Chaos Corona 12 for 3ds Max - Daily Builds Changelog

[rowmanns]

For all information about the daily builds and the download link, see: Daily Builds FAQ

[rowmanns]

Please check this article covering the risks of using daily builds: Daily Builds FAQ
If you are familiar with the daily builds and know how to use them, download the newest one here:
chaos-corona-12-3dsmax-daily-2023-12-13.exe

Note: The following will be released as a hotfix for v11 in the new year

General

• Added Gamma Correction tone mapping operator.

Bugfixes

• Fixed a crash with the nodes group replacement in ObjectReplacer.
• Fixed rare issue where sun is disconnected from its target after loading a scene.

Scatter

• Fixed issue where using Isolate would lead Scatter to recompute and thus slow down viewport interaction.
• Fixed an issue with the improper display of the edge trimming tip.
• Fixed incorrect edge trimming for instances of hierarchical/group models.
• Fixed edge triming map usage detection for the hierarchical/group models.

[rowmanns]

Please check this article covering the risks of using daily builds: Daily Builds FAQ
If you are familiar with the daily builds and know how to use them, download the newest one here:
chaos-corona-12-3dsmax-daily-2024-01-05.exe

Note: The following will also be released in the upcoming v11 hotfix

Bugfixes

• Fixed DrServer crashing, when passing `--noGui` switch. (also fixes issues with running DR as a windows service)
• Fixed color picker stuttering when changing values via HWB.
• Fixed crash when Chaos Scatter distributes empty Corona Proxy.
• Fixed issue where color picker was causing infinite restarts of IR and could display value with alpha < 1, when alpha was not being modified.
• Fixed rare crash in Scanned Material.

Scatter

• Fixed issue where using Isolate would lead Scatter to recompute and thus slow down viewport interaction. (again)

[TomG]

Please check this article covering the risks of using daily builds: Daily Builds FAQ
If you are familiar with the daily builds and know how to use them, download the newest one here:
chaos-corona-12-3dsmax-daily-2024-01-17.exe

User-Facing Improvements

• Added "Additional outputs" to MultiMap.
• Added normal direction indicator for Corona PatternMod crop box.
• Added message box with confirmation of deletion of animation keys/layers in SceneCleaner Power Tool.
• Lister - added option to reorder tabs by mouse dragging.
• Users can use both the pattern and the base object UVWs for Corona PatternMod texturing.
• Added option to distinguish by materials to Cryptomatte.
• Added posibility to use batch loading together with additional inputs of MultiMap.
• Added 3 toggleable locks to the tilemap UI, which constrain tile size & offset & shrinking.
• Added the ability to generate automatic caps for the pattern geometry sliced by a pattern crop box.
• Added the ability to zoom and navigate in the the curve editor.

Bugfixes

• Fixed "Apply denoising to this element" checkbox not affecting Optix denoiser.
• Corona Pattern modifier's "Fit in object/world space" actions are now tracked by undo.
• Fixed a bug with the nodes group replacement in ObjectReplacer.
• Fixed an issue where importing Cosmos materials with child materials did not work.
• Fixed animated proxy conversion from V-Ray to Corona creating corrupted frames.
• Fixed LUT not working when the path is relative and the scene is saved on another drive.
• Fixed a crash when parsing RailClone objects.
• Fix of wrong tile width/height during lock when one of them is zero.

[TomG]

Please check this article covering the risks of using daily builds: Daily Builds FAQ
If you are familiar with the daily builds and know how to use them, download the newest one here:
chaos-corona-12-3dsmax-daily-2024-01-29.exe

User-Facing Improvements

• Added bend parameters for decals.
• Improve performance of Corona renderer with bucket rendering on high-core count machines.

Bugfixes

• Fixed a typo in Tile map tooltips.

Scatter

• Improved performance of surface scattering when using a density map.
• Edge trimming via checkbox now works in Corona Renderer.
• Fixed an inaccurate calculation in the instance collision detection process when specifying the surface random distribution by a map and using a rest pose time-frame.
• Fixed incorrect edge trimming for instances of hierarchical/group models.

[TomG]

Please check this article covering the risks of using daily builds: Daily Builds FAQ
If you are familiar with the daily builds and know how to use them, download the newest one here:
Warning! There is a major bug in this daily build causing a crash once a Corona Camera is created or selected! This will be fixed in the upcoming versions.
chaos-corona-12-3dsmax-daily-2024-03-05.exe

User-Facing Improvements

• Added a toggleable lock button for Corona Decal to lock width to height aspect ratio.
• User-Facing Improvements: added glossiness mapping for clear-coat in CoronaScannedMtl.
• Viewport display of camera's focal plane was enabled in the camera view and parameters to enable it and change its opacity were added.
• Added the option to fit Corona's Pattern crop box using another object size and transformation.
• Added the option to ignore bump in Corona Curvature map.
• Added option to select objects in the scene that will be included in/excluded from environment illumination.
• Added the Alpha interaction option into the CoronaScannedMtl.

