Corona Renderer 7 for 3ds Max - Daily Builds Changelog

[maru]

*You can always get the newest build at the usual location [link]*

[Ryuu]

This post is reserved to be used for compiling a full "all changes since v6" changelog as v7 daily builds get released.

[Ryuu]

Note that all changes in this build will be released in v6 hotfix, so this is more of a hotfix preview than actual v7 daily build.

• Fixed crash when Falloff Map with fresnel type and world - z axis direction is applied to refraction
• Fixed DR being stuck when rendering second frame of an animation
• Fixed the issue where having Norwegian locale lead to 3ds Max crash at startup.
• Fixed: Scatter missed update in IR causing "popping" while scrubbing timeline
• Fixed LEGION_STOP in scene with falloff + RGB multiply maps combo
• Reverted behaviour of the no tiling mode in CoronaBitmap which was causing unwanted results when used as a mask

[rowmanns]

• Added support for Ornatrix v7 (the older versions are no longer supported)
• Fixed scene parsing taking longer in each frame
• Does not fix prolonging geometry parsing, this will be addressed in the future
• Fixed crash of 3ds Max caused by our quad menu
• Fixed falloff map built-in color mixing
• Removed the old displacement method. Only 2.5d displacement method remains.
• This currently breaks combinations of displacement + light emission and displacement + fast rounded edges mode. This will be fixed over the course of daily builds
• In Corona Scatter, the parameter limiting number of instances displayed in the viewport is now colored when the limit gets exceeded.
• Added displaced primitives to the VFB stats tab
• Added new render stamp option: displacement primitives: %sd
• Displacement primitives are also published in maxscript with getStatistic(15)
• Fixed bug in Light solver precomputation that caused crashes in IR
• CoronaBitmap now automatically removes NaNs and INFs from input images

[rowmanns]

corona-7-3dsmax-daily-2020-11-13.exe

• Fixed: IR no longer crashes when deleting (model) object being instanced by Corona Scatter.

[rowmanns]

corona-7-3dsmax-daily-2020-12-01.exe

• Fixed CIE to correctly apply B&G in case of cubemap panoramic renders.
• Fixed rare issue where B&G might not be updated in VFB
• Fixed crash in Aperture dialog when it is destroyed and update is still running
• Fixed crash related to using map hierarchy with multiple fall off textures connected to each other
• Fixed Corona Scatter not to crash in case of spline scattering with zero frequency set to models
• Displacement:
• Normal displacement is now properly clamped in 2.5d displacement - only [0, 1] interval from the map is considered
• Fixed incorrect handling of blend material with empty sub-slots. When one of the 2 submaterials is now missing, the default wire color material will be properly displayed.
• Uninstaller
• Corona uninstaller now removes installation info from registry
• Added an error window which is shown when the uninstaller fails to restart in an elevated mode

[rowmanns]

corona-7-3dsmax-daily-2020-12-10.exe

• Added new grounds up PBR material - CoronaPhysicalMaterial
• Renamed CoronaMaterial to CoronaLegacyMaterial
• There should be no change in existing maxscript which uses CoronaMaterial
• Fix of "No sockets could be bound!" DR failure
• Fixed memory leak when rendering hair

[rowmanns]

corona-7-3dsmax-daily-2021-01-04.exe

• CoronaPhysicalMaterial changes
• Fixed the bug where multiple warnings may spawn when selecting a new preset value
• Improved metalness tooltip to inform about the texture values
• Displacement
• Added support for light emission from displaced geometry
• Added support for fast mode of rounded edges when displacement is enabled

[rowmanns]

corona-7-3dsmax-daily-2021-01-08.exe

• CoronaPhysicalMaterial changes
• Fixed problems (extreme memory consumption and crashes) caused by too low roughness value of sheen in Physical material
• General Bugfixes
• Fixed saving a render to disk (png,tif,tga) saving Alpha channel as black when Sharpening/Blurring is enabled

[rowmanns]

corona-7-3dsmax-daily-2021-02-19.exe

• Optimizations
• Significantly improved rendering quality for scenes far away from origin by internally shifting the scene so the camera sits at origin. No changes to scenes are needed. https://corona-renderer.com/comparer/FGMmnT
• Improved the High Quality denoiser speed by 20% on average, up to 60% in extreme cases
• Optimization of multiple transparent hits resolving - achieves up to 30% speedup in scenes with opacity and media
• Global medium is now enclosed by a sphere - which should result in more predictable and consistent behavior. This also fixes the following:
• Fixed: CoronaVolumeGrid bounding box always visible when rendered inside a global volume material https://corona-renderer.com/comparer/ZOcHg9
• Fixed: Visible border when using global volume material
• Fixed: CoronaVolumeMaterial casting incorrect shadows when set as global volume material
• Fixed: Artifacts caused by many overlapping volumetrics https://corona-renderer.com/comparer/7rO2Kb

