Chaos Corona for 3ds Max > [Max] Tutorials & Guides

Corona Tips & Tricks

(1/5) > >>

romullus:
This topic is for collecting various tips and tricks related to Corona. If you have some small secrets that helps you while working with Corona, do not hestitate to share it with comunity. I'm sure everyone will be thankfull for that.

To keep topic nice and tidy here's few simple rules that i ask you to follow before posting something:

* One advice or technique per post. No need to cram everything you know into single space - it just makes search more difficult.
* No chatter. Please, do not post something like thanks, cool, didn't know that. Lets keep this topic for useful information only. Posts that contains no value will be deleted.
* Don't ask for advice or help, we have aprropriate board for that. However, you can ask if there's something unclear in previous posts or you want to add something from yourself. Bear in mind that lengthy discussions may be split into separate topics.
So, lets get started!

romullus:
Take advantage of displacement adaptivity. If you have a map that contains quite large areas of almost pure white or black color, you can clamp those colors with color map curve and Corona's adaptivity algorithm will kick in with full strength, saving you a lot of RAM and possibly render time. See attached pictures for proof.

romullus:
Blur displacement maps. Usually generic textures contains too much high frequency details to be used for displacement. Plug such texture directly into displacement slot and results won't be good (1). One can try to play with color map curve, but this doesn't work well with every map (2), but if one adds a little amount of blurring, wonderful results may be achieved (3). One can always mix blurred texture with original one to bring back a little bit detail (4).

romullus:
Here's small trick with CoronaScatter. Lets say you want to distribute with CScatter some number of instances on certain area as evenly as possible. Usually results are not that good - in some places instances forms clusters, in other places there are large gaps left. That's not exactly what we want. Luckily, there is simple solution. Set scatter count to relatively large number so instances would cover all area without bigger gaps, enable Avoid collisions and adjust spacing until you reach desired density.

romullus:
Since we don't have camera culling option in CoronaScatter yet, we can do it very easy for ourselfs. There's only a few steps required.

1. create distribution plane, give it a few subdivisions (our camera culling won't work very well on a big single polygon), also create objects to be scattered, some camera and CoronaScatter object. Increase scattered instances count and enable avoid collisions. Last step is optional, but without it you may need to constantly adjust scatter count.



2. add camera map (WSM) modifier to distribution plane, click pick camera button and choose your camera. You can change mapping channel if needed or leave it at default.



3. open material editor and create gradient ramp map, set it's mapping channel to same as in camera map modifier, disable U and V tiling and set all flag's colours to white.



4. assign previously created gradient ramp to CoronaScatter's density slot. Voila! We have perfectly working camera culling now.



Now you can play with gradient ramp to further improve camera culling funcionality. Try to change gradient type to box and set one of the flags to black - you will get nice fallof in instances density. If you need to extend camera culling beyond image borders, decrease gradient ramp tiling to 0.9 or any other value.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page