Messages

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[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Chaos Corona 13 for 3ds Max - Daily Builds Discussion

« on: 2025-05-25, 19:29:51 »

I would ask to add mappable "Amount" value for Thin Film and min-max thickness values for more usability.

I understand that you wanted to simplify the approach, but this only complicates it.

Yes, adjustable amount can be emulated by adding a map to the thickness / IOR slots, but such setups only become more complicated.
1) To simulate the mappable amount value, you need to use sufficiently contrasting maps, otherwise we will get a rainbow transition instead of a smooth fading at the boundaries even if we don't want it.
2) Despite the fact that the film thickness is set in nanometers, when I add a Corona color with a HDR [1.0 1.0 1.0] value to the slot, it corresponds to 5000 nm (and I expect 1 nm).
And when I use Solid Color with 1.0 output multiplier the shader performs linear interpolation and white 1.0 corresponds to the nm value set in the spinner. 2 completely different logic aprroaches that make no sense to me as a user.

In this case, it would be logical if white 1.0 corresponded to the value of 1 nm and then I could use Corona Color with output multiplier to accurately set the values ​​of the minimum and maximum thickness (using 2 CoronaColor maps as the input for the Noise map for example), but now I have to calculate which color from the [0 : 1] range corresponds to the value I need in nanometers. This does not make life easier.

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Hardware / Re: GPU - 3ds max

« on: 2025-04-01, 12:55:37 »

Also, the 5xxx series seem to be having more issues than we've seen in a generation of cards possibly ever :)

btw, Intel GPU AI interactive denoiser doesn't work on rtx 5090 with Corona 12 update 1 hotfix 1
Juraj, if it's not too much trouble, pass this on to the developers

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Hardware / Re: AMD 9950x

« on: 2025-03-20, 23:39:14 »

ps can you please provide a link to the reddit thread you were talking about?

It's this one: https://www.reddit.com/r/overclocking/comments/1i1cmwi/9950x_with_192gb_4x48gb_at_expo_6000cl30_stable/

64gb pr stick on sounds crazy for am5, but maybe worth waiting a couple of months to see what happens? But then again, we can always juuust wait a bit longer for something new and better. My old xeon at home (which this build will replace) scores only 5mil rays in the corona benchmark, and running on 64gb 3200mhz ram :D So no matter what, I will feel the upgrade. Last night I was tempted to just go with a 9900x and 2x48gb and save a lot of money and probably headache. The 9900x is almost half price of the 9950x3d and I would still get over 2x performance compared to my old system. With ai upscaling, I don't see a huge need to be able to render out more than 3-4k native and for that I think the 9900x might be enough and use the saved money to save up for a better gpu. End of day it's only for the occasional freelance job, but I can feel the old pc at home is troubled + win10 updates will end this year and it so old its not allowed to upgrade. Curious if the 9000 series will have smoother IR and material editor performance than the 3990x threadrippers we use at work.

I just looked and saw that I have exactly this memory, as described in this post on reddit. I'll try to overclock it :D In any case, I advise you to take at least 9950x, even without x3d and high overclocking, this is a processor with exceptional performance for its power consumption.
I hope that soon all these lags when working with it in Corona will be fixed.

By the way, I saw that in the neighboring topic you were choosing a case and a cooling system for a quiet build. I'm using the FD Meshify XL 2 with dark tempered glass (I'm also a fan of the "Big Black Box That Works"). There are no fancy RGB lights, it's very well ventilated, and there's enough room for 2*420 radiators and any GPU.

I assume you're leaning toward air cooling, but I can recommend you my setup. I'm using the Arctic Liquid Freezer 420 III without RGB lights, and it cost me under $100 on Amazon. I also bought 2 sets of 5 high-speed 140 mm Arctic P14 Max fans for $45 per set. And 2 Arctic fan controllers for $9 each to control them. So, 6 fans are on the AIO radiator in a push-pull configuration, 3 fans are in the front of the case for intake, and another 1 is in the back for exhaust.

So for ~$200 I got a cooling system that dissipates 260 watts of heat in virtually silent mode. It would seem that 10 fans should make a lot of noise and yes, at 3000 RPM it sounds like a jet engine. But the trick is that each fan up to 1000 RPM is virtually silent and even at these speeds it transfers quite a large volume of air (especially considering the number of fans), and the area of ​​the large 420 * 38 mm radiator is enough to dissipate a lot of heat without actually turning on the fans. Therefore, under everyday load without rendering (web surfing, single-core applications, etc.) the fans are almost always off or are within 600 RPM) And when rendering I raise the speed to 1000-1400 RPM and they remain very quiet.
Considering that I also have PBO activated and the limits are disabled, I believe that in stock mode within 200-220W it will work almost silently.

