version updates/hotfixes e.g. 12.1, 12.2 etc. and saving the new feature updates for major versions (and not necessarily every major version). In that way perhaps it would be possible to delay major new features being worked on and pivot development to addressing sometimes very serious bugs within the current major version in a hotfix - as many as needed - maybe 2, 3 or 4 x. In recent times there have been instances where potentially show-stopping bugs have had to be left for some future major version update because it's too late to shoehorn it in, causing frustration in the userbase (reasonably so...). As a studio, we have completely skipped 2 or 3 major versions of Corona (maybe 8, definitely 12) because of this situation. And if that reminds anyone of how many of us work with 3dsmax then I'm not surprised! Since 3ds max 2008 or so we have ignored every other version, because it's pretty well-known that the odd-versions are usually where the bulk of new features are introduced, and the even version is where they're bug-fixed and optimised... in a production environment that's critical stuff.... We don't and can't work with flakey software. C12 has proven a bit of a nightmare judging by many accounts on this forum, so we've skipped it. Not something we want to have to do, ever.

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[Max] Corona Goodies - User Contributions / Re: Corona to GLB

« on: 2024-09-11, 12:39:49 »

Fantastic thanks!!

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[Max] Corona Goodies - User Contributions / Re: Corona to GLB

« on: 2024-09-11, 11:35:47 »

No worries Tom.

alexyork, the "Export GLB File(s)" button exports your glb to your directory of choice, from there you drag/drop it into the babylon page. You shouldnt need to do any uploading to webhosting etc, I often test my exports by doing the exact same thing (as per my youtube video).

Drag and drop your .glb file here (anywhere on the page):
https://sandbox.babylonjs.com/

You can also test it locally by double clicking on the glb file and opening it in Windows 3D Viewer

Thanks so much! Somehow I'd missed that you can view these directly offline in Windows 3D Viewer - handy! I've been throwing them in their sandbox but that's their own template which is nice, but for my needs I'm trying to set up a very basic template with a simple white background, which I'm defining through HTML, and loading my model into that. It works as I mentioned but only when running off the webhosting, not locally, which is odd, but I guess a limitation of how the babylon.js works.

I don't suppose you know of any resources online for some basic templates for the viewer we can download and tweak?

Thanks again for the pointers!

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[Max] Corona Goodies - User Contributions / Re: Corona to GLB

« on: 2024-09-11, 10:21:12 »

James, once again thank you - super helpful. I have a request - I wonder if you'd consider implementing some kind of user-friendly sandbox either within the script or as a button after everything's exported to 1-button test the object inside a Babylon.js sandbox? This might help with quicker verification that everything has worked correctly with the materials and exports etc.

As an aside, I'm finding that I'm unable to test local babylon viewers and I'm forced to first throw it all onto my webhosting for testing - do you have the same or is there something I'm doing wrong?

Cheers!

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[Max] Corona Goodies - User Contributions / Re: Corona to GLB

« on: 2024-09-10, 12:17:29 »

Fantastic work, thank you!

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[Max] I need help! / Re: material editor SLOW - i think its a CORONA issue?

« on: 2024-09-06, 16:11:19 »

I agree with a recent poster - working with materials is by far the slowest, most clunky and awkward part of working creatively with Corona in 3ds max, I think. It does very much sound like it comes down to lack of QT implementation. I personally use Compact 99% of the time, because I'm working with library materials, not creating things from scratch, and rarely need the benefit of nodes. Navigating CoronaPhysicMtls inside this is... painfully slow, and does tend to get worse the longer the max session is running. Hopefully the switch to QT can be made soon as a priority.

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[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Caustics playground!

« on: 2024-08-15, 15:16:37 »

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[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Caustics playground!

« on: 2024-08-08, 09:24:05 »

Hey devs,

Are you able to share any insight into your plans for caustics on the roadmap, based on all the feedback you have from users over the last few years? It would be good to know what you're aiming for and testing out even if you can't give a time-frame.