Messages

1

[Max] General Discussion / Re: Has anyone tried rendering any complex animation with corona yet?

« on: 2016-02-16, 13:33:32 »

Well that's a crazy amount of noise - far more than you'd ever allow for a final render, I imagine.

The reality is that you want minimal noise in your work no matter what you're doing, and when you do have a little noise still visible in some areas it is always better that it's random, so it looks more like film grain and is compatible with noise reduction software as well, so at least you have a chance to deal with it in post.

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[Max] Resolved Bugs / Re: Render Selected Mode: vs Region

« on: 2016-02-16, 11:17:49 »

Even if you set the region to be the whole view?

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[Max] General Discussion / Re: Has anyone tried rendering any complex animation with corona yet?

« on: 2016-02-16, 09:38:02 »

But in your video, on the fireplace, the random noise it terrible =) In my opinion, with static noise, you can reduce the noise flickering =)
Anyway, stunning lighting! O_O

Thank you ;) Yes, I agree that there are some noise issues in that shot, on the fireplace. But I don't think it would look any better static. It just needed more passes. We encountered some issues with incorrect bump mapping values as a result of going from 1.3 daily to 1.2.1 on a render farm, which caused this, so we did our best to re-render and de-noise. I think it's an acceptable amount of noise but it could be better, definitely. It seems that issue is now gone forever from 1.3 onwards too, which is good :)

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[Max] General Discussion / Re: Has anyone tried rendering any complex animation with corona yet?

« on: 2016-02-15, 21:29:26 »

In my personal opinion, in fly-through animations, I prefer static noise, instead random noise. =) It's much more pleasant. With random noise on every frame, it looks live we have some "animals, bugs, insect" on the wall )) Also, my stupid client recognized the random noise, but not the static noise. =)

Hmm.... for me, static noise is just terrible. If you have a little random noise then that's at least somewhat like film grain, which most people are very familiar with seeing in motion pictures. Static noise just looks terrible on walls for example. I can't see any scenario where you'd want to use it, and as someone earlier said, most de-noising algorithms won't work with static noise either.

We've done quite a bit of animation work in Corona recently and we'll be publishing it very soon. Here's one for now:

http://atelieryork.co.uk/seaford-court/

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[Max] Daily Builds / Re: New VFB features

« on: 2016-02-15, 18:13:15 »

Alex, Noah,

What did you think of my 'hold shift to add' region marquee suggestion?

Sounds spot-on to me, yep.

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[Max] Daily Builds / Re: New VFB features

« on: 2016-02-15, 10:48:11 »

Exciting times! ;)

I'd like to see what everyone else here is clamouring for, of course, but also:

- Clear VFB Within Region Only option - currently it seems that if you clear VFB between renders it kills the entire VFB, not just the current region.

- Mark-Up Tool - just a simple red pen tool so we can make some marks and notes

- Multiple Regions at same time

- Dynamic zoom levels

- Zoom about cursor instead of centre

- Zoom buttons (useful for tablets/remote control)

- Set Region Off (and On) Toggle

- Big one for us: A proper realtime link so even when you are using CoronaCameraMod on your camera, you can still control those settings in the VFB. Currently they all get greyed out when you do this. In other words, for the VFB to pick up all the current settings from the CCM and then pipe them back into the CCM as you change them.

If we think of more we'll edit this post.

7

General CG Discussion / Re: Multiple Monitors, Win10, Nvidia - Windows/Apps moving to wrong monitor

« on: 2016-01-29, 11:53:33 »

Maybe when PC goes to sleep it automatically switches to iGPU, and when you wake it, it switches back to the other one (or something similar happens). If it's the case, my guess would be that it could be fixed in BIOS by forcing the additional GPU to be always active.

No iGPU here. Running xeon E5 processors. There is surprisingly little to no info on this anywhere online that I can find :/

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General CG Discussion / Re: Multiple Monitors, Win10, Nvidia - Windows/Apps moving to wrong monitor

« on: 2016-01-29, 09:45:10 »

I wonder if it's a driver thing.

