Bump Issue

[Redeemer]

Hi Guys,
Corona user for a few years now.. accomplished a lot of nice projects with this render engine!

Needless to say: layer stacking in the bump channel is a real pain in ass.. from the beginning there are numerous issues regarding stacking of noises with the layer shader. This is a shame, creating original complex materials are fully dependent on layer stacking. Other engines are perfectly capable of using layers and layer stacking, why is it such an issue with Corona for C4D?

I ran into it again while starting a new project, please take a look at the attached images. Maybe the issue here is somewhere between the chair en my keyboard, in that case i'd love to hear a solution!

Thanks!

[Nejc Kilar]

Seems similar to what I experienced here - https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?topic=28382.0

So basically you are saying that you are using bump maps under the C4D Layer shader and once you render full res the bump looks different?

[Redeemer]

Yes, that is pretty much what happened.

at first i got into a fight with the normal noise type, which worked fine without a layer shader. Once inside the layer shader and multiplied with some scratches bitmap, the bump just disappeared. Turbulence however seems to work, but with a different look when rendered inside the vfb.

[edit] fiddlin around a projector map inside the glossiness slot of the reflection made the bump dissapear completely again. *Sigh*

[Nejc Kilar]

Yeah, if its the same issue then I don't know what to say really, sorry :\ Perhaps you can share the scene with the devs so that they can have a look at it.

The whole bump thing is just plain weird and I don't know what else to say about it. It is unreliable and as you've noticed it gets even more unreliable when you start messing with the projector shader. We don't have UVW nodes in Corona so scaling bump maps is pretty much impossible on certain systems (2S?) unless you are cool with a severe performance reduction or as you've noticed... Bump maps changing their appearance when dealing with different resolutions.

The situation gets even more confusing because from what I can tell this has been present in v5 and probably earlier builds as well. So while I hope the devs fix this thing in the upcoming daily builds, it still remains a problem because dailies are supposed to be broken in weird ways anyway and so if you are running or are relying on an external farm things get super messy with the different versions and features that work in some releases and don't in others.

TLDR, if you have a farm, what do you do? Update the farm for project X with the daily then downgrade the farm to the latest official release for Project Y because the daily is broken in other ways? I'd almost like to say that maybe the official releases should be fewer but more polished out.

Anyway, to end on a positive note, I think we all know that the devs are hard at work at the moment and hopefully these things will be ironed out for whenever v6 gets released. I personally wouldn't mind if they take 3 month more to really polish stuff out and make it production ready. However wants to play around with the latest and greatest can download the daily build anyway :P

[Redeemer]

Thanks!
Frustrating isn't it. I mean, like I said, it's basic things that every 3d artist needs. I just don't get it that Corona for C4D is at V5 whilst those key elements of rendering still are very buggy and weird to handle.

Let's hope for the best in V6.

As far as the bump issue, I couldn't figure out why it happens so I should report it as a bug I guess.

[sirio76]

Same thing here https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?topic=28841.0 I really hope that they will investigate this critical bug and resolve the issue ASAP.
Please keep reporting similar experience otherwise this will never be solved.