Bugfixes

• Fixed rare NAN caused by an error in VFB.
• Fixed rare NAN in Caustic solver.
• CoronaNormal map uses fixed gamma = 2.2 in OCIO mode for gamma correction (enabled by "Add gamma to input").
• Fixed issue where some scenes with Chaos Scatter might load for infinitely long time.
• Fixed issue where some instances were occasionally placed outside of very-fine meshes when using the UV-distribution scattering.

[TomG]

Please check this article covering the risks of using daily builds: Daily Builds FAQ
If you are familiar with the daily builds and know how to use them, download the newest one here:
chaos-corona-12-3dsmax-daily-2024-05-10.exe

User-Facing Improvements

• Added accurate sampling mode for environment maps that is slower but delivers more accurate results (especially for large environment maps)
• Added option to distinguish media based on their material (e.g. two intersecting objects with the same material will be now considered as a single volume)
• Added option to delay Bloom&Glare computation after rendering
• Improved the conversion from VRayMaterial to Corona Physical material (especially metals and colored reflections), this change influence also imports from Chaos Cosmos
• Extended range of solar elevations supported by the PRG sky model, now is possible render all solar elevations down to -12 degrees
• Added rollout in CoronaCamera to define Environment Overrides. Each override can be defined with 3 options: Inherit (default), Enable and Disable
• Added warning about Corona not fully supporting OCIO color managment workflow
• Added the possibility to define visibility of Corona Pattern using texmap
• Corona VFB now displays the rendered image with correct display/view transform when OCIO color management is used

Bugfixes

• Added back support for motion blur in Corona Standalone
• Metalness setting in the converter is now respected when converting V-Ray and Autodesk Physical materials
• Superfluous sky darkening by the clouds for low solar elevations removed

Regression bugfixes

• Fixed issue with 3dsMax crashing, when CoronaCamera is created from Corona Toolbar

[Aram Avetisyan]

Please check this article covering the risks of using daily builds: Daily Builds FAQ
If you are familiar with the daily builds and know how to use them, download the newest one here:
chaos-corona-12-3dsmax-daily-2024-06-07.exe

Major User-Facing Improvements

• Added initial support for export to Vantage. Users can now export and render in Vantage with one click (Render settings > System > Export+Render specifying .vantage format).
• Added new reskinned VFB 2.0 rewritten in Qt.

User-Facing Improvements

• Added the possibility to define visibility of Corona Pattern using texmap.
• Added lift, gamma, gain tonemapping operator.
• Significantly improved speed of loading of Corona and Scatter plugins.
• Improved rendering speed up to 25% on DUAL CPUs.
• Improved UI of Camera Environment overrides.
• Added the option to override the environment map in Corona Camera.
• Added the option to apply the LUT in linear color space instead of gamma-mapped one.
• Fixed crash when opening Corona Color Correct Texture curve editor with an empty curve.
• Considerably speed up saving in 3ds Max (up to 10 times in some scenes), when the scene contains Corona Bitmaps.

VFB 2.0

• Smoother IR and faster overall interaction during IR (viewport IR not fully integrated yet).
• Added possibility to compare different resolution renders.
• Added loading of Corona EXRs and editing them through. Drag and drop into VFB is also supported.
• Added support for multiple Lightmix elements.
• Fixed VFB not closing after changing active renderer.
• Fixed crash and freeze during IR after changing active renderer.
• Added maxscript access to tonemapping “Load” and “Save” buttons in VFB 2.0.

Bugfixes

• Cryptomatte render element now works correctly in DR and in resume render.

Scatter
User-Facing Improvement

• Improved viewport draw performance in Full and Box preview modes.
• Introduced adaptive previz for these two modes, which improves the responsiveness in case of frequent viewport redraws and large number of instances.

Bugfixes

• Fixed issue where some instances were occasionally placed outside of very-fine meshes when using the UV-distribution scattering.
• Fixed issue when an outdated persistent config file is found. The issue is handled instead of showing an error/warning message.
• Fixed issue where the method of export may introduce small floating point errors in the geometry data (a fix primarily targeted for the V-Ray cloud export).

Regression bugfixes

• Fixed issue where toolbar icons were replaced by text.

