Messages

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[Max] General Discussion / Animation in Corona vs Vantage vs D5

« on: 2025-05-14, 04:47:59 »

Just trying to offload some self frustration here.

Our visualisation team has just completed a retail project animation rendered in Corona and it's taken us a whole week of non stop rendering 24/7, fixing flickering, re-rendering with Anima, forestpack plugins only for the architecture team to output more than double the animation footage in 24 hours in D5 and looking 80% as good as our Corona output. We've got a few EPYC servers as farms along with another bunch of older 10700K's and 12900K's to help with the CPU rendering. We tried to output the scene from Max to Vantage to test but it wasn't having it and erroring out (Prob not optimised in some way but the deadline was tight so we just gave up)

At this rate our team is getting out competed by non visualisers doing the same kind of work and acceptable level of output for a presentation using a free software (D5) whilst we're justifying to the Finance dept to renew Corona, purchasing Anima 6 and updates to all our other plugins. It just feels like it's the end of the road for us a as a team within the company and the senior execs are certainly noticing this in the rates.

We're so on the edge of jumping onto D5 for animation work and migrate our pipeline across. I love Corona and the quality is still far beyond D5, Twinmotion, Enscape etc and especially for high end still image work. But for Animation esp the time it takes to output.. It's taking too much time for us.

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[Max] General Discussion / Re: Displacement is still rubbish

« on: 2025-02-05, 08:29:51 »

Is this function basically the "Keep Continuity" option in Vray displacement? I remember Vray has this resolved. Maybe this needs to be added into Corona.

https://docs.chaos.com/display/VMAX/VRayDisplacementMod

Are there any plans to drastically improve displacement because frankly it's still absolutely terrible and absolutely riddled with artifacts.

The ONLY way to get displacement to behave correctly is by having a perfect quad mesh with dense uniformly sized quads, which is ridiculous in the context of modeling buildings with chamfered edges because the size of the uniform quads would need be driven by the tightness of the edges around the chamfers.  And absolutely nobody is modeling walls/buildings with perfectly uniform tiny quads.  Model basic wall, add edge loops for window openings, delete poly to create window opening, chamfer modifier for rounded corners.  That should be more than enough for modeling buildings.  But no, not if you want to use displacement.  Then you have to make sure the geometry is perfectly uniform quads.

It doesn't even work on simple flat surface, see the driveway in the artifacts screenshot below.  That's a spline for the main shape, then extruded, then edit poly with everything but the top face deleted.

The screenshots below are an override material with preserve disaplacement enabled. 1px for the displacement.  5k render.  The override shader has wires to highlight just how many artifacts there still are.

I've also done a simple version with some simply geometry, however, in this example I've made the driveway a really dense quad mesh so you can see how the displacement improves.  But I couldn't imagine refining that simple piece of geometry to a dense uniform quad mesh just to get displacement to work properly.  It's just not practical in the context of a full scene with full buildings as opposed to simplified example geometry.  The mesh in the viewport screenshot should be more than enough for a typical building.

Displacement is a mess.

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[Max] General Discussion / Re: Corona 12 Update 1

« on: 2025-01-03, 04:53:30 »

Is there any news on fixes to this issue? Heading into a massive project at work this month with big scenes. Just want this issue fixed so it doesn't bog down our productivity.

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[Max] General Discussion / Re: Corona auto-renewing and billed without notification

« on: 2025-01-03, 04:40:22 »

Yes, not even a single email to say that there was an upcoming payment. I'm so angry about this. I didn't even need to renew as we have licenses at work. I just feel like it's cash grab by playing off people unaware of their subscription dates.

Yup, i raised this a couple of months back.  I used to get emails about my upcoming payment etc etc, this year I just got an email to say it had been renewed, it didn't even tell me how much etc etc.  The communication side of things is very poor these days

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[Max] General Discussion / Corona auto-renewing and billed without notification

« on: 2025-01-02, 09:45:00 »

So I've been running the 3 month free trial for Corona, and just today it automatically took payment and billed me for a whole year subscription which I don't even need anymore since we have licenses in the office. I'm so pissed! I didn't even recieve any email to say that my trial was expiring and that on a certain date the software would be auto-renewed or billed. That's 500 USD gone down the drain..