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Hardware / Re: AMD 9950x

« on: 2025-03-19, 20:05:29 »

cheers marchik, good insight! Should (in theory) any 6000mhz cl 30 48gb modules work in a 4x configuration? If having to lower ram speeds as you did, does that have a real life performance slow down in production work or is it just for gamers? (I don't care about the gaming performance).

Reason I ask is that the modules I saw by other reddit user who managed to run 4x48gb at 6000mhz, is currently sold out.

I think that with timing selection and OC skills, you can run a lot of RAM sticks at 6000 MHz, but among the "plug & play" solutions I only know that recently Biwin announced 192GB DDR5-6000 and DDR5-6400 memory kits, but they are not yet on sale (and I'm not sure that any motherboard can handle them). Personally, I use 4*48 GB VENGEANCE 6000 CL30 AMD EXPO CMK96GX5M2B6000Z30 (2 different kits of 2 sticks) and it works quite well, I think with experience you can make them work at 6000, it will just take days or weeks of fine tuning.

Memory speed does not dramatically affect performance in our tasks, within 3% I would say. This is purely a race for numbers and ego.

For most users, a 4*48 set generally works at 3600 or 4400, so there is no reason to complain. But now almost all boards with 8+ PCB layers can withstand 5200 without problems, and this is already enough.

and by the way, I noticed that the latest BIOS updates for my motherboard claim support for 256 GB kits (4x64GB), and I think I've already seen them on sale (I can't confirm for sure right now, I need to study this issue in more detail), so soon we'll be chasing completely different ddr volumes and solving other problems :D

ps can you please provide a link to the reddit thread you were talking about?

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Hardware / Re: AMD 9950x

« on: 2025-03-19, 02:38:06 »

thank you for the update, I think I will go for the 9950x3d too

In any case, I would recommend waiting for the mass benchmark results. It is quite possible that reviewers now just have selected samples of chips and all the advantage over 9950x is explained by this (for the same reason, my sample is just slightly worse than others). And I do not see objective reasons why it should give a result better than 9950x. In the end we don't know at what settings of curve offsets and PBO limits and with what cooling the existing benchmarks were executed and what had to be done to achieve frequencies of 5.45-5.5 GHz

After all, this processor is mostly a marketing story, since it is the most expensive in the line but offers gaming performance identical to a much cheaper 9800X3D, which means that it will be in demand only among enthusiasts who need both productivity and gaming performance (in other words, who just want the best possible from the non-HEDT segment because there is no objective sense for any other group of buyers to overpay for it) and AMD can create artificial hype around it for this reason (this certainly sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it definitely worked for me :D)

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Hardware / Re: AMD 9950x

« on: 2025-03-17, 22:55:50 »

I recently bought my 9950x.

After some tests (testing with 4 of my scenes), the improvement over the 7950x is 16-18%.
(Scene 1: 16.63% improvement
Scene 2: 17.71% improvement
Scene 3: 22.32% improvement
Scene 4: 16.44% improvement)

BUT, I didn't have the 7950x overclocked because the temps were already high at stock.
AMD claims the 9950x is more efficient so I enabled PBO, which led to a higher difference.

Hope this helps.

How is life with the 9950x so far Lupaz? I'm considering to build a new system with that cpu. What amount of ram and motherboard are you using?

My short review. At first it worked great, I assembled it on the basis of Asus Rog Strix x870e-e + 4*48gb 6000 MT/s, which I was able to make work at 5200-5600MT/s without errors.

The raw performance is amazing.
The only thing that bothered me was a slightly lower score in the benchmark than my friends with the same cpu, despite the fact that my cooling system removes ~280 W of heat without a problem and I got a fairly good (Gold/Platinum) silicon sample with good curve offsets, but I can’t make it give a higher result no matter what I do.

I also encountered problems lately, I use Win11 23H2, and disabled core parking and on the latest Corona updates my workflow with enabled interactive rendering became laggy (like for many other users of this CPU, as far as I know).  In the end, only turning off XMP profile and returning the RAM frequencies to 3600 helped me, which further reduced the result in the benchmark.

Now I'm looking at the 9950X3D, considering the tests that appear recently after the release (it shows even better results than the regular 9950x), I'll probably buy it for the main workstation and put my 9950x in the secondary one.

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General CG Discussion / Re: UVW Mapping this chair leg without seams

« on: 2024-11-28, 06:15:50 »

As marchik already said, you can bake procedural advanced wood to a texture, so it would be accessible to anyone in any app.