[Aram Avetisyan]

Please check this article covering the risks of using daily builds: Daily Builds FAQ
If you are familiar with the daily builds and know how to use them, download the newest one here:
chaos-corona-12-3dsmax-RC1.exe

User-Facing Improvements

• Added an option to the System Rollout of Render Setup to directly render the scene in Vantage.
• Added information about Corona EXR color space in the history item tooltip.
• Added name of the currently edited LightMix element into the LightMix tab.
• Added density scaling parameter in CoronaSky clouds (missed in the previous changelog).
• Corona Bitmap will now use the Color space selected in the Open file dialog.
• Added warning about deprecating Corona Material Library and moving it to Cosmos.
• Added an error message when attempting to export a sequence to Vantage/Standalone.
• If the current Max scene is not saved, it is exported to the %temp% folder upon clicking the "Render in Vantage" button.

Bugfixes

• Fixed issue where message boxes or dialogs shown in VFB2 stays visible after VFB2 is closed.
• Fixed issue where VFB2 buttons were not properly disabled when switching from/to picking mode, editing mode, history comparison.
• Fixed issue where loading CXR with unknown color space into VFB2 would lead to crash. It now shows warning and does not crash.
• Fixed issue where Corona Camera environment overrides checkboxes appear as garbled text in the 3ds Max Track View.
• Fixed crash in VFB2 when right-clicking on the DR entry.
• Fixed DR tab in VFB2 not cleaning the old entries properly.
• Fixed light mix tab flickering in VFB2 (e.g. during IR update).
• Fixed issue where displayed statistics in VFB2 were inaccurate (actual ray/s, sample/s) or missing (max passes, dr passes, noise limit).

Regression bugfixes

• The Bloom & Glare progress is now shown in the VFB2.
• Fixed issue where docked VFB would only render in a small region, while the rest of VFB would be black.

Scatter

Major User-Facing Improvement

• Scatter instance brush: place or erase scatter instances freely or according to scatter settings.

User-Facing Improvement

• Introduced on-demand mesh optimization/simplification (controlled by the polygon limit) to ease the viewport load in full mesh preview mode.
• Extended the UI, so translate, rotate, scale and density control maps could be disabled/enabled easier.
• Introduced hit-testing optimization, which overcomes a very noticeable lag on hovering/selecting scatter with many visible instances.

[Aram Avetisyan]

Please check this article covering the risks of using daily builds: Daily Builds FAQ
If you are familiar with the daily builds and know how to use them, download the newest one here:
chaos-corona-12-3dsmax-RC2.exe

User-Facing Improvements

• Added old VFB double click (fit to render) functionality to the new VFB2.

Bugfixes

• Fixed issue where Aperture Dialog would become larger after every collapsing/expansion of the collapsed properties.
• Fixed VFB 2.0 being small for first open and each time render settings were opened and closed.
• Fixed old and new VFB 2.0 not having consistent IR resolutions between first and later runs.
• Reenabled 3ds Max hotkeys that were disabled when VFB 2.0 had focus. Removed Ctrl+C hotkey copying VFB2 content.
• Fixed rare crash occurring during material renaming in lister.

UI/UX improvements in VFB2

• Fixed missing update when editing history items.
• Forbid of showing context menu for names of history items.
• Fixed color probe to always adapt size to fit the contents.
• Tabs widths were made smaller to better fit on High-DPI monitors.
• Disabled expandable buttons are no longer highlighted.
• Fixed a rare issue where a render region from a previous rendering could be used during the first second of a new render.
• Fixed crash when entering in aperture dialog's spinbox.
• Prevented turning on 3ds Max's walkthrough mode when navigating with up-arrow in render elements combo box.
• Fixed crash in VFB 2.0 when removing comparison while editing CXR.
• Fixed issue where rendering would get stuck in clean-up phase when any menu was opened.
• Fixed rare crash that occurred when changing resolution of IR while denoising.
• Fixed issue where CoronaSky connected to Camera environment map override did not work with volume shader.
• Fixed scaling issues on high dpi monitors - VFB 2.0 UI should now correctly upscale on high dpi monitors.
• Fixed issue where saving defaults and loading would lead to crash.
• Fixed rare freeze which occurred when certain render stamp tokens are used and tonemapping/lightmix is being changed.
• Fixed Bloom&Glare aperture editor button being disabled after loading a scene with enabled custom aperture.

Scatter
Bugfixes

• Fixed issue with missing icons in Max 2025.
• Fixed multiple issues with the "Adaptive previz" mode:
• A crash on switching to full mesh preview when painting/brushing is active.
• "Adaptive previz" doesn't react upon user view pan, zoom, rotate for specific scenes.
• Avoid unnecessary recomputation on "Adaptive previz" enable/disable.
• Fixed crash when using Scatter as an input in Corona DistanceTex.
  
• Various minor fixes:
  
  • Fixed crash on deleting a distribute-on object.
  • Added precise control on when the painted/edited instances should be cleaned/removed and preserved when it is possible/safe.
  • Added safe undo support on clearing instances.
  • Minor fix on the display mode control during brushing/erasing so it is consistent with the legacy edit-only mode.
  • Minor fix on the default display mode.