Chaos Corona 13 for 3ds Max - Daily Builds Discussion

[Aram Avetisyan]

Okay, sorry about that. I'll try to be more clear. I just meant this (render history A/B comparison). When I use DR, it no longer saves the CXR file. But without DR it saves it.

Hi,

I have finally found time to conduct some tests for this. Corona 12 fh1, Max 2024:

• When rendering a single frame, with DR, the history autosave works as expected - file is saved on the master. Nodes do not save anything (it would be incomplete anyway). If confirmation window for deletion appears, OK-ing it will remove some file(s) and save, if cancelled, output will be saved without any deletion (this means confirmation window will appear on the next round of rendering too, as file count/size is reached)
• When rendering sequences, Max will throw a warning message, that only the last file will be saved, prompting for output. History autosave (not output autosave) is expected to not work here, which is fine with the tests too.

If you have a scene where rendering with DR does not do history autosave, please send it over and we will test it.

For the rest:
• Stopping (but not cancelling? any thoughts on this) IR should make history autosave. Currently it doesn't, only when pass limit is reached - this will be reported.
• Output autosave (the one made for full, complete renders by design), worked as expected in any scenario - single or sequence rendering, with or without DR. It automatically overwrote oldest files.

My suggestion is to use history autosave for IR (iterating over design, local rendering), and for complete frames use Output autosave, that is given you have not explicitly specified output for renders in Max.
The main difference is that history autosave automatically adds history items for convenience. But you can still load CXR from output autosave into history.

Another suggestion:
Output autosave automatically overwrites old files to store new ones, without any confirmation window.
Does it make sense to implement the same behavior for history autosave too?

Hope this clears things out.

[shortcirkuit]

Hi team

Not sure if this could be posted here, but it does affect the dailies.  I wrote a post here:
https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?topic=43406.msg227275#msg227275

Look at the difference between Maxs Native Physcal Material vs Corona.  Its such a time waster!!!!

[shortcirkuit]

Hi Devs

Something that has been bothering me for years.  When you do a render and have bloom ON and THEN you want to REGION render an area, the bloom disappears when you re-render (ie when you have the 'clear VFB between renders' checked OFF).
is this something that can be fixed?

[aaouviz]

So, I started using Corona in 2018. I almost immediately complained that a Corona Light with direction set at .4 or above isn't properly visible in reflections/refractions.

This is still somehow a problem 6 years later.

Any plans to improve this?

Many thanks :)

[Aram Avetisyan]

So, I started using Corona in 2018. I almost immediately complained that a Corona Light with direction set at .4 or above isn't properly visible in reflections/refractions.

This is still somehow a problem 6 years later.

Any plans to improve this?

Many thanks :)

Hi,

This is not quite v13 related.
It it because of POV, if a light source has some directionality, it is expected to not see if from some angles, same applies for reflections. You can use separate lights for lighting and for light source visibility.

[maru]

The "prevent black appearance" option doesn't affect reflections and refraction, only direct visibility. We have this logged at (Report ID=CMAX-195).

[Avi]

Hi Devs

Something that has been bothering me for years.  When you do a render and have bloom ON and THEN you want to REGION render an area, the bloom disappears when you re-render (ie when you have the 'clear VFB between renders' checked OFF).
is this something that can be fixed?

Hi,

We have this logged in our system.

(Report ID=CMAX-1261)

[zaar]

Please please pretty please could we finally get a toon outline shader? Or even just expand coronawire to include a profiles mode (like sketchup profiles) without needing to outline every face?

At work currently to produce elevations with just the profiles outlined and not every polygon we are relying on a free third party exporter to export to sketchup and then produce them in there. If corona had the ability to render outlines it would have saved me genuinely weeks of work in the last two months.

It has been requested since 2014 for the exact same purpose and theres a TON of support for it every time someone posts about it. I dont think ive seen many people asking for ink and paint style shading. Just this outlines feature.

I imagine youll say you cant make any commitments to features etc etc and to post it in the feature requests etc which is fine. But toon outlines have been requested since the beta days and are consistently requested still and are one of the most backed and popular requests every time its mentioned. So if you could consider this for v13 it would make lots of your core user base very happy.

I think this topic produces a cognitive dissonance in Corona. From what I understand Corona sees itself as a cheaper (?) and simplified verision of v-ray that is more focused on just producing photoreal renders without all the clutter and confusion of all the settings and buttons in v-ray. Now contrary to popular belief, you don't need to touch all the buttons in v-ray render settings anymore. But there are other things like working with displacement that is very nice and simple in Corona compared to v-ray! So with this in mind one can understand that you can't just keep adding stuff all over, because at the end of that trajectory Corona eventually becomes V-ray? And then v-ray users would ask the question why they pay more for v-ray if they are almost the same? So Corona either has to increase it's price or v-ray has to lower it's price.