Yes, I know but they are not high quality textures. You cannot depend on advanced wood in interior production renderings.

yes, they require some refinement after baking using e.g. Substance Painter, but they offer a great start and I've used them a lot in interior production renderings, it all depends on the artist

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General CG Discussion / Re: UVW Mapping this chair leg without seams

« on: 2024-11-27, 20:58:01 »

Any ideas how to apply texture to this leg without seams? in 3DS MAX
to achieve the same result in the image or close to it.

You can use built-in Advanced Wood map or its OSL version with some modifications and you can even bake it to the texture.

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[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Faster caustics + volumetric caustics playground!

« on: 2024-10-23, 01:55:19 »

Hi Marchik, could you share this scene? (via PM/support portal/directly on the forum)

Thanks for the response, maru, of course! I edited the scene in such a way that 2 problems became immediately visible.

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[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Faster caustics + volumetric caustics playground!

« on: 2024-10-22, 01:22:17 »

A couple more comments:

Tested on a simple scene with a rectangular pool, water is a box with tessellation and a noise modifier on the upper polygon. Default Sun & Sky. Materials without displacement.

1) If I submerge the camera under water and turn OFF the "caustics in volumes" checkbox in the render setup, the caustics at the bottom of the pool are calculated incorrectly, turning from correct patterns into mush.

2)And I also noticed (I think I haven't noticed this before) that when the camera is half submerged and the Camera Physical Size option is turned on, this box casts a shadow and prevent caustics from appearing, which in my opinion isn't correct.

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[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Faster caustics + volumetric caustics playground!

« on: 2024-10-18, 14:10:03 »

it has now become treacherously noticeable how slowly volumetrics renders with the Inside Volume mode.

You used this mode in the "sphere" example, right? I can only recommend increasing the step size as much as possible and enabling "single bounce only". 

(and of course the ability to render caustics by region)

This should now work better than before. If you render a region, this should not result in glitches/splotches, but under the hood caustics are calculated for the whole image, so there won't be as much speed up as expected.

Throwing one more. :)

Yes, where the smoke above the surface is not uniform, which is usually the case in scenes closer to production. I even had to do this pic with a step size of 25 cm and render it in a very low resolution, I'm afraid to imagine what will happen in a real exterior scene, for example, like yours with the pool.

I recently had scenes with a hot jacuzzi, where I would like to get caustics from a light source at its bottom, passing through a layer of bubbling water and steam above it. Naturally, this will be the noisiest place in the whole scene and I would definitely use a render region after the rest of the scene is ready. But, according to my tests, rendering with a region still creates splotches for now, which then do not disappear later.

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[Max] Daily Builds / Re: Faster caustics + volumetric caustics playground!

« on: 2024-10-18, 01:07:22 »

I'm happy as a clam, I've been waiting for this for several years. The only thing is that since the caustics in volumetrics need the volumetrics itself, it has now become treacherously noticeable how slowly volumetrics renders with the Inside Volume mode. Now this is a desired improvement. (and of course the ability to render caustics by region)

As for the caustics itself, everything works nice, I haven't encountered a single bug yet (once, however, it simply disappeared until I moved the camera a little). It has become much faster and cleaner, thanks to the devs!

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Hardware / Re: Second Monitor Decision: Same Model or Upgrade?

« on: 2024-10-11, 07:09:25 »

I have 2 Illyama 32"..Honestly too big, its a neck work out looking back and forth, honest. 27" 4k would be sufficient.

having two 42.5" LGs I can't agree, having unlimited space and 100% scaling is a big advantage that I wouldn't refuse now :D

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Gallery / Re: Selected | Office CGIs

« on: 2024-10-05, 11:27:58 »

And yes, that sofa is amazing. If you'd be willing to share more info (or even sell the model/technique) I'd be extremely appreciative.

These are about 6-7 variants of "wisps" created with Ornatrix, they look like a semicircle, just multiplied and slightly fluffed up. And 3 Forest Pack scatters, 1 for small wisps that fill the entire surface, 2 for large wisps, there are slightly fewer of them, but both the first and second scatters use the Full distribution mode to form a grid pattern. The 3rd Forest Pack is for individual hairs made from splines. Thats all basically.

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Hardware / Re: AMD 9950x

« on: 2024-08-20, 02:45:07 »

I'm going to upgrade as soon as it will be available.
According to various available benchmarks, the maximum performance is about ~15% higher compared to the previous 7950x, but I wouldn't expect miracles.
If you're not 100% sure, I'd suggest waiting 2-3 months for the first user reviews to appear and any "raw" nuances to emerge, if any.