My colleague has the same issue, with a different graphics card and only 2 monitors.

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General CG Discussion / Multiple Monitors, Win10, Nvidia - Windows/Apps moving to wrong monitor

« on: 2016-01-28, 16:35:05 »

Hi everyone,

Anyone else using the setup in title? I have 3 x monitors and whenever I turn them all off each evening, when I come in to work the next morning and switch them back on all my windows/apps are rearranged on the wrong windows, as are my desktop icons. I am using a program to sort out the icons, which works fine, but I can't find a solution for the windows. It's happening with max, photoshop, the whole lot. And what's worse is that it moves all the docked and floating windows within these apps, and they are all rearranged each time. Nightmare!

Anyone know a fix?

Win 10, gtx 970, 3 x dell monitors (different resolutions).

Cheers,

10

General CG Discussion / Re: Does anyone actually use mental ray?

« on: 2016-01-28, 16:32:18 »

Back in the day it was my no. 1 choice. It was (and probably still is) extremely robust. It leant itself to a kind of "get it right or it won't render at all" mentality, which forced you to be really clean and accurate with your models and mats/lights. Other renderers of the day were throwing around all sorts of tricks for getting around bad geometry but MR was kind of steadfast and stubborn, which resulted in really good results if you played nicely with it. It also had some very pioneering tools such as render subset of scene, which was missing from all other renders for *years*. That and per-object AA controls etc. I gave talks at various places on how good MR was, and I meant it.

I made the switch from MR to Vray back in around mid 2011 because I was very impressed with Vray's general speed, particularly for exteriors, and for compatibility with the pool of freelancers around London at the time, who were basically all vray trained by that point. Trying to find talented MR guys was a total pain!

MR handled/s materials and lights very nicely. I always enjoyed working with it. Did some seriously big animation projects with it and loved the workflow and results. At the time it was a very sound option for any kind of work. I've not looked at it since, so I have no idea what it's like to use these days. For me, and most around me, "unbiased" renderers are now totally feasible in everyday production, so there's no reason not to use them. Iray still piques my interest from time-to-time because of GPU-acceleration, but the current VRAM limitations still make it unusable for us. That should change soon though from what I keep hearing. Interesting to see how that will change the game!

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[Max] Corona Goodies - User Contributions / Re: CoronaTools maxscript

« on: 2016-01-27, 12:02:15 »

Looks great. I will let others bugtest and jump on when more robust, but thank you for doing this. It's needed, for sure.

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[Max] Resolved Bugs / Re: DR maps not transferring (this old problem again...)

« on: 2016-01-26, 16:32:54 »

Here is .reg file which does Juraj's fix with one doubleclick. Not sure if restart is necessary

Excellent! FWIW I didn't need to restart my nodes after doing this manually.

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[Max] Resolved Bugs / Re: DR maps not transferring (this old problem again...)

« on: 2016-01-26, 15:49:47 »

Well.. good news! It works! Maru's steps fixed things. I.e. disabling "run as admin" and enabling security privileges for the drserver folder.

Actually all the glory goes to Ondra. I am just his little helper. ;)

Maru, is there any way of making this happen during installation somehow so users can avoid having to do it?

Hopefully it is possible. The problem is acknowledged and we will be attempting to fix it.

Great to hear it! Looking forward to 1.4 too, and more VR support. Cheers.

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[Max] Resolved Bugs / Re: DR maps not transferring (this old problem again...)

« on: 2016-01-26, 15:31:05 »

Well.. good news! It works! Maru's steps fixed things. I.e. disabling "run as admin" and enabling security privileges for the drserver folder.

Maru, is there any way of making this happen during installation somehow so users can avoid having to do it?

Thanks again.

Cheers,

15

[Max] Resolved Bugs / Re: DR maps not transferring (this old problem again...)

« on: 2016-01-26, 15:21:25 »

Thank you both! Will try these suggestions out and see if there's any change.

Cheers,