I will send a scene of the current project, if team have the time to investigate. Just need to complete the project first .
Have already checked the thread couple of times, and for some reason never happened to be across the limitations. Bugs are bugs, obviously solved by next versions or one finds a way to revolve around them. I am not IT guy, nor know how to script, but intuition has always helped in the past years to narrow down the possible solutions and it has worked great so far.
The issues am about to mention are not only related to Corona, nor to version 1.7, but they are present for couple of years.
Currently experiencing several issues with a scene, which is bit bigger - the above mentioned which will send later to team. The problems appear at certain stage at almost every exterior project which have started during the past 6 months - the bigger the scale and the more the scatter'ss/railclone's, the worse:
1. Flashing 3ds max screens when hit "stop" while rendering. Afterwards can not save the scene or wait for 10+ min until 3ds max somehow recovers. The problem seemed to be at higher scale, since it happened in vray. After dealing with Win Defender settings, managed to fix it in Vray, but when render complex scene in Corona at higher res, the problem appears back. Solutions suggest reinstalling some Microsoft programs, reinstall all 3ds max related software and plugins.
2. Railclone, Forest pack..... ah where to start. Parsing, vertices, not working multitextures...Most of these seem listed in both plugins. Also encountered that when there are multiple Railclone objects across the scene with mixed visibility settings active (point cloud, adaptive, box, mesh), could not even render the scene- parsing either freezes or takes 20 + min. Forest pack edge mode - major problem. The biggest speedup in my personal workflow is due to using Railclone, thus leaving more work to experiment.
3. Opening the same scene takes 5+ minutes. Few textures missing, which is not the case. Tried merging in new scene, cleaning the scene, deleting the wide variety of objects, which project insist using, and narrowing down the variations of proxies to no more than 30. Same slow opening, long parsing, unstable rendering, and lag in 3ds max viewport. Material editor - super slow and unsatble, picking object materials can provoke 3ds max crash. Tried testing 3ds max for viruses - it returns false.
5. Just got message from Corona that current scene takes 90GB virtual ram. Deleted even more objects, railclone ones as well, proxies, cleaned up scene even more. Hit render - 50 GB on loading, and RAm consumption decreases down to 18-20 when rendering for around 30 min. I was aware of the the RAM issues in the past, but managed to squeeze similar and bigger projects in the past within 32 GB ram, like 2 years ago.
When a scene renders, it does render indeed quickly, clean... But wondering how much time an artist should waste on waiting for interactive view to refresh, scene to load or parse to do a job. How much time is necessary to always test and keep track of the compatible elements between plugins, to devote time to test, to put a list of all issues which each and every software used in workflow brings and play the game of "true" and " false" when fighting with problems when deadlines are out there.
The point is that whole workflow somehow became quick but "bulky" during the past years - obviously updating to most recent versions still causes trouble. Downgrading works, but involves to keep a list and try every single new version in the past so that one knows which is the exact version and we shall not forget Microsoft, who obviously tend to put a lot of pressure on software and hardware developers, people using it and eventually clients. Every now and then we need just stable versions, who just work seamlessly. Speed is nothing, if we do not have compatibility and stability...
The questions which put on the table are the following:
If a certain scene does not work with most recent versions, what is the chance of finding the culprit- by looking at the forums of each software?
Having all software developers stating mostly the advantages of using their latest software, how one can be sure, that the problems are due to one specific tool - win, or autodesk, or itoo software, or Corona/Chaos group? Send a scene we will investigate - just does not work for our clients. :)
If there is indeed a problem with one of above - mentioned or any other, which version should one always revert to - if not render fast, at least do the job? I do not seem to easily find a list of most used archviz autodesk related plugins with a map of their development throughout time with compatibility between each other.
