Topics

1

[Max] I need help! / Bitmap Render Mask

« on: 2017-03-03, 16:33:35 »

Hi All,

Is there a bitmap render mask feature in Corona? Which is to say that I can use a black and white bitmap to define which areas get rendered and which don't? I thought there was but I might be confusing it with VRay, which definitely does.

Thanks!
Dan

2

[Max] Resolved Bugs / CoronaUtils2016.dlt failed to initialize on Windows Server 2012R2 - Corona 1.4

« on: 2016-05-17, 17:23:37 »

Hi guys,

We just upgraded to Corona 1.4 and we're loving it so far! It's working perfectly on all our workstations which run everything between Windows 7 and Windows 10. Max 2016 SP1.

However, we also have some servers that use Windows Server 2012R2 and whilst 1.2.1 and 1.3 worked fine, 1.4 offers me the following error in the Backburner server window (I have no Max license on these nodes so I can't actually launch Max in UI mode):



The installation does the "installing additional magic" redistributable and offers no errors. I went to the Windows website and tried to update it manually but it said I already had it installed. I installed all the Windows updates I could and it runs (in a virtualised environment) Xeon E5-2670's.

I just uninstalled 1.4 and went back to 1.3 and that worked without problem.

Any thoughts?

3

[Max] I need help! / Corona renders randomly ending early on Backburner

« on: 2016-04-06, 12:39:08 »

Hi Guys,

Not totally sure if this is a Corona problem or a Backburner problem but this is happening:

- I submit a 200 frame render
- It's rendering fine, using all machines, taking roughly 30 minutes to do 200 passes.
- One of the machines will appear to successfully finish a frame in 5 minutes.
- The output is correctly saved, including all passes. However, the quality is much lower - as you would expect for a render of only 5 minutes.
- This same machine will then usually go off and render something of higher priority (another 3D scene, a Nuke render etc)
- It'll will then re-join the original job, and continue rendering fine.

So it seems to cut out when a job of higher priority comes along. But this isn't supposed to be the case - it's meant to finish the frame as expected, then move on.

So my question is this: Does Corona support some sort of "finish early" request from Backburner that I've never seen before because no other renderers support it? We've been using Corona for well over a year now and I've not seen this behaviour before, but it happened with two separate machines on the same job, so I'm very curious to hear if anyone has experienced something similar.

For what it's worth, in the Backburner Server window on the node it said something like...

3dsmax adapter: Corona: Pass 28/200

3dsmax adapter: Corona: Pass 29/200

3dsmax adapter: Corona: Pass 30/200

3dsmax adapter: Corona: Saving + Cleaning Up

So it doesn't seem like it error'd.

Any ideas?!

4

[Max] I need help! / AO Problem

« on: 2015-02-05, 15:04:05 »

Hi Guys,

I have a small problem with AO. By default, the AO settings are slightly shonky - you end up with a sort of "overlap" in the corners of buildings that is a perfect square. For example...



It looks a bit weird and makes it practically unusable.

If you edit the settings, though, to read something like this...



Then you end up with an image like...



Much better! The only problem is, these settings "pull in" the AO a lot, which requires you to then bump up the "Max Distance" - for example, in the top image the setting is at 5m, and in the bottom one it's at 30m.

The problem then is that if you take it too high, entire faces just go completely black. This is the case whether you switch the other settings or not, but it's only really a problem here because of the significant "pull in" to get the nice AO.

So ideally I'd love to hear any advice to either a) get rid of the surface turning black with higher Max Distance properties or b) otherwise get a nice AO without the doubling up in the corner in such a way that doesn't require increasing the max distance.

Thanks!

5

[Max] I need help! / Corona & Amazon

« on: 2014-07-31, 19:23:44 »

Hi There,

Firstly, I love the renderer! You chaps came to visit us at River Film in London a few months back and we've been using it in a number of productions already; We'll be ready to show off a few soon!

However, my problem stems from Corona Alpha 7's licensing. It's all very simple and easy on our workstations, but we have a render farm in the cloud using Amazon's EC2 platform. The problem I have is that the render nodes that we boot up in the cloud there cannot access the internet. When I launched one in order to install Corona (and then create an "image" of that machine to launch again later) I was able to install it by using the activation website - it all worked fine. However, when I boot other machines, they take a job from Back Burner but then sit there with the license activation screen up (with the request code showing). Obviously they get no further than this.

Now I assume the problem stems from the fact that all the machines have different names, different MAC addresses or any number of "unique" machine numbers that can be used to tie a license to a machine. But is there any way to avoid this? At the moment it's really stopping us from being able to use it in this production as it's very render-heavy and we can't rely on our local farm alone.

Thanks,
Dan