Corona has also described itself as being focused on visualisation, specifically architectural visualisation (correct me if I'm wrong here!). But in the process of visualising architecture it is not uncommon that the client or architect wants more NPR-like diagrams, sections, axonometric with lines on top of them. But then you are breaking the rule of being the "simple camera that just does photoreal rendering".

Going to sketchup to produce the lines seems like a pain. Depending on how much control you need over the lines, like do you need dashed hidden lines and so on? I think even V-ray toon falls short and you need to look at a specialised toon renderer.
What I've done is to set up a simple template Arnold file, that just renders everything with a white override material and black toon lines. I just merge tha camera and geometry and render. And as long as I don't have a lot of proxies and Corona specific stuff that won't render in Arnold it works ok and I can use it as a multiply layer in Ps.


EDIT: btw, this reminded me of how I a year ago or two, really needed to bake texture maps from a product visualisation job done in Corona. I had to manually convert everything to V-ray. Despite there being some compability, I had used a couple of corona specific maps that wouldn't render in v-ray. And there as a huge amount of manterials to go through. For my main task, Corona render was the perfect choice and a joy to work with! But for my secondary task it fell short. And if you as an artist more and more diversify into different kinds of tasks, you start to question Corona as your choice of renderer. IMHO Chaos could have solved this situation from arriving by simply not allowing any new render-specific maps to be created after the merger. This wouldn't have stopped either team from contributing or taking the lead on a new function/map, but the other team would have to ensure that it was compatible. If a Chaos TriplanarX5000 map was created by the Corona team in one release, one could expect the V-ray team to include Chaos TriplanarX5000 in the next release. From a developer side I'm sure there a billion reasons for why this would be a pain. But from a customer perspective this makes sense to me. Corona could still be Corona, but I could pay for a month of V-ray when I need those extra features like toon lines or texture baking.
Sorry if this is off topic and derailing the thread! I just want to help this situation that I and others are struggling with.

[ronaldjung]

I hope that the Vray, Gaussian Splatting, and Firefly remover updates arrive soon in Corona.

BTW, where do I find an updated Corona Renderer Road Map?

[aaouviz]

I hope that the Vray, Gaussian Splatting, and Firefly remover updates arrive soon in Corona.

BTW, where do I find an updated Corona Renderer Road Map?

I saw that Gaussian Splatting update too... Would be amazing!

[alexyork]

Oof, the new caustics improvements in today's DB are sounding tasty! Thanks devs. This is what we like to see. Hope we can test here soon.

Edit: devs, do you have any visual examples of the changes and the impact they have by any chance? Would be super cool to see your internal tests for this and how they're impacting speed + quality.

[romullus]

I like the new distribution map presets, but i think in current implementation they are very limiting. We need controls for scale and also RW scale support. Instead of high-low variants of the same map, it would be much more useful if users could edit the balance (levels) and contrast. Rotation and perhaps offset would be very useful too. I know that most of those things can be achieved by other means, like adding UVW map and UVW xform modifiers to distribution object, but it's much more convenient to have all controls in one place, especially since switching between scatter and other objects is not particularly snappy operation even in medium complexity scenes.

Oh, and why UV channel selection is disabled with custom maps? A bug perhaps?

Edit: one more request - an option to invert map.

[88qba88]

I love it!
One light (corona disc, directionality 1), 2 lenses with dispersion (spheres with refraction set to 1, color white, roughness 0, caustics ON + dispersion 35 ON). All inside box with volume material applied (absorption + scattering, close to white color, distance adjusted to scene size).

[maru]

I did some similar experiments and I think there is one upgrade you could add: duplicate the lenses, apply Corona Slicer Mtl to them, and slice the volume box (not the lenses). This way you will end up with no volumetric medium inside the lenses. If we imagine that the volume box is smoke, then in your scene there is some smoke INSIDE the lenses too and it affects light passing through them. :)

[TomG]

Current roadmaps are at https://trello.com/b/EfPE4kPx/corona-tentative-road-map-3ds-max for Max and https://trello.com/b/dgI8vjDb/corona-tentative-road-map-cinema-4d for C4D, though with a focus on 12 Update 1 and not what is planned for next year (ie big pool hasn't been reviewed in a bit, as we'll wait til the next release is done - an example there is we hope to add the rendering of Gaussian Splats into one of the releases next year, but it's not on the map yet).

And yes, on release, this is being called 12 Update 1, not 13 :)

I hope that the Vray, Gaussian Splatting, and Firefly remover updates arrive soon in Corona.

BTW, where do I find an updated Corona Renderer Road Map?