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[Max] General Discussion / Re: Corona 12 Update 1

« on: 2024-12-16, 04:57:44 »

Our whole team is getting the mouse lag issue too in IR and Viewport. it's really affecting our productivity.

We're running 12900K's and Quadro RTX4000 cards and never had this issue till 12.1

I encountered crazy mouse lag during IR and also when doing anything in SME.  But oddly I experienced (milder) mouse lag even without IR running, even just running the mouse over a complex object in the viewport would cause slight lag.  I downgraded pretty fast back to the July 30 DB which didn't have those problems and then from there to HF 1 which, for me, performs the same as that DB.  I didn't upgrade my nodes or do any major rendering with 12.1 so I can't speak to rendertimes, the lag was a dealbreaker for me and I have deadlines :)

I hope they figure out what's going on with 12.1.  Cheers,
Daniel

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[Max] General Discussion / Re: Corona 12 Update 1

« on: 2024-12-13, 07:58:16 »

I'm getting a slow down in general too, the max viewport just feels sluggish and mouse cursor is sometimes ghosting due to latency. Interactive rendering just seems slow to refresh..

I looked into the task manager. can anyone tell me what this is for (see attachment) and why are there multiple instances of it? It's tied to Corona Renderer.

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[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Corona 12 VFB UI

« on: 2024-07-08, 05:47:16 »

Upon further investigation, yes the new VFB is using twice as many vertical pixels on the top horizontal menu bar and the RHS menu is super spaced out...

Not sure why this change is necessary, we need all the screen space we can get - viewing renders, changing settings etc and especially in interactive rendering mode (the interactive view especially since a full 100% preview is limited by the pixel height of our monitors without zoom) We also have multiple menus open in max at the same time during production.

For now I've gone into Corona system settings and reverted back to the last VFB instead of VFB 2.0

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[Max] Daily Builds / Corona 12 VFB UI

« on: 2024-07-08, 05:09:46 »

Is it me or the UI in Corona 12 is using a bit more pixel space? Everything seems a bit more spread out especially the top part of the window. Just feels like a lot of wasted screen real estate and those buttons on the top row don't need to be so big (It looks like the UI you would use for basic software like enscape/twinmotion or something...)

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[Max] General Discussion / Multimap slow when used on many objects

« on: 2023-09-14, 10:47:10 »

We've notice rendering grinds to a halt when lots of multimaps have been used in different materials applied to trees and foilage specifically when using multimap on instances and mesh element. We also used multimap on the scene spotlights and bulb objects with light material applied on. Is this somewhat a known issue?

The render went from rays/s 3.5 million to rays/s 700,000 on an i9 12900K.   

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[Max] General Discussion / Re: AMD Epyc Dual 64C 128T rendering with Corona 9

« on: 2023-02-12, 18:17:20 »

Maybe a silly question, but is it worth the price of such a system ?...

I guess it depends on your rendering needs. We had to render a lot of animation work lately and using an online renderfarm was too costly especially since we have to develop the animation throughout the process so a lot  of draft rendering was required for interim meetings before final rendering.

We had considered buying a large number of desktops based on either Intel 12900K’s at the time or Ryzen 7950x’s but we calculated that we needed around 10 systems and it just wasn’t feasible space wise to hook up 10+ PC’s together with 10 separate power supplies and network connections. On top of that you have to deal with 10 installs and multiple software licenses. The hardware would have cost much less than the dual Epycs though.

Having the dual epycs on racks allowed us to store them in the server room which is temp controlled and saves a lot of space. In the long run I think the return on investment is justifiable. We will be using these for the next several years.

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[Max] General Discussion / Re: AMD Epyc Dual 64C 128T rendering with Corona 9

« on: 2023-02-12, 05:51:44 »

What can be happening with Epycs is more complicated inter-core communication with the 64+ core versions esp. in multiple sockets. Dataset on one CPU will need to access the data-set on second one. Populating channels is thus not increasing the performance, but just making sure a bottleneck isn't happening.