• General Bugfixes
• Fixed extreme parsing times in scenes with large numbers of instances and displacement (introduced in earlier v7 daily builds)
• Fix crashes on second render of a scene with some specific material configuration
• Fixed issue in CoronaDisplacementMod where displacement map was not taken from the material, even if it was requested
• Fixed image texture cache. This improves memory usage when the same image file is referenced multiple times using different file paths (e.g. when symlinks are involved).
  This also resulted in some internal changes which unfortunately break backwards compatibility of the Corona Standalone exports.
• Corona Standalone now gives a more relevant error message when trying to load a file of unsupported version.
• Enabled PhoenixFD Foam and Particle maps in the material editor

• Toolbar/Quad Menus
• Actions on the Corona Toolbar have been renamed and reordered to be more unified (applies only after deletion of the toolbar in Main Menu > Customize User Interface > Toolbars; or for new Corona installs).
• Removed old Corona usermacros - as a result, user-defined menus entries/quad menu entries/toolbar items which use those macros will not work anymore. They can be safely removed from the UI and replaced by entries executing actions exported by our C++ action system (available since Corona 6), which are better integrated to 3ds Max

[rowmanns]

corona-7-3dsmax-daily-2021-02-26.exe

• Displacement
• Improved tessellation and mapping of 2.5d grid displacement
• Fixes many issues and artifacts caused by using the 2.5d displacement
• https://corona-renderer.com/comparer/6mFx83
• https://corona-renderer.com/comparer/ZkCZyt
• General Bugfixes
• Fixed freeze when removing items from Distance maps

[rowmanns]

corona-7-3dsmax-daily-2021-03-05.exe

• New
• Added possibility to have a camera’s origin as an input to distance texture
• Hence, in Corona Scatter it can now define density falloff based on distance from the camera’s origin (by plugging such texture into the density slot).
• General Bugfixes
• Fixed incorrect rendering when a refractive CoronaPhysicalMtl is inputted above any other PhysicalMtl base material
• Fixed NaNs in certain scenes by enforcing minimal focal distance in camera
• Fixed loading of 4K/UHD caches precomputed in older builds
• This fixes a slowdown in rendering times compared with earlier daily builds when a UHD/4k cache file generated with an older daily build was used in a newer build.
• Fixed few bugs in scene export introduced in recent builds
• Fixed normals element in camera space which was broken in recent builds
• Fixed licensing server not loading in the daily build 2021-02-26

[rowmanns]

corona-7-3dsmax-daily-2021-03-22.exe

• PBR Material
• If clearcoat bump map is not supplied, clear coat does not use any bump-mapping (previously it used bump map from base layer)
• Added accurate Fresnel for metals into Physical material
• Added translucency color
• Fixed thin glass mode
• Modified presets to use edge + base color based on metal complex IOR, lowered some high albedo values
• Changes to UI:
• Introduced edge color and translucency color, moved parameters around accordingly
• Moved plug slot for maps in slate editor to more correspond to the old legacy material
• Moved maps in the common dialog to correspond to their new positions in slate editor
• Fixed some enable/disable issues
• CoronaConverter now converts all materials to the new CoronaPhysicalMtl.
• CoronaConverter now converts CoronaLegacyMtl to CoronaPhysicalMtl.
• New
• CoronaDistance map can now compute distance from any scene object.
• Note that due to 3ds Max limitations the include/exclude dialog supports only adding geometry objects. Other objects (e.g. camera) can be added only using the "+" button.
• Added options for propagation to some render elements (Mask, ID, Wire color, Zdepth, Texmap)
• General
• We now render the image in 32x32 pixel buckets. 5% speedup on average, up to 15% in some scenes.

See our blog article which explores the new material in depth: https://blog.corona-renderer.com/behind-the-scenes-the-physical-material/

[rowmanns]

corona-7-3dsmax-daily-2021-03-30.exe

• Added support for 3ds Max 2022
• Fixed crash during initialization of scatter UI in 3ds Max 2022
• Fixed crash related to render setup dialog in 3ds Max 2022
• Optimizations of rendering speed
• Up to 30% speedup in empty scenes (both interactive and non-interactive)
• Up to 10% speed up in standard rendering in our real world testing scenes
• Changed the way the bucket rendering is applied
• It is applied from the beginning only in IR+subsampling or DR slave renders
• In all other cases we start with the old progressive render and switch to buckets after 5 passes.
• General
• Fixed: CoronaConverter no longer duplicates nodes in SME - only for 3ds Max 2020 and newer
• Fixed Bad allocation exception/Crash in 2.5D Displacement for extreme number of verticies
• “Propagate element” checkbox in render elements which support this functionality renamed to “Allow propagation through reflection/refraction” to better indicate its meaning + added explaining tooltip
• Removed VCM, VPL, PPM, LightTracer algorithms