Yes I think the 64 Core versions of the EPYCS running in multiple sockets is the issue here with Corona and not every dual CPU system. That's why it was so hard to find out what the problem was as there wasn't many user cases out there.

Thanks again for the advices given.

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[Max] Bug Reporting / Re: dual CPU issues?

« on: 2023-02-11, 05:47:24 »

Some updates on our experience with a DUAL CPU system

On our Dual EPYC node, we realised that 4 x 64Gb Dimm configuration was the issue. Supposedly on a Single CPU, filling 4 Dimm slots would enable the system to run in Quad Channel but since we have 2 CPU's then 4 Dimms is just a Dual Channel Memory set up and we would need 8 Dimms for Quad Channel or 16 Dimms for 8-Channel Memory set ups. (Our school boy error when setting out the original specifications).

So it seems Corona is much more bandwidth dependent on the number of memory channels much more so than Vray and Cinebench. When we ran benchmarks for Vray and Cinebench in Dual Channel, the scores were very good and matched to other systems of similar spec. It was only Corona that had issues, Dual Channel Ram literally halved the performance on the Corona Benchmark giving us around 20seconds where as Quad Channel gave a respectable 11 seconds. I suspect 8-Channel may push the Corona benchmark to 8-9 seconds but we don't have enough Ram to test this.

Other things we considered to resolve this speed issue before switch the RAM were:

- Upgrading to Windows Pro 11 Workstation Edition (This version can run more CPU's and RAM than Windows 11 Pro but it didn't affect our case even with 128 Cores and 256 Threads)
- Turning off Virtualization (Didnt really do much)
- Turning off VBS, Core Isolation and Memory Integrity on Windows (Didn't really do much)
- Power Plan on High Performance (Both in Windows and BIOS - Not sure how this affects the system performance as yet)
- NUMA settings on BIOS (Not yet looked into it) 
- Windows Updates and latest BIOS

Hope this can help others out there configuring Dual Socket Systems.  I would be interested to know from the Corona Development team why there is such a dramatic performance difference between DUAL and QUAD/8 Channel RAM configs as Vray doesn't have this issue at all.

Cheers.

14

[Max] General Discussion / Re: AMD Epyc Dual 64C 128T rendering with Corona 9

« on: 2023-02-11, 05:44:43 »

Some updates and positive news.

On our Dual EPYC node, we realised that 4 x 64Gb Dimm configuration was the issue. Supposedly on a Single CPU, filling 4 Dimm slots would enable the system to run in Quad Channel but since we have 2 CPU's then 4 Dimms is just a Dual Channel Memory set up and we would need 8 Dimms for Quad Channel or 16 Dimms for 8-Channel Memory set ups. (Our school boy error when setting out the original specifications).

So it seems Corona is much more bandwidth dependent on the number of memory channels much more so than Vray and Cinebench. When we ran benchmarks for Vray and Cinebench in Dual Channel, the scores were very good and matched to other systems of similar spec. It was only Corona that had issues, Dual Channel Ram literally halved the performance on the Corona Benchmark giving us around 20seconds where as Quad Channel gave a respectable 11 seconds. I suspect 8-Channel may push the Corona benchmark to 8-9 seconds but we don't have enough Ram to test this.

Other things we considered to resolve this speed issue before switch the RAM were:

- Upgrading to Windows Pro 11 Workstation Edition (This version can run more CPU's and RAM than Windows 11 Pro but it didn't affect our case even with 128 Cores and 256 Threads)
- Turning off Virtualization (Didnt really do much)
- Turning off VBS, Core Isolation and Memory Integrity on Windows (Didn't really do much)
- Power Plan on High Performance (Both in Windows and BIOS - Not sure how this affects the system performance as yet)
- NUMA settings on BIOS (Not yet looked into it) 
- Windows Updates and latest BIOS

Hope this can help others out there configuring Dual Socket Systems.  I would be interested to know from the Corona Development team why there is such a dramatic performance difference between DUAL and QUAD/8 Channel RAM configs as Vray doesn't have this issue at all.

Cheers.

15

[Max] General Discussion / Re: Corona 1.3 Benchmark

« on: 2023-02-08, 10:28:44 »

Just wondering what do these numbers mean at the end of the CPU column?